Comment by FatFingers23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FatFingers23 | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to preface I'm pretty active in atprotocol ecosystem, so my experience is more than likely a bit more biased, but thought I'd share some of my thoughts as a big fan of tangled.

I've really enjoyed Tangled. It has so far been what I've wanted from a GitHub replacement, is simpler and does not have as many features, but it has been the main social/git provider I've been using for personal open source projects for about a year now (this me https://tangled.org/did:plc:rnpkyqnmsw4ipey6eotbdnnf)

- It has a social graph connected to it I know from the social media I use (Bluesky), it's nice to put a face/name I may have seen to their commits/prs/issues

- Is nice it's login is the same as other things I use

- They have recently added built in support for static sites, nice for those client side webites or simple index.htmls you want to host somewhere straight from your git repo.

- Spindles is their build system/actions. Not a nix fan, but they do use some flavor of that and have worked really well for what I've needed

- An open API that allows me to easily render information thanks to being built on shared standards I know (atproto). I've built bots and wrote a few features into npmx.dev that uses various things from tangled easily thanks to that.

- Ability to run your own knot(git server) and runner (spindles), or easily use the ones they host, but the cool thing about this is the social features are separate so even if you have a separate git server the issues/prs/etc are all coming from that shared social layer, not like they need to make an account on it to partake in the convo.

It's not perfect. It has alpha in the navbar and does feel like that sometimes. I am missing some features, but all in all I've really enjoyed using it for my open source work and will more than likely continue using it going forward.

I'm afraid that atproto will suffer from Bluesky's irrelevance. Not sure if that's a valid fear.

Fair enough! We are a pretty small ecosystem all in all. I will say in Tangled's case their infrastructure is separate from Bluesky's for the most part, and the rest can be switched easily enough if ever needed.

One example is if you don't care anything about atproto, you can create a new account on Tangled's website that creates the account on their servers, but thanks to how atproto works it's just like you made one on Bluesky and can still interact with Tangled and everyone on the protocol for it's social features.

In what sense is bluesky irrelevant in this context? It's obviously not Twitter scale, but no alternative to GitHub will be GitHub scale for a long time to come either...

And it does seem to have the right feature set. Not sure which other social graph/network you could reasonably build a GitHub alternative around that would be less irrelevant....

It's largely perceived to be an ideological site. Obviously every community has its own biases and tastes, but I think Bluesky has just captured the imagination as the "left-leaning social platform." When the NYT was talking about a potential link between the WHCD shooter and Bluesky posts, that's what they referred to Bluesky as.

Obviously Tangled can live completely separate from Bluesky, it doesn't even need to share branding. Protocols are just protocols and people who don't understand how email works often don't even realize that Outlook and GMail use the same protocols. I'm hoping for this future personally where ATProto is only something the nerds care about (and write code for.)

(Please don't respond to this post with ideological argument. I'm just trying to talk about Bluesky and ATProto.)

>It's largely just become an ideological site.

That may be the case, but anyone can use ATProto. Unlike X where reach is suppressed for ideological motivations, or Mastodon with the federation turf wars, anyone can use it, regardless of their politics. If you disagree with the ideology of the majority users and avoid it for that reason, it just perpetuates the problem.

Unfortunately, I suspect it is only that way at present because the "other side" is perfectly content to continue existing in a communications environment that prioritizes them, rather than one that is actually open.

Unlike Mastodon? What's the difference? Anyone can use AP regardless of politics, you just might get banned from other's infra the same as for ATProto.

I wonder how much this translates to places outside the US... Bluesky being the place for everything Center-left and left of it by US standards would just make it the place for mainstream opinion in much of the EU.

Personally I found it much easier to avoid politics on Bluesky than on other platforms. Which is why it's been more sticky for me than Twitter was. And I put that down to having good feed control, and not being beholden to an algorithm that tries to keep me engaged.

It doesn't. I don't really believe this meme of the center-left and left in the US being the mainstream in the EU. It's true that certain attitudes around labor and economics are shared between the American left and more center left and center EU parties, but our stances on social issues are completely different. There's an entire fabric of multiculturalism that's present in the US that just isn't in the EU that has a very different lens. For example, the US just doesn't have anything resembling an EU-style Christian Democratic party from a social values perspective at all.

Bluesky is mostly about day-to-day American politics, which means talking about how a court ruling is bad, how Trump did something stupid, or how the current admin is corrupt. The complaint I've read from most EU folks is how American day-to-day politics takes up way too much of the site.

I was unable to turn off politics without pretty much completely nuking my feed. I tried using mute words but that ended up just turning off most of my timeline. I build a US Politics labeler that worked pretty well, but ended up in a similar effect. Content outside of the politics on the network just isn't very interesting. Pretty much none of my hobbies are well represented there except some photography, and the photography is mostly about sharing pictures (which is definitely cool) rather than talking about shooting weddings or events or street the way it tends to shake up in other photography communities.

I mostly agree with you that the political landscapes are mostly extremely different, rather than just shifted. Incidentally, when I tried Twitter (pre take over) it was more the US centric activist left that drove me away.

(Edit: That said, in the previous comment I was primarily thinking about the fact that the Republican party now explicitly supports far right and populist parties in Europe that are firmly outside the mainstream.)

That said, it sounds like your problem is more that other stuff isn't there? I am an academic, I followed interesting people in my field, and I am mostly on the feed that just shows me stuff from people I follow (plus a few curated feeds). So I didn't try to actively block stuff, and I have enough content to spend ten minutes every other day on the site and find new and interesting things. So maybe it's the combination of the niche I am after and the fact that I don't want to spend too much time on social media anyway that makes bsky a good experience for me...

Ah yeah if you're an academic it makes sense presuming your niche is there. I'm looking for a more general hobby site and sadly Twitter and Reddit are still that to me.

atproto will suffer from centralization via Bluesky and its user wanting it to be centralized.

Everything is irrelevant until it isn't. Then it isn't until it is. If we all do our part, X will become irrelevant.

Aren't we reinventing what were forums in pre smartphone days?

Those were all isolated places, where you needed an account for that specific forum (whereas you can use your PDS anywhere), where that forum held your data (whereas you hold your atproto data, and we all internetwork to see the aggregate), where you were subject to the moderation decisions of that forum (whereas you have control over your PDS (but not other people's clients)).

Pretty unclear what your comment is trying to indicate but it sure feels very different to me, and I've offered some characterizations for why.

More generally, atproto is useful for all kinds of tech, solves a cold start social network problem. Aren't we reinventing forums, and tv watching, and book reviews, and trail maps, and photo sharing, and streaming, and d&d, and key attestation, and file sharing, and publishing, and note taking and containers and git hosting? Yes. Yes we are. https://atstore.fyi

(Under a common protocol set, in a way that respects users unlike everything else that's happened online so far.)

Isn't this stuff we're inventing more complicated than having accounts on websites?

Fuck yes it is. Centralizing everything & owning all the data & giving users no rights is technically easy as hell. Walk in the fucking park!

It's also abjectly awful. Sites change hands, change owners, change terms of service, change moderators... sites shut down. Taking "your" content with them. To accept centralized services is technically simple but it means accepting the infinitely long timeline of social and corporate complexity, that plays out, day by day & decade by decade.

As a user it is much simpler for me to have a PDS where my data is, that I control, and manage.

And it's all my data. I don't have to manage my data across thousands of different profiles on different sites. On that hostile unstable ground I've spoken of, each of these sites evolving and devolving in their own multi-variate ways.

It's perhaps sometimes simpler to have experiences that only exist in one site. But it's much richer and more interesting when different apps can interoperate, can adversarially interoperate/competitive cooperation. I also think that for users, once you get the hang of it, the patterns of having a PDS emerge, and provide a consistency of experience across apps, where-as each site has to be learned on its own terms: it's simpler having a single sign on from your PDS, having tools you can manage all your data with. (https://pds.ls)

We have atproto experiences like the just launching Disperse that work across the different apps, that bring them together. Multiple different apps do bookmarking using the same lexion, some with their own add-ons. A single site can't give you that ability to work across systems, to work broadly. You are reduced to working on a site by site basis. That's simple until it becomes overwhelming, at which point better tools becomes simpler: having a PDS leaves the door open to making these better tools, that work more broadly, across systems. https://bsky.app/profile/quillmatiq.com/post/3mkq2hzfjn22s

Whereas you might get stuck with a complex bad app hosted on one site, with atproto your data is yours to manage and you can use whatever app you please, and those different apps can attune to different user types: users who want a rich complex app might use one app, other folks can prefer a simpler less complicated app. Not being evolutionarily handcuffed to one company's app your whole life lets everyone explore not just what us "more complicated"/simpler, but a whole range of preferences that suits the user, that better matches what the user wants, that can grow and evolve with the users and their data, in a way that the "simple" centralized system by definition cannot enable.

It's so wild to me how much I see the dual of complexity. Rich Hickey talking about complecting is spiritual holy matter to me, is deeply cherished. But I see so so so many people who use aversion to complexity as a tool to turn off thinking, to not regard the complexity: endless Chesterton's Fences, no curiosity about why the fence might be there. There's such strong swelling of dark energy to tear down destroy and berate, the smugness of those so happy to criticize ram usage or to say software is all bad now. I dunno man. It really tires me out having such shallow engagement such superficial reactions.

Personally my soul craves a deeper connection with systems, wants to engage and explore, to sift what complexity brings interestingness from that complexity which is incidental. I've written a bunch of posts in this submission what I think is so so so interesting in the inherent choices of having an Authenticated Transfer Protocol, where you can send my data around over http, or web sockets, or MoQT, or IP over avian, or tin cans and shoe string, and still have it be clear to the world that that data is mine. Very few other systems offer that. ActivityPub certainly doesn't practice that widely, maybe doesn't offer that at all. All these systems we've built assume a host that stays online forever, that owns the responsibility fully. It's wicked deeply compelling to me to march into some complexity to liberate us from this ancient bitter internet constraint. Hello & thank you, complexity.

We're not discussing social networks though, this is about Git project hosting. Bluesky doesn't have to compete with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or any of that for Tangled to be useful.

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