Comment by jrm4

Comment by jrm4 a day ago

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Been thinking about this lately and ultimately, I'm thinking that -- taking into account what we know about "federation" -- both the Nostr and ATProto models are generally pointless because they attack a problem with more complicated tech that must be solved with OR without that tech anyway.

Someone said it really well; if your solution relies on "maybe people will learn about or do new complex thing X" it's just not likely to take off.

But for the sake of argument, let's try going down that road for this. Along the way you'll be communicating with people, building trust, etc etc.

But now YOU'VE ALREADY DONE THE THING YOU'RE trying to optimize for, and for which we already have an extremely resilient model, aka Mastodon-which-is-very-analogous-to-email. At that point, just make a mastodon server or servers with with those people.

It just feels like the smart bet is doing that analogously to email, a model that definitely works, then trying to do the same thing PLUS invent a whole new idea of "take everything with you" at the user level.

grumbel a day ago

If I'd wanted my user account tied to a server controlled by somebody else, I'd just use Twitter. Mastodon isn't solving any problems here.

The beauty of Nostr is that it turns the server into a dumb relay, the server controls and owns nothing and you can replace it with another one at anytime or broadcast to multiple at once to begin with. The user is in full control and everything is held together by public-key crypto.

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  • clarkmoody a day ago

    The magic moment is importing your secret key into an alternate client and all your contacts, posts, and feed populate from the data stored in the relays.

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    • jazzyjackson a day ago

      Is it practical for an individual with a $4 VPS to spin up a mastadon server + front end client for their own use and have it interact with existing servers? Curious how much friction there is that users end up in on someone else's machine

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      • thejohnconway 18 hours ago

        Mastodon is a fairly finicky beast, has a few dependencies that you also have to manage (redis, sidekiq, Postgres), and is surprisingly resource intensive.

        So you can do it, but it’s not really designed for that use case.

        I would be great if there were a full-featured single user ActivityPub server, but last time I looked, there wasn’t really.

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      • kevinak a day ago

        He's talking about Nostr here, not mastodon.

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        • jazzyjackson 19 hours ago

          Ah makes more sense thanks. iirc mastadon doesn't have much of an identity migration story, except for using domain control as proof of identity which is kinda neat. I still like DNS and TLDs as a pay-to-play distributed namespace if you're going to have a persistent identity that can travel from server to server, and change hands as property from one owner to another. (I think there is case law on domain names being property, somewhat unique in cyberspace)

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danabramov a day ago

AT model is very different from Mastodon or email. It’s much closer spiritually to RSS and plain old web.

Mastodon is “many copies of the same app emailing each other”. There’s no global shared view of the network so you can’t have features like globally accurate like counts, shared identity, global search, algorithmic feeds across instances, etc.

On the other hand, in AT, the idea is just that apps aggregate information from different repos. So each application’s server has information aggregated from the entire network. Everybody sees the same consistent information; apps exist to separate experiences rather than communities.

For example, Tangled (https://tangled.org) and Leaflet (https://leaflet.pub) are AT apps, but they’re nothing similar to “mastodon servers”. These are complete apps that implement different experiences but on the same global network.

Crucially, normal people don’t need to “buy into” the protocol stuff with AT. Most Bluesky users don’t know what AT is and don’t care about it; they’re just using the app. There’s interesting crossovers you can do (each AT app sees each other AT app’s public data) which do bleed into the user experience (eg my Tangled avatar is actually populated from Bluesky) but overall apps compete on their merit with centralized apps.

Hope that makes sense. See https://overreacted.io/open-social/ for a longer article I wrote about AT with visual explanations.

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  • nightpool a day ago

    > It’s much closer spiritually to RSS and plain old web

    What do you mean by this? ATProto requires a giant indexing database that has access to every post in the network. Mastodon is more like a feed reader—you only get notified about the posts you care about. How is needing a giant database that knows about every RSS feed in the world closer to the plain old web?

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    • danabramov a day ago

      >What do you mean by this?

      RSS is a way to aggregate data from many sites into one place. AT lets you do the same, but with bells and whistles (the data is signed and typed, and there's a realtime stream in addition to pulling on demand). If you're forced to describe AT via existing technologies, AT is basically like RSS for typed JSON in Git over HTTP or WebSockets that scales to millions of users.

      It is completely up to you what you decide to index. If you want to build an app that listens to records of "Bluesky post" type that are created only by people you follow, you absolutely can.

      See https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3m2fjnh5hpc2f (which runs locally and indexes posts relevant to you) and https://reddwarf.whey.party/ (which doesn't have a database at all and pulls data from original servers on demand + using https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ for some queries).

      The reason you don't see more of these is because an isolated experience is... well, isolated. So people are less interested in running something like this compared to, say, a whole new AT app. But AT can scale down to Mastodon-like use cases too.

      >ATProto requires a giant indexing database that has access to every post in the network.

      Only if you want to index every post, i.e. if you want to run a full-scale social app for millions of users. As an app builder, you get to choose what you index.

      For a start, you probably only want to store the records relevant to your app. For example, I doubt that Tangled (https://tangled.org/), which is an AT app, has a database with every Bluesky post. That seems absurd because Tangled is focused on a completely different use case — a social layer around Git. So Tangled only indexes records like "Tangled repo", "Tangled follow", "Tangled star", and so on.

      Naturally, Tangled wants to index all posts related to Tangled — that's just how apps work. If you wanted to build a centralized app, you'd also want it to contain the whole database of what you want the app to show. This isn't specific to AT, that's just common sense—to be able to show every possible post on demand with aggregated information (such as like counts), you have to index that information, hit someone else's index, or fetch posts from the source (but then you won't know the aggregated like counts).

      That said — if you want to build a copy of a specific app (like Bluesky) but filtered down to just the people you follow (with no global search, algorithmic feeds, etc), you absolutely can, as I've linked earlier. Or you can build something hybrid relying on global caches, or some other subset of the network (say, last 2 weeks of posts). How you do indexing is up to you. You're the developer here.

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      • nightpool a day ago

        This would make sense if there weren't so many features—like Blocks, DMs, followers-only posts, etc—that were reliant on the AppView enforcing a single global view of the world. I agree that I do think the AT model does have good properties but right now too much of it is reliant on this single shared global app view

        But thanks for the link to Konbini! That looks really exciting and promising and I would love to start using it if I can run it completely decoupled from Bluesky infrastructure.

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        • danabramov 19 hours ago

          I think it's only reliant on them to the extent that you want to build copies of the same exact experience, which I personally don't find very interesting. I think a much more compelling story is not, say, "a clone of Bluesky with a Bluesky DM folder", but, say, "a Spaces-like product that closely integrates with Bluesky (for posting) and is also listed as a stream on on Streamplace".

          I agree that some information seems important to know, like blocks. (Although in different apps it's reasonable to expect blocks to be app-specific.) Blocks are public on Bluesky though, for this exact reason. DMs are a disconnected service but the eventual idea is some kind of E2E (https://www.germnetwork.com/ is also building something now). Follower-only things could work through some variation of private state mechanism (see https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhmtognls2q, https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhui2zbxk2b).

          >I would love to start using it if I can run it completely decoupled from Bluesky infrastructure.

          You could use Blacksky's relay as the input source (https://atproto.africa/), or run your own relay. The only piece you'd then depend on is PLC registry (since it resolves PLC identity). Bluesky is in the process of separating it into a separate entity in Switzerland, but if that's a hard goal, I guess you could forbid `did:plc` identities in your app (vast majority of users) and only ingest data about `did:web` ones? Or do you feel OK about PLC resolution?

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      • jazzyjackson a day ago

        > The reason you don't see more of these is because an isolated experience is... well, isolated.

        I don't understand why you become isolated once you've built your own app, it it because the bluesky firehouse has to decide to index posts I make on my server? I guess I'm asking how does an application decide which sources to index from, just anyone advertising that they are serving that lexicon? Why then would I become isolated by virtue of hosting only data I want to host/indexing only feeds I care to index?

        (Thanks in advance I do want to grok this...)

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  • hugs a day ago

    i'm very curious about tangled. i'm building a new thing (tl;dr: an e2e testing and monitoring service) and hope to add more distributed/decentralized functionality into its core. i had been leaning heavily towards using nostr at the core, but it's nice to see atproto-based examples i can learn from, too.

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Zigurd a day ago

I've been doing some exploratory implementation using ATProto and the Bluesky server. It strikes me as a bit over engineered, but I'd take that over Ruby on Rails and Node.js, especially if it needs to turn into a product.

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