Comment by sidmitra

3 years ago

For those not getting the context(like me), this seems to be about the Bluesky Social(https://bsky.app/), a twitter alternative.

36 comments

sidmitra

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pyentropy  3 years ago

Further context: Bluesky lets you use a domain name you own as a user handle.

The official method is to set a TXT record, but apparently their "AT protocol" also lets you confirm a domain by serving `GET your.domainname.com/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle`

and `xrpc` was available as an S3 bucket name :)

givemeethekeys  3 years ago

Sometimes it feels like companies fund weak competitors to discourage / drown out competition.

armchairhacker  3 years ago

How does Bluesky compare to Mastodon? (Other than letting you register S3 as your user handle)

  • steveklabnik  3 years ago

    Here's how I think about it:

    * ActivityPub -> AT Protocol (https://atproto.com/)

    * Mastadon -> Bluesky (https://blueskyweb.xyz/)

    Right now, federation is not turned on for the Bluesky instance.

    There are differences in both, however. I'm not going to speak about my impressions of the Mastadon vs Bluesky teams because frankly, Mastadon never really caught on with me, so they're probably biased. ('they' being my impressions, that is, I just realized that may be ambiguous.)

    At the protocol level, I haven't implemented ActivityPub in a decade, so I'm a bit behind developments there personally, but the mental model for AT Protocol is best analogized as git, honestly. Users have a PDS, a personal data server, that is identified by a domain, and signed. The location of the PDS does not have to match the domain, enabling you to do what you see here: a user with a domain as their handle, yet all the PDS data is stored on bluesky's servers. You can make a backup of your data at any time, and move your PDS somewhere else with ease (again, once federation is actually implemented, the path there is straightforward though). This is analogous to how you have a git repository locally, and on GitHub, and you point people at the GitHub, but say you decide you hate GitHub, and move to GitLab: you just upload your git repo there, and you're good. Same thing, except since identity is on your own domain, you don't even need to do a redirect, everything Just Works.

    This analogy is also fruitful for understanding current limitations: "delete a post" is kind of like "git revert" currently: that is, it's a logical deletion, not an actual deletion. Enabling that ("git rebase") is currently underway. Private messaging does not yet exist.

    Anyway if you want to know more the high-level aspects of the docs are very good. Like shockingly so. https://atproto.com/guides/overview They fall down a bit once you get into the details, but stuff is still changing and the team has 10,000 things to do, so it's understandable.