Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

steveklabnik

There is an IETF Working Group these days https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group

Those can't register trademarks, of course.

> that also runs the only viable instance?

This is false, both in the framing ("instances") and in the viability of running alternative infrastructure.

View on HN

But it’s true in the general idea of Bluesky being highly centralized and dependent on a single for-profit entity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48931191

Why can't the IETF register trademarks?

Well, clearly they can:

https://static.ietf.org/logos/ietf.svg

Does the IETF register trademarks on behalf of their working groups? It’s possible that I’m just misinformed about that.

I left this comment shortly before bed and my thought process was “a working group isn’t a legal entity and therefore can’t do this” but it’s entirely possible that that was shortsighted of me.

(Obviously the IETF itself can.)

How do you mean? As in you can run different instances or as in it's a false open protocol?

ATProto is closer to how RSS works than ActivityPub. In the same way talking about "RSS instances" makes little sense, the same goes for "ATProto instances".

It makes sense to talk about “RSS aggregators”. Especially it makes sense to talk about “RSS aggregators that speak a specific vocabulary on top of RSS, host 99% of content using that vocabulary, and if you host your own RSS feed with said vocabulary they’ll show it in their aggregator but can ban it any minute”.

Did I just describe Apple Podcasts? Huh. Regardless, yeah, there’s no “ATProto instances” technically, but there are ATProto apps and the single biggest one now owns the trademark to the protocol name.

i guess that's fair, but i've never listened to a podcast from a non-foss app; i'm not really "in" the podcast sphere, but from where i'm sitting it seems podcasting would survive and migrate just fine if apple podcasts had to go away suddenly

I guess that’s fair, too. I’m not really into podcasts either, and the ecosystem seems healthy enough. Many FOSS podcast clients use Apple for discovery, which I guess make sense; but there’s probably other databases, and the contents themselves aren’t usually hosted by Apple, just the metadata.

So yeah, podcasts are in good shape. In fact, they are probably the most used decentralized media right now (apart from torrents, maybe). I hope Bluesky gets to that point, and I do wish them luck, but we’ve got to see the incentives are not that well aligned. As for the trademark... it’s surely weird, it’s not the end of the world if they continue to hold it, but setting up a non-profit (not in US, perhaps) for the protocol itself would probably be more appropriate down the road.

The solution to that is to create more apps, and for one of them to become more popular. This is entirely in our hands as developers.

The thing with ATProto is, there is little incentive in creating apps that speak the app.bsky vocabulary. If I understand correctly, there is one other full-fledged app that does that, Blacksky [0]. By full-fledged, I mean they host a PDS, a relay, an app view, a moderation service, and a bunch of feeds and other doodads. If Bluesky goes down, Blacksky will probably be fine. They are, however, yet another US company [1], which is not ideal.

[0]: https://docs.blacksky.community/

[1]: https://blackskyweb.xyz/about/support/tos/#:~:text=Blacksky%...

Even if that was the case, Google Reader's death almost took RSS with it so the concern remains valid.

Read the recently frontpaged "There are no instances in ATProto" by dan abramov <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599515>

It's a different network topology. ActivityPub couples three things into one box: community, hosting, and an app.

Atproto decouples them: there's app-agnostic hosting (which anyone can run), and there's hosting-agnostic apps (which anyone can run).

I wrote about it here: https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/#so...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com