Samuel
@samuel.fm
a feed generator is in a sense a sort of sub-appview - it provides a partial and *extremely* opinionated view of the network
are feedgens federated appviews?
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shreyan (wise)micro-appviews made useful by other appviews
1 8shreyan (wise)atproto is magic
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Tom ShermanYeah kinda. I've been describing feeds (and labellers) as a federated aspect of the bluesky app
1 6Tom ShermanTom Sherman@tom.sherman.is· 26 Jul 2024I am team nano AppView 🙋
A web of little appviews each providing a handful of specific capabilities
v buckenhami don't think so - the most important property of federation is that the experience still works even if any particular entity goes away or tries to stop it. the feedgen is displayed by the appview, so i don't think it gets there (but it's good! and in the right direction!)
1 6Samuelsure, the main appview is the entrypoint in a sense - it's the backend to the app you're using. but in a multi-appview world you essentially have a constellation of mini-appviews to pull lenses of the network from
bsky.app/profile/samu...
Samuel@samuel.fm· 3 Nov 2024so, imo the network (with multiple AppViews in play) looks like this. when you use a client, you ask an AppView to give you an opinionated view of the whole network. It acts as a cache in front of any number of hosts, which unlocks stuff like global search and accurate like counts (wild, right!)
v buckenhamsure - in a multi-appview world, then the feedgens give more choice and resilience to the experience. but they aren't a replacement for multiple (meaningfully separate) appviews, in terms of choice and resilience.
1 1v buckenhami don't know how idiosyncratic my definition of "federated" is - for me it is: the network is operated by a variety of entities who have differing aims and motivations, and if any of them go away then the network as a whole still meaningfully exists.
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imaxThat pretty much is the well-established meaning of the word "federated" in computer science.
Natanael, Tech janitorI describe this as cross-layer federation between components, versus the peer-like federation between monoliths in Mastodon
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Dario Castañé 🏴☠️I like the concept "cross-layer federation". It does capture the idea that the federated actors aren't full nodes/peers but a constellation of different actors, each one serving a specific purpose.
From the gigantic AppView and relays, to the smaller labelers and feeds, through different-sized PDS.
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Peter W🤓It seems to me like there’s a spectrum. Right now there are clearly part of the “plugin ecosystem” around an AppView.
But if they start interacting with users and directly addressing PDSes or lexicon bits outside of the AppView, then they become new first class citizens in their own right
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Thomas DickersonI’ve actually been wondering - feed generators nominally sit after the appview right? Can they inject content from outside the app view’s view of the world?
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danthey can inject any content that’s addressable (ie anything on any PDS) but an appview might not be able to hydrate the parts it doesn’t know about (has not cached / doesn’t want to resolve at runtime)
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Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦So I think AppView will just completely ignore any at-URIs of posts that it doesn't have in its database and will filter them out, right?
2 1danup to the AppView. not sure what ours would do
1 2Thomas Dickersondan this is the atproto dev equivalent of preemptively offering to hold kuba's beer, you know that right?
2Natanael, Tech janitorIt can choose to search for them, but unless the feed can include a hint at which relays/PDS have a copy it might not be practical to retrieve it efficiently
1 1Thomas Dickersonokay so hydration gets bounced back to the AppView and not to the client?
2Natanael, Tech janitorI don't think clients are given the feed's response directly, it gets the list of posts which the appview knows about (although you could make the appview forward every URI and then additionally tell the client which it knows of and which the client may try to find elsewhere)
1 1Thomas Dickersonit would actually be nice if there were visual indications of "appview could not find (or actively suppressed) this" 🤔
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