danabramov

I have a different article that goes into this here: https://overreacted.io/open-social/#open-social Also here: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/#l…

I wouldn't say other components are expensive. Common ones are: - Relay as an optimization. That's cheap-ish ($30/mo) or free-ish if you pool with others. - Your own app server. That&#x…

Great questions! The protocol does have suggested app-agnostic moderation primitives (see https://atproto.com/guides/labels , https://atproto.com/guides/cre…

I see! That's a huge topic by itself since you're raising a lot of questions. Maybe this could be a different article. My aim with this one was just to clarify the network topology because i…

Well, I think you also need to consider what PLC is. It’s an open source implementation of an open source spec. The implementation holds zero private state and exposes a verifiable log of operations f…

I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server). So their account only works when seen thorough the Blacksky app. What is a better sol…

If you’re asking about moderation, it works similarly as you’d expect it to work in a everything-RSS world. At the hosting level, the hosting you use will likely ban you for clearly illegal stuff. Sam…

I don't understand how running your own Relay is related to competing with Bluesky. A Relay is just a dumb websocket broadcaster. Yes, you can absolutely run one on your own if you don't wan…

I'm being a bit cheeky in the article's tone but I am fairly confident from discussions in the past that "But where are Bluesky instances?" is a common question which usually demo…

Running your own firehose is not expensive, fwiw, it's $30/mo. If I were making a "serious" app I'd probably do that. Otherwise, relying on community-maintained ones seems fin…

Sure, there are servers, but the different grouping is the whole point because they're not coupling hosting to apps. When people say "where are Bluesky instances", they're assertin…

I'd say atproto gives you a clear sense of what's tied to each of your identities — you can go and explore your repo in a browser. There's nothing to say your identity has to be "t…

What kind of censor? Whoever operates hosting can decide to ban someone from hosting. This isn't different from how Cloudflare would ban you for hosting something illegal. Whoever operates an app…

Yea that's fair. My stubborn point is that Fedi is trying to do the right thing using the wrong technology, and the resulting tradeoffs in user experience are why it will always remain niche. I h…

- There's no "instances" so I don't know what you mean by this. - Re: PLC directory, indeed, there is only one of those. I think this is a legit point but it's worth consideri…

Yeah, Relays are one way to do that. I've mostly skipped them because they're an invisible optimization and there are other strategies. E.g. many smaller apps today rely on Constellation ( h…

That's not true. It's not centralized in any way that matters. The Relay Bluesky uses is open source, you can run your own for $30/month if you really insist on doing that, it's tr…

Author here! I mostly skipped over it because a Relay is an optimization and not essential to the shape of the network. It's not a fundamental element in the same way that PDS (hosting) and AppVi…

(Update: I actually have moved my hosting today but it seems like Blacksky is caching resolution too aggressively so it might not resolve it for a few more hours.)

Update: I just wrote a post about this since I keep typing it over and over in these threads. https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/ …

Note that “instance” is Mastodon-brained and is a wrong way to think about atproto. The correct parallel is RSS / Google Reader. Atproto has two types of things: hosting and apps. - Hosting is li…

What does “people on other app servers” mean? That’s not a thing. App servers are aggregators. You can use any to read the network. Here’s a post I wrote, as seen via Bluesky aggregator: https:/…

That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”. Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent P…

Do people actually do this? I’ve been on a sabbatical when the whole AI thing happened and I might start working again soon and I’m not sure what to expect in the Slack mines.

it’s like raaayeyeeeaaaayeeeain

I mean mostly the writing. The visual design is fine but the grandiose tone is clearly LLM, as well as attempt to be “data-driven” to an absurd degree. The screaming “DAMAGE” blocks, “body count”, “(…