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Comment by danabramov

19 hours ago

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).

If this got you curious, I have two longreads: https://overreacted.io/open-social/ (conceptual) and https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ (diving into the data model).

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danabramov

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cxr  18 hours ago

> 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://m15o.ichi.city/site/writing-atom-feed-manually.html>

  • miki123211  17 hours ago

    Atom is pull, Atproto is push.

    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.

    • cxr  16 hours ago

      > 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.

      And this is widely recognized by now to have been a very bad thing, even/especially those most susceptible to its draw. It's strange that you're framing it as a strength and not a lament.

      > There's no coming back from that world.

      You can't say that when everyone just begs the question and shoves application-server-needed-here protocol designs to the fore.

      2 replies →

  • jauntywundrkind  18 hours ago

    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.

    • tolerance  17 hours ago

      > 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.

      These seems to defeat the purpose of the relative amount of sovereignty that hosting a static site gives you compared to depending on a PDS.

      > It's unclear to me why static site needs are an interesting or useful target that social networking ought conform to.

      How is this possible?

      2 replies →

4lx87  18 hours ago

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.