It has, over time, become harder and harder for me to advocate for the "fediverse" as it exists today.
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It has, over time, become harder and harder for me to advocate for the "fediverse" as it exists today.
Especially with the growing maturity in ATProto. It isn't there yet, in some ways not by a longshot, but it is also a far cry better than our current situation in many relevant aspects.
It doesn't mean that the solution is BlueSky, but I'm increasingly wondering why AP, why mastodon, and why our current model.
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Hrefna (DHC)replied to Hrefna (DHC) last edited by [email protected]
I'd like everyone who is working with AP or who has worked with AP to go look at this resource:
https://atproto.com/guides/applications
Read it, beginning to end if you can.
Then come back and look at the following:
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers
and
https://jenniferplusplus.com/no-universal-translators/
and
https://web.archive.org/web/20240224195830/https://gopiandcode.uk/logs/log-writing-activitypub.html
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@hrefna are you talking about a deficiency in specifications here, or an overall fundamental design issue with AP vs ATProto? Presumably ActivityPub specs could be improved, but no amount of rewriting will pave over any issue you're having with the network arrangement that ATProto solves.
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@greg There is no fixing the fundamental problems with the specs for AP is the problem.
The issue isn't lack of documentation, it is fundamental to how the objects are constructed and shared, and how those objects are understood.
There's been an extreme lack of will to fix these issues in AP, and it shows.
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the joys of reading this post and finding out that half the comments are missing
gregs second reply to hrefna didnt show up for me. i know why base replies sometimes dont show up with ap's server model, but getting the first reply by shown and not the second reply by the same account is a new kind of weird that ive seen
and i totally understand where you're coming from hrefna. had you seen this one by any chance as well? https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers think its quite good
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Are we on the track to Hof's law: the replies to any comments about problems with the ActivityPub specification will provide an example of the problems with the ActivityPub specification?
And @[email protected] I agree, good thread!
@[email protected] @[email protected] -
Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D.replied to Hrefna (DHC) last edited by
@hrefna Thank you. I've had a vague sense that AP had limitations that weren't really fixable or at least weren't fixable in a way that the main developers were going to take on.
I haven't done the reading yet on ATProto but I'm glad there's at least a potentially viable alternative.
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Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D.replied to Michael T. Bacon last edited by
@hrefna Relative to this, I've been thinking that one thing that the AP fediverse is missing is something like forums, threads, or other forms of coherent spaces beyond just instances and hashtags. Particularly ones that can have cross-instance closure and moderation.
Do you happen to know if that's possible in ATProto?
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@hrefna Iβm hesitant to get involved with a community on Bluesky or Threads. Both are owned by the same corporate entities & billionaires that ruined Facebook and Twitter. Mastodon & the Fediverse certainly are not perfect, but at least weβre not under the thumbs of corporate boards or mercurial billionaires.
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@keydelk k.
Like I don't even know where to begin with this. There's a lot to unpack here but maybe we should just throw out the suitcase instead.
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Hrefna (DHC)replied to Michael T. Bacon last edited by
@MichaelTBacon I don't think it exists out of the box in the bluesky app, but at a glance I think it'd be relatively straightforward to implement.
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@hrefna divide and conquer
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https://frontpage.fyi/ is a simple HN-type link aggregator, they're planning on adding multiple communities (a la reddit). I haven't seen anything about anybody working on a forum yet but seems like a natural idea.
@[email protected] @[email protected] -
Nah. AT's focused on something AP isn't good at: broad flat public conversations. And more generally the idea that we'd all adopt a single protocol isn't realistic -- especially not one that was built without thinking about security, safety, or scalability.
@[email protected] @[email protected] -
Exactly.
ATProto is trying to solve a specific problem. AP was trying to solve every problem in representation but punted on most of the actual distributed systems questions
Their reasons for wanting to do something different are very much "because AP isn't suitable to the problem" and not "to do something different [for the sake of being different or for the sake of fragmenting the ecosystem]"
Dorsey also isn't on BlueSky's board any more. He's disenchanted with them.
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The easiest way I've seen to understand what ATProto seeks to do that AP is simply unsuitable toward is this.
ATProto wants, explicitly, to make codegen easy. In any language. You should be able to take their system, codegen, and you can interface with the app. Consequently, they also wanted to separate the app from the infrastructure.
These are baked-in assumptions and you can find them throughout the system.
I can't even imagine what that would look like with AP.
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smallcircles (Humanity Now π)replied to Laurens Hof last edited by
@laurenshof @jdp23 @hrefna @greg
My reply-check only found @hazelnoot comment missing from the thread. Unfindable, undisplayable in my Mastodon web UI and not in the "post & replies" collection, but when looking at the public thread from hachyderm in a separate tab it is there: https://hachyderm.io/@[email protected]gbt/113126078989951122
But yes, hazelnoot, for me also "reliance on JSON-LD and the complicated type model" are the biggest issues, I guess.