This is why Bluesky could never have "private likes" in the same way Twitter or ActivityPub does—every AppView needs to track the like counts of every post in the network manually. It's a huge hassle! I just don't see this architecture winning out in the long term, when compared to the AP feed-subscription architecture.
primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity
We are currently working on something based on https://fedify.dev
Would you consider that can provide more complete AP functionality?
I've thought a lot about ATProto and integrating it in similar ways. I'd love to have a look at what you're doing and how. The struggle I have is that I think the ATProto repos have a fairly strong cryptographic structure compared to AP
If someone requests an object over AP, that object contents can come from anywhere easily, and can be signed easy. So for me, when someone requests an activitypub object of one of my notes via fedify, it just reads the truth from my markdown note files and returns it. If I edit my markdown files, it's no real issue, the next request gets the latest version of that markdown (there's some signing nuances in places, but it's generally straightforward)
With ATProto PDS and repositories use things like Merkle Search Trees and other things which I assume means the backend data needs to be a lot more... consistent. Like the data has to live in the PDS, and that has to become the source of truth to maintain the merkle structures, including updates.
But with AP via fedify, it feels super easy and nice for my source of truth to be whatever backend store I like (markdown notes).
I've done enough with crypto to see the benefits provided by the transparent verifiable history of merkle like structures, but honestly, this is social media not cash: I don't care if someone wants to subtly change something to manage how they come across with their own social media. In that respect, I feel the ATProto repositories overcomplicate things a bit.
A true "ActivityPub server" is almost as simple as a Bluesky PDS—all it's responsible for is 1) storing blobs of data, 2) fanning out subscriptions and 3) collecting incoming data for you to view. In the original way ActivityPub was designed, all of the actual data presentation layers—Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed—were designed to be specialized clients that could communicate with the user's generic server. However, the first popular implementations cut out the client-to-server part of the protocol, so now we're stuck in a place where everyone thinks ActivityPub means you need a separate identity for every client application.
So, what I would recommend for your own username/password site is implementing an ActivityPub client, and recommending that users use it to connect to a third-party ActivityPub server. That way, the user owns the data, and they simply use your service to get access to (filtered version of) it.
Unfortunately, since this is a less implemented part of the protocol, the client APIs necessary to make this a reality haven't seen much development. And you're facing an uphill battle for user adoption. In practice, users don't seem to mind having separate accounts and identities for different clients. It reminds me a bit of the "key management problem" in e2e cryptography. Having a stable cryptographic identity is doable if you're technically minded, but most people just muddle along and don't really care about it that much—they create new keys every time they get a new laptop instead of trying to figure out cross-signing, and everything works itself out more or less fine.
I didn't know "private likes" even existed, but if atproto includes public key encryption, I could publish a record containing a "like" that I have encrypted with the "liked" user's public key. Only that user would know what the record contained. Though, the fact that the encrypted message exists and had a cleartext "@name" is itself informative to adversaries. Concealing that level of info would require other measures.
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
When I glance at the Bevy discussion link you shared, my reaction is:
> Your goal here is to make the best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine possible. It's not to make the most performant game engine. Not to make the game engine that powers the best games. Not to make the best looking graphics in a game engine. Not the highest quality game engine or game editing experience. It's to make the best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine.
That sounds awful if applied to Bevy, and seems you misunderstand what "Mr. Beast" is trying to say.
They're not saying make the best game engine, but make the game engine that would do best by GitHub-popular metrics, which is absolutely the wrong way to go.
I hope they continue to simply make the best game engine available, as before, and ignore useful metrics or focusing on where it's hosted.
Bevy is still incomplete as an engine. AFAIK there's only one commercially successful game made with it, Tiny Glade, and it doesn't even use Bevy's renderer but a custom one.
Yet the Bevy developers distract the project with essays and debates about the politics of their federated social media presence. You don't need that to build a game engine, but you do to build a "GITHUB OPEN SOURCE" game engine. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it, but that's clearly the focus here.
Yes, but the misunderstanding I'm trying to point out is that Mr Beast is not trying to create something of value, they're trying to create something that works well on a specific platform.
In the Bevy analogy, that would be creating a GitHub project that gets the most stars, regardless of how useful or well the engine itself is working.
I'm instead saying the same thing as you, they should continue focusing on building the greatest engine, regardless of the platform for hosting the project.
If Bevy were to follow Mr Beasts advice, they'd focus on flashy demos, engaging READMEs and so on, to increase the success on the platform itself, instead of focusing on the engine itself, which from following their direction almost since inception, they're doing a pretty good job with already.
For another thing, even if there aren't any other specific effects that are desired, there still might be some that are specifically not wanted, and avoiding those might be important. Mr. Beast is a exactly the type of example that demonstrates this point; by focusing on making the "best" YouTube content as measured purely by popularity, he's done all sort of things that someone might very understandably want to avoid. I agree that he's not confusing, but that's not the issue with him. He's extremely transparent in how little he cares about whether what he does actually helps anyone other than himself (or if he hurts other people in the process of helping himself). I suspect this is quite different from the mentality of most open source developers, who are putting in personal time and effort towards contributing to something that realistically has little likelihood of direct personal benefits for those involved. What you're perceiving as a lack of focus comes across to me as having the humility and thoughtfulness to try to look at the big picture and understand one's actions in the context of a larger environment that isn't improved in the long term by pursuing a single narrow goal to the exclusion of literally everything else.
Of course I understand these are different things. Bevy is not at all competing with Unity.
Because Bevy is trying to be best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine. I’m just trying to be a little jocular about how… you know, I didn’t say unfocused, but surely it seems a little silly to write 3000 words in response to a community worried about which open source social media federation protocols to adopt. That giant thread IS the product, it makes perfect sense from the POV that Bevy is trying to be the best OPEN SOURCE GITHUB GAME ENGINE, in the same way that Mr Beast is making the best YOUTUBE videos or Egyptology professors are making the best EGYPTOLOGY writing or painters are making the best PERSONALLY MEANINGFUL FINE ART or whatever. I like Bevy!
Unity and Unreal also have billions of dollars in funding
You're the only one saying this. No one else, including the person working on the project that you originally responded to, have claimed this is their sole goal to the inclusion of everything else. It's hard to tell if you think they literally don't care about anything else but are choosing their actions poorly, or if you think that they have the wrong priorities and should change them, or if you just didn't really stop to consider that maybe your assumption about what you're saying they're trying to do is incorrect and haven't read what I'm saying closely enough to understand that no number of examples of other things that happen to fit what you're saying is relevant if you aren't able to establish why anyone else should agree that it applies here in the first place.
I agree, but why not also apply the same logic to the other two communication platforms you are using (Discord and GitHub)?
Aside, this infuriates me - "here's our open source project/website, join our Discord!" (even Lemmy instances). sigh
One point I disagree on that's also mentioned in the replies: I don't think a global state should be seen as necessary or even desirable. Sure, it helps people who optimize for clicks/likes/attention as a business model But that shouldn't be the only concern. Having some degree of uncertainty around the global state can help reinforce a healthy skepticism towards what you're seeing in general. The 'correct' global number of upvotes on a post, or the majority of what has been said about a subject might still be manipulated to the point of being essentially fake. Optimizing for virality is not desirable if you think of the platform as a public good. Think about what it has done for the centralized platforms, and the consequences it's had in the real world.
In theory additional dids could come into existence too, those are just the two that blueksy supports at the moment.
It’s worth noting that PLC can’t fake your data because each edit is recursively signed. So you can verify a chain of updates. However, PLC can in theory deny you service or ignore your updates.
Also someone from Nostr made a tool that let you upload image files and encode them (split into parts) into plc directory records…
Why do you think that's different in ActivityPub? As far as I know there's nothing preventing (for example) Mastodon and Pixelfed using the same identity.