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133 points by mmattbtw 2mo ago

cube00 2mo ago
>Simple: the network won. The developers stopped being an asset, and the API progressively closed. You can add Reddit to that list, IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build.
- icepush 2mo ago
  Reddit went public in 2024. What are you talking about ?
  - cube00 2mo ago
    > you'll even get downvoted for "living in the past" if you attempt to bring it up later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390953
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      That comment was posted 6 days ago. What are you talking about?
  - johndough 2mo ago
    I guess you have to read OPs comment as the inner monologue of Reddit's CEO in 2023: "IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build." When Reddit raised its API prices in 2023 in order to make itself more attractive for an IPO, it effectively priced out third-party apps, such as the Apollo reader app. Discussion back then: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
aftbit 2mo ago
I can't decide if ATProto is actually amazing or if its proponents are just dazzled by their own tech. Is it truly decentralized? What makes it better than Mastodon or Matrix or Scuttlebutt? Of course, at the end of the day, it's the network effects that matter. Attention is all you need indeed.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  The Twitter-competitive social site is moribund, so I think maybe what you're seeing more and more of is the pivot towards infrastructure --- always planned, but not before such a big part of the messaging.
- pfraze 2mo ago
  The team came from the IPFS and Scuttlebutt worlds. "Better" is relative to your design goals. Iroh is better for point-to-point connections & localfirst. Matrix is better for chat rooms. Etc. The general logic of atproto was to serve large scale publishing with an open model that doesn't seriously degrade the UX. The scale orientation means - at least until the non-public spaces land - you're syncing a lot of records to provide an alternative microblogger to bluesky. The account hosting system, however - the pds - remains exceedingly cheap and easy to run. Pros and cons, matching with the design goals.
- tynanpurdy 2mo ago
  I will say that I have no relation to bluesky so it's not my tech and I do find it amazing. This post from Dan Abramov might help in clarifying how 'decentralized' it is compared to the threadiverse https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/ https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/
  - crabmusket 2mo ago
    Dan's post "a social file system" also does a great job at explaining and motivating the data model behind atproto. It can do anything, not just microblogs!
- inigyou 2mo ago
8organicbits 2mo ago
For blog posts, I'd look to RSS instead. That's where that content is traditionally published. Instead of SELECTing from bluesky's index, you can use OPML subscription lists. There are a bunch of places that curate feed lists, so it's significantly less likely to face API death like twitter did. There are multiple sites that support follower semantics over RSS. Feedland tracks subscriptions publicly, so you can see the blogs I read (https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev), and who reads my blog (https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fblog%2Frss.xml https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...). I run another variant which collects OPML blogrolls via crawling, so you can find out who else likes your favorite blog and what else they recommend. Here's the page for Simon Willison's blog (https://blogroll-network.alexsci.com/discover/feed-a34ee2a885866974aa1f1f41131ac7b6/ https://blogroll-network.alexsci.com/discover/feed-a34ee2a88...). Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint.
- tynanpurdy 2mo ago
  > Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint. Nothing to do with Bluesky services. There are many independent firehoses and relays. Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one. No curator between me and the posts, and no work by me to crawl the whole network for them. https://pdsls.dev/jetstream?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Fchennai.firehose.stream%2Ftap&collections=site.standard.document https://pdsls.dev/jetstream?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Fchennai.fir... Edit: ok there is an aggregator, the relay is scraping all of the PDSs out there to build the event stream. Notably this is not possible with RSS, where you need to build a large index with knowledge. PDSs request relays to crawl and that's that.
  - 8organicbits 2mo ago
    > Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one. This stream lacks any blog posts that haven't been specifically published to atproto. Conversely, I see RSS feeds for the content in the stream, like https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:byf7jvh3yvhffackiumpddtf/rss https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:byf7jvh3yvhffackiumpddtf/rs... (if RSS feeds exists for every profiles then I'd argue that atproto is a strict subset of RSS, but I'm not certain how that feature works). The stream may give you every blog post that was published to atproto, but that's already a small subset of long-form content on the web. > Notably this is not possible with RSS, The web supports blog discovery so well that people forget it exists. A simple Google search can find a very large amount of content, much available over RSS/Atom. Many web-based feed readers index the subscriptions across all their users to help with discovery. Here's the Feedland firehose, for example: https://feedland.com/?everything=true https://feedland.com/?everything=true I don't think its helpful to argue how complete the Google index is vs a bluesky firehose though. Most users are drowning in content and discovery is about search and filtering. There's lots of interest right now in vouching for the content of others: https://susam.net/wander/wander.js https://susam.net/wander/wander.js, https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json, https://www.manton.org/2024/03/11/recommendations-and-blogrolls.html https://www.manton.org/2024/03/11/recommendations-and-blogro..., etc.
James_K 2mo ago
There are invariably 3 solutions to all “federated” web problems: - Email - Semantic HTML - Web indexing services In this case, it's mostly indexing and a little of the other two if you want to add social features. I despite ATProto with all my soul for taking a problem with such a simple and standard solution and totally obscuring it behind hundreds of layers of JSON, faux federated services, and technical jargon, all in service of creating an inferior version of Twitter. I guess it wouldn't be as sexy to offer a web indexing service instead.
- pfraze 2mo ago
  Genuinely curious, how would you build it differently? Would you stick with atproto's indexing model and try to simplify it, or would you use another approach?
  - James_K 2mo ago
    You send a request to a web indexer with a page you want added to the network, it scans your page for outgoing links and sends an email to the owners of any domains who are also on the service. One can imagine making it a little more featureful, for instance indexing OPML blogrolls which would allow you to see whom a person follows and https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry which would allow outgoing links to be categorised (like, reply, etc) so notifications filtered. With that, it would be possible to add a front-end site imitating one of the popular social media paradigms (Reddit-style or Twitter-style being the most obvious). If there's one genuine design decision I would give for it beyond what is basically a cobbling together of existing interfaces, it would be to charge users per page uploaded. Likely very detrimental to growing the service, but I think one of the simplest ways to weed out spam and junk. A real problem with many web services is that the receiver of the message pays for it in terms of attention, where in other mediums the sender has to pay. Given that uploading crap is basically free, that's all you get. Increasing the cost of upload would weed out those endless AI summaries and lists of affiliate links. The issue with ATProto is that it operates on too many layers. You can see lacking in what I have described here the concept of durable authorship, but this is a property of content not how the content is distributed. Perhaps someone will invent a standard way to sign HTML documents, in which case you could base user accounts on that instead of DNS. AT enforces this centrally but it does not need to. It is walling itself off from the common and decentralised software ecosystem of the web for no good reason.
canterburry 2mo ago
I'm sorry, but this blog post is written as if the described functionality should obviously be available and supported by the Internet and companies who expose their data. I agree it would be neat. But, when did we conclude this "should" be possible and thus warrant such a whiny post?
- tynanpurdy 2mo ago
  Not a would be cool, is cool. At least now that the atproto network has proved it is in fact cool.
tolerance 2mo ago
ATProto has the hardest working developer relations department in the game right now.
madrox 2mo ago
There have been so, so many attempts to decentralize in my lifetime. I used to be a huge believer and worked on these problems, but have to admit I'm somewhat exhausted. The technology is not the problem. The problem is always quality, effort, and cost. If decentralization is ever going to win, it needs to be turnkey, explained without showing a network diagram, be basically free to run on your laptop, and actually have the content people want to see and not just be a bunch of people who speak lojban. [1] While I'm not sure how much of a legal leg X has to stand on, I understand why they'd rather Nitter not exist. Twitter tried (valiantly, imo) to stay open. What ultimately began the API lockdown was the need to stop bleeding financially. Ads were inevitable, and there being no reliable way to do that via API access. Twitter solved those three problems, and no one spends nearly as much time talking or caring about the technology used to do it than people who talk about decentralization. Myself included in my younger days. Now they're just defending their moat. 1: https://xkcd.com/191/ https://xkcd.com/191/
- inigyou 2mo ago
  We don't have to have any respect for X's profitability btw. We're allowed to despise it even while it's losing money.
- hamburglar 2mo ago
  I’d have a lot more sympathy for Twitter’s position wrt profit had they not explicitly told advertisers to go fuck themselves.
- someothherguyy 2mo ago
  decentralization exists and is working though? why does it need to "win"?
  - madrox 2mo ago
    Reacting to the tone of the article
skybrian 2mo ago
To put it another way: Google search works by making their own copy of the Internet. It's much smaller scale, but similarly, atproto makes downloading the entire social network relatively easy. Many ordinary techies have the resources to replicate the whole thing if they wanted to. To query your replica, you use a database, designed however you like. So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone. Google's Go Module Mirror is a similar but more specialized service that has a copy of all the Go modules that anyone has published on the Internet.
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago
  > So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone. That makes no sense - and yes, I'm aware that people think like this, even though it's entirely contradictory. If you intend to make information public, you relinquish control over access to it. Trying to walk that back, or even to retain capability of walking it back, is perverting the system and turning the earlier claim of information being public into a lie.
  - someothherguyy 2mo ago
    just because someone shared something within a small circle of intended observers, doesn't mean they want some omniscient entity to be able to discover it and use it as they desire. i think the atproto has mechanisms for this?
    - skybrian 2mo ago
      Not yet, but soon. There’s a “Spaces” proposal in alpha testing: https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha
  - skybrian 2mo ago
    I think a lot of people prefer to post in obscurity. It’s somewhat similar to the “share with anyone who has access to the link” security model.
lightandlight 2mo ago
> The web is a few dozen companies, each holding a filing cabinet, each with a receptionist posted out front. He'll read you one file at a time, but only files you can name, as fast as he cares to read, and as long as his boss allows. Fortunately this isn't true. Social media consists of a few big walled gardens, but the web itself is still open. Go forth and create a website!
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago
  Yeah, but the web is getting smaller, as the most valuable and interesting parts got turned into private whatsapp groups or non-indexed discord and other "community first" nonsense, and went dark.
arjie 2mo ago
At first, I thought that the fraction of people who want this kind of network of peers would be rather small. I thought that almost all people want extensive restrictions on user agents and controlling how the data is revealed to the user. But Bluesky actually does not restrict AI scraping and consumption of data. You're just yet another consumer, subject to rate-limiting etc. whether you are browser or headless agent. I have to say that I am somewhat (pleasantly) surprised that this approach is accepted by Bluesky considering the community is more anti-AI than most. The fact that you're allowed to consume the feed is amazing. Good stuff!
- pfraze 2mo ago
  I’ll give a pretty honest accounting of that. We made it a pretty big goal from the start to clearly communicate to users that the network is extremely public, and that we believe open access to public content is an important part of preventing another round of walled gardens. This is generally understood and appreciated, but the community has a wide range of opinions about it. Some people see public as public and that they’re there to have their voice heard. Some people see it as a pretty uneasy arrangement at best, and would rather it wasn’t that way. The atproto community has been spending a large portion of the year developing “atproto spaces,” which are essentially a way to cheaply mint mini-atprotos with access control. This is the answer to non public data. It will be added to the Bluesky app and the ecosystem, and it will remain accessible to apps based on the grants of the users, but the spaces will not broadcast their content on the firehose. I believe, based on the reception we’ve received from that work, that people appreciate that it’s being done, and that people eager for less exposure will pick it up. This should, hopefully, resolve any tensions at play. We will continue to advocate for public speech and I think many people will continue to participate in it, but I am quite curious to see if the non public spaces gain more adoption overall. My guess, based on people’s general use of the internet, is that they naturally will. The public arenas serve a particular purpose and not everyone is always trying to be a part of them. EDIT: did I really just say "let me give an honest accounting of that." I have been spending way too much time with llms.
  - edent 2mo ago
    > This is generally understood and appreciated I don't think that's true. For example, nowhere on the blocking interface does it tell users that their blocks are public. https://bsky.app/profile/edent.tel/post/3l4rjxx32br2j https://bsky.app/profile/edent.tel/post/3l4rjxx32br2j
dmje 2mo ago
Turned off by the typo in the first LINE…
anshxgoyal 2mo ago
[flagged]
lloydatkinson 2mo ago
I don't understand the premise, is this saying short form posts (dare I call them Tweets) on Bluesky are somehow a replacement for long form blog posts?
- conradludgate 2mo ago
  No. atproto (which is what bluesky is based on) supports all kinds of public media - for instance https://standard.site/ https://standard.site/ which is designed for longer form static content. You can choose where your PDS runs and the ecosystem still works. If one relay shuts down (Google Reader) or takes their API private (X, Reddit) it shouldn't matter, the PDS are separate and another relay can take over. Worst case you can go directly to the PDS, but that wouldn't work at scale
domysee 2mo ago
I think for any kind of widespread adoption we're a couple of decades out regarding feasibility. The problem for managing your own thing is not necessarily the usability of current software (although that too), but education of the masses regarding technology. It'd be great if schools taught foundations like how the internet works (not in-depth, but basics like what a server is) and how to create your own server. People would get gradually less afraid of technology and that'd enable systems like this. As it stands, people are just more comfortable using walled gardens because their data is managed for them and they don't bear any responsibility for it.
- skybrian 2mo ago
  People can use Bluesky without understanding any of this stuff. Their posts are stored in a separate pds automatically.
flaburgan 2mo ago
IMO those problems are better solved by SOLID https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ pushed by Tim Berners Lee himself. As someone who worked(s) a lot on diaspora, I can tell you decentralization is hard. I don't see how atproto solve most of the complicated problems (discovery, scalability, etc.)
- jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
  > I don't see how atproto solve most of the complicated problems (discovery, scalability, etc.) Oh! So you don't know very much! Well, happy to help give you some links so you can learn some of the basics! @pfrazee gave a talk recently on how atproto was built from day 1 for scale. It's not a secret, it's in the name, Authenticate Transfer Protocol! Your key that you control signs all of your content! Such that your can be forwarded by anyone, that it continues to bear your authentication, wherever it goes, whatever replicas it's on! https://youtu.be/BoJnj2yPf14?is=YcnoJZSqQw1YBhl9 https://youtu.be/BoJnj2yPf14?is=YcnoJZSqQw1YBhl9 It's so easy and small that one can run a whole network firebose off a small VPS! There's a list of them. https://atproto.at/relays https://atproto.at/relays Discoverability is a function of this! There's all sorts of tools to filter for different kinds of data. There's indexes, so you can find things like back links, https://www.microcosm.blue/ https://www.microcosm.blue/. And there's specific schemas (lexicons) for helping find blog posts, https://standard.site https://standard.site. I'm a fan of the API that Solid exposes, I'm a fan of the json-ld. But for discoverability and scalability, in terms of being a networked protocol, ATproto is great.
  - flaburgan 2mo ago
    I would need a real chat to discuss this in depth and certainly can't do this here, but this is not what I meant by scale and discoverability. Scale is, how can I run my own server with access to all the content without having a DB that explodes, and discoverability is the usual "if you don't have the full ID of someone you can't find them". The attempts to solve these are old as the internet and every solutions that I know of (such as relays) means re-adding some centralization in the architecture. I still have to see a fully decentralized protocol which is also reliable and fast (so, it scales, even for small servers). Matrix is the closest to that but they are facing tons of problems which come from the architecture itself.

133 points by mmattbtw 2mo ago

>Simple: the network won. The developers stopped being an asset, and the API progressively closed. You can add Reddit to that list, IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build.

icepush 2mo ago
Reddit went public in 2024. What are you talking about ?
- cube00 2mo ago
  > you'll even get downvoted for "living in the past" if you attempt to bring it up later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390953
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    That comment was posted 6 days ago. What are you talking about?
- johndough 2mo ago
  I guess you have to read OPs comment as the inner monologue of Reddit's CEO in 2023: "IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build." When Reddit raised its API prices in 2023 in order to make itself more attractive for an IPO, it effectively priced out third-party apps, such as the Apollo reader app. Discussion back then: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

aftbit 2mo ago

I can't decide if ATProto is actually amazing or if its proponents are just dazzled by their own tech. Is it truly decentralized? What makes it better than Mastodon or Matrix or Scuttlebutt? Of course, at the end of the day, it's the network effects that matter. Attention is all you need indeed.

tptacek 2mo ago
The Twitter-competitive social site is moribund, so I think maybe what you're seeing more and more of is the pivot towards infrastructure --- always planned, but not before such a big part of the messaging.
pfraze 2mo ago
The team came from the IPFS and Scuttlebutt worlds. "Better" is relative to your design goals. Iroh is better for point-to-point connections & localfirst. Matrix is better for chat rooms. Etc. The general logic of atproto was to serve large scale publishing with an open model that doesn't seriously degrade the UX. The scale orientation means - at least until the non-public spaces land - you're syncing a lot of records to provide an alternative microblogger to bluesky. The account hosting system, however - the pds - remains exceedingly cheap and easy to run. Pros and cons, matching with the design goals.
tynanpurdy 2mo ago
I will say that I have no relation to bluesky so it's not my tech and I do find it amazing. This post from Dan Abramov might help in clarifying how 'decentralized' it is compared to the threadiverse https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/ https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/
- crabmusket 2mo ago
  Dan's post "a social file system" also does a great job at explaining and motivating the data model behind atproto. It can do anything, not just microblogs!
inigyou 2mo ago

8organicbits 2mo ago

For blog posts, I'd look to RSS instead. That's where that content is traditionally published. Instead of SELECTing from bluesky's index, you can use OPML subscription lists. There are a bunch of places that curate feed lists, so it's significantly less likely to face API death like twitter did. There are multiple sites that support follower semantics over RSS. Feedland tracks subscriptions publicly, so you can see the blogs I read (https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev), and who reads my blog (https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fblog%2Frss.xml https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...). I run another variant which collects OPML blogrolls via crawling, so you can find out who else likes your favorite blog and what else they recommend. Here's the page for Simon Willison's blog (https://blogroll-network.alexsci.com/discover/feed-a34ee2a885866974aa1f1f41131ac7b6/ https://blogroll-network.alexsci.com/discover/feed-a34ee2a88...). Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint.

tynanpurdy 2mo ago
> Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint. Nothing to do with Bluesky services. There are many independent firehoses and relays. Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one. No curator between me and the posts, and no work by me to crawl the whole network for them. https://pdsls.dev/jetstream?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Fchennai.firehose.stream%2Ftap&collections=site.standard.document https://pdsls.dev/jetstream?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Fchennai.fir... Edit: ok there is an aggregator, the relay is scraping all of the PDSs out there to build the event stream. Notably this is not possible with RSS, where you need to build a large index with knowledge. PDSs request relays to crawl and that's that.
- 8organicbits 2mo ago
  > Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one. This stream lacks any blog posts that haven't been specifically published to atproto. Conversely, I see RSS feeds for the content in the stream, like https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:byf7jvh3yvhffackiumpddtf/rss https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:byf7jvh3yvhffackiumpddtf/rs... (if RSS feeds exists for every profiles then I'd argue that atproto is a strict subset of RSS, but I'm not certain how that feature works). The stream may give you every blog post that was published to atproto, but that's already a small subset of long-form content on the web. > Notably this is not possible with RSS, The web supports blog discovery so well that people forget it exists. A simple Google search can find a very large amount of content, much available over RSS/Atom. Many web-based feed readers index the subscriptions across all their users to help with discovery. Here's the Feedland firehose, for example: https://feedland.com/?everything=true https://feedland.com/?everything=true I don't think its helpful to argue how complete the Google index is vs a bluesky firehose though. Most users are drowning in content and discovery is about search and filtering. There's lots of interest right now in vouching for the content of others: https://susam.net/wander/wander.js https://susam.net/wander/wander.js, https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json, https://www.manton.org/2024/03/11/recommendations-and-blogrolls.html https://www.manton.org/2024/03/11/recommendations-and-blogro..., etc.

James_K 2mo ago

There are invariably 3 solutions to all “federated” web problems: - Email - Semantic HTML - Web indexing services In this case, it's mostly indexing and a little of the other two if you want to add social features. I despite ATProto with all my soul for taking a problem with such a simple and standard solution and totally obscuring it behind hundreds of layers of JSON, faux federated services, and technical jargon, all in service of creating an inferior version of Twitter. I guess it wouldn't be as sexy to offer a web indexing service instead.

pfraze 2mo ago
Genuinely curious, how would you build it differently? Would you stick with atproto's indexing model and try to simplify it, or would you use another approach?
- James_K 2mo ago
  You send a request to a web indexer with a page you want added to the network, it scans your page for outgoing links and sends an email to the owners of any domains who are also on the service. One can imagine making it a little more featureful, for instance indexing OPML blogrolls which would allow you to see whom a person follows and https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry which would allow outgoing links to be categorised (like, reply, etc) so notifications filtered. With that, it would be possible to add a front-end site imitating one of the popular social media paradigms (Reddit-style or Twitter-style being the most obvious). If there's one genuine design decision I would give for it beyond what is basically a cobbling together of existing interfaces, it would be to charge users per page uploaded. Likely very detrimental to growing the service, but I think one of the simplest ways to weed out spam and junk. A real problem with many web services is that the receiver of the message pays for it in terms of attention, where in other mediums the sender has to pay. Given that uploading crap is basically free, that's all you get. Increasing the cost of upload would weed out those endless AI summaries and lists of affiliate links. The issue with ATProto is that it operates on too many layers. You can see lacking in what I have described here the concept of durable authorship, but this is a property of content not how the content is distributed. Perhaps someone will invent a standard way to sign HTML documents, in which case you could base user accounts on that instead of DNS. AT enforces this centrally but it does not need to. It is walling itself off from the common and decentralised software ecosystem of the web for no good reason.

canterburry 2mo ago

I'm sorry, but this blog post is written as if the described functionality should obviously be available and supported by the Internet and companies who expose their data. I agree it would be neat. But, when did we conclude this "should" be possible and thus warrant such a whiny post?

tynanpurdy 2mo ago
Not a would be cool, is cool. At least now that the atproto network has proved it is in fact cool.

tolerance 2mo ago

ATProto has the hardest working developer relations department in the game right now.

madrox 2mo ago

There have been so, so many attempts to decentralize in my lifetime. I used to be a huge believer and worked on these problems, but have to admit I'm somewhat exhausted. The technology is not the problem. The problem is always quality, effort, and cost. If decentralization is ever going to win, it needs to be turnkey, explained without showing a network diagram, be basically free to run on your laptop, and actually have the content people want to see and not just be a bunch of people who speak lojban. [1] While I'm not sure how much of a legal leg X has to stand on, I understand why they'd rather Nitter not exist. Twitter tried (valiantly, imo) to stay open. What ultimately began the API lockdown was the need to stop bleeding financially. Ads were inevitable, and there being no reliable way to do that via API access. Twitter solved those three problems, and no one spends nearly as much time talking or caring about the technology used to do it than people who talk about decentralization. Myself included in my younger days. Now they're just defending their moat. 1: https://xkcd.com/191/ https://xkcd.com/191/

inigyou 2mo ago
We don't have to have any respect for X's profitability btw. We're allowed to despise it even while it's losing money.
hamburglar 2mo ago
I’d have a lot more sympathy for Twitter’s position wrt profit had they not explicitly told advertisers to go fuck themselves.
someothherguyy 2mo ago
decentralization exists and is working though? why does it need to "win"?
- madrox 2mo ago
  Reacting to the tone of the article

skybrian 2mo ago

To put it another way: Google search works by making their own copy of the Internet. It's much smaller scale, but similarly, atproto makes downloading the entire social network relatively easy. Many ordinary techies have the resources to replicate the whole thing if they wanted to. To query your replica, you use a database, designed however you like. So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone. Google's Go Module Mirror is a similar but more specialized service that has a copy of all the Go modules that anyone has published on the Internet.

TeMPOraL 2mo ago
> So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone. That makes no sense - and yes, I'm aware that people think like this, even though it's entirely contradictory. If you intend to make information public, you relinquish control over access to it. Trying to walk that back, or even to retain capability of walking it back, is perverting the system and turning the earlier claim of information being public into a lie.
- someothherguyy 2mo ago
  just because someone shared something within a small circle of intended observers, doesn't mean they want some omniscient entity to be able to discover it and use it as they desire. i think the atproto has mechanisms for this?
  - skybrian 2mo ago
    Not yet, but soon. There’s a “Spaces” proposal in alpha testing: https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha
- skybrian 2mo ago
  I think a lot of people prefer to post in obscurity. It’s somewhat similar to the “share with anyone who has access to the link” security model.

lightandlight 2mo ago

> The web is a few dozen companies, each holding a filing cabinet, each with a receptionist posted out front. He'll read you one file at a time, but only files you can name, as fast as he cares to read, and as long as his boss allows. Fortunately this isn't true. Social media consists of a few big walled gardens, but the web itself is still open. Go forth and create a website!

TeMPOraL 2mo ago
Yeah, but the web is getting smaller, as the most valuable and interesting parts got turned into private whatsapp groups or non-indexed discord and other "community first" nonsense, and went dark.

arjie 2mo ago

At first, I thought that the fraction of people who want this kind of network of peers would be rather small. I thought that almost all people want extensive restrictions on user agents and controlling how the data is revealed to the user. But Bluesky actually does not restrict AI scraping and consumption of data. You're just yet another consumer, subject to rate-limiting etc. whether you are browser or headless agent. I have to say that I am somewhat (pleasantly) surprised that this approach is accepted by Bluesky considering the community is more anti-AI than most. The fact that you're allowed to consume the feed is amazing. Good stuff!

pfraze 2mo ago
I’ll give a pretty honest accounting of that. We made it a pretty big goal from the start to clearly communicate to users that the network is extremely public, and that we believe open access to public content is an important part of preventing another round of walled gardens. This is generally understood and appreciated, but the community has a wide range of opinions about it. Some people see public as public and that they’re there to have their voice heard. Some people see it as a pretty uneasy arrangement at best, and would rather it wasn’t that way. The atproto community has been spending a large portion of the year developing “atproto spaces,” which are essentially a way to cheaply mint mini-atprotos with access control. This is the answer to non public data. It will be added to the Bluesky app and the ecosystem, and it will remain accessible to apps based on the grants of the users, but the spaces will not broadcast their content on the firehose. I believe, based on the reception we’ve received from that work, that people appreciate that it’s being done, and that people eager for less exposure will pick it up. This should, hopefully, resolve any tensions at play. We will continue to advocate for public speech and I think many people will continue to participate in it, but I am quite curious to see if the non public spaces gain more adoption overall. My guess, based on people’s general use of the internet, is that they naturally will. The public arenas serve a particular purpose and not everyone is always trying to be a part of them. EDIT: did I really just say "let me give an honest accounting of that." I have been spending way too much time with llms.
- edent 2mo ago
  > This is generally understood and appreciated I don't think that's true. For example, nowhere on the blocking interface does it tell users that their blocks are public. https://bsky.app/profile/edent.tel/post/3l4rjxx32br2j https://bsky.app/profile/edent.tel/post/3l4rjxx32br2j

dmje 2mo ago

Turned off by the typo in the first LINE…

anshxgoyal 2mo ago

[flagged]

lloydatkinson 2mo ago

I don't understand the premise, is this saying short form posts (dare I call them Tweets) on Bluesky are somehow a replacement for long form blog posts?

conradludgate 2mo ago
No. atproto (which is what bluesky is based on) supports all kinds of public media - for instance https://standard.site/ https://standard.site/ which is designed for longer form static content. You can choose where your PDS runs and the ecosystem still works. If one relay shuts down (Google Reader) or takes their API private (X, Reddit) it shouldn't matter, the PDS are separate and another relay can take over. Worst case you can go directly to the PDS, but that wouldn't work at scale

domysee 2mo ago

I think for any kind of widespread adoption we're a couple of decades out regarding feasibility. The problem for managing your own thing is not necessarily the usability of current software (although that too), but education of the masses regarding technology. It'd be great if schools taught foundations like how the internet works (not in-depth, but basics like what a server is) and how to create your own server. People would get gradually less afraid of technology and that'd enable systems like this. As it stands, people are just more comfortable using walled gardens because their data is managed for them and they don't bear any responsibility for it.

skybrian 2mo ago
People can use Bluesky without understanding any of this stuff. Their posts are stored in a separate pds automatically.

flaburgan 2mo ago

IMO those problems are better solved by SOLID https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ pushed by Tim Berners Lee himself. As someone who worked(s) a lot on diaspora, I can tell you decentralization is hard. I don't see how atproto solve most of the complicated problems (discovery, scalability, etc.)

jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
> I don't see how atproto solve most of the complicated problems (discovery, scalability, etc.) Oh! So you don't know very much! Well, happy to help give you some links so you can learn some of the basics! @pfrazee gave a talk recently on how atproto was built from day 1 for scale. It's not a secret, it's in the name, Authenticate Transfer Protocol! Your key that you control signs all of your content! Such that your can be forwarded by anyone, that it continues to bear your authentication, wherever it goes, whatever replicas it's on! https://youtu.be/BoJnj2yPf14?is=YcnoJZSqQw1YBhl9 https://youtu.be/BoJnj2yPf14?is=YcnoJZSqQw1YBhl9 It's so easy and small that one can run a whole network firebose off a small VPS! There's a list of them. https://atproto.at/relays https://atproto.at/relays Discoverability is a function of this! There's all sorts of tools to filter for different kinds of data. There's indexes, so you can find things like back links, https://www.microcosm.blue/ https://www.microcosm.blue/. And there's specific schemas (lexicons) for helping find blog posts, https://standard.site https://standard.site. I'm a fan of the API that Solid exposes, I'm a fan of the json-ld. But for discoverability and scalability, in terms of being a networked protocol, ATproto is great.
- flaburgan 2mo ago
  I would need a real chat to discuss this in depth and certainly can't do this here, but this is not what I meant by scale and discoverability. Scale is, how can I run my own server with access to all the content without having a DB that explodes, and discoverability is the usual "if you don't have the full ID of someone you can't find them". The attempts to solve these are old as the internet and every solutions that I know of (such as relays) means re-adding some centralization in the architecture. I still have to see a fully decentralized protocol which is also reliable and fast (so, it scales, even for small servers). Matrix is the closest to that but they are facing tons of problems which come from the architecture itself.