AT Protocol works like the Web, where each user is a website and each application is a search engine. The apps crawl the network of hosts and aggregate activity. We have over 100 outside hosts and at least 3 aggregating apps out there. It’s a different model than ActivityPub, which is more akin to email.
We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. We have an open system for algorithms, which we and 3p devs can operate. We have a default algorithm for every user called Discover. It was one of our main concerns to have an answer to algorithms in a decentralized network.
For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. We also support the Web DID method, and if folks like this remain concerned we’re open to other DID methods. It’s important, but roughly similar to DNS or TLS issuers; supporting infra to the application network.
It comes from the people who don't know what an algorithm is but heard that Twitter has it and it's making them doomscroll so it's bad
(which is not to defend Twitter or other social media's algorithms, but to say that some people seem to have a blind hatred of them entirely due to misconceptions)
It's easy to forget there's a gray area between "unsorted feed of all posts" and "nothing but insane rage-bait to maximize ad views".
Instead of having an explicit algorithm to do the work of surfacing ragebait posts, that work is done by the users themselves.
What is notable, though, is that things don't necessarily have to be that way, in my experience, the Polish Mastodon community does far less of this than the English one.
For example many definitions include the requirement that an algorithm has to terminate for every input. And I suspect that there are probably some bugs lurking somewhere in the HN codebase that make it go into the occasional infinite loop. So technically it's not an algorithm by definition.
(And even weirder, because I just suspect it might have those bugs, but I don't know for sure, I have to admit that I don't know whether HN is powered by an algorithm.)
I agree with you that for practical definitions we can go by a definition that's essentially: 'by algorithm we just mean "computer program", but we want to focus on the abstract things it's doing, and not details of the concrete implementation.'
The formal definition of algorithm doesn't really require that a human can inspect them, nor understand nor explain, or does it?
> (Which in some contexts is a legal requirement.)
That's another can of worms. Which contexts are you talking about?
btw: The Malgorithm does actually exist, and ironically is the name of a electronic music device that applies bit-crushing (undersampling and/or bit resolution reduction) effect to audio signals, that is, it mostly makes the signal sound worse although it can be used creatively, which however occurs very rarely in pop music.
Like when people get a random post or video served to them they found interesting they'll say "the algo decided I should see this today"
Content creators will discuss what they need to create for "the algo" to like and promote them.
"And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm."
Apparently people understand different things by "algorithm". I also use the general one and not "algorithm" as a special algorithm that tries to find things I might like based on my past interactions, but mainly tailored to keep my engagement high so I watch more ads"
I would like the possibility of creating and tweaking my own algorithm for my feed.
People here are wilfully ignoring the proper context and meaning of the term as used, even though no one has any trouble understanding what is meant. You even spelt it out perfectly, demonstrating that there isn't any genuine miscommunication happening:
> "algorithm" as a special algorithm that tries to find things I might like based on my past interactions, but mainly tailored to keep my engagement high so I watch more ads".
I do think the internet would be a better place with more openness about those magic black boxes, even if it's just an ability to tweak it yourself without having to do some arcane incantations and rituals (ever gotten your YouTube recommendations completely fucked? How do you unfuck them?).
> I would like the possibility of creating and tweaking my own algorithm for my feed.
This would be really useful, and I think actually should be a right - like data portability. However it doesn't address the issue with the default view not being linear, and hence breaking the utility of such services as a public or community notice board.
> "And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm."
An algorithm is being used to serve content in that context, but content is not being removed, substituted, inserted or filtered by an algorithm in (the platonic version) of displaying a linear chronological feed. The are the issues which 'the algorithm' has been criticised for in the modern context. If we can acknowledge that's the intended usage here then we can move beyond semantics.
What happened on Facebook in 2012 is that Facebooks product changed from being one that served the affordance 'connecting people', to one that effectively divided people and charged to connect them in more limited ways. The impact of that one change (on FB and mirrored on other services) in creating the sensitisation and polarisation which followed, as well as removing the one major utility of social networks beyond pure entertainment, cannot be overstated.
At the time everyone was complaining that Facebook was just "people posting their lunches" and from that PoV I thought it was a great addition to promote the things people found important in their lives instead of the noise.
Of course that didn't last long.
That's the only kind of algorithm people have been exposed to, so they hate the term.
One of the most important algorithms, google search, has become crap. Social media algorithms have become crap.
Average people hate “the algorithm” because it was a trusted friend(ly tool) ands it has become crap and betrayed them!
If we, technologists, want people to love and use algorithms, we have a duty to avoid making them become horrible or useless for people.
If you’re trying to build an application, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/applications
If you’re looking to run the bluesky application, you need to run the codebases in https://github.com/bluesky-social.
For PDS is that true? If bsky.app shuts down, will my PDS be able to function as an independent instance incl the web frontend etc.?
It's the kind of thing where it's preferable that either everybody switch at once, or that new applications with different "lexicon" (post types / social media format) picks a new default from the start.
Is there a way to clone the app and make this easy to find as a button to switch?
(unfamiliar with the licensing and the app in general, some things I have seen make me excited that it's possible to be uncensored and decentralized, then things like this come up and I wonder if I should put time into it or something else to promote)
There's already third party clients, account hosting servers, etc, as well as different apps building on the same system (and which can use the same accounts and data store!) like blogs and more. Most devs are trying to coordinate their custom extensions so it doesn't cause conflict.
If it weren't coordinated we'd easily end up in the same place as Mastodon with their spurious server blocks where large parts of conversations are broken for most users.
Will my self-hosted account be able to talk directly to other self-hosted BlueSky accounts?
So anyone can label/mislabel/ban/block anyone else, but everyone can chose whose labels/mislabels/bans/blocks to follow
I also enjoyed Brian Newbold 's post from early August taking inventory of how Bluesky is doing so far at being decentralizable, and what's remaining,
https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/
There's some wildly negative often wildly in my view inaccurate posts down below slinging all kinds of things. So much of it is so wildly off base.
Atproto dev has a ton of strong wins already, and there's been a massive influx of dev interest in the past few weeks. Really looking forward to seeing this ecosystem bloom. I feel like we are at an inflection point.
ICANN is rather centralized. This is the biggest concern I have with ATProto, I would have expected it to work over P2P i.e. IPNS, or even some sort of a blockchain rather than a centralized web server.
One could start their own DNS server with different records than the ICANN ones, thus ignoring their authority.
As long as that possibility exists, it’s fine.
There are many alternatives to (ICANN) DNS, but since none have support built into major browsers, they end up being a pain to use, which hampers adoption.
The most successful is probably the Onion network and that's far from mainstream.
It’s usually the force of large, powerful (or early) organizations.
Realistically I’m okay with a single overwhelming popular entity as long as I, as an individual, can choose have my alternative.
For those of you who are interested in solving this my first suggestion is to read the Scuttlebot docs which are still up at: https://scuttlebot.io/
Sometimes I think about a retro Scuttlebot revival. If you want to set sail on this kind of project, contact info is in my bio.
Second biggest is that while a PDS does decentralize the data, I belive bsky.app is still the place providing the 'frontend' that makes it all work.
Thank you. ATProtocol is really cool, but I share some concerns about the centralized resolution of identities to custom servers and the conflict of interest in Bluesky's stewardship of ATProtocol development (what is good for the ATProtocol Network vs what is good for Bluesky).
If I understand Bluesky correctly:
When you follow users on Bluesky (even those on a hosted custom server), atprotocol allows you to follow them by a "URL" (DID:web) but by default you're following them by their DID:PLC, a kind of Decentralized Id that is resolved via an equivalent to a "name server" (see: https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc).
You give that name server a DID json representing a user you want to follow or are following, it will tell you the IP of the (custom atproto) server where that user's posts and replies are. By default Bluesky apps only know about PLC nameservers that are in Bluesky's registry.
And so even if I'm using custom hosting if Bluesky PLC nameserver delists my DID (or the nameserver that points to me?) most bluesky users will be unable to find me.
Bluesky is theoretically interested in moving this nameserver under a nonprofit consortium structure - where no one entity could prevent a nameserver from being listed - but no one is working on it, and BlueSky for years hasn't gotten around to it.
My questions are:
1. Is that right, or are there any promising nascent efforts to create a nameserver registry under a consortium structure?
2. Is it fair to ask users, potential users and developers to take it as an article of faith that BlueSky will fully support and partner with such a consortium (since it hasn't helped set one up already in the years of its development)?
3. If Bluesky has features that are not being "backported" to ATproto, does this not raise concerns about Bluesky's conflict of interest in its current stewardship of ATProtocol? One could imagine a situation where Bluesky "slow walks" contributions to ATProto out of its own private company interest in keeping its userbase on Bluesky servers.
1. Basically, yeah. That said, I still think it may be a bit early to do this. A consortium would be useful if it was meaningfully independent of bsky, so you need to grow and gain interest first. Otherwise the “independent group” would be run by the same people, which is pretty meaningless. Plus, working on that means les time for working on other things. I would expect to see this happen once there’s another non-toy atproto application, and for representatives from it to be involved too. Before then feels premature to me, but I can appreciate others may feel differently.
2. I do. The team has continually set out a vision, and then executed on it, over and over. Including following through on things that actively reduce their control over things. Tons of folks asked a similar question previously: “they’re saying that you’ll be able to host your own PDS someday, but do you trust them to actually ship that and not just say they’re gonna a do it and put it off forever and keep control?” And then they shipped it.
3. Any application has semantics built on top of the underlying protocol: that’s what an application is, in some meaningful sense. But I do agree that without independent governance for atproto, doing things like that could stifle other users of atproto, sure. We’re back in the same realm as 1, imho. I’m following the devs of various other apps and none of them have expressed that they think bsky is hoarding the goods so far, at least.
These people are just winging for followers IMO.
The traits required to become a billionaire are not the traits required to run a social network. This should be obvious by now. Zaphod Beeblebrox had no actual power for a reason.
this isn’t a “problem” that needs to be solved. you’re not “at the will of the server” in a federated environment, its the actual literal opposite. if i don’t like the server operators or if i don’t like the servers it federates with, that’s totally ok. i start my own and federate with who i like.
this is a good thing, not a “problem.” the ability to freely move and the freedom to associate is incredibly important. and for some weird reason people keep pretending like these things aren’t important if it’s online. its ridiculous.
if i don’t want to spend my play time around eric, i should absolutely be able to move and play somewhere else without eric. that’s actual freedom. if you try to keep me in one place or force me to play with eric, you’re trapping me.
no, the ability to pick and choose how, why, where, and with who i spend my free time is important, its not a “problem”. that’s agency, and i wish people would quit arguing against agency and calling it a problem.
So everytime you move, can you take your existing network and posts and messages with you, or do you have to start from scratch every time?
if its something you're super worried about, you could always do what ive seen some folks do and just like docs, photos, etc..., make a backup. just create a mirror federated account with same follows etc...
its not really something i personally have a need for. to me, the worst that happens is i lose some conversations i had with some friends. i cant remember the last time i looked back at some random tweet i made 3 years ago or whatever...
to your comment, the ability to keep posts and such is going to vary by which system you’re using, for example:
- twitter, absolutely not. they want to force you to spend your free time around whoever they say. and they absolutely want to make it difficult for you to have freedom to leave or the freedom to associate. in the before times there were sites you could use to move your contacts and follow the same people on Mastodon. elon hated the idea of people having freedom so he shut that down shortly after he took power. for this reason i recommend people start manually building their contacts on other sites now so the move will be easier once you’re ready.
- threads, im not familiar enough with it yet to say for sure. i have a couple of accounts there but honestly, ill never use them, its zuckerberg… facebook… no thanks. been burned too many times by these people.
- Mastodon, almost entirely yes. you can backup and download both your posts and your contacts. i dont worry too much about it, but if it’s something you’re super worried about just do like we all do with photos, docs, etc… keep a backup. i know some people keep a backup federated account mirroring follows, etc… for worst case scenarios. i occasionally download my follows and posts, but im not really too worried about it.
- bluesky, yep. i love blue sky but for different reasons from Mastodon, i use them both all day long. just for different reasons. blue sky doesn’t at all have the same quality of community as Mastodon or even hn. it’s nice, but its not community focused. its more like twitter before eternal september took over. at the end of the day tho, i don’t have a lot of hope for it, the VC people will definitely figure out a way to ruin it.
but to bring it back to my original comment: the important part is that we have the agency to utilize freedom of movement and association. it should creep you out when someone tries to convince you that having agency is a problem. having freedom to jump from place to place, server to server, community to community is a good thing and its crazy when these people keep attempting to convince us that jumping around is "a problem".
when someone tries to force you to spend your playtime somewhere you don’t want to be, or when they try to convince you “no, you should want to be around eric especially when he’s a dickbag.” that should make your hair stand up with red flags. and that’s what these people have been trying to convince us for years—“noooo, why would you want to spend your free time somewhere else having fun? dont go enjoy yourself! you want to be here! no one here likes each other and everyone is screaming at each other! thats what you really want to do with your freetime!”
other than some family pictures on insta, i can’t remember the last time i’ve gone back and looked at old conversations. i can imagine why some people might need that, but for Mastodon i mostly use it for chatting with friends or light ephemeral type stuffs.
besides whatever the content of posts might be, not treating it like 'a part of your identity' when it is literally a reflection of it, i don't know, seems a little dismissive of yourself, but if that's your prerogative, sure. it's super not the same for everybody. for some people, their stuff is either more important to them personally regardless of what it is, or it holds more value with the amount of work put into it, or both.
it's a little bit obtuse to look at platforms filled with posts, and then go and think that those posts are of no value, when it is literally the point and the core of those platforms, don't you think. like, you don't have to imagine. just look at those places that are filled with art and artists, content and creators.
Meanwhile there's a certain quality of service that can be obtained with "mere" federation that is much tougher for many decentralized strategies. The actual topology matters, but federation is a pretty decent model IMO! There's a reason that e-mail has been so useful as a system for so long!
Anyhow, federation should be seen as a part of specific strategy for decentralization; federation itself is not decentralization and cannot achieve it without more bits---like topological consideration. Many federated protocols tend to push those bits into the horizon and fail at scale when that horizon eventually approaches, while ATProto is at least explicitly constructed with eventual decentralization in the mind and seems to be fine for now. Mastodon will need to prove much more than ATProto in order to show that it's capable for eventual decentralization in contrast.
One particularly visible weakness of Mastodon is that there is no working and efficient mechanism to operate on the entire network. Searching and algorithmic feed [1] would be major features affected by this weakness. I know some consider this to be intentional, but if that's true then Mastodon can't be really said to replicate a social network at all. It is yet another matter whether such features are warranted or not, but if we believe that something like a worldwide social network should exist, then we don't yet have a clear answer that a social network without such features would be technically or socially scalable to that extent, so not being able to fully replicate an existing social network is important enough to consider.
[1] This includes trivial feeds like all posts from my followers, because in my knowledge a large number of follows is not really scalable in Mastodon.
This does not seem like an improvement.
It may not be a huge improvement when identities and posts can't be migrated, but it's still an incremental one.
You can export and import, I believe, for some instances but generically re-posting them to a new instance with the old date isn't currently feasible[0], correct.
You also need to re-federate them to get the "links" correct (and probably de-federate the old) which causes confusing results if your client doesn't handle backdated posts correctly (and most of the ones I was using in 2023 didn't.)
There's probably a solution[1][2] but I think it's something the ActivityPub people just haven't given much thought to just yet.
[0] No date field in https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create
[1] When I was importing a 10 year Twitter history to my Akkoma instance, I just tweaked the code to a) allow backdating posts, b) allow certain accounts to backdate posts and c) not federate backdated posts from those accounts. Doesn't really solve the full problem but worked for me.
[2] Obviously there's other problems such as people creating fake history, etc., if you're allowed to post backdated statuses.
I don't think it's a problem really, but I may be mistaken about what the goal of these platforms is. I can also create a fake history on a blog or news site and backdate posts. But in the odd case where it matters, say for a copyright dispute or something, it'd be very hard to pretend that the history is legit and very easy to find clues that it is not.
Without the implied "authority" of something like Mastodon[0] or Twitter[1], or Facebook, etc. though. You can (currently) point to a post on a $BIGNETWORK and say "I posted that then" and be credibly believed. If you allow backdated (or timestamp-edited) posts, that goes out of the window, surely.
[0] Ok, not if you're running your own instance, obviously.
[1] Who resisted adding editing for years for similar reasons.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice Over a year ago, a blog claiming the opposite
> But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.
AFAIK People with did:web dids can make accounts and use bluesky
> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.
And one of the first investors was Jack Dorsey. They've used libraries and concepts that are only vogue amongst those with cryptography/cryptocurrency interests. This is not new, this is always been the case.
- - -
A person, any person, can join the relevant developer chats, or find and ask people who are working on or have brought up their own servers, about how centralized or decentralized bsky is, but that does not seem to be the case for this person's research.
As a result, if did:web can be well integrated into bluesky itself (it works across AT Proto already AFAIK, just not all parts of Bluesky's GUI, a current pain point), that should open the path to add additional discovery mechanisms like IPNS
> In the context of social media, people mean highly optimized algorithms for maximum retention.
I was simply informing you that:
* Chronological is an algorithm
* It, like all ways of sorting feeds, has its own controversies
pxoe: points out Mastodon has an algorithm
cuu507: says the news feed is chronological
me: reasonably inferring this means cuu507 isn't aware this is also an algorithim, I point out that it is, and that chronological feeds are also not without detractors with good arguments.
j_maffe: jumps up my ass from out of nowhere for some reason. I replied assuming they were the person I replied to (cuu507) since I don't really notice user names but no, they're just some random person on a mission to spread a quote.
I'm clear on things and am sure that I'm being sincere, not being pedantic, not agitating (on purpose), not being obtuse. I don't know what j_maffe's deal is since I said nothing to them before all this.
It is not helpful or necessary to point any of this out.
There really isn't a polite way to say this, but it needs to be said: no one asked you. Or j_maffe. Neither of you accomplished anything by butting into a sub-sub-thread that didn't involve you and didn't need your antagonism and ill-tempered presumptions about my intent.
However, the entire point of a forum is for users to "butt-in" on threads. If you didn't find the reply contributing anything meaningful, you're very much free to not reply. And if you don't like random people replying to your comments, you really shouldn't be using forums. cheers.
> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round?
Yet that is the only thing that matters.
The technical pieces for a vast range of alternative designs for online interactions are already available. Decentralized, federated, distributed, peer-to-peer. Who cares? What matters is the outcome.
What is entirely missing in these silly "protocol wars" is any concrete and realistic vision of what that "good next generation Web" looks like, not technically, but economically, socially and politically. Who gets empowered and who gets exploited. Who gets (and how strong) a voice and who gets manipulated by that voice.
The prior norms, social contracts and institutions we used to have in the pre-digital era have been completely corrupted yet there is no visible replacement beyond some vague ideals.
The shape of the "next gen web" very much depends on who funds it, why (what incentives and expectations do they have) and how (what incentives and expectations do they create to the vast ecosystems of developers, entrepreneurs, moderators, users, etc).
Other services both centralize identity AND algorithms/operations.
This seems to centralize identity WITHOUT the second thing, which strikes me as the worst of both worlds.
It's just, we've already mostly "solved" the centralized identity problem with EMAIL. As often, the key is "fail elegantly," not be bulletproof. Email, in it's federated state, allows for individuals to more or less choose what kind of centralization they want -- and more importantly, to kill and restart accounts if needed. Thus, Mastodon is the best parallel.
What am I missing? What is the advantage of bluesky here?
Fewer Nazis.
Roughly, e.g. -- Twitter (nope not calling it X) is still overwhelmingly the most useful and productive place for Black+US Politics discussion. Despite, or even perhaps because of, the presence of bad guys.
The thing I hate the most about Mastodon (despite being the right model) is people trying to make it nice, but end up making it STERILE. The left leaning folks, who politically I generally strongly agree with, really do overdo it in terms of "shutting down disagreeable speech."
(Bluesky is similar to Mastodon here)
Disconnected keyboard lefties who don't touch grass calling me a Nazi because I also still use Twitter, being completely clueless as to the fact that a lot of Black folks like myself are still there because, well, we're used to surviving and thriving in hostile spaces.
(and then also snowflake hard-left Black folks who -- and I've literally NEVER seen this in my life until Mastodon -- really do "play the race card." It's wild)
Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time frequenting empty communities instead of merging it all together. Regardless of how the backend is handled, centralized or not, people need the same thing on the frontend. These valiant attempts at remaking popular sites for the people by the people are not only fighting every corporation that wants them gone as a concept but also their own dumb decisions, which will probably prove too much of a hurdle in the long run.
https://slrpnk.net is an exception in that it’s a cute place for activism and related news, but that’s obviously not the only thing I want to use the internet for, especially when I’m looking to relax.
So far, with an n of 5 days: BlueSky is what I was waiting for. Especially for scientific content - memes or otherwise!
This is actually reason why I like Mastodon. There is barely anything happening. I get content from few niches - but I do not need it to be generating something every minute. I have no time for that.
But for people who prefer old Twitter experience, BlueSky is pretty good.
* nostr is very decentralized (keys) and has terrible UX (manual management of keys).
* Mastodon is medium decentralized (dependence on DNS; can't migrate accounts) and has bad UX (confusion about which instance to use; "Take Me Home" to interact with anything).
* Bluesky (atproto) is moderately decentralized (did:plc) and has great UX.
The main advantage that atproto has over the other two is that if someone solves the did:plc problem, it can become the first very decentralized/great UX social media platform over night.
Basic knowledge of manual key management should be essential for every internet user. Think about password managers.
What I love about Nostr is that individuals can actively participate in making it better. It’s fully open, allowing anyone to build whatever they wish on top of it. I agree it’s not perfect now, but it will improve over time and the progress already made can speak for itself that Nostr is here to stay and it's getting better and better each day. The more developers the Nostr ecosystem has, the faster it will evolve.
Personally, I enjoy using it. Cross-posting has been resolved, so I can’t even remember the last time I opened Twitter. Mastodon never really attract me much. Bluesky is yet another Twitter and it's not decentralized. They can read your DMs btw.
One of best features of Nostr is when you build something, you get users instantly and whenever I post on nostr I cross post to Mastodon and Bluesky as well. Reactions are also interchangeable :)
This post is not that and misses the mark for me.
Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech.
If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.
It’s all about the user experience. See also privacy and security.
Bluesky hasn't released what their DAU/MAUs are but Mastodon's aren't that bad.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://mastodon-analytics.com
https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
Mastodon has dropped to 800K monthly actives and has no data on daily actives which I would assume that number would be even lower.
Not a good look for Mastodon, considering that huge drop of 400K monthly users on that active users chart and did not recover even after Elon's changes to X, the majority of X users in Brazil chose Bluesky and ignored Mastodon.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
[0] https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11327098336778135...
I think framing social networks with metrics like number of nodes or active daily users is inadequate and only designed to appeal to some VC/founder mode bros.