atproto and the ownership of identity

Re:atproto and the ownership of identity by aintly on Saturday January 18, 2025 @05:37PM (#42751985)

It's not so bad. I managed to create a minimal implementation of a PDS for a Bluesky bot that can make simple text-based posts, and it only took a couple of days. Kind of lost interest in it after that but it was reasonably straightforward to iterate on. The trickiest bit was getting the subscribeRepos websocket to work, mostly because the documentation was unclear.

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Re:atproto and the ownership of identity by quantadev on Saturday January 18, 2025 @05:53PM (#42752081)

Maybe so but I bet you 90% of the code you were running was already written because it was in a library right? So you didn't really have to understand it. You were just running someone elses code.

With Nostr, for example (or even RSS), you can fully understand it from end to end, in minutes. As a former IPFS deloper myself I can assure you in just 2 days you didn't even understand the CAR format of a repo, unless you had prior experience.

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Re:atproto and the ownership of identity by jazzyjackson on Saturday January 18, 2025 @06:15PM (#42752211)

I don’t know, as an IPFS developer you might be discounting what prerequisite knowledge you possessed while hammering out a nostr implementation.

I looked at nostr but lost interest when I noticed there was no provision for key rollover. I guess that’s fine but ephemeral identities. Is there a concept of using a domain name as a handle like bluesky? It’s been a few years so maybe it’s worth a second look.

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Re:atproto and the ownership of identity by quantadev on Saturday January 18, 2025 @06:38PM (#42752319)

I always considered the permanent keys/identities of Nostr to be a desirable thing. I had basically invented Nostr before fiatjaf did. It's a trivially simple "concept".

Key rotation is an unnecessary complexity, imo. I never heard of anyone wanting to use a domain name as identity in Nostr, but there's probably a NIP for that where a domain can prove it owns the private key, and be used as an identity.

I mainly quit Nostr development because it was all essentially controlled by 'fiatjaf', and he was making bad decisions, and a childish intolerable arrogant person in general whenever people asked him to justify those decisions.

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Re:atproto and the ownership of identity by rglullis on Saturday January 18, 2025 @10:42PM (#42753358)

> I never heard of anyone wanting to use a domain name as identity in Nostr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.svg

The one thing that completely turned me off nostr is the idea that my identity is tied to my private key and that it can not be recovered. I'd guess that the reason you don't hear from people like me is that we simply don't bother to work with such a boneheaded design.

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Re:atproto and the ownership of identity by quantadev on Saturday January 18, 2025 @11:47PM (#42753734)

I always felt like in the age of cryptocurrencies, people can be expected to protect their private key, and yeah pretty much if they lose it, they lose their data. I mean that's how encryption works also. No key, no data. I don't call that boneheaded. I think it's a feature not a bug.

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