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Comment by hugs | Hacker News Reader

from an an average developer perspective, nostr is interesting because it's "just" a digitally signed json data structure sent over a websocket. reading the spec [1] for creating a simple nostr client (aka "nip-1"), my average developer brains thinks: i could do that.

i don't get that same feeling when reading atproto or activitypub docs. ultimately, there's a reason why all these protocols get complicated at scale, but in the simple case, nostr is very easy to make a client for and start playing with.

nostr feels like a good example case for gall's law: "a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."

[1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md

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For me, as a veteran of social networks since Fidonet, the question that actually matters is the social construction: who's using it, for what purposes and topics, and - crucially - how is the work of moderation (including spam and abuse prevention) handled.

Technology doesn't make or break these things, the users do.

What questions do you have about AT? I agree its docs are mostly “bad” and hard to understand. I find the actual tech approachable so happy to answer more concrete questions.

Tools like http://pdsls.dev in particular can be helpful to see how things fit together.

i think it really is as simple as boiling it down into a doc that looks like nip-1 and saying, "this is the absolute minimum amount you need to understand and implement to start sending messages on an AT-based network." -- not from a user perspective, but from an average developer perspective.

i know eventually i'd need to implement a ton more than the absolute bare minimum, but my gut-feeling "average developer brain" says nostr's absolute minimum feels smaller that AT's absolute minimum. i guess i'm looking for an AT doc for devs that shows the absolute minimum for creating a client that is equally approachable as NIP-1.

Thanks, that’s helpful. I’ll see if I can write something in that spirit later.

thanks. also, fwiw, i'm also a very a happy AT user (@hugs.bsky.social) besides also being a happy nostr user.

i appreciate bsky's focus on user ux and community building and look forward to seeing more sharing of ideas between nostr and AT.

edit to add: to nerd-snipe my brain into wanting to make stuff with AT (or any future protocol) is to focus on a quick-start or tutorial showing the absolute minimal client to send one message.

once i can do that... i'm ready to learn all the rest of the vocabulary and server-side stuff, but not until i can send one simple message from a barely functional minimal client.

Would it be ok to use a library or is the requirement to keep it to raw primitives like curl?

i like seeing a bit of the raw, low-level protocol first. a few curl examples are perfect for understanding what’s really happening under the hood. once i get that, i'm happy to use a library to handle all the edge cases.

but starting with a library tutorial makes me wonder how many stacks of turtles are being hidden. if i can see the turtles upfront, i'll appreciate what the library does for me -- and i'll have a better sense of how to debug when things break.

Absolutely. I think it’s a great constraint actually. I have a few other pieces in the backlog but I’ll keep this one in mind.

This isn’t quite what you want but should illuminate at least the “fetch on demand” part in detail: https://overreacted.io/where-its-at/

yeah, that looks like a good base for a simplified remix. thanks!

everything we need to authenticate the msg should exist in the msg. sig => timestamp, hash

The docs are bad, sadly that’s true.

I kind of feel like you’re taking one of the specs from nostr - the first one written - and calling that the whole protocol. Then you’re comparing all of the atproto specs to that one spec.

The substantive difference is that we didn’t do a mix & match spec process because we knew the ambiguity of spec support causes problems, just as it did with XMPP. Protocol specs only get implemented a few times. The meaningful developer choices are in schemas and business logic.

the spirit of my comment was more psychological than technical. nip-1 successfully nerd-sniped my brain into thinking it was easy to get started with a simple, barely functional client. (even though, you're right, at scale, everything gets complicated and is not easy.)

perhaps this a roundabout way of hoping there is already a developer-focused quick start or tutorial for making a barely functional AT client. it either already exists, but i didn't look hard enough for it, or it might only be one chatgpt or claude prompt away.

Yeah that’s fair

But that's essentially the whole protocol. You can implement a client or a server reading only NIP-01 and it will be able to interoperate with the rest of Nostr.

Reading and implementing NIP-01 can be done in an afternoon (or a weekend if you're taking your time), and it gets you relays that can accommodate multiple clients and applications. From the client perspective, only implementing NIP-01 gets you a simple Twitter clone with an identity that belongs to you.

This so much. ATProto just seems so complicated in comparison.

nostr can get plenty complicated, too, but nostr successfully tricked me into thinking it was simple enough to get started.

Yeah, although I would argue that there are far fewer moving pieces in Nostr than there are in ATProto and that's part of why it's so simple - it's just clients and relays. That's it!

Edit: another thing I thought about just now is that you don't really have to worry about implementing most NIPs - many are not relevant if you're just building an application. All the Bitcoin Lightning Network stuff, for example, or private messaging, Blossom, etc.

yes, "there are too many NIPs!" feels like a red herring. at the moment, as a developer, i feel comfortable picking and choosing which NIPs i might want to use for whatever i'm building. but i can also understand why that might be a little confusing/frustrating to others. might be a education/communication issue more than anything else.

both projects are "controlled chaos", where nostr is a little heavier on the "chaos", atproto is a little heavier on the "control".

The more nerds that get sniped by a simple-seeming protocol, the more likely it is to catch on. Hitting a 100 page spec doc full of XML and links to other specs is a big de-motivator to start hacking on the protocol.

NGL that's kind of been the appeal of atproto. Once you get into the weeds you start learning about all the many many many moving parts but at its face 99% of it is:

Hey here's some schema files we call lexicons. Every single interaction with the network is a JSON RPC call to the same domain (whatever your PDS is) with the lexicon's path appended to it.

The fact that it's trivial to hack on atproto via the devtools console or a curl prompt makes things so much more fun to play with.

Both of these systems are rebellions against the structure of secure-scuttlebot, but took different paths as they rebelled.

Beyond using different cryptography, the biggest difference between the "ATProto System" and the "Nostr System" is that Jay Graber wanted to account for deletes and the re-organization of the message structure of an entire feed.

In early ATProto, aka smor-serve, https://github.com/arcalinea/smor-serve Jay didn't like that we couldn't delete a message on SSB so she centralized all of the operations into a "repo" where we can modify our social feed as much as we want, including even backdating posts. We can see how that evolved into how ATProto currently works today by browsing a repo with pdsls.

For Nostr NIP-01 to work, we generate a keypair, sign a message and blast it at a relay. There's no structure at all to how the messages are organized. Messages are out there once they are sent to the relays. This lack of structure leads to all kinds of issues about how one develops a strategy for syncing an entire history of a feed.

Both of these systems have developed into far larger complex systems that are impossible to hold in anyone's mind at this point, but the key difference is being able to delete a message. Most of the complexity in the "ATProto System" results from accounting for a message that one sends and then wants to unsend later. This is why everyone complains that Bluesky is centralized on the AppView/Index layer. But it's also centralized at the PDS layer.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think another important aspect of AT is Lexicons, i.e. there's an officially suggested way to do schemas, and application authors are encouraged to create and distribute schemas for their apps. Data is grouped in the repo by its schema too.

True. Scuttlebot had msg types too.

true, however

>You can read and leave comments on this post here on Bluesky, or here on Nostr, or even here on Mastodon.

the only link that doesn't work is the Nostr one, the content doesn't load for me

That's not an issue with Nostr, it's an issue with the client that they decided to link to. Here's the content loading just fine in Primal: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsqfeuezj38syyppscdpu0c0zwermxl...

Okay, so I think this is the first time I've seen something posted on Nostr. Unless maybe I saw it on another client where it looked very different?

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