Publishing on the ATmosphere | Hacker News Reader

Publishing on the ATmosphere

tynanistyping.offprint.app

38 pointsdanabramov37 comments

ATproto might not be a platform exactly, but it is an ecosystem. Programming language ecosystems don't really die but they do fade sometimes.

I think the issue with publishing via a PDS is that you're basically letting anyone republish on their own website. For comments that makes a lot of sense since they can show up under articles. But for a blog? Maybe it would be better to keep your database of articles offline, publish it to your own website, and not replicate it to the world? Instead, send a ATproto post for each article with a link to your website.

What's the downside of it being replicated and distributed?

It's got a digital signature, which can verify that it comes from you and is unaltered.

They could sell their advertising instead of yours :-)

I don't see a digital signature helping? Digital signatures can be stripped.

I mean, that is the status quo of everything published anywhere on the internet today, using any protocol, and is why copyright exists. I'm not sure how ATProto changes that equation, aside from providing additional mechanisms for authorized republication?

Not a whole lot but there is at least robots.txt and scraper blocking like Cloudflare does. At least there are norms and copyright law. What are the norms for serving content from someone else's PDS? I think not asking permission is the default?

Why would you do that vs just publishing on your own domain?

This ATproto astroturfing is becoming a bit ridiculous.

The three main publishing platforms are working together

https://standard.site/

ATProto and the ATmosphere are different

I’m looking at the site and right at the beginning it says:

> Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere.

Which part of these required a new protocol and couldn’t be built before @at existed? Seems to me we’re reinventing the wheel for I’m not entirely sure which benefit. But maybe someone who’s more into this part of the web can educate me on this.

One answer is right under Introduction:

> Content portability

> Users move between hosts without losing their content, audience, or metadata.

Did that require an entire new protocol though? I am 100% sure that if Twitter, Facebook and all the other platforms decided that they want to offer a way to move around accounts they could do it.

Maybe, coordination is the problem. What does that data look like, what does the target look like, can they be transformed?

ATProto has lexicon, which are more about social coordination than schemas for data correctness

https://pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance

The protocol is much more than data portability, it essentially turns the global social media system into a giant distributed system anyone can participate in at any point. Imagine if FB also let you tap into the event stream or produce your own event stream other FB users could listen to in the official FB app. That would be a pretty awesome requirement for all social media apps, yea?

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

> it essentially turns the global social media system into a giant distributed system anyone can participate in at any point.

Don’t we already have that and is called “the web”? It’s already a giant distributed system anyone can participate in at any point.

What are we really gaining here?

A shared event bus, lexicon for coordination, apps that store user data in the users database, separation of client from app data

if they decided to, sure they could. they don't want to and never will.

I am not debating that. But this same reasoning applies to @at or any other implementation. You have to be willing to implement the features and use the protocol. So I still don’t see why this is any different.

You keep asking questions, rejecting answers, and then saying you don't understand.

Perhaps it is time to read more about the protocol directly instead of asking questions on HN to poke holes in it from a position of ignorance.

> Which part of these required a new protocol and couldn’t be built before @at existed? Seems to me we’re reinventing the wheel for I’m not entirely sure which benefit.

The atproto folks went and categorized all of the other attempts to do this at the time. (They even had some I hadn't heard of!)

All of them make various tradeoffs. None of them were the set of tradeoffs the team wanted. So they needed to make some new things. That's really the core of it.

My sibling has one of the largest and most specific things, but this is the underlying reason.

> The atproto folks went and categorized all of the other attempts to do this at the time. (They even had some I hadn't heard of!)

Is this study/exploration available anywhere? I’d love to give it a read if that’s available. If you have a link to share I’d really appreciate it.

I believe that https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosyste... is the canonical link, it's not the one I read originally, but is linked from the "related work" section of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239

Thank you, will give this a read. I appreciate it.

ATproturfing is that correct term for it.

(yes very proud of myself for this )

God forbid that technologists are enthusiastic about a technology.

Such things never happen, least of all here, on Hacker News.

The article isn't resolving, so I can't speak to what it exactly says.

However, the question isn't "on your own domain vs not," it's "how you publish." Blog networks are popular because most people do not have the technical ability to spin up a server, buy a domain, and point it at it.

Why an atproto based solution instead of Medium or whatever? Because then you actually own your own data. And that also doesn't preclude it ending up on your own domain in the end anyway, because it's your data.

I can set my offprint blog to use my domain, just haven't gotten around to it. The post is made on my atproto account, which is under my domain @tynanpurdy.com. All of the content lives under that account, on which I can attach a new domain handle at a later date if I so choose. Offprint is just one place to view the post. This is more durable than just posting to a website in that the content is indexable, discoverable, and reusable by a growing ecosystem due to the usage of standard broadcast rails and schemas. I get all the benefits of something like substack but without locking myself into that social graph and company.

I understand I’m behind in terminology in this space and figured that there at least would’ve been a post to make its way through HN that would explain what the “Atmosphere” is. Apparently this submission was supposed to be that (5 days ago) but it doesn’t define the concept.

> The "Atmosphere" is the term we use to describe the ecosystem around the AT Protocol.

— <https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#atmosphere> (Why on earth is the glossary not alphabetized by the way?)

I think that ATProto is going to win against other decentralized/‘fediverse' protocols in the long run. Bluesky? Maybe not. But I am impressed by the look of other platforms like Leaflet and that one that’s supposed to be an alternative to GitHub or something like that. [1]

I can’t speak on the tech behind the protocol itself but as far as marketing is considered it’s in the lead in my opinion. ActivityPub seems too gangly and Nostr is the worst—as in 'worse is better’—and in a way I’m fond of it because of that.

The planning behind ATProto appears to be far more coordinated than the other two. Despite being the senior of the three, ActivityPub is still going through inter-platform drama (e.g., the Instagram clone that was recently condemned for not handling text-only posts...like an Instagram clone should) and I get the feeling that the mind behind Nostr can care less about coordinating. I look at it more like a toolkit to build a protocol out of than a single one akin to the other two. [2]

[1]: This is my first look at OffPrint. It looks too much like Substack. I hate it. But I figure that the beautiful thing is that in theory I can use Leaflet and you can use OffPrint and I guess our writing is all in the same...atmosphere. Hah.

[2]: Similar to another web project that I’m fond of, Datastar.

Herman characterises this as the third distillation: sourcing mass-media news.

AT is not yours - it belongs to Blue Sky pbc. You can link your own domain to it, but the user interface belongs to Blue Sky and they will block you if they want.

This is, like, the entire problem ATProto is designed to solve.

Sure, Bluesky can block you from showing up in Bluesky the application. But if they do, you can still host your own content (as is being done here) or access it via alternative apps (like Blacksky).

This is like saying that "RSS isn't yours because Google Reader can block you."

This article has nothing to do with the Bluesky lexicon or with the bsky.app AppView.

What does “they will block you” even mean: this article is talking about hosting your data on your PDS and presenting it on your domain.

Everyone* using AT is using it through BlueSky. If you're not trying to reach those people there isn't any reason to use AT, it's just RSS with an identity centrally tied to BlueSky PBC.

The majority still use bluesky PBC's infra but that's increasingly less true.

- Blacksky has their own full appview for bluesky nowadays + relays and PDS w/ something like 60-70k users. It's small compared to the total bluesky count but it's still very sizable.

- There are countless atproto relays running independent of "big bluesky" and they only cost like 20usd/month max nowadays to run.

- Likewise it's trivial to host your data on any thirdparty PDS and scaling up a PDS community isn't terribly hard (PDS scale linearly up to like 500k users and then it scales linearly past that by just periodically launching a new PDS part of your "cluster")

- And most importantly the UX on migration is getting a lot better so it's reasonably approachable for average users.

--------

Side note but I noticed your name. Are you "the direwolf20"?

How does a relay cost $20/month with a copy of all ATProto data? That's many terabytes.

You only needed the full copy of all atproto data for the first version of the relay protocol. Since "relay 1.1" relays became a lot thinner.

Nowadays you can run a relay which maintains the current firehose of events + some amount of backfill (commonly a day, week, or month).

Appviews listen to the relay and can save what they care about and can look to other relays if they need more backfill.

So in practice you have your relays for regular use which handle large amounts of outbound traffic and then you have "archival relays" which store all or large portions of the history.

And in the eventual future "archival relays" will likely end up providing backfill for extremely old history via something closer to IPFS (it's the same underlying data structures so this isn't a major change, just nobody has done it yet).

And of course in the event a particular bit of history is missing, a relay can just ask the PDS for a new copy of the data.

-----

TLDR: The 20usd/month is for a relay with like a month or so worth of backlog attached and you can get by with less/cheaper or with more.

So the whole ecosystem still relies on the one big relay of blue sky pbc?

Not at all. There are several active relays, some of which serve unique purposes such as the backlinks relay from microcosm.blue. Anyone can run a relay and it is cheap. The expensive thing is running a fully copy of the network in an appview.

in fact more relays just dropped today https://sri.leaflet.pub/3mddrqk5ays27

Reply on news.ycombinator.com