Comment by S0y | Hacker News Reader

Comment by S0y | Hacker News Reader

>Right now, there aren’t a lot of other apps in the ATmopshere, but there are experiments happening. There’s a blogging tool called WhiteWind, a Reddit clone called frontpage.fyi, and an events app called Smoke Signal. More will follow, I’m sure.

The unfortunate thing about ATproto is that even tho there are these apps that are built on top of it. None of these app actually talk to each other. Bluesky the app has no idea what you're posting on WhiteWind and vice versa. This is the BIG advantage ActivityPub has over AT. A Mastodon account can follow accounts on any ActivityPub compatible server and they're able to talk to each other. You can follow a peertube channel or some AP enabled wordpress blog and it'll all be visible and intractable inside your Mastodon feed.

At the moment, ATproto to me, seems a lot more like a glorified oAuth system than anything else. It's a lot like using your google account to login on an app and then have your data stored in google drive (your PDS).

It’s just early days. This is a “hasn’t happened” and not a “can’t happen.”

I myself am thinking about serving my entire website out of my PDS. I’ll be blending several existing Lexicons together and probably making some of my own.

I think these possibilities are some of the strongest reasons to be intrigued by AT Protocol, but I also hear you that it’s more potential than actively realized as of today. It’ll get there!

>I think these possibilities are some of the strongest reasons to be intrigued by AT Protocol

Genuine question, considering you can already do what you're talking about with ActivityPub what makes you stick around on ATproto/Bsky?

Important context: long ago, my friends and I built a federated Twitter alternative based on ostatus, the predecessor to ActivityPub.

I believe the architectural model of ActivityPub is bad. I think the architectural model of atproto is good. Everything is downstream of that.

I don’t have time to elaborate at this exact moment, but figured I’d at least give you a preliminary answer.

> I believe the architectural model of ActivityPub is bad. I think the architectural model of atproto is good. Everything is downstream of that.

ActivityPub is a W3C standard which uses standard, “boring”, sometimes “complex” (JSON-LD) technologies.

The fact the AT protocol does things smarter doesn’t mean it should, or will, be used on the WWW. There’s a reason why we still use e-mail and JSON for interoperability, instead of smarter technology.

We should favor standards IMHO, even if they’re imperfect.

Anyway, I’m really curious about your analysis in your future comments!

Bluesky also uses W3C and other standard technologies, for example, DID, the most centralized part, is a W3C standard https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/. Lexicons use JSON-schema. dag-cbor is another example, though not W3C. CAR is another example.

Being fit for purpose is more important than being "standard", if a standard doesn't do what it needs to do, that it's standard is irrelevant. Bluesky/atproto uses a ton of standard approaches where appropriate, and innovates where appropriate.

Standards are borne out of usage, and a need to interoperate. Being blessed by a standards body doesn't inherently mean something is good. I can represent some data in JSON, or in HTML, but because both are standards doesn't mean that they're equally good. Standardization is a means to an end, not an inherent good in and of itself. People need to try new things in order to eventually produce new standards.

> There’s a reason why we still use e-mail and JSON for interoperability, instead of smarter technology.

Ironically, JSON came out of one language, and didn't come from any standards body, like ActivityPub. It wasn't until ECMA-404 (2013) that JSON got a standard from one of the bodies.

It's a good example of technology that came from outside the typical standards, but was eventually adopted by a large portion of the ecosystem, and eventually became a standard. Just like HTML :)

There's nothing substantively stopping that from happening, it's just that bluesky and the other app devs haven't used each others schemas to trigger it. For instance, if frontpage really wanted to, they could publish stories as bluesky-schema posts. It just doesn't produce a win yet. There's some discussion about introducing some schemas that would make that worth doing.

I think the fact that devs even have to think about using "each others schemas" is a pretty big flaw in the system. It would definitely make ATProto look a lot better if it had a standardized way for all of its app to talk to each other. You don't want devs to have to implement new schemas for each and every new app that pops up on AT just so they can communicate with each other.

Like, it would be pretty dang cool if you could follow a WhiteWind blog from your Bluesky account. Honestly I'm a bit confused as to why this isn't a priority for the Bsky team.

It's actually quite important that you can introduce new schemas!

It's entirely up to WhiteWind whether they use bluesky's follow schemas or not. There's no blocker on that. The only question they have to ask is whether that's how they want it to work.

Another option that's available for them/others is to read from the bluesky follows to provide suggestions, but then use another schema for subscriptions.

That’s not a problem at all. These applications have different concepts and the overlap hasn’t been formally defined yet. Should they choose to do so, they can easily connect up. I think it’s great that different applications can exist on the same base layer and explore concepts independently from each other.

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