I think the issue with publishing via a PDS is that you're basically letting anyone republish on their own website. For comments that makes a lot of sense since they can show up under articles. But for a blog? Maybe it would be better to keep your database of articles offline, publish it to your own website, and not replicate it to the world? Instead, send a ATproto post for each article with a link to your website.
It's got a digital signature, which can verify that it comes from you and is unaltered.
I don't see a digital signature helping? Digital signatures can be stripped.
> The "Atmosphere" is the term we use to describe the ecosystem around the AT Protocol.
— <https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#atmosphere> (Why on earth is the glossary not alphabetized by the way?)
I think that ATProto is going to win against other decentralized/‘fediverse' protocols in the long run. Bluesky? Maybe not. But I am impressed by the look of other platforms like Leaflet and that one that’s supposed to be an alternative to GitHub or something like that. [1]
I can’t speak on the tech behind the protocol itself but as far as marketing is considered it’s in the lead in my opinion. ActivityPub seems too gangly and Nostr is the worst—as in 'worse is better’—and in a way I’m fond of it because of that.
The planning behind ATProto appears to be far more coordinated than the other two. Despite being the senior of the three, ActivityPub is still going through inter-platform drama (e.g., the Instagram clone that was recently condemned for not handling text-only posts...like an Instagram clone should) and I get the feeling that the mind behind Nostr can care less about coordinating. I look at it more like a toolkit to build a protocol out of than a single one akin to the other two. [2]
[1]: This is my first look at OffPrint. It looks too much like Substack. I hate it. But I figure that the beautiful thing is that in theory I can use Leaflet and you can use OffPrint and I guess our writing is all in the same...atmosphere. Hah.
[2]: Similar to another web project that I’m fond of, Datastar.
Sure, Bluesky can block you from showing up in Bluesky the application. But if they do, you can still host your own content (as is being done here) or access it via alternative apps (like Blacksky).
This is like saying that "RSS isn't yours because Google Reader can block you."
What does “they will block you” even mean: this article is talking about hosting your data on your PDS and presenting it on your domain.
- Blacksky has their own full appview for bluesky nowadays + relays and PDS w/ something like 60-70k users. It's small compared to the total bluesky count but it's still very sizable.
- There are countless atproto relays running independent of "big bluesky" and they only cost like 20usd/month max nowadays to run.
- Likewise it's trivial to host your data on any thirdparty PDS and scaling up a PDS community isn't terribly hard (PDS scale linearly up to like 500k users and then it scales linearly past that by just periodically launching a new PDS part of your "cluster")
- And most importantly the UX on migration is getting a lot better so it's reasonably approachable for average users.
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Side note but I noticed your name. Are you "the direwolf20"?
Nowadays you can run a relay which maintains the current firehose of events + some amount of backfill (commonly a day, week, or month).
Appviews listen to the relay and can save what they care about and can look to other relays if they need more backfill.
So in practice you have your relays for regular use which handle large amounts of outbound traffic and then you have "archival relays" which store all or large portions of the history.
And in the eventual future "archival relays" will likely end up providing backfill for extremely old history via something closer to IPFS (it's the same underlying data structures so this isn't a major change, just nobody has done it yet).
And of course in the event a particular bit of history is missing, a relay can just ask the PDS for a new copy of the data.
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TLDR: The 20usd/month is for a relay with like a month or so worth of backlog attached and you can get by with less/cheaper or with more.
Nextgrid•1w ago
tomgag•1w ago
verdverm•1w ago
https://standard.site/
ATProto and the ATmosphere are different
manuelmoreale•1w ago
> Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere.
Which part of these required a new protocol and couldn’t be built before @at existed? Seems to me we’re reinventing the wheel for I’m not entirely sure which benefit. But maybe someone who’s more into this part of the web can educate me on this.
lou1306•1w ago
> Content portability
> Users move between hosts without losing their content, audience, or metadata.
manuelmoreale•1w ago
verdverm•1w ago
ATProto has lexicon, which are more about social coordination than schemas for data correctness
https://pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance
The protocol is much more than data portability, it essentially turns the global social media system into a giant distributed system anyone can participate in at any point. Imagine if FB also let you tap into the event stream or produce your own event stream other FB users could listen to in the official FB app. That would be a pretty awesome requirement for all social media apps, yea?
https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
manuelmoreale•1w ago
Don’t we already have that and is called “the web”? It’s already a giant distributed system anyone can participate in at any point.
What are we really gaining here?
verdverm•1w ago
tynanpurdy•1w ago
manuelmoreale•1w ago
verdverm•1w ago
Perhaps it is time to read more about the protocol directly instead of asking questions on HN to poke holes in it from a position of ignorance.
steveklabnik•1w ago
The atproto folks went and categorized all of the other attempts to do this at the time. (They even had some I hadn't heard of!)
All of them make various tradeoffs. None of them were the set of tradeoffs the team wanted. So they needed to make some new things. That's really the core of it.
My sibling has one of the largest and most specific things, but this is the underlying reason.
manuelmoreale•1w ago
Is this study/exploration available anywhere? I’d love to give it a read if that’s available. If you have a link to share I’d really appreciate it.
steveklabnik•1w ago
manuelmoreale•1w ago
zawaideh•1w ago
(yes very proud of myself for this )
lukev•1w ago
Such things never happen, least of all here, on Hacker News.
steveklabnik•1w ago
However, the question isn't "on your own domain vs not," it's "how you publish." Blog networks are popular because most people do not have the technical ability to spin up a server, buy a domain, and point it at it.
Why an atproto based solution instead of Medium or whatever? Because then you actually own your own data. And that also doesn't preclude it ending up on your own domain in the end anyway, because it's your data.
tynanpurdy•1w ago