Comment by pfraze
10 hours ago
This writeup is useful for backend engineers: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
The simple answer is that atproto works like the web & search engines, where the apps aggregate from the distributed accounts. So the proper analogy here would be like yahoo going down in 1999.
This is a fantastic write-up, thanks for sharing!
Sorry, but this analogy is very misleading, no one browses websites through Google's servers.
For example, right now in my URL bar I read "news.ycombinator.com", not "google.com/profile/news.ycombinator.com".
If Google goes down now I can keep browsing this website and all the other websites I have in all my other tabs as if nothing had happened.
Does Google Reader help you make sense of it? It’s more like each app is like its own Google Reader. And indeed you were able to access the same posts via other apps at that time of outage.
> no one browses websites through Google's servers.
Didn't Google's AMP project do exactly that?
Technically you can still view the posts directly from the PDS. It’s just uninteresting compared to web pages
Do you have ideas about how Bluesky could decentralize?
Not the original poster but I do have some ideas. Official Bluesky clients could randomly/round-robin access 3-4 different appview servers run by different organizations instead of one centralized server. Likewise there could be 3-4 relays instead of one. Upgrades could roll across the servers so they don't all get hit by bugs immediately.
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Google and MSN Search were already available at this time. Also websites used to publish webrings and there was IRC and forums to ask people about things.