As a former CEO of HTMX I thank you for your service as the current CEO of HTMX.

And yet, they don't advertise content hashes so the data cannot be distributed by the software.

Yes like all of this would benefit from their team studying the implementation of Tahoe-LAFS.

Yes, and is that useful within the structure of the Bluesky ecosystem?

What if PDSes replicated the content of PDSes? Then it'd be available.

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.)

Yah it clearly has always done this, but why doesn't it support multi-PDS replication?

But you're right that the screenshot proto and the copy and paste proto are quite successful as a distributed system these days.

There's nothing stopping multi-PDS replication right now. It would work fine. No one would know that content is available elsewhere, is kind of the main chicken-and-egg problem.

Hubble is starting to come online, which is a network cache. With excellent storage and runtime characteristics, cheap to run. I'm not sure if this is in the same https://microcosm.blue banner-head, but the same developer, as another incredibly fantastic network service that's open for use, that's open source, that other people can also run themselves. https://atproto.com/blog/introducing-hubble-a-public-mirror-...

I agree that yes the PDS's hopefully start doing more mirroring too. It'd be nice if they would themselves also attest that they have seen it too.

Having the content available everywhere seems like the definition of a distributed system to me. Hashing content is not a discovery issue, one simply iterates over a list of hosts and asks if they have the msgs by their hash.

What would be the upsides and downsides of that? It’s unclear what you’re asserting. Do you just want IPFS?

IPFS already exists. What I want is distributed Bluesky, since it's a product success and I do like most of the proto and the team. Do you want to fix this? I just spoke with Claude and I don't think it'd be too difficult these days for us to fix this in the core product.

Upside: data is always available even if Bluesky's funding is pulled. Downside: we lose deletes.

Like peers could sign sites?

We need git-ssb

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

Twitter Bootstrap 2 was the height of web design. If we can go back and stay there forever why should anyone fault our society.

ATProto would need to use signing key cryptography and content addressable storage to be distributed. If we can't store our data with third parties or create an offline-first system then it's not a decentralized social network.

ATproto does support storing data elsewhere. That’s what a PDS does. I’m not sure what you mean by an offline-first system in this context though or why it’s required for decentralization. Could you elaborate?

Yes, and it only supports storing one's data in one place. If we use local-first as our measuring stick for a decentralized system then ATProto fails since we can't store the msgs anywhere -- such as on the nodes of my friends. Prior art such as secure-scuttlebot had this figured out, and thus no one ever complained about ssb being centralized.