ATProto and its advocates increasingly sound like all the crypto-based decentralized platforms that failed. The difference is that crypto people actually had reasons to run nodes, they got paid to, while ATProto expects enthusiasts to do so for the love of the game or act like bluesky and have 99% of the "decentralized" platform on a centralized node.
It never catches on with application developers because it requires you to already worship the protocol and build around it.
the cultiness is why I left crypto and atproto, it plagues many great ideas by creating in and out groups around opinions on the right way to do things
Really strange, considering there’s more debate, disagreement, and lack of conformity in atproto than I’ve ever seen in crypto.
I think you might mean, “people who disagree with me intensely because they believe strongly in the way they view things.”
Atproto is very, very far from a cult. It is a bunch of poasters, though, and nobody should be surprised when a social protocol has a bunch of, well, really social people in its leadership, and you shouldn’t expect them to act like senior leadership of Intel, IBM, or Nvidia.
The fact Paul makes jokes on a social forum at or with people is a reminder that he’s a human. He’s smart, passionate, nerdy, talented, and sometimes extremely annoying, much like everyone else here, and I’m GLAD the leadership of the company and the protocol are as engaged with the community as they are.
It’s a social protocol, for god’s sake. Remember when everyone would complain that the people who ran Twitter would never use it? I do, and just because Elon is down the K-hole and a posting menace doesn’t mean the criticism was incorrect.
I hope you will agree that Paul's personal attacks towards me are unacceptable and unbecoming for the CTO of Bluesky. This is not the first time, I hope it is the last.
(see his peer comment flagged by the community here)
Wow. Irrespective of what the other commenter did to you outside of this thread (assuming you two have a history) your comments (this and others) here feel indeed like trolling and almost egging.
Are you the CTO? If you are then this just feels like a red flag and kind of tells me as a user to look at this protocol/ecosystem (which truly is BSKY at the moment) with much caution.
I'm not sure why you always feel the need to attempt to troll me personally on HN like this. Last time you did, HN flagged your reply. We do not have to agree, but we can be civil. For HN reader context, Paul (Bsky CTO) and I have discussed the protocol and permission system IRL and have different visions.
My sense it that microblogging platforms like X/Bluesky condition people to discourse in ways online they would not in the physical world, though I have encountered online behaviors manifesting in the real world in recent years. ymmv, I have left them all completely and have a much better mental state since.
Apologies if "worship" came across as calling you a cult, but it doesn't seem that you took what I said too seriously either. Good luck on ATProto, certainly don't want to deal with this kind of replies from you or Dan every time criticism or concerns come up, maybe once the protocol leaves BlueSky, but let me guess, it's planned for some point in the far future like every other concern?
Seriously, the entire separation of Bluesky from ATProto not happening is my main reason for not trusting it at all. You can't have a protocol owned by a for-profit entity and seriously call it "open"
I think a more potent example is who controls the source for the spec and official implementations. This is a notable lack of community governance around this part. In this sense, Bluesky can and does change things at will. I have experienced breaking changes from their devs changing how things work and merging their own PRs in a matter of minutes, while not using versions. (indigo)
When it comes to private/permissioned data, Bluesky people have decided the shape it will take while not participating in the conversation until they shared their already decided upon design. They are letting the community give feedback, but the community never was able to participate in the design phase.
It never catches on with application developers because it requires you to already worship the protocol and build around it.