Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pfraze 111 days ago
This writeup is useful for backend engineers: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

The simple answer is that atproto works like the web & search engines, where the apps aggregate from the distributed accounts. So the proper analogy here would be like yahoo going down in 1999.
3 comments
tapoxi 111 days ago
This is a fantastic write-up, thanks for sharing!
link
fiatjaf 111 days ago
Sorry, but this analogy is very misleading, no one browses websites through Google's servers.

For example, right now in my URL bar I read "news.ycombinator.com", not "google.com/profile/news.ycombinator.com".

If Google goes down now I can keep browsing this website and all the other websites I have in all my other tabs as if nothing had happened.

link
danabramov 111 days ago
Does Google Reader help you make sense of it? It’s more like each app is like its own Google Reader. And indeed you were able to access the same posts via other apps at that time of outage.
link
pfraze 111 days ago
Technically you can still view the posts directly from the PDS. It’s just uninteresting compared to web pages
link
_heimdall 111 days ago
> no one browses websites through Google's servers.

Didn't Google's AMP project do exactly that?

link
evbogue 111 days ago
Do you have ideas about how Bluesky could decentralize?
link
wmf 111 days ago
Not the original poster but I do have some ideas. Official Bluesky clients could randomly/round-robin access 3-4 different appview servers run by different organizations instead of one centralized server. Likewise there could be 3-4 relays instead of one. Upgrades could roll across the servers so they don't all get hit by bugs immediately.
link
evbogue 111 days ago
If multiple personal data servers (pdses) share the same set of posts how would we guarantee that they are tamper resistant to third parties?
link
wmf 111 days ago
PDSes should be sharded not replicated. Your posts live on your PDS which lives in one place (although it can move).
link
evbogue 111 days ago
What's stopping us from doing both?
link
isodev 111 days ago
Google and MSN Search were already available at this time. Also websites used to publish webrings and there was IRC and forums to ask people about things.
link