Comment by 4lx87
19 hours ago
Looks really cool but ATProto means I won't be using it. I'm not going to invest in another network when we already have an open one.
We already have the web. The web already has OAuth. OAuth is already widely supported. IndieAuth already offers a very simple and standard approach to personal OAuth servers, if people really want to run their own identity server.
"Feeds" are perfectly doable using the web. It's already pull-based. We don't need another protocol to listen for changes at a URL. The web already has support for different content types and document schemas, we don't need to reimplement content types and schemas as ATProto "lexicons".
The web still has other protocols on top of it, like RSS. Just because the "web" exists doesn't mean that solves every problem.
Also OAuth only handles auth and permissions and doesn't do anything for provided federated views of disparate data sources.
Also this isn't about identity either, you're really misunderstanding what this is about.
You're right. RSS builds on top of the web. ATProto does not. I'd say RSS is a resource format / content type, not a communications protocol. A resource format intended for syndicating updates – exactly what ATProto and ActivityPub do (but decided to invent new formats instead of extending RSS/Atom. JSON all the things!).
It is very much about identity. To use tangled you need to use ATProto and authenticate using ATProto – rather than using the existing open standard for authentication used by pretty much everyone at this point (missed opportunity to login to Tangled using GitHub). What's crazy is people still use the web to interact with tangled anyway.
AT Protocol uses OAuth: https://atproto.com/specs/oauth
The thing about file formats is that there are so many to choose from. From a distance they may seem much the same, but ATproto has its own conventions for database records and links between them that makes it easier to replicate data without breaking references.
It's like records are born to replicate for better or worse. They get downloaded immediately and you have no control over where they go after that. Anybody can tap into one of the firehoses spewing them all over the place. But they're all linked together and if links break it's because nobody kept a copy of that record.
Other file formats don't work quite the same way. A git repo is easy to clone and pull from, but things like call graphs are language-specific.
It seems hard to say what apps this sort of replication is right for.