Although the Manus decision might change things for AI, Singapore-washing is quite rampant among Chinese companies, so I wouldn't call this place of origin an alternative market.
Calling AP services a bunch of small "centralized" services in this context removes all the meaning from that term. You might as well call any web server centralized while comparing them to clouds.
Proper federation is exactly such bunch of small services messaging each other. On the hand, what ATProto leads to is at most a handful of large-scale providers each running the own portion of the network.
There’s a clear difference in architecture between
1) a layer of app-agnostic hosting providers + a separate independent layer of apps aggregating over data from those (like personal sites with RSS + aggregators like Google Reader)
2) a circle of flat instances where each node couples app+hosting (like many little Twitters)
One doesn’t couple hosting with apps, another one does.
Mastodon/AP model is (2), atproto model is (1). You should be able to see the outcomes from different network shapes.
In atproto, you can build a new app that works with existing data, but in AP you can’t. In atproto you can move hosting with zero effect on your identity or how you show up in apps, in AP you can’t.
ATProto simply ignores the need for decentralizing incentives on a human/community level. What we get is a sort of a "top-down" federation rather than a grass-roots one. Whoever invests in the infra ends up running a domain.
I mean, practically no one is aware of any other ATPROTO provider other than Bluesky whereas the issue with AP is merely the lack of better implementations, so mastodon.social got the most attention and the hype died off with niche success.
There’s no such thing as “running a domain” or “atproto provider” in atproto. You’re approaching it with a Mastodon/AP mindset and it doesn’t match that.
In atproto, there’s two axes.
One is hosting. Bluesky offers hosting but some people host on their own (it’s just a Docker container with sqlite), some on Cloudflare, some on community-hosted nodes like https://npmx.dev and https://selfhosted.social. From app perspective it looks exactly the same way (unlike in Mastodon where “hosting” = “choosing a community”) and you can switch hosting anytime.
Another axis is apps. Apps aggregate from data from all hosts. Bluesky is an app, Tangled is an app, Leaflet is an app, Wisp is an app, Semble is an app, and so on. Those can all aggregate over the same data (which enables cross-app interop) but they don’t have to (eg Bluesky doesn’t overlap with Tangled much except that Tangled can reuse Bluesky avatar on login). Generally you don’t have people running copies of the same app (as in Mastodon) which is why there aren’t many “blueskyes”. But when someone has an incentive, they can. (Eg Blacksky is a complete fork including server and DB, allowing their own moderation decisions over same data.) Similarly you can build your own app on top of distributed Tangled data.
Hope that helps clarify why “atproto provider” as a concept doesn’t make sense. You have hosting, which is as distributed as you want, and you have apps, which anyone can make.
So does Bluesky app have control over what data it aggregates and can decide (without checking with a user) not to aggregate data from a host? I am trying to understand what are the implications for a user, and a bad scenario where one would disagree with an action of the app.
And if the answer is "yes" then at least when someone "makes their own app" can they easily use "Bluesky hosts list" + add special extra hosts (or remove specific hosts) so that the app relies on the platform, with the exception the disagreement point?
An app can choose to ignore/ban some users (or even entire hosting servers if they’re specifically created for network abuse). This is similar to how any web app may choose to ignore POST requests from spammers.
And yes, someone can decide to aggregate data themselves and provide an alternative app over same data with different moderation policies. In fact that’s already the case (Blacksky runs their own application server that mostly piggybacks on Bluesky moderation decisions but overrides some of them. There are also clients that ignore moderation altogether and show you the raw data from hosting.)
No because apps are decoupled many-to-many with hosting.
Every app can display public data from every other app because the source of truth is outside both apps (in hosting).
App owner can’t do bad things to your account other than banning you in their particular app. Other apps (even for same data) independently choose whether to show your data. So app owners are only in control over how your data is presented in their apps, not over your actual data.
Whereas in AP, each app’s moderators literally control your entire identity.
Not really. From my understanding, in AP, your account belongs to an instance and your data is then synced to other servers. If the instance goes down, your account is gone.
In ATP, your data is stored in the "Atmosphere", hosted on decentralized "Personal Data Servers" (PDS). The app then simply parses and filters that data. They can apply moderation actions by choosing not to display or read certain posts, but your data still exists and another app could choose to display it. Similarly, if the app goes down, your data is still perfectly intact in the Atmosphere.
It might then seem like the PDS is equivalent to an AP instance, but as mentioned, they are decentralized. Identity is verified through signatures, so if your PDS goes down, you can migrate to a new one as long as you have your signing keys. Therefore, the account belongs to you and not any specific server.
You're interpreting my post with the assumption that I don't know what I'm talking about. You don't need to explain the protocol to me.
Domain here referred to the area of influence or control, like what the provider of a relay effectively has. The fact that other groups can run any element of the infra themselves doesn't change the fact that the drift towards centralization is much greater with ATP than with AP.
ATP has its own uses (quick aggregation) but it doesn't even attempt to solve fundamental issues of current ecosystem of social networking,. AP, on the other hand, offers the foundation for further development in the right direction.
A new hosting provider can preemptively request known relays to crawl it. Or relays (or apps) can lazily discover it when the user hosted there tries to log in for the first time, or their data is linked to by a known user. It’s similar to the relationships between websites and search engines.
Hosting providers don’t need to discover other hosting providers. Data only flows between hosting and apps; not between hosting and hosting or apps and apps.
There's a big difference between having to run a particular company's OS and being forced to share private data (whether that's merely your DNS requests or your ID documents and full financial history). with said organization.
Your disdain isn't helpinh you here either as you're just as wrong as parent.
Such public utilities ought to always prioritize privacy, platform-independence, and empowering market competion long- and short-term. And to achieve that you need to start at the design level.
In this case, clearly, you either have to avoid relying on app attestation or lay the foundation for an unrestricted number of independent chain of trust frameworks.
The latter, of course, is a policy-level issue, but the ones responsible for the design and development are the ones who need to pass such concerns up the chain.
You have the right starting point, but the wrong conclusion. Government services need to be inclusive of everybody. But you simply cannot build technical solutions that put technical requirements on devices owned by the users in a way that the service is sufficiently inclusive. That is just a fact.
If you want to be critical of the outcome on compatibility grounds, forcing a grind to increase technical compatibility is the wrong thing to ask for. That must necessarily always leave some people behind. The only honest alternative positions on that front are (a) the government issues the tech to everybody itself or (b) the government doesn't build advanced systems at all.
The German government offices rely on a lot of quaint-looking paper based processes, but they have one thing going for them: working through them can be done with pen and paper - tools that are available for cheap and broadly compatible. It's probably not such a bad thing after all?
Inclusivity is secondary here. Moreover, it's just fallacious to argue the nation has to give up on its own rights and principles and be content with whatever the market provides.
Towards the end of the article, I say this: "If you just make the same game, the one you know how to make, the players get bored because it’s nothing but problems they have seen before and already have their answers to. Sometimes, they get so bored that an entire genre dies." -- the last phrase links to a video about how MMOs are dead. :D
I thought this was obvious? These are social games where everyone is in the same funnel and the players with the most time dominate others... but also need new objectives. At the beginning you quest with people your level, but they always, always devolve into bigger, more tedious tasks (raids) that have less and less differentiated rewards (1% chance of a drop that boosts you 2%) because otherwise you have players at level 283 and there is no way to balance team dynamics as some people scale infinitely.
I loved World of Warcraft for many years, but kind of stopped playing during Cataclysm.
And it's kind of weird, but I preferred the old-style questing (many repeated quests and perhaps less streamlined experience) compared to what came afterwards.
In Cataclysm they tried to improve the quest experience, add more variety, but somehow the game lost a bit of its magic - at least from my point of view.
It's really sad no one just looks up the legal principles conservatives are pushing forward together with Trump.
Here, it's the unified executive theory, which is based on how the US system had worked for its first century.
Same with the birthright citizenship. The conservative argument is actually to a degree fairly reasonable. If I say this, then the current SC will surely rule in favor.
It's stunning the number of people on HN (a tech news site!) who don't realise there is simply no requirement for "cookie banners" UNLESS you are using those cookies to track me or personally identify me (advertisers take a bow)..... In which case you need to ask my explicit permission to do so.
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