✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The AT Protocol | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com · 6,749 words · saved by 1 readers

Rolling out this protocol on a site without a community forum or other discussion channel but simply a "give us your email address and we'll let you know when it's done" is a red flag. Also, despite the ideals & good work of early ActivityPub work, in practice its server-centricity has already sent it many evolutionary steps down towards the same semi-feudal architecture as email & HTTP, where your identity, content-policies, & even privacy are at the mercy of your "home server" (feudal lord). Even the real option to freely choose a new liege (at some serious switching costs) doesn't promptly or fully address this weakness, and the theoretical potential for practices to be radically different faces a giant "architecture tax" from the installed base, & costs/expectations of backward-compatibility. Users of ActivityPub have already self-selected for those who are OK with such "home server" dependencies. Why, they find them "cozy" & even have (well-reasoned!) apologetics describing ways i

The AT Protocol | Hacker News Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login The AT Protocol ( atproto.com ) 116 points by agd on Oct 18, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 103 comments TrevorFSmith on Oct 19, 2022 | next [–] If a team can't work within an existing standards body or a community (like the ActivityPub contributors) then they simply can't create an actually decentralized and open protocol/network. They can, however, create something that they can define and control for their own gain. Rolling out this protocol on a site without a community forum or other d

Explore this link on the map →

related reading