At Protocol: Building the Social Internet

_kst_•5 minutes 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

phyzix5761•about 2 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.

bbor•14 minutes 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.

NiallBunting•about 2 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.

bladeee•30 minutes ago

How common is it to host your own PDS? It's not really clear to me what the advantages/disadvantage are.

evbogue•28 minutes ago

It is not common, but it is becoming more common: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

thesuitonym•about 2 hours ago

I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can send information through the internet without HTTP(S)

embedding-shape•about 2 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.

mghackerlady•about 2 hours ago

it's not impossible to implement encryption elsewhere, gemini pretty famously requires it

embedding-shape•about 1 hour 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 :)

riffic•about 2 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.

rapnie•about 1 hour 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

qznc•41 minutes ago

I assume for anything else someone will run into firewall/proxy issues.

thesuitonym•2 minutes ago

That's such a non-issue, though. And using HTTP doesn't guarantee you won't run into firewall/proxy issues.

HelloUsername•about 1 hour ago

Previous discussion in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108

danhon•about 3 hours ago

Those of you old enough to remember etherpeg can now see an ATproto version:

https://bsky.land

binyu•about 3 hours ago

This is really cool. It has retro vibes of the era when the Internet was still free from the big five domination.

mghackerlady•about 2 hours ago

I could see this turning into a more modern and sane usenet replacement

ChrisArchitect•38 minutes ago

Blog post about this new site from February might shed some light: https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026

At Protocol: Building the Social Internet

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews