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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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