6 ms·

At Protocol: Building the Social Internet

94 points by resiros 5mo ago

binyu 5mo ago
This is really cool. It has retro vibes of the era when the Internet was still free from the big five domination.
danhon 5mo ago
Those of you old enough to remember etherpeg can now see an ATproto version: https://bsky.land https://bsky.land
thesuitonym 5mo ago
I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can send information through the internet without HTTP(S)
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Since others starting intercepting and eavesdrop on non-authenticated traffic, it got a lot less comfy to do so though. It's not like people are adding encryption to stuff for the fun of it.
  - mghackerlady 5mo ago
    it's not impossible to implement encryption elsewhere, gemini pretty famously requires it
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      Of course not, the context here is ATProto which literally stands for "Authenticated Transfer Protocol", and it uses other protocols than just http/tls, so of course there are other ways :)
  - riffic 5mo ago
    it seems the parent comment isn't referring directly to encryption / TLS, but building everything on top of HTTP / HTTPS, which seems to be the default abstraction these days to build on top of.
    - rapnie 5mo ago
      I agree, it is always HTTP nowadays. The Librecast project [0] is doing interesting R&D around multicast and social networking, and has been / is being funded by multiple NLnet grants over the years. I think they have plans to use ActivityPub to demonstrate their work. Current active project is LibreCast Studio, a collaboration environment. The linked video on the page is a very interesting watch. [0] https://librecast.net/about.html https://librecast.net/about.html
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can use TLS through the internet without HTTP
- qznc 5mo ago
  I assume for anything else someone will run into firewall/proxy issues.
  - thesuitonym 5mo ago
    That's such a non-issue, though. And using HTTP doesn't guarantee you won't run into firewall/proxy issues.
    - gavmor 5mo ago
      [dead]
- wmf 5mo ago
  If you ever want to implement a protocol in the browser it has to be on top of HTTP, WebSocket, WebRTC, WebTransport, etc.
- miohtama 5mo ago
  You can, but every non web protocol would need the user to install a binary. This is gated by Microsoft, Google and Apple today.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  In addition to the middlebox problem, most (not all, but most) of the things that send information over the Internet that aren't HTTP-shaped (incl. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3) are worse than the best HTTP-shaped things. This makes sense: HTTP-shaped things are where all the energy is directed.
NiallBunting 5mo ago
I think it would be interesting if the file servers had read/write/list/delete permissions on files. For both groups and users. It would mean the public stuff could see your files but private projects could exist. Eg. Maybe I don't want my At Protocol version of Figma making all my drawings public. If they could be shared in a group (anyone in a list in that folder or whatever). Maybe this is coming, but would interest me way more about using applications on the atmosphere.
- nightpool 5mo ago
  The ability to make information private fundamentally conflicts with how ATProto is designed. All records have to be sent to all Relays and AppView nodes on the network to provide a "global view" of the network. So there's no way to keep records private without locking out some user's servers from viewing them, and since AppViews are centralized indexing services, they won't function without being able to see the entire network.
  - NiallBunting 5mo ago
    Yeah, apps wouldn't be able to only listen to the firehose. There are some proposals for private files. However, I'm outside the AtProto world so not sure what exactly the suggested implementations are. I just hope they give enough control. I think the technology could potentially be used for way more than microblogging. I would love to use webapps that store the data on my devices and share it with specific people. The data and access under my control. [1]: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o
    - blackqueeriroh 5mo ago
      What you linked is by Bluesky’s own staff - it’s him laying out the design plans for the protocol’s private data implementation. He’s doing it to engage publicly with the community, since many of us also build on the protocol.
      - 5mo ago
phyzix5761 5mo ago
I didn't understand what this was until I did some more digging around. Apparently, it's a decentralized way to interact with social media. A protocol created by Bluesky which allows social networks to communicate directly. This is similar to how different email clients like Gmail and Outlook can send messages to each other.
- bbor 5mo ago
  Yes, but to nitpick slightly: the focus of this protocol is to let people use their own data with social media sites. It might not matter much while the site is active, but separating data ownership from the site makes moving platforms in the future much, much more feasible. Data like posts, friends lists, block lists, likes, comments, etc. Obviously, this was informed by people's experiences with Twitter, especially the early power users who built strong communities and then felt trapped.
  - yawnxyz 5mo ago
    though technically your data lives within Bluesky's servers (kind of like your money lives in a bank) so in some ways it's still the bank's money though it's allotted to you
    - blackqueeriroh 5mo ago
      Actually your data does not live in Bluesky’s servers if you don’t want it to. Mine doesn’t. At least another 20-30,000 people’s doesn’t either.
      - idiotsecant 5mo ago
        What keeps bluesky from simply catching the data?
mghackerlady 5mo ago
I could see this turning into a more modern and sane usenet replacement
HelloUsername 5mo ago
Previous discussion in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108
ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
Blog post about this new site from February might shed some light: https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026 https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026
bladeee 5mo ago
How common is it to host your own PDS? It's not really clear to me what the advantages/disadvantage are.
- evbogue 5mo ago
  It is not common, but it is becoming more common: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/ https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
- numpad0 5mo ago
  The advantage of Bluesky over Twitter and Mastodon is that it's centralized with no actual plan to decentralize.
  - blackqueeriroh 5mo ago
    This is false. Every single people of the atproto stack can and has now been hosted and deployed by others and is operating at less get than the scale of a small community.
_kst_ 5mo ago
The summary of what this is about is: "Atproto is a big-world open social protocol. Users publish JSON records into repositories. The changestreams of those records then sync across the network to drive applications." It's too bad that information isn't on the front page. You have click "GET STARTED" and scroll down
- outside1234 5mo ago
  Is it really, at the end of the day, a server that serves your data over JSON (aka a social media post) and offers feeds (ala an RSS model) of the changes of that data and provides services for discovering the schema of that JSON (aka its lexicon)?
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    Yes
- skrtskrt 5mo ago
  Try reading the actual ATProto docs they are a million times worse
g4t0r 5mo ago
Someone posted this article[0] earlier today and I thought it was a really good primer on AT-stuff I've been playing with my own PDS and AppView for a side project, and it's really fun and interesting. [0] - https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
- skrtskrt 5mo ago
  That article should be the official ATProto docs at this point. The current docs are hilariously self-referential and uses terminology that is either way too broad and overloaded for the component they are supposed to describe, or so far misaligned with the standardized computer science concepts that it seems intentionally opaque. It reads like the devs think they invented a whole new world of computing and not just a little protocol.
argimenes 5mo ago
I love that it embraces standoff properties for rich text markup.
esbranson 5mo ago
The W3C equivalent PDS efforts are in the LWS WG.[1][2] And of course other W3C standards like DIDs, VCs, and ActivityStreams/ActivityPub. W3C is still missing standards around data replication and a global indexing / feed layer. [1] https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/ https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/ [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/lws-ucs/ https://www.w3.org/TR/lws-ucs/

94 points by resiros 5mo ago

binyu 5mo ago

This is really cool. It has retro vibes of the era when the Internet was still free from the big five domination.

danhon 5mo ago

Those of you old enough to remember etherpeg can now see an ATproto version: https://bsky.land https://bsky.land

thesuitonym 5mo ago

I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can send information through the internet without HTTP(S)

embedding-shape 5mo ago
Since others starting intercepting and eavesdrop on non-authenticated traffic, it got a lot less comfy to do so though. It's not like people are adding encryption to stuff for the fun of it.
- mghackerlady 5mo ago
  it's not impossible to implement encryption elsewhere, gemini pretty famously requires it
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Of course not, the context here is ATProto which literally stands for "Authenticated Transfer Protocol", and it uses other protocols than just http/tls, so of course there are other ways :)
- riffic 5mo ago
  it seems the parent comment isn't referring directly to encryption / TLS, but building everything on top of HTTP / HTTPS, which seems to be the default abstraction these days to build on top of.
  - rapnie 5mo ago
    I agree, it is always HTTP nowadays. The Librecast project [0] is doing interesting R&D around multicast and social networking, and has been / is being funded by multiple NLnet grants over the years. I think they have plans to use ActivityPub to demonstrate their work. Current active project is LibreCast Studio, a collaboration environment. The linked video on the page is a very interesting watch. [0] https://librecast.net/about.html https://librecast.net/about.html
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can use TLS through the internet without HTTP
qznc 5mo ago
I assume for anything else someone will run into firewall/proxy issues.
- thesuitonym 5mo ago
  That's such a non-issue, though. And using HTTP doesn't guarantee you won't run into firewall/proxy issues.
  - gavmor 5mo ago
    [dead]
wmf 5mo ago
If you ever want to implement a protocol in the browser it has to be on top of HTTP, WebSocket, WebRTC, WebTransport, etc.
miohtama 5mo ago
You can, but every non web protocol would need the user to install a binary. This is gated by Microsoft, Google and Apple today.
tptacek 5mo ago
In addition to the middlebox problem, most (not all, but most) of the things that send information over the Internet that aren't HTTP-shaped (incl. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3) are worse than the best HTTP-shaped things. This makes sense: HTTP-shaped things are where all the energy is directed.

NiallBunting 5mo ago

I think it would be interesting if the file servers had read/write/list/delete permissions on files. For both groups and users. It would mean the public stuff could see your files but private projects could exist. Eg. Maybe I don't want my At Protocol version of Figma making all my drawings public. If they could be shared in a group (anyone in a list in that folder or whatever). Maybe this is coming, but would interest me way more about using applications on the atmosphere.

nightpool 5mo ago
The ability to make information private fundamentally conflicts with how ATProto is designed. All records have to be sent to all Relays and AppView nodes on the network to provide a "global view" of the network. So there's no way to keep records private without locking out some user's servers from viewing them, and since AppViews are centralized indexing services, they won't function without being able to see the entire network.
- NiallBunting 5mo ago
  Yeah, apps wouldn't be able to only listen to the firehose. There are some proposals for private files. However, I'm outside the AtProto world so not sure what exactly the suggested implementations are. I just hope they give enough control. I think the technology could potentially be used for way more than microblogging. I would love to use webapps that store the data on my devices and share it with specific people. The data and access under my control. [1]: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o
  - blackqueeriroh 5mo ago
    What you linked is by Bluesky’s own staff - it’s him laying out the design plans for the protocol’s private data implementation. He’s doing it to engage publicly with the community, since many of us also build on the protocol.
    - 5mo ago

phyzix5761 5mo ago

I didn't understand what this was until I did some more digging around. Apparently, it's a decentralized way to interact with social media. A protocol created by Bluesky which allows social networks to communicate directly. This is similar to how different email clients like Gmail and Outlook can send messages to each other.

bbor 5mo ago
Yes, but to nitpick slightly: the focus of this protocol is to let people use their own data with social media sites. It might not matter much while the site is active, but separating data ownership from the site makes moving platforms in the future much, much more feasible. Data like posts, friends lists, block lists, likes, comments, etc. Obviously, this was informed by people's experiences with Twitter, especially the early power users who built strong communities and then felt trapped.
- yawnxyz 5mo ago
  though technically your data lives within Bluesky's servers (kind of like your money lives in a bank) so in some ways it's still the bank's money though it's allotted to you
  - blackqueeriroh 5mo ago
    Actually your data does not live in Bluesky’s servers if you don’t want it to. Mine doesn’t. At least another 20-30,000 people’s doesn’t either.
    - idiotsecant 5mo ago
      What keeps bluesky from simply catching the data?

mghackerlady 5mo ago

I could see this turning into a more modern and sane usenet replacement

HelloUsername 5mo ago

Previous discussion in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

Blog post about this new site from February might shed some light: https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026 https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026

bladeee 5mo ago

How common is it to host your own PDS? It's not really clear to me what the advantages/disadvantage are.

evbogue 5mo ago
It is not common, but it is becoming more common: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/ https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
numpad0 5mo ago
The advantage of Bluesky over Twitter and Mastodon is that it's centralized with no actual plan to decentralize.
- blackqueeriroh 5mo ago
  This is false. Every single people of the atproto stack can and has now been hosted and deployed by others and is operating at less get than the scale of a small community.

_kst_ 5mo ago

The summary of what this is about is: "Atproto is a big-world open social protocol. Users publish JSON records into repositories. The changestreams of those records then sync across the network to drive applications." It's too bad that information isn't on the front page. You have click "GET STARTED" and scroll down

outside1234 5mo ago
Is it really, at the end of the day, a server that serves your data over JSON (aka a social media post) and offers feeds (ala an RSS model) of the changes of that data and provides services for discovering the schema of that JSON (aka its lexicon)?
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Yes
skrtskrt 5mo ago
Try reading the actual ATProto docs they are a million times worse

g4t0r 5mo ago

Someone posted this article[0] earlier today and I thought it was a really good primer on AT-stuff I've been playing with my own PDS and AppView for a side project, and it's really fun and interesting. [0] - https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

skrtskrt 5mo ago
That article should be the official ATProto docs at this point. The current docs are hilariously self-referential and uses terminology that is either way too broad and overloaded for the component they are supposed to describe, or so far misaligned with the standardized computer science concepts that it seems intentionally opaque. It reads like the devs think they invented a whole new world of computing and not just a little protocol.

argimenes 5mo ago

I love that it embraces standoff properties for rich text markup.

esbranson 5mo ago

The W3C equivalent PDS efforts are in the LWS WG.[1][2] And of course other W3C standards like DIDs, VCs, and ActivityStreams/ActivityPub. W3C is still missing standards around data replication and a global indexing / feed layer. [1] https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/ https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/ [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/lws-ucs/ https://www.w3.org/TR/lws-ucs/