They should be interoperable... I should be able to take my account from bluesky and host it on any other pub server

The server shouldn't need to be specific to mastodon/bluesky networks either

Ghost (the blogging platform) is kind of a peek into this — you can host your microblogging account there and interact with other activity pub networks like mastodon

this is the promise of the activitypub standard, anyone that uses the standard can interact with anyone else using the standard...

I've tried to lightly allude to Mastodon here:

>Social aggregation features like notifications, feeds, and search are non-negotiable in modern social products.

Conceptually, Mastodon is a bunch of copies of the same webapp emailing each other. There is no realtime global aggregation across the network so it can only offer a fragmented user experience. While some people might like it, it can't directly compete with closed social products because it doesn't have a full view of the network like they do.

The goal of atproto is enable real competition with closed social products for a broader set of products (e.g. Tangled is like GitHub on atproto, Leaflet is like Medium on atproto, and so on). Because it enables global aggregation, every atproto app has a consistent state of the world. There's no notion of "being on a different instance" and only seeing half the replies, or half the like counts, or other fragmentation artifacts as you have in Mastodon.

I don't think they're really comparable in scope, ambition, or performance characteristics.

In my view the atproto approach asks the users to make fewer required complex decisions, but gives them the freedom to make many voluntary ones. If someone wants to use a particular application, they basically just need to sign in. If they don't have an existing ATProto account, they can just make one, in the flow of the application they're signing into. Later they can chose different clients, or different infrastructure, or move their account, to their own hosting even if they want.

Mastodon requires a complex decision upfront, which server do I trust, which is analogous to where you create your account on ATProto, but unlike ATProto, doesn't give the tools to seamlessly transition later.

The trust lens I think is a good one. You want to let different users make different tradeoffs in effort without having that leading to a worse experience..

I might not be fully understanding the idea, but the difference here is that a let's encrypt certificate can be generated on the fly. domains are considered branding, and getting a 5 letter domain nowadays is impossible. The cost here is that you're renting a domain that others might want aswell, people don't really want your LE cert

running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity.

so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it. letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free domains?

There are some github project which offer free domains if you send them a issue asking them kindly for subdomain iirc

https://github.com/topics/free-domains

Another thing, the thing that you mention is really similar to how tor onion links work... Except they offer encryption and prevents MITM/any other ways while still having your ip hidden.

Another idea which I use sometimes is to use something like cloudflare tunnels or ssh forwarding with things like serveo.net or any ssh based remote forwarding in general like pinggy or even ngrok.

If you are using this in some internal thing, I can also suggest something like piping server which I really like and I want to build something like a web browser tor-onion links esque but on top of piping server, its really really cool

https://github.com/nwtgck/piping-server

> It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and available free of cost.

You're essentially talking about IPv6 addresses.

Interestingly, most residential ISPs these days already issue your home network an IPv6 /64 or better! But they (sadly) just firewall off use of most ports that residential users have no purpose for — on my own network, even if I configure my router to allocate each machine on the network a public-routable IPv6 address, the only port the network (not the router!) is willing to allow non-established incoming flows to is 22/tcp.

But even if they worked, they'd still be ephemeral. At best, even if your ISP keeps the allocation the same, you'd lose it if/when you switch ISPs. (Similar problem to ISP email addresses.)

The real key here, would be if someone was freely giving out tiny slices of IPv6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-independent_address_s... to individuals; and there were hosting providers / residential ISPs willing to add BGP routes in their ASN for these tiny prefixes. Then you could have a stable and portable and free IPv6 address for life. (It's certainly possible in theory, just not built yet — similar to how LetsEncrypt was "certainly possible in theory, just not built yet" until it was built.)

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That being said, if you really want this to be DNS (not sure why; if it's not a short memorable name [and thus inherently competed over by typosquatters], then DNS is the wrong tool for the job), then you could do what systems like ngrok do, but directly serving those dynamic records as domains under its own gTLD, rather than serving them as subdomains under a domain. Maybe with each domain getting its own DNS zone and everything. That'd certainly be neat.

Note that way back when, the .me ccTLD sort of did this — they gave away .me "domains" for "free"; but with all web traffic on those "free" domains being intermediated by their L7 reverse-proxy servers, where they'd inject ads into any delivered HTML pages.

> It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and available free of cost.

This is basically where did:plc comes in, for atproto. https://web.plc.directory/ provides free ID numbers. For example, mine is https://plc.directory/did:plc:3danwc67lo7obz2fmdg6jxcr .

Your domain then uses a txt record to indicate that you want it to be associated with that particular did:plc.

It's been tried. People quickly distribute a JavaScript snippet to remove whatever monetization you put on there, as Namezero discovered.

Maybe AT over TOR? A hidden domain / onion address is totally free... I would supporting this a really nice enhancement to the protocol.

There was a .FREE initiative but that got all weird after a while, the deadlines were not respected and then nothing happened... https://icannwiki.org/.free

[delayed]

Shindig https://shindig.apache.org/ was the reference implementation of this spec. Was pretty novel at the time.

Unfortunately, yes. The problem is, basically, people.

Even if everyone is on bsky.social, that's still a huge improvement on the status quo. It's not like the web isn't decentralised just because lots of people are on AWS - you can move away at any moment, adversarially if necessary.

> If the answer is that most people should just make a bluesky account

wow, SOMEONE didn't read the article lol, very obviously. That's not the answer and if you had even skimmed the article you would realize that

the whole point of the article is that AT protocol solves the problem of "make a new account"

like seriously, log off bro

That's one reason why Bluesky has gained a lot of traction. All of this is under the surface, not something you need to care about unless you want to.

In atproto, those websocket connections aren't between users's repos, they're between an application and user's repos. Bieber has one connection per application doing aggregation, not per follower.

You are correct, and yet depends on ourselves to popularize and make this tech happen. Maybe, just maybe a newer startup out there will have a CEO/CTO that is deeply influenced by open social and delivers a success app that reaches the masses.

One never knows, but for sure it won't happen when we do nothing.