How will this end up going any better than Mastodon has?
Near inevitabilities:
- All the small instances defederating from the largest due to politics/spam/annoying noobs/whatever, effectively killing the easiest path to entry into the community
- Pointless debates about whether it’s OK to federate with instances that host pirated content, disagreeable politics, furry VNs, etc., which everyone has to take a side (the correct side) on
- Relatively little actual work/productive discussion going on, since many users are there mostly for the politics / fediverse posturing than for actual work
Atproto isn’t “many servers sending messages to each other”. It’s structured more like RSS:
1) there’s an app-agnostic hosting layer (and anyone can run a host, a bit like personal site with RSS)
2) then there’s apps, which aggregate over data from all hosts (a bit like Google Reader or Feedly)
So there’s no such thing as “defederating”. You don’t have many copies of Tangled beefing with each other. It’s more like you can run your own hosting for your own data (if you want), and anyone can build an app that aggregates from everyone’s data (Tangled is one such app).
> Atproto isn’t “many servers sending messages to each other”. It’s structured more like RSS
Except that, crucially, RSS/Atom plays well with static nodes (e.g. personal websites generated with Jekyll/Hugo/whatever—or even written by hand[1]), and Atproto does not. (Nor does Mastodon; previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862612>.)
It'd be great if the complexities needed to support the "Atmosphere" were widely recognized/acknowledged to be overkill and soon enough ended up going the way of things like CORBA and WSDL while in its place a resurgence of interest in the Atomsphere emerged.
Atom was designed for news, before social media existed, where 15+ minute polling times were (borderline) acceptable. Atproto was designed for social media, in an age of Twitter users getting their news in seconds, to the point of being able to comment on live events play-by-play. There's no coming back from that world.
With that said, I wish both Mastodon and Atproto supported opt-in pull-based, static sources.
There's always some Gemini protocol faction that shows up to yell that everything is wrong and we have to keep hand assembling our packets by hand or it'll never work.
Atproto's PDS is the root idea that everything extends off of, is the "social filesystem" that you control. There's a protocol objective to be able to spread your data around widely and for folks to be able to cryptographically check that that data came from you (even if you have to change hosts or even if someone sneakernets your data around). That's going to have some complexity! But it allows aggregation, is essential to how we are able to syndicate data so widely in atproto. It's so important it's in the name: Authenticated Transfer protocol.
And that in turn enables systems like Tangled here to be built, that layer stop the personal data servers, and relays. These work because there is identity.
If you need your static site to be on atproto (yay!), you can just have one of the various PDS hosts (such as Bluesky or eurosky or black sky or npmx) host the PDS for your. Since it is authenticated and user sovereign, you can permissionlessly move to a different host whenever you please, should that go awry. It's unclear to me why static site needs are an interesting or useful target that social networking ought conform to.
If you want to make a simpler network where we don't have those guarantees, please go right ahead. It feels to me like a snap reaction though that doesn't bother weighing what we have gotten or why things are this way, that is reflexively demanding.
The web is already structured like this. You can poll a URL for updates. You can host your own data. Anyone can build an app that aggregates from everyone's data.
Yes, all of those things are possible. Now imagine a protocol built from the ground up for those purposes, not just possible, but the entire community and ecosystem embracing those things.
ATproto federates in a very different way than Mastodon. There is no concept of "instances" on ATproto.
Your account is hosted on a PDS and you sign into the app with your PDS sign-in and records go to your PDS, but everything on the app is from what's called an "AppView" which provides a centralized view of all data in all PDSes so it feels just like you're using a regular centralized app. But there can be multiple AppViews and AppViews can be self-hosted.
So unlike with Mastodon, it doesn't matter what PDS "instance" you're on because the app layer is completely separate from it.
Not in expert in either but ATProto services (what they call AppViews) are substantially different from the fediverse because they rely on a shared relay instead of explicit federation.
I'm conflicted about the costs of what is currently effectively global discovery, but it's not just another Mastodon.
E: I think its funny multiple other people said the same thing in the time it took me to write this
Note a relay is a perf optimization and doesn’t have to be a single shared chokepoint.
These days running a relay is fairly cheap (~$30/mo?), there’s maybe a dozen of them, and some apps don’t use one at all (instead relying on services like https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ for querying backlinks).
> - Pointless debates about whether it’s OK to federate with instances that host pirated content, disagreeable politics, furry VNs, etc., which everyone has to take a side (the correct side) on
Why do you have to take a side / take the correct side? Can't you either just not take any side or take whatever side you feel like and go with that?
On Mastodon, if you take the wrong side, those on the correct side will defederate from you. Not merely because you host (or don't host) the content they like (or dislike), but because you merely enable (or discriminate against) those who host that content.
Of course, all sides are wrong in somebody's eyes; so no matter what you do, you will be defederated from by at least somebody.
The way Mastodon works, defederation irreversibly breaks all follow relationships, without notifying those involved. If you disagree with the decision, you can migrate to another server, but you won't get your followers / followees back, not without everybody involved doing a lot of manual drudge work. This is just one way in which the myth of "users are free to do what they wish, if they disagree with the admins, they can migrate somewhere else" breaks.
To make matters worse, there's no way to see which users that you may wish to follow are / will be hidden from you if you choose a given instance. Defederation lists are a (somewhat open) secret; it's good practice to announce defederations, but there's no automated API endpoint to see them, so there's no way to answer the question of "who am I going to lose if I migrate from x to y."
> On Mastodon, if you take the wrong side, those on the correct side will defederate from you. Not merely because you host (or don't host) the content they like (or dislike), but because you merely enable (or discriminate against) those who host that content.
Ok, so? People block you all the time because they don't agree with you, why is that a problem? If people don't want to hear what you say, shouldn't they be allowed to not listen?
Personally, I don't understand that point of view of blocking people who you disagree with, for me the point of the internet is to find different views and perspectives, but I'm also fine with others filtering out whatever I say, doesn't really impact me either way.
If you want no rules what you say, run your own instance. Depending on what you say, some people will want to listen, others will want to filter your opinion away, I don't think either sides are "wrong" for that, it's just like in real life. If you want to use someone else's instance, you follow their rules. It mostly isn't harder than this.
No, because this happens on a per-admin level, not on a per-user level.
You go on a cruise for two weeks and there's a disagreement about whether to federate with Meta or not. Your admin takes a side, whatever that side might be. Two weeks later, you come back and lose 10% of followers, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Yeah, that kind of makes sense to me, you chose that instance because you're OK with that admin making choices for you. Just like how I choose to post comments on HN, and if the admins/moderators tell me to stop something, or that now half my comments are gone for reason X, I can't really cry about it, all I can do is follow what admins do/say or jump ship.
They'll then defederate also from you. The argument goes, you're a nazi/facist/racist/*phobe, because you associate with (== did not defederate from) the designated nazi/facist/racist/*phobe.
Yes, it's that toxic. Go subscribe #FediBlock hashtag if you don't believe me.
Ok, so what? Let those people block you then, sounds like people you probably don't want to interact with anyways?
I've seen that, and I'm not sure what's supposed to be toxic. It's community-organized filtering of unwanted views, for the people who want to engage in that. I don't agree with that, so I don't participate or do that myself, and I also don't seem to face any negative consequences because I'm not participating in that. What am I supposed to be sad about here, that some people don't want to listen to my views?
That's not totally true. Orion supports Chrome/FF WebExtensions, for example. The engine does (practically, even in the EU) have to be WebKit, but that's not the same thing as a "Safari skin."
Idk about zero, my Android device has SMS spam filtering, putting them in a separate inbox, hiding the notification, and with big red warnings if I indeed open them.
Can't be blocked by the provider, doesn't require a subscription with a provider, can falsify the sender, can send to everyone in range instead of guessing numbers.
The conspiracy explanation would be that the primary purpose is IMEI/IMSI data collection and/or wireless bug planting, and scamming is secondary purpose and/or deep sampling operation. Though, this is just my hallucination.
That logic doesn’t make any sense to me. Game programming, art, and even marketing are highly specific niches within those broader fields. You can’t pick any random programmer off the street and get them up to speed on game development overnight (let alone your specific crazy custom engine/architecture, as often seems to be the case).
1) Nothing critical is lost if a video game team stops working. Society doesnt need it and there are lots of alternatives.
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
If you're constructing your unsandboxed parent document HTML using string concatenation, you might as well not use the sandboxed iframe at all. But presumably someone who bothers to sandbox untrusted content also knows about setAttribute(), or the srcdoc JS property.
And any additional CSP directives can only narrow what's allowed. Also works with headers plus <meta> - <meta>s can restrict the CSP even more than what the headers specified, but they can't widen it.
I don’t know about immoral, but it is at the very least a bit sleazy. When I look for domains for side projects, I very rarely have to abandon a name because it’s been taken by an actual operational service; it’s almost always because someone is squatting it with a “parking” page filled with sketchy ads that they’re paying almost nothing for. That isn’t doing any good for anyone besides the squatter.
Allowing people to pay a fair price for the resources they need to start a business (rather than paying scalper prices to the bridge trolls who got there first) serves the public good. “For the public good” includes more than just feeding blind orphans.
yeah just like laying claim to the most fertile land in your region, doing nothing with it, and waiting until your neighbors are sufficiently desperate to sell it to them for gigantic markup
hugely value-added activity, and a well-earned increment.
A lot of the value of these domains stems from the popularity of sites they may have been attached to in the past, or search terms that relate to them.
So these people are literally making money off of the back of others’ work whilst providing no benefit themselves, probably not that much even to their advertisers.
Such squatting sites are, at best, an annoyance to web users as well.
The one takeaway I got from my engineering ethics class in college was that everyone has different morals. Debating if something is “moral” or not is useless. Education on a subject is useful, but once someone understands your point of view and still thinks it’s within/outside their morals, there’s nothing more to discuss.
> I fondly remember the good old days of 2004 when I first started using Firefox as my main browser and thinking how fresh and lightweight it felt compared to the atrocity that was IE. Firefox, sadly, got bloated over the years. So far, Chrome hasn’t put on the same weight
Near inevitabilities:
- All the small instances defederating from the largest due to politics/spam/annoying noobs/whatever, effectively killing the easiest path to entry into the community
- Pointless debates about whether it’s OK to federate with instances that host pirated content, disagreeable politics, furry VNs, etc., which everyone has to take a side (the correct side) on
- Relatively little actual work/productive discussion going on, since many users are there mostly for the politics / fediverse posturing than for actual work
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