I wonder why the hell someone decided to create a new protocol for another decentralized social network platform, instead of contributing to Activity Pub, that has been developed for years. Is there some technical reason or it was just the trend to rei...
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Érico Andrei 🇧🇷 :plone:replied to everton137 last edited by
@everton137 I've read some smart people mentioning AT Protocol is better than ActivityPub in some ways -- but I did not even bother to go into the details -- but I would bet the decision to create something new was just a matter of "not invented here"
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everton137replied to Érico Andrei 🇧🇷 :plone: last edited by
@ericof do these smart people have some publicly available analysis or was it just coffee talk?
I would love to read some technical arguments. (Thanks for reminding me of the other protocol name)
#activitypub #atprotocol #decentralization #BlueSky #Mastodon
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I'll talk about this more in an upcoming post but there's a short preview in the "Stay tuned for more!" section of https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/#stay-tuned Here's the first part of it ...
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BeAware :fediverse:replied to everton137 last edited by
@everton137 @ericof if you care to read a random person's understanding of the protocol in comparison to Fediverse with a bit of personal opinion mixed in, I made a long, detailed post going over it here:
BeAware :fediverse: (@[email protected])
@[email protected] Long winded, nuanced answer, ready your eyeballs: It's a bit complicated, but since we're on Fediverse and at least somewhat familiar with how things work here, I'll try to explain with that comparison in mind. On Fediverse, instances are in control of the user data directly. To "migrate" your account, you'd be switching instances and admins entirely. BlueSky splits things up quite a bit more. There, you can host your own "PDS" or Personal Data Server. That hosts your account and post info only. Then, there's the "AppView". In comparison to Fediverse, these are like Lemmy, Mastodon, Mbin, etc. Right now, there's VERY few Appviews to choose from. Then, there's the "relay". Which to Fediverse, the only thing similar is also relays, but they work differently. On BlueSky, they relay every post and interactions of all the PDS data that connect to AppViews. I do not think there's a choice on *what* is relayed, just a huge firehose. That being said, they're not optional like Fediverse. To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized. Now, that we have those definitions out of the way, this is where things get a bit muddy and a bit of purposeful corporate created confusion for purpose of selfishness is quite apparent. Right now, there's very few AppViews. The ones I'm aware of are, BlueSky itself, Whitewind, and Frontpage.xyz. The confusion happens because BlueSky, the company, doesn't separate the fact that accounts hosted on self-hosted PDS, aren't technically Bluesky accounts, they're ATproto accounts. Everywhere you look to login, it says "login using your BlueSky account". I can only assume they're doing this on purpose so that anyone who tries to make an Appview, host a PDS, AND a relay, can't have their own "identity" like different instances and platforms have here on Fedi. That will confuse people and make them think *everything* is just hosted by BlueSky the company. However, as we've now established, there's definitely a separation of "Bluesky" the company, "BlueSky" the AppView that you can login to using your "BlueSky" account, which doesnt technically have to be hosted by anything related to BlueSky. I hope this all makes sense and you can tell that *technically* things are decentralized for the most part. It's just that BlueSky is purposefully muddying their own definitions of things so that anyone that tries to build on ATproto, has a hard time making themselves known as *not* bluesky due to the way they conflate all these definitions. Sorry for the huge post and hope it makes sense in some way. Thanks for reading.😁👍 @[email protected]
BeAware (social.beaware.live)
Just thought I'd share in case you were interested.🫡
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@jdp23 @[email protected] I got some answers to my questions and I will read them carefully later. I wonder about your highlighted part as compared to this post, where it says it's more expensive to implement the AT Protocol. It is simpler for developers, but expensive to maintain?
Do we have other famous instances using the AT protocol? If not, why not intrigues me.
https://toot.io/@jan/113089749688331180
CC @jan
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There are other small platforms using AT (WhiteWind is a blog, FrontPage.fyi link aggregator) but they're very early stage. maybe a few hundred people host their own PDSs,. It's basically just Bluesky so far but there's a lot of energy so we'll see.
In terms of cost, it's hard to know.. @jan's right about a PDS not being independent. 3rd-party AppViews can use the Bluesky relay. Cost per AppView is proportional to number of users ...
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So Bluesky's AppView for 3 million active users is probably quite expensive; not clear how expensive smaller AppViews (for the new apps once they grow some, or only seeing a subset of the network) would be. There isn't really an equivalent of "instance", and it's not clear yet what topologies make sense for what purposes.
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@jdp23 @jan @ericof okay, thanks for sharing these two examples. I'll take a look.
This discussion made me wonder why a company as big and experienced as Meta would decide for Activity Pub instead of AT Protocol.
I remember in 2006, when I started working as a software developer, in a social network platform of University of São Paulo, there were discussions about decentralization of these social networks tools, and there was a competition among Google and Facebook for their protocols. I think both companies gave up about it, it would be interesting to know more details.
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@everton137 @jdp23 @ericof Yeah, we had the same discussion in 2010 with diaspora* then Google+ came around, but still the early days for decentralisation.
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With Meta, first of all they're looking to the protocol to solve a different technical problem than Bluesky. Threads uses Instagram's existing infrastructure, and they want to connect it to other social networks -- AP's strength. Bluesky needed new, highly-scalable infrastructure to build their own ... not something AP's good at.
But also, Threads gets a HUGE PR advantage for adopting an existing W3C standard - and can use it as part of a regulatory play
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And AP's federation (at least as implemented in today's Fediverse) means that bigger instances get a better "big world" discussion. In general posts only federate to an instance if somebody on the instance is following the person who posted (or boosted). So hashtags and searches have a lot more info on .social (which has a lot of people ) than on a small instance. Good news for Threads!
I talked more about what I think Meta's up to in
https://privacy.thenexus.today/embrace-extend-and-exploit/ -
And yeah, lots of interesting comparisons with past efforts. I don't know if anybody's looked at those in detail. Other than XMPP, that is, and AP supporters have reasons why they think this time will be different. We shall see.