This is an older discoery than that. Expert systems back in the day often modeled knowledge as graphs with the arrows being labeled with the specific relationship between the things.
It works because (node, edge, node) triplets then form propositions, the fundamental units of knowledge
Come to think of it, expertise researchers still do this today to make rough sketches of domains of study. The result is called a concept map.
That's just the bluesky PBLLC PDS that banned you or refused to register you.
You can create an account with any email address you want if you host your own PDS or you can find another PDS that someone else hosts that is willing to register you an account.
One participant's new account spam protection has nothing to do with the network at large being centralised
Only if you choose to use bluesky PBLLC's relays and it's super trivial to not do that. Plus you can run your own relay super cheaply.
Side note: it hasn't been called BGS for a very long time. Nowadays they are just called relays and since sync 1.1 the cost for running a relay decreased by multiple orders of magnitude.
Not that that isn’t a practical concern, but that’s not the level at which the network claims to be decentralized. Your account was banned by one participant in the hypothetical decentralized network.
Agreed, in theory all participants are equal and being banned by one participant shouldn't lock you out of a decentralized network.
In practice, the vast majority of handles (98.9% as of 2024) are under bsky.social [1]. Yes, alternative PDS providers exist, but if the default onboarding funnels everyone into one provider, and the average user doesn't even know what a PDS is, then decentralization is an implementation detail, not a user-facing reality.
ActivityPub is a terrible protocol. The protocol isn't what the specs are, and there's not even a consensus de-facto spec beyond "what Mastodon does". Atproto is a bit better.
Atproto is terrible at decentralization however, because of the model where data is stored decentrally, but accessed centrally, in big servers that need to be aware of all the data. In the ActivityPub model there isn't such a thing as "all the data" - you see what you see.
I am proud of my data, in its many media-type/lexicon feeds (browse my PDS directly at https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:zjbq26wybii5ojoypkso2mso), and I want people to know. I put my data on my PDS because it's good data and I believe that people contributing their "data" (sharing the world as they see it) is a democratic / open society virtue that makes the world better.
When you can meaningfully index all the data on a rpi4, I think that's awesome. That makes a lot of people scared or mad, it evokes many of the things people don't like. But it also stems from only ever having seen or known that situation when the entire stack is under corporate control and when it's a mega-corp harvesting the data. From being in captivity. Not when it's one dude bad-example.com running a link indexer for the entire site on an rpi4, and you can too. We don't know what's that like: it's never been possible. https://constellation.microcosm.blue/
There are legit reasons to have Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about atproto, and you don't have to have fun online. You are free to fuck off to less connected less online spaces if that's your bag. But I grew up wanting to be online and i still want to be online, and no service has ever actually done that before, not like this. This is dozens of times better than the next best thing as a distributed connected online system that I can be online with and that gives me the most freedom to build and use interesting neat new mini apps and tools, to be online with.
To say that like it's a bad thing, is, to me, a joke. I acknowledge your values differ, and respect your decision, but it seems so weird to not want to have fun being online, to get better at it, to make more nodes on the noospheric graph, and to made more edges between them. That still feels like the right choice for me, and it's never been tried socially, and I think it has potential to let humanity keep improving in radical ways. In contrast, renouncing the connected feels like a bad dumb move. But enjoy!! GL;HF.
I'm pretty sure the previous poster was not referring to the fact a PDS holds all of YOUR data -- mastodon servers do the very same thing.
I think they might've been referring to the fact that ATProto requires the existence of big, central relay/BGS servers, which are forced to index all the data of everyone on the network for the whole "social" aspect to work well.
That requirement makes hosting a complete, independent ATProto stack much more expensive and resource intensive than hosting an ActivityPub server, thus making ATProto harder to like, actually decentralize. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think currently the only independent, full-network relay is the corporate Bluesky one?)
To conflate having doubts about ATProto's design with "not liking fun" feels silly to me; it's a much less battle-tested design, doubts are warranted.
Neither Bluesky, nor other ATProto services require any of this.
RedDwarf is an example of an ATProto client that connects only with your PDS, uses Microcosm (https://www.microcosm.blue/ )'s aggregation index (they calculate aggregate counts for a variety of things with a couple of raspberry pis run off of a home fiber connection): https://reddwarf.app/
No big iron anywhere in the picture.
You give up the ability to search the network, but okay, that's already a feature that all Mastodon users sacrifice as well.
Does it work well? It sounds like it relies on scraping all follow relations in a central place (Microcosm) and then scrapes those feeds to find who replied to you.
This submission is about BlackSky doing the whole stack themselves. There are other single node app-views. So, thanks for asking, with apologies, let me correct you: you are wrong.
There are lots and lots of full network relays. A couple that run a full network relay on a < $5/mo VPS . See my other comments in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302514
If all you want is like and replies (which is the biggest huge part of the app view responsibility), Constellation has done that, is open source, and can do a full network link indexing on a raspberry pi. And which runs public endpoints you can just use, that many apps rely on.
Atproto unlike Mastodon also faces these challenges that, if you tried to do them on Mastodon, would get you screamed at and banned from instances. Fediverse broadly doesn't want you to use "their" data. You can't write search tools. As a result, Mastodon doesn't need anywhere near the complexity, because these unofficial but vociferously enforced terms-of-service disallow thorough interconnection to begin with. Makes it technically much simpler to pull off! No one is allowed to get a full fire hose. No broad app views are allowed. Dunno if this is still true, but for the longest time you wouldn't get likes or comments from someone unless they were already followed by someone on your fedi, and it's a direct result of this deliberate explicit lack of interconnection.
Those constraints greatly reduce the difficulty of scaling Mastodon: technical scaling is not a problem if you socially don't allow scale. So distributed you can't even read it.
Doubt is allowed. But from my view, Mastodon world deserves the doubt. It has stood still, barely budged. I'd love to be wrong. But it seems dominated by the one software that is Mastodon, and it doesn't seem to have a universe of interesting connected neat social softwares sprouting up left and right. The software centralization is near to total, the protocol centralization even worse. As a result, there is little distinguishing interesting novel Mastodon technology happening. The one API is deeply rooted. ActivityPub is trying to find some way to get started breaking this mono-culture & enable innovation but that's just started.
Meanwhile a casual glance at Atproto shows hundreds of amazing apps and systems and clients springing up, from amazing empassioned developers. 2025 saw a massive amount of technical decentralziation. Npmx and Eurosky setting up sizable idependent public/public-ish PDS instances, and has shown people indeed moving their core identity off BlueSky servers at some kind of scale. I forgive you for not knowing how far things have come, and I forget myself how incredibly quickly it's come together. It's still 99.99% Bluesky concentrated hosting, but it is distributed, has independent services for the full network, there is credible exit (1000 moved to npmx hosting in the past ~3 weeks), and to me the most important thing: there is technical diversity & independent exploration. There are so many devs building amazing things. That feels so so so absent on Mastodon.
That's the checkbox at the end of the Fermi great filter of interest for online social systems for me: can we permissionlessly build interesting social systems & experiences with these social protocols, or will each system have to look like a cookie cutter copy of a single instance?
> But it seems dominated by the one software that is Mastodon, and it doesn't seem to have a universe of interesting connected neat social softwares sprouting up left and right.
There's quite a few activitypub software that plays nicely with mastodon, it seems to me. Like, Wordpress has an official activitypub plugin that allows likes, replys, following and all that. Lemmy, snac, pixelfed, bookwyrm, misskey, peertube, pleroma..
There's even work on distributed/custom recommendation going on.
I think it's fair to like either atproto or activitypub (I like both!), and bluesky certainly has momentum, but I don't think one can reasonably say the other side is not moving.
The only significant motion I've seen in years in the AP space is Bridgy/A New Social and Wafrn. And while having investment and conferences isn't the only sign of life, it's notable that AP hasn't had once since the first in 2020 while AT is headed into its second building on all that started at the first.
It's neat that some websites communicate on AP, but every single one compounds the problems AT attempts to solve. You talk about software playing nice with Mastodon while AT is converging on standard lexicons and Cisco is investing in changing the nature of the relay for the better:
After everything that spawned at the first AtmosphereConf last year, I'm eager to see what happens after the one coming up. We got all this from stuff that started there, or was built on things started there.
If you wish to avoid downvotes you might benefit from stating why you think ActivityPub’s decentralization is superior. We’re in a thread discussing an example of Bluesky decentralization so it’s clearly possible.
There's no other network where anything like this is remotely even possible today, much less at such tiny costs! And it turns out it's actually computationally not hard to do so much stuff!
Imo a good time to remember the old chant: "the only war that matters is the war against imagination; all other wars are subsumed by this war." A lot of totally closed people around HN parts. Atproto is one of the new favs for the shallow hate-brigade (alongside systemd, Linux audio, k8s).
Bluesky's end user story is extremely solid. User-driven, first class moderation tooling, inside the protocol. Why do you think the difference in resources required between the two is decisive?
Your opinion sounds too strongly held to be defended this half-heartedly.
It was not designed so anyone could run their own social media for $5. It simply has a fundamentally different design that tries to solve different problems.
No need to call it a "joke." Both solutions can co-exist on vastness of the Internet.
It's more the parts they didn't make federated that hold it back in this regard.
Maybe it's good for end users but that doesn't mean much if it can fall into the same enshittification trap as the others. Also, centralised moderation. I don't want to be dependent on an American company's moderation rules.
There was an article here recently about someone who really tried setting up their own including a did:web and they ran into many problems. https://notes.nora.codes/atproto-again/
There's still many little centralised ties in bluesky and I doubt they'll ever relinquish control completely.
Personally I like nostr a lot more, it seems to be more censorship-resistant and really decentralised.
It's wild how many of these so-called sabotage techniques happen daily in the workspace without even realizing it. I can’t tell if this website is being serious or just having a laugh. I don't know whether I find it funny or sad.
Is this a deep philosophical reflection on the nature of work and organisational behaviour?
Or does it simply reflect the fact a good sabotage technique is something you can get away with - and therefore it has to be something that happens daily in the workplace?
That is, in fact, the point. You don't want to get caught/fired for sabotaging your company. The site suggests introducing additional perfectly explainable events which happen all the time, and are hard to assign blame to direct incompetence, but slow progress and cost money.
It may just be me or my internet, but I tried this specifically to see the effect and it was a very slow escape (seemed delayed starting to load, and then loading the escape page).
I came to say the same thing: I love the idea of the quick escape, but some of the sites take way too long to load. They should prioritize sites with the fastest loading (smallest footprint) over some of the jokey-er websites like "43 Gifts for Every Type of Boss."
I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided.
I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily work from home.
None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.
Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones.
In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too long.
As a child of the 80s, who lived 20 miles away from a city, I can tell you that my life was pretty much dark ages before I understood that driving was not just something parents did; I could also do that. And that there were people with similar interests as me at the end of that drive! Took 18 years.
I grew up in a rural township 50 miles from a major city in the 1980s. We were never isolated and there were in fact a diverse set of peers my own age with interests and heritage all across the spectrum. Yes there were a few racists or religious zealots but 99% of the folks got along just fine.
My own lasting impression is that this is the “American experience” that is not dead nor impossible to recreate in 2026. We just all need to learn to be decent Americans again.
Probably a similar environment to me. Around the peak of stranger danger + inefficient means of public transportation. So the world can feel extremely small.
I agree that big tech is and has been too powerful and too unregulated. But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements. Which is why I called it out.
I also didn't say the 80s were dark ages. I was also around back then and life was fun. But none of what I wrote was easy or possible 20 years ago. You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
>But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements.
It's not making everybody miserable "yet". But the current rate of change suggest that is the goal, and that's where the alarm comes from. We had the term "embrace, extend, extinguish" used to describe their business last decade and they clearly want to extend that philosphy to the consumers over time too. Some parts of tech are already arguably at the "extinguish" stage as we speak.
>You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
I feel inclined to nitpick a nitpicker who rejects a statement "there making everyone miserable" with "yes, but not everything is miserable".
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.
>I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small.
>None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.
I also enjoy having those things, but we had all of them 15 years ago. Since then we got... algorithmic feeds?
You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.
None of the good things you described requires the existence of powerful private actors. The internet was created by public funded researchers, it is fundamentally decentralized. Wikipedia is a non-profit, video call could be p2p, etc.
> But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?
Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)
2005 you could do these things. Heck by 2005 I had moved to the remote mountains and still had high speed internet. 30 years ago these things weren't coming from big tech, they were coming from small scrapy startups that were going to replace evil entrenched institutions with something better.
Today, these things are actually LESS accessible due to enshitification from entrenched big tech companies.
You enjoy individual benefits and completely disregard the fact that electronics addiction and loneliness get worse year by year. You've been able to Google anything and chat with anyone back in 2010, all we've achieved since is making the average person spend 4-5h mindlessly doomscrolling on their phone and watching YouTube instead of having meaningful social interaction.
Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.
You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.
That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.
> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.
So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.
>Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Not only that, but big tech proprietary products have depended and depend heavily on F/LOSS and community supported code.
But seriously, this is a political problem, not a technological problem. The harms of technology are like the harms of the food industry or the gambling industry. Those of us who care, know these things can be bad for society, and we regulate them. Our society doesn’t care, we literally just legalized sports gambling, and the leagues have embraced it, forgetting the clear history of what happened last time.
Hating technology is like hating metal because you don’t like gun deaths. The problem is that our electorate has stopped caring about society.
They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.
The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.
In most countries living in the woods on your own isn't allowed. You're forced to be connected if you want a job, social life, not be seen as a crazy person. You pretend like we're all living on some island where everything is merely decided by what you as an individual do.
In my home country several old people had to close their shop as they were forced to move to a digital accounting system, they didn't have a choice. My bank only allows me to go to their office without an appointment 1 day a week (maybe not even). My grandpa who doesn't have a phone (he never even got a landline), doesn't have internet and barely even drives, he has to depend on others to call and make appointments. If you want to apply for a job, you need internet connection. Many won't even hire you without owning a car (even if you could perfectly commute with a bicycle or public transport).
If you think we're at the end of this 'evolution', we're just getting started. My grandpa could perfectly do everything on his own until 2010, by 2018 it was getting almost impossible, 2026 he feels like a burden for not being into technology.
I do choose big tech less, but over time it finds its way to creep back in. Over time it becomes increasingly more difficult to engage with a society increasingly more dependent on it. It's not just stop using facebook and degoogle your phone.
unfortunately it will not be enough to just choose not to "do big tech" while the rest of society around you degrades. i.e. try going outside into the woods next to an ai datacenter and see if it really doesnt kill you.
reply