At Protocol: Building the Social Internet(atproto.com)
59 pointsby resiros8 hours ago12 comments
  • g4t0ran hour 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/

  • phyzix57614 hours 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.

    • bbor3 hours 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.

      • yawnxyzan hour 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
        • blackqueerirohan hour 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.

  • thesuitonym5 hours ago
    I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can send information through the internet without HTTP(S)
    • miohtama2 hours 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.
    • wmf3 hours ago
      If you ever want to implement a protocol in the browser it has to be on top of HTTP, WebSocket, WebRTC, WebTransport, etc.
    • embedding-shape5 hours 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.
      • mghackerlady4 hours ago
        it's not impossible to implement encryption elsewhere, gemini pretty famously requires it
        • embedding-shape4 hours 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 :)
      • riffic4 hours 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.
        • rapnie4 hours 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

    • qznc3 hours ago
      I assume for anything else someone will run into firewall/proxy issues.
      • thesuitonym3 hours ago
        That's such a non-issue, though. And using HTTP doesn't guarantee you won't run into firewall/proxy issues.
  • _kst_3 hours 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

    • outside12342 hours 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)?
  • NiallBunting4 hours 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.

    • nightpool2 hours 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.
      • NiallBunting2 hours 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

        • blackqueerirohan hour 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.

  • argimenes36 minutes ago
    I love that it embraces standoff properties for rich text markup.
  • danhon5 hours ago
    Those of you old enough to remember etherpeg can now see an ATproto version:

    https://bsky.land

  • HelloUsername4 hours ago
    Previous discussion in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108
  • bladeee3 hours ago
    How common is it to host your own PDS? It's not really clear to me what the advantages/disadvantage are.
    • evbogue3 hours ago
      It is not common, but it is becoming more common: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
    • numpad02 hours ago
      The advantage of Bluesky over Twitter and Mastodon is that it's centralized with no actual plan to decentralize.
      • blackqueeriroh44 minutes 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.
  • binyu5 hours ago
    This is really cool. It has retro vibes of the era when the Internet was still free from the big five domination.
  • mghackerlady4 hours ago
    I could see this turning into a more modern and sane usenet replacement
  • ChrisArchitect3 hours ago
    Blog post about this new site from February might shed some light: https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026