I feel like it's the best ATProto architecture explanation on the web.
I hope it will make people who argue that "there are no instances in ATProto" is wrong, understand that it is actually true and not just a naming debate.
The article seems to forget about content addressable storage and signing key cryptography and how these tools might make their software more distributed.
my experience with most more-distributed internet-systems is: it's so distributed it's hard to get.
here you have Authenticated Transfer Protocol. you can get data very easily. via any of a huge range of means & sources! we have some examples ones today (direct from a pds, relay, jetstream, appview, new protocols like Atom (atproto over MoQ), new systems like hubble). and in most cases, you can tell that it's from a certain account!
i agree with you, i just think the bases are mostly covered here. i also think that it's a fascinating topic. and yes it matters. an "Atproto for Distributed Systems Engineers" probably should know why atproto has such great addressable data (not hash based though), signed key crypto. but also, if you dig in, you'll find quickly it has a great story here. (although your https://anproto.com/ indicates some clear disagreement about sufficiency.)
and the higher level what it is and how it works here is a much more useful practical guide, for getting started with.
there's a lot of people who focus on distributed, on what that means. what seems a lot missing though is that atproto is already nicely a nicely authenticated (crypto) transfer protocol. and that it's probably the best actually distributed, in terms of data availability, in terms of people trying to get your data.
Yah atproto auths moving data from the pds to the index, similar to like https, but they missed authenticated distributed data storage somewhere along the way. Why is that, I wonder?
Not quite sure what you're getting at with "authenticated distributed data," but records that came from a PDS are signed by the PDS. The signatures are there to enable untrusted mirrors to be used for distribution. There's a downside: you can't really disavow a post. But that doesn't seem to be the purpose of the signatures? It's more of an unfortunate side-effect.
In practice, this can be annoying and there are alternatives for people who write software that doesn't bother to check signatures.
Relying on https alone means you kinda have to get the data from the original website to know that it's authentic, and you can't prove it to anyone else other than by sending them the URL so they can check for themselves. (I mean, technically. In practice, people will trust quotes or screenshots even though they can be faked.)
I hope it will make people who argue that "there are no instances in ATProto" is wrong, understand that it is actually true and not just a naming debate.
here you have Authenticated Transfer Protocol. you can get data very easily. via any of a huge range of means & sources! we have some examples ones today (direct from a pds, relay, jetstream, appview, new protocols like Atom (atproto over MoQ), new systems like hubble). and in most cases, you can tell that it's from a certain account!
i agree with you, i just think the bases are mostly covered here. i also think that it's a fascinating topic. and yes it matters. an "Atproto for Distributed Systems Engineers" probably should know why atproto has such great addressable data (not hash based though), signed key crypto. but also, if you dig in, you'll find quickly it has a great story here. (although your https://anproto.com/ indicates some clear disagreement about sufficiency.)
and the higher level what it is and how it works here is a much more useful practical guide, for getting started with.
there's a lot of people who focus on distributed, on what that means. what seems a lot missing though is that atproto is already nicely a nicely authenticated (crypto) transfer protocol. and that it's probably the best actually distributed, in terms of data availability, in terms of people trying to get your data.
In practice, this can be annoying and there are alternatives for people who write software that doesn't bother to check signatures.
Relying on https alone means you kinda have to get the data from the original website to know that it's authentic, and you can't prove it to anyone else other than by sending them the URL so they can check for themselves. (I mean, technically. In practice, people will trust quotes or screenshots even though they can be faked.)
But you're right that the screenshot proto and the copy and paste proto are quite successful as a distributed system these days.