FRESH

Hacker News

Building on ATProto

57 points by speckx

by Striving7340

1 subcomments

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.

by MarceColl

1 subcomments

I've been building a board game community on ATProto. The idea revolves in trying to build the feeling of local clubs but online, instead of "PLAY NOW" being on the landing page (although you can play now if you want) it's organized around clubs. I also wanted to move away from one game oriented community. I play Go and Chess and I would love clubs to be for mixed games. You can create leagues, or tournaments, etc.
As an extension of that I've been building a small language to build games (with a nice time traveling debugger and automatic replays) inspired by Elm. Go and Chess are both built on top of this and you could fork them and modify the rules. Want to code a new Chess variant? Go ahead! Want to code a whole new game you want to try? Go ahead!
What I'm very excited with ATProto is that because all games are broadcast on it and each shares a core system of turn-based replays (and review system with branching) software can be built on top to do AI analysis, or a replay view. The idea that my application can be extended without me adding an API is very exciting and very much in the direction I want to take the system (community is the core tenet).

by ekosz

5 subcomments

Reading articles like this one, I do think people are trying to put a square peg (their applications) through a round hole (ATProto). The ATProto was designed around all data being public. You write public data to a user's PDS and then any application can read that public data and do something with it. If all data was private (encrypted?) by default then that would defeat half of all of ATProto's goals.
Imagine someone starts startup A on-top of the ATProto. They raise some money, get some users, some people love it, but ultimately they die. If the data was private to that service, that data dies with the startup. But if the data is all public future startup B can read that old data and do something with it. As a user that's brings me a ton of utility and comfort trying out new services.
If you're trying to built a local-first, mostly private service I just don't think the ATProto is the right tool for the job.

by verdverm

2 subcomments

by inigyou

0 subcomment

What's even the point of publishing anything online any more if you don't hope to become an influencer? The nature of the game has changed, and now does everything possible to discourage it.