Comment by embedding-shape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by embedding-shape | Hacker News Reader

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> why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers?

Of course depends on the context, but in a lot of discussions about ATProto, ActivityPub, Mastodon and nearby areas, people talk about "instances" as in "ActivityPub instances that host my data and my profile uses its URL as a 'name'". The blog post is specifically for that context I think.

It's less about trying to hide around the issue, and more reframing how you see the concepts, as people start to associate words with concepts and structures. So when people talk about "decentralized social media", lots of people think about ActivityPub, which typically (always?) has a kind of federated architecture, and the instance is one of those nodes in the network. When these people see ATProto, instinctively (and perhaps rightly so) they literally ask "But why is there only one Bluesky instance that people join?" as those concepts map close to what they know.

Overall I think the post is a good and useful addition to the discourse, with perhaps not a completely novel perspective, but posted publicly for future reference when this inevitably gets asks again sometime in the future, specifically for the people who have these previous associations already formed in their head.

All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media.

Swarms of content.

Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution.

Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability.

Immutability in general.

Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten).

Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts.

You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a common platform. 3rd party tools and extensions can filter content, provide trust graphs, interest graphs, etc.

You can just slurp up and score whatever might interest you. Your agent or algorithm might do pre-filtering against your preferred heuristics to downsample to relevancy.

You could write any client for this in any shape or form. Completely different look and feel for different people and interests / focuses.

Daniel Holmgren discusses this in his really good atproto ethos talk — the P2P networks are cool but incapable of delivering on what users expect from modern social media https://youtu.be/1A-0k58TfPo?si=f_d4uoz_I8kMoKDw

> All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media.

This is the wrong way to see it. There is no "Best and correct" solution, only solutions with different trade-offs. ActivityPub/Mastodon/Federation makes sense in some cases, "pure" direct distributed P2P makes sense in some cases, one central server makes sense in some.

Bluesky/ATProto just made different trade-offs, for different use cases, some of which wouldn't have been possible without the architecture they ended up with, which sibling commentator expanded on exactly what.

The problem with client P2P is there’s no aggregation at scale. You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. Not to speak of recommendations, search, and all other basic things people expect from social apps.

Atproto is an attempt to engage with the problem space in a way that hits the baseline UX of Web 2.0 apps.

But it’s worth noting atproto designers come partially from P2P lineage. Some worked on Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and others.

> You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes.

And maybe that's a good thing.

Technical problems give way to philosophical differences but the over-arching problem is that the people behind ATProto really want to make a social media ecosystem that attracts lots of average people who will refuse to understand that the solution you're giving them can't do things Twitter could do back before Musk bought it. People get angry enough at Bluesky not having an edit button, and it's at least possible to talk about how editing can be abused.

You can switch to the AppView from https://mu.social/ and you'll get editing working.

mu.social is a "client".

An "AppView" is the API server that most clients connect to that aggregates data from the network and serves it in a more useful way. mu.social still uses bluesky's AppView (api.bsky.app).

The name is confusing. I thought clients were appviews myself for a while.

I kind of started calling them all “apps” with true appviews being “independent apps”. I think sometimes it makes sense of think of this as an implementation detail. For example, Mu could actually switch to its own database if they do a bunch of technical work in the future. From the users’ perspective, it wouldn’t be noticeable.

Perhaps, but that isn’t what users want.

Coming up with a new model for social media and also dictating what features are good and bad for users is going make user adoption a tough challenge.

Nostr is basically this.

It's a cool idea, in practice it kind of sucks as an experience.

It's been developed adjacent to the Bitcoin community and I can't say there's much going on besides spam.

Yeah, kind of a bummer. There are some cool ideas that have been implemented in nostr, but everything has that bitcoin/zap hussle.

Secure Scuttlebutt was a fun implementation of this, but the project is all but dead with Staltz working for Bsky and the other maintainers moving on.

Both Blue Sky and Mastodon are that, if you squint.

(NOT ATProto and ActivityPub. Those are platonic ideals of protocols which have no real-world implementations. ActivityPub, especially, was obviously designed by architecture astronauts.)

> architecture astronauts

Not sure how I haven't heard this one before, but I'm stealing it. Salient descriptor.

Even has a wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut

Joel's post was the genesis https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

Salient indeed!

> They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.

Interesting. I'm an architect by title because my employer doesn't have the career path of a "senior specialist who really knows their stuff and wants to keep going at it". No. We have only two paths: either Manager (not interested in the slightest), or the almighty Architect. Every time I'm forced to architect something, that bit about the bottom line comes to my mind.

I'd say an architect is kind of the opposite from a specialist. The specialists cares about the stuff only they know. The architects care about the stuff everybody should know.

Anyways, it's similar in my company. People get the architect title, so managers can justify the salary promotion.

P2p networks either kill your phone battery or require you run a hosted instance somewhere, which cuts out about 99% of potential users.

This doesn't work for intermittently-online, battery-powered, CGNATed mobile devices, and that's what people are using in practice.

The Google / Apple walled gardens don't make it any easier, but even without them, the fundamental issues of battery life and intermittent connectivity don't disappear, walled gardens just force you to design around them instead of hiding your head in the sand and pretending they don't exist.

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