@Claire The article I pointed to was about fully self hosting your own atoproto infrastructure, including relay, and people seem to be getting excited about it on bluesky as being feasible, and I'm feeling uncertain it is
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Clairement crevée last edited by
@Claire @eramdam Well I mean, Bluesky's ATproto recently has made the rounds as the "more decentralized" protocol over ActivityPub, and clearly a lot of people on my Bluesky feed right now seem to think it's more decentralized, and it does have one major improvement which is that it uses content-addressed posts (I don't think the DID methods currently actually do their job though the goal is good, I can expand on that at a future time)
Which is what's leading me to look more into it, in which ways is it more decentralized in practice? Is it even particularly decentralized in practice? I'm trying to gain a technical understanding.
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Dr. Quadragon ❌replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber That's what I like about the Fediverse and its projects. They're basically self-contained, with very little base maintenance cost, even those engines on the heavier side, like Mastodon or Misskey. Leaves more leeway for horizontal scaling, more people can afford it.
Bluesky kinda looks designed by billionaires for other billionaires.
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Clairement crevéereplied to Dr. Quadragon ❌ last edited by
@drq @cwebber i get why you'd design things like this tbh, that neatly solves a lot of issues, or at least make them a lot easier to deal with
you can much more easily reason about complete up-to-date information without a need for custom update logic and strategies; comparatively, current-world ActivityPub is a mess in that regard
but a world where everything is public, shared and mediated by a world-knowing entity (even if it can “easily” be replaced with an equivalent one) is not what i'm looking for
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@Claire @drq @cwebber the architecture of atproto kind of presumes that there is value/utility in "full world" indices: ability to search and find strangers with no social-graph-connection across the network.
I don't think all (or even much at all) social web stuff needs to end up in that bucket! but that bucket is going to exist in the world and have an impact. I love the AP social outcomes, but if AP doesn't provide for big-world broadcast, Twitter will continue to have a role in society
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bryan newboldreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber @Claire @eramdam don't think the goal w/ atproto is to be "more decentralized" in the abstract. we (team) had worked on SSB and dat, which were radically decentralized/p2p but hard to work with and grow. would not supplant "the platforms".
atproto came out of identifying the *minimum* necessary decentralization properties, and ensuring those are strongly locked in. we basically settled on:
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@cwebber @Claire @eramdam
unbundling and composition: ability to swap components w/o swapping full stack.credible exit: ability for new interoperable providers to enter network. public data must be accessible w/o permission, and schemas/APIs declared
control identity: whole network/proto doesn't need to be individualist, but identity is personal
easy to build new apps: don't build for the old modalities, enable new modalities. accomodate opinionated devs.
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@cwebber @Claire @eramdam I have a longer post on this, and our progress, on my personal blog:
https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ -
@bnewbold @cwebber @Claire @eramdam
my counterpoint to that is, like trying to run your own version of the architecture for e.g. 11ty, it locks things into a scale and architecture that requires full time devs.
what people need for "'credible exit" is a dead simple system.
something that a small, non-venture-capital, organization can reasonably host. think cohost's budget.
going for "you of course need 8 full time engineers" level complicated isn't decentralized.
needing a full time rails sysadmin isn't great in mastodon's favor, but it's getting better.
this is similar to saying "static site generators and hosting are viable alternatives to WP" when wordpress is easy enough for people to spin up and use, and there's a viable ecosystem for it, for newbs to run.
WP has a lot of inefficient resources when all they need is a static CMS, but it got the deployment story right.
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@cwebber @Claire @eramdam
I think a bunch about this post about the history of mp3 piracy and "minimum viable decentralization":
https://web.archive.org/web/20180725200137/https://medium.com/@jbackus/resistant-protocols-how-decentralization-evolves-2f9538832ada(though it wasn't directly influential on atproto design, and Backus has since pulled the post)
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@bnewbold @cwebber @Claire @eramdam
don't expect a tracker company that plans to make money on the big data of tracking torrents to fully embrace the magnet file specification or the DHT in favor of their cure.
e.g., the "VPNs cure everything" of social media
you can't make someone learn that which their job depends on them not getting.
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@risottobias @cwebber @Claire @eramdam
I'm not sure I understand 11ty; is that https://www.11ty.dev/?for me credible exit means being able to replace the largest operator, who is indexing the full network. if the network is large, such an index is going to be large! spinning up a cozy/indie/small network is good, and important, but the full-network thing is also important in society.
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@risottobias @cwebber @Claire @eramdam the value of data-for-sale is usually proportional to how exclusive access to it is. if data is public, it is commodity and "worth" a whole lot less.
IMHO client apps are way under-appreciated in this regard: they can track attention/behavior way better than API servers can.
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@bnewbold Thank you Bryan, this is extremely helpful!
I hope to see multiple #BlueSky relays soon (incentives unclear: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113364719373034539). I worry about the climate costs of many full copies.
One accidental design feature in #Mastodon is how an instance serves as "relay" with a cache of posts and media caused haphazardly by whatever happens to federate. This is messy but flexible. https://masto.host/re-mastodon-media-storage/ Instances can share deduplicated object storage. https://jortage.com/
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@nemobis atproto relays currently mirror only "records", not media blobs, so size isn't too crazy.
we think a degree of duplication and mirroring is good/healthy for the network. similar to having multiple copies of git repo checkouts. but a few dozen full network copies is probably plenty?
resource/climate-wise, what we see in our infra is that "reverse chron" timelines, and to some degree notification tracking, are expensive (much more than relay). ironically "algo feeds" are cheaper?
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@nemobis at least for us, now, at current scale, for the bsky app, "reads" are more expensive (in kilowatts and silicon) than "writes". I don't think this would be particularly more efficient if network distributed the load more to many smaller nodes (vs having big API servers).
it is possible to "shard" parts of network for things like search queries. https://yacy.net/ might be relevant. I don't think that helps with efficiency though?
