open protocol != decentralization. Your example is gets into why the situation is not at all similar. Had never even heard of that instance using Afghanistan TLD before, the other 30 000 instances participating on the fediverse remained available despite that government action.
also just to be clear there are trade-offs inherent in the design of either AP or atproto and it's totally fine to choose either for any reason! Some devs in the atproto space run their own mastodon servers (I like gotosocial)
(off-topic mb) literally looking into running gotosocial rn, seems really cool
Yeah also there's snac codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 I think due to the nature of AP it's not really catered towards single user instances b/c discoverability is weird w/ one user? I've seen stuff like github.com/g3rv4/FakeRe... github.com/g3rv4/GetMoa... though if I'm wrong please correct me!
oh yeah I heard about snac awhile ago, forgot most of what I learned about it though lol
social.indexx.dev/@index
My GTS instance fell over on my NixOS server 🫢 so I need to fix that (the homelab bug bit me).
aw, gl with that! was kinda surprised to learn more about the fediverse and how there is little to no backfill when interacting with an account. besides the first post and some general profile stats
To be clear it was not NixOS’ fault it was me tweaking my nix files. Yeah I’ve heard of weird issues of posts from other instances not being received. I think Mastodon the app implements AP in a non-standard way that other servers have to work around (could be outdated info). Might setup Pixelfed
It’s a little annoying from an AT perspective that a Pixelfed account and a GTS account would be two wholly separate identities, accounts, servers (others are probably fine with this 🤷♂️ maybe im just weird).
also @kkowboy.bsky.social I did not mean to talk your ear off, you can definitely argue for de facto centralization of bsky in the sense that most users use the Bluesky company's PDS, relay, AppView, and client totally fair argument! I think people are unaware that 3rd party AT infra/apps exist tho
Yeah I was aware of the third party stuff but I do appreciate you recognizing the point of view that in practice it's still very centralized as valid. There's also still at least the PLC directory that is not run by anyone else and the fact that PLC identities cannot be migrated to did:web.
I can’t find the thread but some lovely Nostr folks did this really funny prank where they created a storage system based on writing dummy records to plc.directory 🥰 Very cool when I went to make a local copy of plc.directory and it was over 80GB 👍 (I hope you can feel the sarcasm).
cwebber wrote about how Bluesky seems to be shooting for a "credible exit" more than actual decentralization. Personally I'm a little skeptical that an exit can really even be credible without a nontrivial amount of decentralization on the network though.
Yep yep yep and these are things that independent devs of atproto (should be) painfully aware of. It’s still very early in the process towards that goal. 😅 I think a lot of devs that work on atproto stuff are attracted to it b/c of the community, everyone is pretty supportive of each other.
thanks for mentioning snac, had not looked at it before and it looks more scriptable to me than GtS which could be useful in the future.
You are correct that the rest of the fediverse was unaffected, but any user of that particular instance had their account lost without a lot of coordination from the server admin, especially to set up forwarding to a new handle and stuff like follows. You can't port your account easily. 1/n
We are actually more on the same page than you think, I was trying to show that a DNS block for a particular instance of a service != blocking the service if it is part of a greater network. People can still use AP if one server goes down (tho not the users of that particular instance). bsky: 2/n
Blocking bsky.app does not prevent 3rd party clients. Ok but you would rightly point out what if the admins for the AppView server pulled shenanigans? There are active 3rd party infrastructure and implementations of AT protocol, some hosted outside the US & atproto accounts are portable by design
there are also a bunch of other apps using atproto that are completely independent ex: @tangled.sh (github) @bad-example.com has run their own infra to make bsky post w/o any bsky infra and developed a lot of tools for self hosting pieces with @microcosm.blue like constellation.microcosm.blue
@rudyfraser.com has demonstrated the porting of over 400 accounts from the Bluesky personal data servers (PDS where your account data lives) to his own infra, you can check the accounts here pdsls.dev/blacksky.app. This is non-trivial at the current moment on AP and this includes follow data etc.
The blacksky project is independently funded and runs their own separate moderation service (atproto is designed for pluggable moderation) and relay atproto.africa and client blacksky.community they even run their own implementation for the entire stack.