For blog posts, I'd look to RSS instead. That's where that content is traditionally published. Instead of SELECTing from bluesky's index, you can use OPML subscription lists. There are a bunch of places that curate feed lists, so it's significantly less likely to face API death like twitter did.
I run another variant which collects OPML blogrolls via crawling, so you can find out who else likes your favorite blog and what else they recommend. Here's the page for Simon Willison's blog (https://blogroll-network.alexsci.com/discover/feed-a34ee2a88...). Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint.
tynanpurdy
> Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint.
Nothing to do with Bluesky services. There are many independent firehoses and relays. Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one. No curator between me and the posts, and no work by me to crawl the whole network for them. https://pdsls.dev/jetstream?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Fchennai.fir...
Edit: ok there is an aggregator, the relay is scraping all of the PDSs out there to build the event stream. Notably this is not possible with RSS, where you need to build a large index with knowledge. PDSs request relays to crawl and that's that.
8organicbits
> Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one.
This stream lacks any blog posts that haven't been specifically published to atproto. Conversely, I see RSS feeds for the content in the stream, like https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:byf7jvh3yvhffackiumpddtf/rs... (if RSS feeds exists for every profiles then I'd argue that atproto is a strict subset of RSS, but I'm not certain how that feature works). The stream may give you every blog post that was published to atproto, but that's already a small subset of long-form content on the web.
> Notably this is not possible with RSS,
The web supports blog discovery so well that people forget it exists. A simple Google search can find a very large amount of content, much available over RSS/Atom. Many web-based feed readers index the subscriptions across all their users to help with discovery. Here's the Feedland firehose, for example: https://feedland.com/?everything=true
Oh the opml blogroll map is pretty exciting! I occasionally try to browse around for these manually but they can be hard to explore for so having a big list is a big deal. I usually just do searches for them + use a scour.ing interest to find more. I'm excited to look at it more this weekend when I'm not so tired.
One thing I'd love to see with rss / ompl sharing sites is more ease of exploration. It feels a bit clunky browsing many of these feed sharing sites because you need to evaluate each feed by manually clicking through each one etc or worse you can only import the whole opml at once flooding your feeds. For example I've seen some sites with feeds directly showing posts as they come in for each persons feed list(s) so you can see what that batch of rss feeds looks like in action without clicking around much. There are some sites doing great work getting people to share their lists but I think there is room for qol improvements.
One site I've been liking that has feeds for each list and is trying to reduce friction on sharing is blogflock.com. You can also follow other peoples lists directly on the site too so they show up in your main feed. I believe I've also seen some people self host their blogroll on their personal sites with similar feeds but I'm having trouble finding that software atm.
8organicbits
> more ease of exploration
Absolutely. One good thing going for this approach is that anyone can grab the OPML export (the URL is stable) and build their own frontend, I'd love to see more.
Could be a fun weekend project for frontend folks.
arjie
At first, I thought that the fraction of people who want this kind of network of peers would be rather small. I thought that almost all people want extensive restrictions on user agents and controlling how the data is revealed to the user. But Bluesky actually does not restrict AI scraping and consumption of data. You're just yet another consumer, subject to rate-limiting etc. whether you are browser or headless agent. I have to say that I am somewhat (pleasantly) surprised that this approach is accepted by Bluesky considering the community is more anti-AI than most. The fact that you're allowed to consume the feed is amazing. Good stuff!
pfraze
I’ll give a pretty honest accounting of that.
We made it a pretty big goal from the start to clearly communicate to users that the network is extremely public, and that we believe open access to public content is an important part of preventing another round of walled gardens. This is generally understood and appreciated, but the community has a wide range of opinions about it. Some people see public as public and that they’re there to have their voice heard. Some people see it as a pretty uneasy arrangement at best, and would rather it wasn’t that way.
The atproto community has been spending a large portion of the year developing “atproto spaces,” which are essentially a way to cheaply mint mini-atprotos with access control. This is the answer to non public data. It will be added to the Bluesky app and the ecosystem, and it will remain accessible to apps based on the grants of the users, but the spaces will not broadcast their content on the firehose. I believe, based on the reception we’ve received from that work, that people appreciate that it’s being done, and that people eager for less exposure will pick it up.
This should, hopefully, resolve any tensions at play. We will continue to advocate for public speech and I think many people will continue to participate in it, but I am quite curious to see if the non public spaces gain more adoption overall. My guess, based on people’s general use of the internet, is that they naturally will. The public arenas serve a particular purpose and not everyone is always trying to be a part of them.
EDIT: did I really just say "let me give an honest accounting of that." I have been spending way too much time with llms.
edent
> This is generally understood and appreciated
I don't think that's true. For example, nowhere on the blocking interface does it tell users that their blocks are public.
> I am quite curious to see if the non public spaces gain more adoption overall. My guess, based on people’s general use of the internet, is that they naturally will. The public arenas serve a particular purpose and not everyone is always trying to be a part of them.
My guess, based on what happened in the past decade, is that it will definitely happen, a lot of people will be unhappy about it, but by then it'll be too late to stop it.
Private spaces have, by definition, a natural asymmetry to them: it's easy to find a plausible reason to turn a community private, an argument that resonates deeply with people, even if it's not applicable or completely bogus. It's hard to convince people to appreciate the fact that conversations in the open have value reaching beyond the participant. Public spaces are a gift to the world.
The way I see it: imagine WhatsApp, et al. came a decade earlier, and the Internet went dark in the early 2000s, suppressing the "blogging revolution". The idea of Internet as source of knowledge, a place where you can learn anything you're curious about, would've never happened earlier, as all knowledge would've gotten locked in private groups, out of reach of search engines. That's what happening right now - even in OSS, if not due to private groups then due to adoption of Discord and Slack as primary communication platforms. The public Internet is increasingly just commercial slop. But it never would've been anything else than slop if private groups came before blogs and social media.
pjc50
Eh, I think this is overstating the case. Private groups did come before blogs and social media: remember Compuserve and AOL?
The underlying tension is the "dark forest". Opening yourself up gets a bigger audience. That feels like a good thing, until your reach expands to those hostile to you. Every community has always had to deal with abuse, but now there's much more coordinated, intentional attacks on communities, orchestrated (ironically) over social media.
skybrian
Yes, also, the posts that are public appear to be all there is to people who don’t have access to private groups. Some people will copy that example and post in public too.
A way around that is to use a pseudonym, but it requires care to not post anything revealing.
jauntywundrkind
There have been a couple attempts to "invade" or "takeover" Bluesky by various groups of haters, and theres two things that keep making it not go well for them:
A) since everything is public it's much easier to see what someone is about, what they are doing. Including the people coming to disrupt and inflame.
B) Bluesky's blocking actually gives folks the ability to deal with their haters, to block reposts for example. So folks can manage engagement they don't want.
It feels like there's almost no cases where communities are given the powers and capabilities to manage the problems. The attackers have been given all the benefits of dark forest advantages, with none of the downside. It feels like there is finally a bit more of a symmetry, and some systems for defense, which until now, no social network has allowed its users.
It's far from over, who knows how things go. But so far the antagonist world burners have not had nearly as good a chance setting fire to the scene as they have had everywhere else. I remain cautiously tentatively hopeful.
arjie
Thank you for responding. Seems like a great choice overall.
cube00
>Simple: the network won. The developers stopped being an asset, and the API progressively closed.
You can add Reddit to that list, IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build.
icepush
Reddit went public in 2024. What are you talking about ?
johndough
I guess you have to read OPs comment as the inner monologue of Reddit's CEO in 2023: "IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build."
When Reddit raised its API prices in 2023 in order to make itself more attractive for an IPO, it effectively priced out third-party apps, such as the Apollo reader app. Discussion back then: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
cube00
> you'll even get downvoted for "living in the past" if you attempt to bring it up later.
That comment was posted 6 days ago. What are you talking about?
domysee
I think for any kind of widespread adoption we're a couple of decades out regarding feasibility. The problem for managing your own thing is not necessarily the usability of current software (although that too), but education of the masses regarding technology.
It'd be great if schools taught foundations like how the internet works (not in-depth, but basics like what a server is) and how to create your own server. People would get gradually less afraid of technology and that'd enable systems like this.
As it stands, people are just more comfortable using walled gardens because their data is managed for them and they don't bear any responsibility for it.
skybrian
People can use Bluesky without understanding any of this stuff. Their posts are stored in a separate pds automatically.
madrox
There have been so, so many attempts to decentralize in my lifetime. I used to be a huge believer and worked on these problems, but have to admit I'm somewhat exhausted. The technology is not the problem. The problem is always quality, effort, and cost.
If decentralization is ever going to win, it needs to be turnkey, explained without showing a network diagram, be basically free to run on your laptop, and actually have the content people want to see and not just be a bunch of people who speak lojban. [1]
While I'm not sure how much of a legal leg X has to stand on, I understand why they'd rather Nitter not exist. Twitter tried (valiantly, imo) to stay open. What ultimately began the API lockdown was the need to stop bleeding financially. Ads were inevitable, and there being no reliable way to do that via API access.
Twitter solved those three problems, and no one spends nearly as much time talking or caring about the technology used to do it than people who talk about decentralization. Myself included in my younger days. Now they're just defending their moat.
I’d have a lot more sympathy for Twitter’s position wrt profit had they not explicitly told advertisers to go fuck themselves.
inigyou
We don't have to have any respect for X's profitability btw. We're allowed to despise it even while it's losing money.
someothherguyy
decentralization exists and is working though? why does it need to "win"?
madrox
Reacting to the tone of the article
flaburgan
IMO those problems are better solved by SOLID https://solidproject.org/ pushed by Tim Berners Lee himself.
As someone who worked(s) a lot on diaspora, I can tell you decentralization is hard. I don't see how atproto solve most of the complicated problems (discovery, scalability, etc.)
jauntywundrkind
> I don't see how atproto solve most of the complicated problems (discovery, scalability, etc.)
Oh! So you don't know very much! Well, happy to help give you some links so you can learn some of the basics!
@pfrazee gave a talk recently on how atproto was built from day 1 for scale. It's not a secret, it's in the name, Authenticate Transfer Protocol! Your key that you control signs all of your content! Such that your can be forwarded by anyone, that it continues to bear your authentication, wherever it goes, whatever replicas it's on!
It's so easy and small that one can run a whole network firebose off a small VPS! There's a list of them. https://atproto.at/relays
Discoverability is a function of this! There's all sorts of tools to filter for different kinds of data. There's indexes, so you can find things like back links, https://www.microcosm.blue/. And there's specific schemas (lexicons) for helping find blog posts, https://standard.site.
I'm a fan of the API that Solid exposes, I'm a fan of the json-ld. But for discoverability and scalability, in terms of being a networked protocol, ATproto is great.
flaburgan
I would need a real chat to discuss this in depth and certainly can't do this here, but this is not what I meant by scale and discoverability. Scale is, how can I run my own server with access to all the content without having a DB that explodes, and discoverability is the usual "if you don't have the full ID of someone you can't find them". The attempts to solve these are old as the internet and every solutions that I know of (such as relays) means re-adding some centralization in the architecture. I still have to see a fully decentralized protocol which is also reliable and fast (so, it scales, even for small servers). Matrix is the closest to that but they are facing tons of problems which come from the architecture itself.
jauntywundrkind
You can literally mirror all Bluesky on a medium/small-ish server, with Hubble. The design scales.
There's a number of different tools to find accounts out there. The main way apps do account type-ahead is a free 3rd party service, one you could run yourself. No one does non-centralized because the network is easy to index & there's no use case for trying to ask everyone each time to do the work, that's a bad strategy, why do it?
Kinda feel like you are just blowing chaff, moving goalposts, not interested in finding out or learning. So, yeah, seems like we're done.
lightandlight
> The web is a few dozen companies, each holding a filing cabinet, each with a receptionist posted out front. He'll read you one file at a time, but only files you can name, as fast as he cares to read, and as long as his boss allows.
Fortunately this isn't true. Social media consists of a few big walled gardens, but the web itself is still open. Go forth and create a website!
TeMPOraL
Yeah, but the web is getting smaller, as the most valuable and interesting parts got turned into private whatsapp groups or non-indexed discord and other "community first" nonsense, and went dark.
aftbit
I can't decide if ATProto is actually amazing or if its proponents are just dazzled by their own tech. Is it truly decentralized? What makes it better than Mastodon or Matrix or Scuttlebutt? Of course, at the end of the day, it's the network effects that matter. Attention is all you need indeed.
pfraze
The team came from the IPFS and Scuttlebutt worlds. "Better" is relative to your design goals. Iroh is better for point-to-point connections & localfirst. Matrix is better for chat rooms. Etc. The general logic of atproto was to serve large scale publishing with an open model that doesn't seriously degrade the UX. The scale orientation means - at least until the non-public spaces land - you're syncing a lot of records to provide an alternative microblogger to bluesky. The account hosting system, however - the pds - remains exceedingly cheap and easy to run. Pros and cons, matching with the design goals.
tynanpurdy
I will say that I have no relation to bluesky so it's not my tech and I do find it amazing. This post from Dan Abramov might help in clarifying how 'decentralized' it is compared to the threadiverse https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/
crabmusket
Dan's post "a social file system" also does a great job at explaining and motivating the data model behind atproto. It can do anything, not just microblogs!
xigoi
> What makes it better than Mastodon or Matrix or Scuttlebutt?
Decentralized identity. You don’t have to choose a specific instance and be locked into your decision.
8organicbits
I wouldn't say the others lack that feature, they do it differently.
The Twitter-competitive social site is moribund, so I think maybe what you're seeing more and more of is the pivot towards infrastructure --- always planned, but not before such a big part of the messaging.
inigyou
Feels like a solution in search of a problem - just like all the others. Also feels like only half a solution - just like anything else developers invent. Do you remember what Joel Spolsky said about P2P architectures and Napster? It doesn't matter whether your system is P2P or not, it matters whether or not the user can type in the name of a song and then listen to it. That's how YouTube is the new Napster. Because you can just type in a song and listen to it, and for the sake of determining popularity, it's completely irrelevant whether this is done by stealing the music or by legally licensing it. However, the ads that pay for that licensing are relevant.
ATProto is attempting the "if we make it P2P it'll be popular!" strategy except not with P2P.
tolerance
ATProto has the hardest working developer relations department in the game right now.
skybrian
To put it another way: Google search works by making their own copy of the Internet. It's much smaller scale, but similarly, atproto makes downloading the entire social network relatively easy. Many ordinary techies have the resources to replicate the whole thing if they wanted to. To query your replica, you use a database, designed however you like.
So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone.
Google's Go Module Mirror is a similar but more specialized service that has a copy of all the Go modules that anyone has published on the Internet.
TeMPOraL
> So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone.
That makes no sense - and yes, I'm aware that people think like this, even though it's entirely contradictory.
If you intend to make information public, you relinquish control over access to it. Trying to walk that back, or even to retain capability of walking it back, is perverting the system and turning the earlier claim of information being public into a lie.
skybrian
I think a lot of people prefer to post in obscurity. It’s somewhat similar to the “share with anyone who has access to the link” security model.
someothherguyy
just because someone shared something within a small circle of intended observers, doesn't mean they want some omniscient entity to be able to discover it and use it as they desire.
i think the atproto has mechanisms for this?
skybrian
Not yet, but soon. There’s a “Spaces” proposal in alpha testing:
I don't understand the premise, is this saying short form posts (dare I call them Tweets) on Bluesky are somehow a replacement for long form blog posts?
conradludgate
No. atproto (which is what bluesky is based on) supports all kinds of public media - for instance https://standard.site/ which is designed for longer form static content.
You can choose where your PDS runs and the ecosystem still works. If one relay shuts down (Google Reader) or takes their API private (X, Reddit) it shouldn't matter, the PDS are separate and another relay can take over.
Worst case you can go directly to the PDS, but that wouldn't work at scale
James_K
There are invariably 3 solutions to all “federated” web problems:
- Email
- Semantic HTML
- Web indexing services
In this case, it's mostly indexing and a little of the other two if you want to add social features. I despite ATProto with all my soul for taking a problem with such a simple and standard solution and totally obscuring it behind hundreds of layers of JSON, faux federated services, and technical jargon, all in service of creating an inferior version of Twitter. I guess it wouldn't be as sexy to offer a web indexing service instead.
pfraze
Genuinely curious, how would you build it differently? Would you stick with atproto's indexing model and try to simplify it, or would you use another approach?
James_K
You send a request to a web indexer with a page you want added to the network, it scans your page for outgoing links and sends an email to the owners of any domains who are also on the service.
One can imagine making it a little more featureful, for instance indexing OPML blogrolls which would allow you to see whom a person follows and https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry which would allow outgoing links to be categorised (like, reply, etc) so notifications filtered. With that, it would be possible to add a front-end site imitating one of the popular social media paradigms (Reddit-style or Twitter-style being the most obvious).
If there's one genuine design decision I would give for it beyond what is basically a cobbling together of existing interfaces, it would be to charge users per page uploaded. Likely very detrimental to growing the service, but I think one of the simplest ways to weed out spam and junk. A real problem with many web services is that the receiver of the message pays for it in terms of attention, where in other mediums the sender has to pay. Given that uploading crap is basically free, that's all you get. Increasing the cost of upload would weed out those endless AI summaries and lists of affiliate links.
The issue with ATProto is that it operates on too many layers. You can see lacking in what I have described here the concept of durable authorship, but this is a property of content not how the content is distributed. Perhaps someone will invent a standard way to sign HTML documents, in which case you could base user accounts on that instead of DNS. AT enforces this centrally but it does not need to. It is walling itself off from the common and decentralised software ecosystem of the web for no good reason.
pfraze
Yeah that'd be interesting to try. If you extend the endpoints and the vocabularies around RSS/OPML enough, you could likely create a fairly robust dataset replication protocol. Microformats are a decent schema basis, but you might want to build upon them as well. If you want to make the users' sites reusable as a datastore across applications, you could introduce an oauth flow to enable 3rd party writes. You might also want to add content signatures so you can verify the data authenticity from third parties (e.g. to support the equivalent of reposts).
James_K
You would repost a page by linking to it from your own. As for uploading content, that is outside of the scope of an indexer. The user hosts their data with some hosting service, or independently. I believe signatures are already handled by XHTML which allows you to add XML signatures to documents, but regular HTML is sadly lacking here thought it would not be too hard to extend (or to just use the XML serialisation of HTML5).
I think it is generally bad to implement new features like this on the part of the indexer. It should just keep track of an existing web of documents rather than creating it's own format and walled garden.
pfraze
> You would repost a page by linking to it from your own.
Ah right, of course. Fair enough. I think Dave Winer is trying some similar ideas, though I haven't looked at it beyond knowing he's trying to extend RSS to support these capabilities.
James_K
We already have those capabilities. My website has reposts on it. I just link to someone else's content from my Atom feed instead of something hosted on my own site. Then I attach a https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/atom.html#category node indicating that those are reposts.
inigyou
Isn't that how it already works but with different protocols that you don't like? You (a PDS) send a request to an indexer (relay) with a page (activity) you want added to the network.
James_K
The difference is one uses W3C recommended web interfaces and the other does not. I make blog posts to my website using HTML, anyone can open them using a web browser. I can host those pages one of many static hosting services with no need for a special protocol or anything like that. AT on the other hand reïnvents this entire thing. Can you type the AT URI of a resource into the browser and have it open? I do not believe you can. So if I want to publish HTML content I now need both my regular web server and an AT PDS running on my server. There exists, as far as I'm aware, no application that can view HTML hosted on the AT network so I have to produce all of my blog posts in an agnostic format or publish them to no one, or I can use one of the services that automatically posts a link to that HTML as a BSky post. So you have all of that architecture and what it accomplishes is posting a link to content hosted elsewhere.
Why, instead of creating an indexer that works with existing formats, did they choose to create one intentionally incompatible with 99.999% of web content? Because in practice it's not a web protocol, it's not a serious thing. It's just a whole bunch of bullshit for nerds to make blog posts about that serves as the back end of a Twitter clone. It is standards proliferation. It adds nothing and fragments existing efforts. Instead of contributing to the web ecosystem, it subtracts from it. It breaks the important rules of software development, to do one thing and do it well, to use existing solutions. Everything it does is duplicated, there's a new way to sign documents, a new way to host content, a new data format, a new exchange protocol, a new way to serve documents, a new way to send notifications, etc. It's not a tenable way of doing things. If every person looking to make a web indexer created an entire separate web ecosystem, that would not be sustainable. They're clearly not intending to replace the Web, so what are they doing? It's just a complicated way to store tweets.
And the silliest part is that, if I recall correctly, they don't even have decentralised network yet since only they can issue PLC DIDs.
inigyou
The W3C has been irrelevant for well over a decade, perhaps you mean the WHATWG. And why should we care about their recommendations?
For what it's worth, the W3C recommends ActivityPub (fediverse base protocol). Do you like that one or do you only like the HTML stack?
James_K
Something based on ActivityPub would be much more reasonable. I would not have nearly the same objections if it integrated with an existing ecosystem rather than carving up the already limited pool of people interested in the open web and locking a bunch of them into a different silo to the rest of us for essentially no technical advantage.
inigyou
But ActivityPub works a certain way and it's different from how ATProto works. You're saying HTTP should've been a layer on top of email - how would that ever work?
James_K
Their primary goal was creating a Twitter clone, ActivityPub can do that. The federation stuff is really just a toy part of it, as you can tell from the fact that PLC DIDs are still issued from a central authority. Or they could have done it the way I suggested, with indexes of HTML pages. Both would be preferable.
dmje
Turned off by the typo in the first LINE…
canterburry
I'm sorry, but this blog post is written as if the described functionality should obviously be available and supported by the Internet and companies who expose their data.
I agree it would be neat.
But, when did we conclude this "should" be possible and thus warrant such a whiny post?
tynanpurdy
Not a would be cool, is cool. At least now that the atproto network has proved it is in fact cool.
There are multiple sites that support follower semantics over RSS. Feedland tracks subscriptions publicly, so you can see the blogs I read (https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev), and who reads my blog (https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...).
I run another variant which collects OPML blogrolls via crawling, so you can find out who else likes your favorite blog and what else they recommend. Here's the page for Simon Willison's blog (https://blogroll-network.alexsci.com/discover/feed-a34ee2a88...). Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint.
Nothing to do with Bluesky services. There are many independent firehoses and relays. Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one. No curator between me and the posts, and no work by me to crawl the whole network for them. https://pdsls.dev/jetstream?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Fchennai.fir...
Edit: ok there is an aggregator, the relay is scraping all of the PDSs out there to build the event stream. Notably this is not possible with RSS, where you need to build a large index with knowledge. PDSs request relays to crawl and that's that.
This stream lacks any blog posts that haven't been specifically published to atproto. Conversely, I see RSS feeds for the content in the stream, like https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:byf7jvh3yvhffackiumpddtf/rs... (if RSS feeds exists for every profiles then I'd argue that atproto is a strict subset of RSS, but I'm not certain how that feature works). The stream may give you every blog post that was published to atproto, but that's already a small subset of long-form content on the web.
> Notably this is not possible with RSS,
The web supports blog discovery so well that people forget it exists. A simple Google search can find a very large amount of content, much available over RSS/Atom. Many web-based feed readers index the subscriptions across all their users to help with discovery. Here's the Feedland firehose, for example: https://feedland.com/?everything=true
I don't think its helpful to argue how complete the Google index is vs a bluesky firehose though. Most users are drowning in content and discovery is about search and filtering. There's lots of interest right now in vouching for the content of others: https://susam.net/wander/wander.js, https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json, https://www.manton.org/2024/03/11/recommendations-and-blogro..., etc.
One thing I'd love to see with rss / ompl sharing sites is more ease of exploration. It feels a bit clunky browsing many of these feed sharing sites because you need to evaluate each feed by manually clicking through each one etc or worse you can only import the whole opml at once flooding your feeds. For example I've seen some sites with feeds directly showing posts as they come in for each persons feed list(s) so you can see what that batch of rss feeds looks like in action without clicking around much. There are some sites doing great work getting people to share their lists but I think there is room for qol improvements.
One site I've been liking that has feeds for each list and is trying to reduce friction on sharing is blogflock.com. You can also follow other peoples lists directly on the site too so they show up in your main feed. I believe I've also seen some people self host their blogroll on their personal sites with similar feeds but I'm having trouble finding that software atm.
Absolutely. One good thing going for this approach is that anyone can grab the OPML export (the URL is stable) and build their own frontend, I'd love to see more.
Could be a fun weekend project for frontend folks.
We made it a pretty big goal from the start to clearly communicate to users that the network is extremely public, and that we believe open access to public content is an important part of preventing another round of walled gardens. This is generally understood and appreciated, but the community has a wide range of opinions about it. Some people see public as public and that they’re there to have their voice heard. Some people see it as a pretty uneasy arrangement at best, and would rather it wasn’t that way.
The atproto community has been spending a large portion of the year developing “atproto spaces,” which are essentially a way to cheaply mint mini-atprotos with access control. This is the answer to non public data. It will be added to the Bluesky app and the ecosystem, and it will remain accessible to apps based on the grants of the users, but the spaces will not broadcast their content on the firehose. I believe, based on the reception we’ve received from that work, that people appreciate that it’s being done, and that people eager for less exposure will pick it up.
This should, hopefully, resolve any tensions at play. We will continue to advocate for public speech and I think many people will continue to participate in it, but I am quite curious to see if the non public spaces gain more adoption overall. My guess, based on people’s general use of the internet, is that they naturally will. The public arenas serve a particular purpose and not everyone is always trying to be a part of them.
EDIT: did I really just say "let me give an honest accounting of that." I have been spending way too much time with llms.
I don't think that's true. For example, nowhere on the blocking interface does it tell users that their blocks are public.
https://bsky.app/profile/edent.tel/post/3l4rjxx32br2j
My guess, based on what happened in the past decade, is that it will definitely happen, a lot of people will be unhappy about it, but by then it'll be too late to stop it.
Private spaces have, by definition, a natural asymmetry to them: it's easy to find a plausible reason to turn a community private, an argument that resonates deeply with people, even if it's not applicable or completely bogus. It's hard to convince people to appreciate the fact that conversations in the open have value reaching beyond the participant. Public spaces are a gift to the world.
The way I see it: imagine WhatsApp, et al. came a decade earlier, and the Internet went dark in the early 2000s, suppressing the "blogging revolution". The idea of Internet as source of knowledge, a place where you can learn anything you're curious about, would've never happened earlier, as all knowledge would've gotten locked in private groups, out of reach of search engines. That's what happening right now - even in OSS, if not due to private groups then due to adoption of Discord and Slack as primary communication platforms. The public Internet is increasingly just commercial slop. But it never would've been anything else than slop if private groups came before blogs and social media.
The underlying tension is the "dark forest". Opening yourself up gets a bigger audience. That feels like a good thing, until your reach expands to those hostile to you. Every community has always had to deal with abuse, but now there's much more coordinated, intentional attacks on communities, orchestrated (ironically) over social media.
A way around that is to use a pseudonym, but it requires care to not post anything revealing.
A) since everything is public it's much easier to see what someone is about, what they are doing. Including the people coming to disrupt and inflame.
B) Bluesky's blocking actually gives folks the ability to deal with their haters, to block reposts for example. So folks can manage engagement they don't want.
It feels like there's almost no cases where communities are given the powers and capabilities to manage the problems. The attackers have been given all the benefits of dark forest advantages, with none of the downside. It feels like there is finally a bit more of a symmetry, and some systems for defense, which until now, no social network has allowed its users.
It's far from over, who knows how things go. But so far the antagonist world burners have not had nearly as good a chance setting fire to the scene as they have had everywhere else. I remain cautiously tentatively hopeful.
You can add Reddit to that list, IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build.
When Reddit raised its API prices in 2023 in order to make itself more attractive for an IPO, it effectively priced out third-party apps, such as the Apollo reader app. Discussion back then: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390953
It'd be great if schools taught foundations like how the internet works (not in-depth, but basics like what a server is) and how to create your own server. People would get gradually less afraid of technology and that'd enable systems like this.
As it stands, people are just more comfortable using walled gardens because their data is managed for them and they don't bear any responsibility for it.
If decentralization is ever going to win, it needs to be turnkey, explained without showing a network diagram, be basically free to run on your laptop, and actually have the content people want to see and not just be a bunch of people who speak lojban. [1]
While I'm not sure how much of a legal leg X has to stand on, I understand why they'd rather Nitter not exist. Twitter tried (valiantly, imo) to stay open. What ultimately began the API lockdown was the need to stop bleeding financially. Ads were inevitable, and there being no reliable way to do that via API access.
Twitter solved those three problems, and no one spends nearly as much time talking or caring about the technology used to do it than people who talk about decentralization. Myself included in my younger days. Now they're just defending their moat.
1: https://xkcd.com/191/
Oh! So you don't know very much! Well, happy to help give you some links so you can learn some of the basics!
@pfrazee gave a talk recently on how atproto was built from day 1 for scale. It's not a secret, it's in the name, Authenticate Transfer Protocol! Your key that you control signs all of your content! Such that your can be forwarded by anyone, that it continues to bear your authentication, wherever it goes, whatever replicas it's on!
https://youtu.be/BoJnj2yPf14?is=YcnoJZSqQw1YBhl9
It's so easy and small that one can run a whole network firebose off a small VPS! There's a list of them. https://atproto.at/relays
Discoverability is a function of this! There's all sorts of tools to filter for different kinds of data. There's indexes, so you can find things like back links, https://www.microcosm.blue/. And there's specific schemas (lexicons) for helping find blog posts, https://standard.site.
I'm a fan of the API that Solid exposes, I'm a fan of the json-ld. But for discoverability and scalability, in terms of being a networked protocol, ATproto is great.
There's a number of different tools to find accounts out there. The main way apps do account type-ahead is a free 3rd party service, one you could run yourself. No one does non-centralized because the network is easy to index & there's no use case for trying to ask everyone each time to do the work, that's a bad strategy, why do it?
Kinda feel like you are just blowing chaff, moving goalposts, not interested in finding out or learning. So, yeah, seems like we're done.
Fortunately this isn't true. Social media consists of a few big walled gardens, but the web itself is still open. Go forth and create a website!
Decentralized identity. You don’t have to choose a specific instance and be locked into your decision.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move
ATProto is attempting the "if we make it P2P it'll be popular!" strategy except not with P2P.
So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone.
Google's Go Module Mirror is a similar but more specialized service that has a copy of all the Go modules that anyone has published on the Internet.
That makes no sense - and yes, I'm aware that people think like this, even though it's entirely contradictory.
If you intend to make information public, you relinquish control over access to it. Trying to walk that back, or even to retain capability of walking it back, is perverting the system and turning the earlier claim of information being public into a lie.
i think the atproto has mechanisms for this?
https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha
You can choose where your PDS runs and the ecosystem still works. If one relay shuts down (Google Reader) or takes their API private (X, Reddit) it shouldn't matter, the PDS are separate and another relay can take over.
Worst case you can go directly to the PDS, but that wouldn't work at scale
- Email
- Semantic HTML
- Web indexing services
In this case, it's mostly indexing and a little of the other two if you want to add social features. I despite ATProto with all my soul for taking a problem with such a simple and standard solution and totally obscuring it behind hundreds of layers of JSON, faux federated services, and technical jargon, all in service of creating an inferior version of Twitter. I guess it wouldn't be as sexy to offer a web indexing service instead.
One can imagine making it a little more featureful, for instance indexing OPML blogrolls which would allow you to see whom a person follows and https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry which would allow outgoing links to be categorised (like, reply, etc) so notifications filtered. With that, it would be possible to add a front-end site imitating one of the popular social media paradigms (Reddit-style or Twitter-style being the most obvious).
If there's one genuine design decision I would give for it beyond what is basically a cobbling together of existing interfaces, it would be to charge users per page uploaded. Likely very detrimental to growing the service, but I think one of the simplest ways to weed out spam and junk. A real problem with many web services is that the receiver of the message pays for it in terms of attention, where in other mediums the sender has to pay. Given that uploading crap is basically free, that's all you get. Increasing the cost of upload would weed out those endless AI summaries and lists of affiliate links.
The issue with ATProto is that it operates on too many layers. You can see lacking in what I have described here the concept of durable authorship, but this is a property of content not how the content is distributed. Perhaps someone will invent a standard way to sign HTML documents, in which case you could base user accounts on that instead of DNS. AT enforces this centrally but it does not need to. It is walling itself off from the common and decentralised software ecosystem of the web for no good reason.
I think it is generally bad to implement new features like this on the part of the indexer. It should just keep track of an existing web of documents rather than creating it's own format and walled garden.
Ah right, of course. Fair enough. I think Dave Winer is trying some similar ideas, though I haven't looked at it beyond knowing he's trying to extend RSS to support these capabilities.
Why, instead of creating an indexer that works with existing formats, did they choose to create one intentionally incompatible with 99.999% of web content? Because in practice it's not a web protocol, it's not a serious thing. It's just a whole bunch of bullshit for nerds to make blog posts about that serves as the back end of a Twitter clone. It is standards proliferation. It adds nothing and fragments existing efforts. Instead of contributing to the web ecosystem, it subtracts from it. It breaks the important rules of software development, to do one thing and do it well, to use existing solutions. Everything it does is duplicated, there's a new way to sign documents, a new way to host content, a new data format, a new exchange protocol, a new way to serve documents, a new way to send notifications, etc. It's not a tenable way of doing things. If every person looking to make a web indexer created an entire separate web ecosystem, that would not be sustainable. They're clearly not intending to replace the Web, so what are they doing? It's just a complicated way to store tweets.
And the silliest part is that, if I recall correctly, they don't even have decentralised network yet since only they can issue PLC DIDs.
For what it's worth, the W3C recommends ActivityPub (fediverse base protocol). Do you like that one or do you only like the HTML stack?
I agree it would be neat.
But, when did we conclude this "should" be possible and thus warrant such a whiny post?