Yeah that's why Tangled didn't go with ActivityPub (Mastodon protocol) and went with ATproto instead, which is specifically built to solve that problem, so individual servers are all aggregated by centralized AppViews (that anyone can host) that give a singular unified "view" of the network that is just as cohesive as a centralized network feels.

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madamelic 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ah ok! Thanks for digging up info that I didn't go looking for myself. That's fantastic news.

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class4behavior 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ATProto simply ignores the need for decentralizing incentives on a human/community level. What we get is a sort of a "top-down" federation rather than a grass-roots one. Whoever invests in the infra ends up running a domain.

I mean, practically no one is aware of any other ATPROTO provider other than Bluesky whereas the issue with AP is merely the lack of better implementations, so mastodon.social got the most attention and the hype died off with niche success.

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danabramov 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There’s no such thing as “running a domain” or “atproto provider” in atproto. You’re approaching it with a Mastodon/AP mindset and it doesn’t match that.

In atproto, there’s two axes.

One is hosting. Bluesky offers hosting but some people host on their own (it’s just a Docker container with sqlite), some on Cloudflare, some on community-hosted nodes like https://npmx.dev and https://selfhosted.social. From app perspective it looks exactly the same way (unlike in Mastodon where “hosting” = “choosing a community”) and you can switch hosting anytime.

Another axis is apps. Apps aggregate from data from all hosts. Bluesky is an app, Tangled is an app, Leaflet is an app, Wisp is an app, Semble is an app, and so on. Those can all aggregate over the same data (which enables cross-app interop) but they don’t have to (eg Bluesky doesn’t overlap with Tangled much except that Tangled can reuse Bluesky avatar on login). Generally you don’t have people running copies of the same app (as in Mastodon) which is why there aren’t many “blueskyes”. But when someone has an incentive, they can. (Eg Blacksky is a complete fork including server and DB, allowing their own moderation decisions over same data.) Similarly you can build your own app on top of distributed Tangled data.

Hope that helps clarify why “atproto provider” as a concept doesn’t make sense. You have hosting, which is as distributed as you want, and you have apps, which anyone can make.

	▲	tardedmeme 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		How does a new server discover other servers?