Samuel
@samuel.fm
ok how about this: AP: you have multiple twitters that talk to each other AT: what if twitter drew its data from the open web?
dan@danabra.mov· 30 Oct 2024
i wonder if diagrams like these might help draw the distinction between ActivityPub (and how Mastodon uses it) and AT Protocol (and how it’s used by Bluesky and atproto apps)? with AP, instance = application + hosting. data gets sent between instances. with AT, data flows *from* hosting *to* apps
diagram with multiple application+hosting boxes. each box contains some users and some posts. data is sent between the boxes.a diagram with two layers. in the top layer, users choose hosting (and their data is stored in their hosting). the data then flows down from hosting into separate apps which mirror and aggregate the data they receive from hosting. the hosting boxes are drawn with dashed borders to indicate they're not fixed, and the user may move their data between different hosting without affecting the applications.
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Samuel
AP’s credible exit: you can make a new twitter. however your data is stuck on the old one AT’s credible exit: the data layer is independent from the apps and the network state is reproducible, so you can move to a new twitter seemlessly and even with an adversarial data host
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Samuel
bluesky is a “view” of all bluesky-type data on the open web. making a new “instance” of bluesky is to create a new “view” of the same data. this is like how Google and Bing have created independent search indexes of the same data
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Samuel
atproto data is a lot more structured, so two different “view”s of all bluesky-type data will be nearly identical. this is why it’s called an “AppView”
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Samuel
you can create a new service using the same technology, and it will have the same benefits. what’s interesting is that since the data is structured and open, you can “borrow” data from other services - e.g. you can kickstart your algorithm with the existing social graph
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Dan Okkels Brendstrup
This part took me a bit to grok. So if I build a new atproto based app, I can read the Bluesky following lists of my users and let them easily recreate that same social graph. But copied into a new namespace in their PDS, so the graphs are ultimately independent between apps/services, right?
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Ezra🦋
I love this: "Bluesky is a 'view' of 'Bluesky-typed' data on the open web". really helps you understand how other apps might be on the same network but paying attention to differently-typed data (lexicons)
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Pelle Wessman
@samuel.bsky.team Slight modification needed though: IndieWeb is Twitter but pulling data from the open web (microformats in html pages served over http) Bluesky is the same but pulling data from the decentralized web (borrowing from eg IPFS)
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Samuel
hmm, kinda misses the crucial aspect that atproto data is intended to be aggregated into network views, which then work like traditional services
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Rob Cadena
The second one could be “you own and control your tweets, likes, and username so when Twitter closes your stuff will still show up in a new Twitter”
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John O'Nolan
I would say AP: what if social worked like email AT: what if social worked like torrents I think using "twitter" as the base metaphor is too reductive to describe either protocol
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Samuel
I think keeping it scoped to twitter/bluesky/mastodon is helpful to compare more directly
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dan
i wouldn’t compare to torrents because that’s assumed to be client peer-to-peer with its own range of issues. it’s more like web search engines
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nasso.dev
AP: what if twitter worked exactly the same way but you can have your own little twitter at home and make it talk to other twitters AT: what if twitter was an RSS aggregator
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jack
except multiple twitters are sweating, slowing down, missing out on some of the data that don't appear open web twitter just collects it all together in a fast meaningful way, where you can cut the unnecessary shit where not applicable
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ǝuuɐſ
I like this description because it points to the potential resilience of the data, which can be overlooked
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Zetaphor
Where do you see that? If it's a label you need to appeal with the labeler, which you can do from your profile
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