Comment by catapart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by catapart | Hacker News Reader

yeah yeah yeah, everyone get on the AT protocol, so that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money) while still maintaining the original, largest, and currently only portal to actually publish the content (which makes money[0]). let them profit from a technical "innovation" that is 6 levels of indirection to mimic activity pub.

if they were decent people, that would be one thing. but if they're going to be poisoned with the same faux-libertarian horseshit that strangled twitter, I don't see any value in supporting their protocol. there's always another protocol.

but assuming I was willing to play ball and support this protocol, they STILL haven't solved the actual problem that no one else is solving either: your data exists somewhere else. until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage. you're just going to change which massive organization is exploiting them.

I know, I know: hardware is a bitch and the type of device I'm even pitching seems like a costly boondoggle. but that's the business, and if you're not addressing it, you're not fomenting real change; you're patting yourself on the back for pretending we can algorithm ourselves out of late-stage capitalism.

[0] *potentially/eventually

> until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage

Quite some BSky users are publishing on their own PDS (Personal Data Server) right now. They have been for a while. There are already projects that automate moving or backign up your PDS data from BSky, like https://pdsmoover.com/

What's a PDS?

Personal Data Server. See https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#pds-personal-data-server

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/atproto

Microblogging is also the least interesting part of the ATProto ecosystem. I've switched all my git hosting over to https://tangled.org and am loving it, not least of which is that my git server (a 'knot' in Tangled parlance) is under my control as a PDS and has no storage limits!

Is it as easy for other people to read as a Github repo? Want to share?

Tangled founder here; it's just as easy! For example, here's the entire Tangled codebase monorepo: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core — you can clone this directly as you would a git repo anywhere else.

Looks nice!

New user sign up is a bit wonky. It asked for an email, login and password, then it's asking for a bsky sign-in too? This seems a little weird.

(Minor nit: for some reason, Google didn't auto-suggest a strong password for the password field.)

Then I got to the screen where it asks for full read-write access to my PDS and stopped there. It's kind of a lot to ask! I believe this is Bluesky's fault, but I don't think I can really use third-party bluesky apps until they implement finer-grained permissions.

Fine-grained permissions are already shipped btw, though the documentation could be better.

yeah, tangled seems like a pretty well-designed piece of tech. I've never used it, myself, but I did an audit and found that it's not only analogous to github as far as UX, but it also includes features like CI/CD, which other public/social repo servers have struggled with.

only reason I backed away from it is that when the bsky team had a big "fuck the users" moment, the user purporting to be the tangled founder was happy to cheer them on. so between having to use AT proto, and assuming that the tangled dev doesn't really disagree with bsky's "fuck the users" sentiment, I moved on. but, obviously, whiny moral grandstanding is irrelevant to whether or not someone made a good product. if you've got a use for it, I'd certainly recommend giving it a try!

yeah, I was one of them. developers are not the endgame, though. true social media needs people who are not going to do anything more complicated than "go to website, sign up". there's no world where setting up your own pds is that simple without an organized piece of software to do that kind of thing.

personally, I could probably get behind recommending something like umbrel[0], if it included something like a "include a pds" option during config. but even that is asking for a lot of mind-share for a non-tech user. it would take a super smooth setup process for that to be realistic. point is, though, I'm not saying it can't be done; I'm saying no one is doing it and what people are doing is not getting the job done for wider adoption.

[0] https://umbrel.com/ *and, naturally, at this point, I'd prefer they include something that isn't based on AT proto for social publication. I wouldn't mind if they had both, but just an AT proto implementation wouldn't attract me.

and you expect these “go to website, sign up” people to take the extra step to select a provider for repoing data? these people can barely pick a mastodon instance, what sort of data ownership integration work do you expect? it’s a consideration that’s more niche than the current status quo. unless you’re fine with people defaulting to onedrive or similar.

no, I expect them to go to a store to buy the same product that their friend bought. then I expect them to use that product by scanning a QR code that comes up on their TV, and then registering an account using the site linked by that code (or, just using their tv's remote to sign up, with an on-screen keyboard, or whatever).

not "a server so simple, anyone could host it"; "a set top box that gives me a private social media storage, network data storage, secure external connections, and effortless integration with all of my other iot devices". note that the former requires you to know what hosting is, while the latter only requires that you know what you want to do, without having to understand the details of how its done.

>that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money)

That's not correct, actually hosting user data is cheap. Most users' repos are tiny. Bluesky doesn't save anything by having someone move to their own PDS.

What's expensive is stuff like video processing and large scale aggregation. Which has to be done regardless of where the user is hosting their data.

come on, man, let's be real. you're talking modern, practical application; I'm talking reasonable user buy in at big boy social media levels. the video hosting IS what I'm talking about being expensive. you think bsky is going to be successfully while ignoring the instagram crowd forever? what are we doing here?

bsky saves the video processing and bandwidth by not hosting that content on bsky. it's a smaller problem, but in a large enough pool, images become heavy, too. and, either way, the egress of that content is expensive if you're doing it for the entire world, instead of letting each individual's computer (their pds) do it.

I'm happy to admit that text is cheap and bsky isn't looking to offload their data as it stands now. but let's be honest about the long term, which is what my original comment takes aim at.

I still don't think this is correct. The Bluesky app always processes video, whether you're self-hosting or not. The personal data serves stores the original blob, but the Bluesky's video service will have to pick it up and transcode it (to serve it from CDN) either way.

Also, this:

>let them profit from a technical "innovation" that is 6 levels of indirection to mimic activity pub.

is also wrong because AT solves completely different problems. None of the stuff I wrote about in the post can be solved or or is being solved by ActivityPub. Like, AP is just message passing. It doesn't help with aggregation, identity, signing, linking cross-application data, any of that.

right on, man, that must be the only way transcoding can be done and completely future proof so it will never change to let the user transcode their own damn content. I get it; you're frustrated so you're nitpicking. funny how dang doesn't swoop in to tut tut you for not steelmanning instead of strawmanning.

in any case, you're completely right about the activity pub comment. that was absolutely mockery and not actually a complaint. artistic license and all that. god forbid we express ourselves. but sure, I can recognize that AT proto is useful in that it provides mechanisms we didn't really have before. that said, it's not novel (just new) and it's not irreplaceable. LIKE I SAID: there's always another protocol.

any time you want to actually address the point of the comments, I'd be happy to get your take on why it's fine, actually, for the CEO to imply she doesn't have to care what users think as long as they aren't paying her. but if you're not ready to have the real conversation, I'll let you be satisfied with whatever other potshots you want to take at my reasonable indignation.

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