AT Protocol works like the Web, where each user is a website and each application is a search engine. The apps crawl the network of hosts and aggregate activity. We have over 100 outside hosts and at least 3 aggregating apps out there. It’s a different model than ActivityPub, which is more akin to email.
We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. We have an open system for algorithms, which we and 3p devs can operate. We have a default algorithm for every user called Discover. It was one of our main concerns to have an answer to algorithms in a decentralized network.
For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. We also support the Web DID method, and if folks like this remain concerned we’re open to other DID methods. It’s important, but roughly similar to DNS or TLS issuers; supporting infra to the application network.
> We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from.
It comes from the people who don't know what an algorithm is but heard that Twitter has it and it's making them doomscroll so it's bad
(which is not to defend Twitter or other social media's algorithms, but to say that some people seem to have a blind hatred of them entirely due to misconceptions)
You expressed it perfectly in word which i couldn't. People's hate for algorithm is so weird . Without the algorithm they can never find quality or content they are interest in .
The OP does not take issue with the algorithm part, but the claim of decentralization. I'm currently running my own instance of an ActivityPub server (GoToSocial), just for me, and it works like a charm. I would not know how to do the same with BlueSky, and I have tried to understand how.
> For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN.
ICANN is rather centralized.
This is the biggest concern I have with ATProto, I would have expected it to work over P2P i.e. IPNS, or even some sort of a blockchain rather than a centralized web server.
It's not really possible to avoid bootstrapping on a centralized authority in general, and DNS seems like a mostly reasonable backstop for that. As others have said, you can make your own DNS network and people have.
Thank you. ATProtocol is really cool, but I share some concerns about the centralized resolution of identities to custom servers and the conflict of interest in Bluesky's stewardship of ATProtocol development (what is good for the ATProtocol Network vs what is good for Bluesky).
If I understand Bluesky correctly:
When you follow users on Bluesky (even those on a hosted custom server), atprotocol allows you to follow them by a "URL" (DID:web) but by default you're following them by their DID:PLC, a kind of Decentralized Id that is resolved via an equivalent to a "name server" (see: https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc).
You give that name server a DID json representing a user you want to follow or are following, it will tell you the IP of the (custom atproto) server where that user's posts and replies are. By default Bluesky apps only know about PLC nameservers that are in Bluesky's registry.
And so even if I'm using custom hosting if Bluesky PLC nameserver delists my DID (or the nameserver that points to me?) most bluesky users will be unable to find me.
Bluesky is theoretically interested in moving this nameserver under a nonprofit consortium structure - where no one entity could prevent a nameserver from being listed - but no one is working on it, and BlueSky for years hasn't gotten around to it.
My questions are:
1. Is that right, or are there any promising nascent efforts to create a nameserver registry under a consortium structure?
2. Is it fair to ask users, potential users and developers to take it as an article of faith that BlueSky will fully support and partner with such a consortium (since it hasn't helped set one up already in the years of its development)?
3. If Bluesky has features that are not being "backported" to ATproto, does this not raise concerns about Bluesky's conflict of interest in its current stewardship of ATProtocol? One could imagine a situation where Bluesky "slow walks" contributions to ATProto out of its own private company interest in keeping its userbase on Bluesky servers.
I don’t work for bsky, but pay a lot of attention:
1. Basically, yeah. That said, I still think it may be a bit early to do this. A consortium would be useful if it was meaningfully independent of bsky, so you need to grow and gain interest first. Otherwise the “independent group” would be run by the same people, which is pretty meaningless. Plus, working on that means les time for working on other things. I would expect to see this happen once there’s another non-toy atproto application, and for representatives from it to be involved too. Before then feels premature to me, but I can appreciate others may feel differently.
2. I do. The team has continually set out a vision, and then executed on it, over and over. Including following through on things that actively reduce their control over things. Tons of folks asked a similar question previously: “they’re saying that you’ll be able to host your own PDS someday, but do you trust them to actually ship that and not just say they’re gonna a do it and put it off forever and keep control?” And then they shipped it.
3. Any application has semantics built on top of the underlying protocol: that’s what an application is, in some meaningful sense. But I do agree that without independent governance for atproto, doing things like that could stifle other users of atproto, sure. We’re back in the same realm as 1, imho. I’m following the devs of various other apps and none of them have expressed that they think bsky is hoarding the goods so far, at least.
To me the biggest problem with ATProto is to discover the current location of a user, you query https://web.plc.directory/resolve which is a centralized service
Second biggest is that while a PDS does decentralize the data, I belive bsky.app is still the place providing the 'frontend' that makes it all work.
Always liked the ssb protocol and had an account but am just not much of a poster to ever add much value. Appreciate the design and open build process. Been following for a long time, hope you are doing well
There's some wildly negative often wildly in my view inaccurate posts down below slinging all kinds of things. So much of it is so wildly off base.
Atproto dev has a ton of strong wins already, and there's been a massive influx of dev interest in the past few weeks. Really looking forward to seeing this ecosystem bloom. I feel like we are at an inflection point.
I don’t understand what the naysayers want? They want an app that is decentralized, completely free, uses nothing remotely related to crypto, doesn’t serve ads, and where it starts day 1 with a robust ecosystem of applications using it.
Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. It doesn't solve some of the problems that come with centralization, it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server). And funnily, it doesn't even solve data portability entirely (you can't actually move your posts). Mastodon's "decentralization" is even worse than a "theoretical promise" of one, cause it's a just marketing promise when it literally just does not work that way in some aspects. You're still "centralized" to whatever server you signed up on, still with caveats that an actual centralized service would have. It's better, but it's truly not all it's made out to be. Definitely not to the point where such sneer and kind of just, speculatively making shit up, wouldn't look just ironic.
> it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server).
this isn’t a “problem” that needs to be solved. you’re not “at the will of the server” in a federated environment, its the actual literal opposite. if i don’t like the server operators or if i don’t like the servers it federates with, that’s totally ok. i start my own and federate with who i like.
this is a good thing, not a “problem.” the ability to freely move and the freedom to associate is incredibly important. and for some weird reason people keep pretending like these things aren’t important if it’s online. its ridiculous.
if i don’t want to spend my play time around eric, i should absolutely be able to move and play somewhere else without eric. that’s actual freedom. if you try to keep me in one place or force me to play with eric, you’re trapping me.
no, the ability to pick and choose how, why, where, and with who i spend my free time is important, its not a “problem”. that’s agency, and i wish people would quit arguing against agency and calling it a problem.
"Being at will of a server" is always a problem, but with federation you can choose which server you are at the will of. You still need trust, but that trust can be chosen by you based off of your needs (and that trust can be placed in yourself). You're on a different part of the trust gradient.
Meanwhile there's a certain quality of service that can be obtained with "mere" federation that is much tougher for many decentralized strategies. The actual topology matters, but federation is a pretty decent model IMO! There's a reason that e-mail has been so useful as a system for so long!
You can export and import, I believe, for some instances but generically re-posting them to a new instance with the old date isn't currently feasible[0], correct.
You also need to re-federate them to get the "links" correct (and probably de-federate the old) which causes confusing results if your client doesn't handle backdated posts correctly (and most of the ones I was using in 2023 didn't.)
There's probably a solution[1][2] but I think it's something the ActivityPub people just haven't given much thought to just yet.
[1] When I was importing a 10 year Twitter history to my Akkoma instance, I just tweaked the code to a) allow backdating posts, b) allow certain accounts to backdate posts and c) not federate backdated posts from those accounts. Doesn't really solve the full problem but worked for me.
[2] Obviously there's other problems such as people creating fake history, etc., if you're allowed to post backdated statuses.
Federation is a form of decentralization. It has its issues but it doesn't mean it isn't decentralized. Moving towards distributed, peer-to-peer applications is the path forward.
> But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.
AFAIK People with did:web dids can make accounts and use bluesky
> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.
And one of the first investors was Jack Dorsey. They've used libraries and concepts that are only vogue amongst those with cryptography/cryptocurrency interests. This is not new, this is always been the case.
- - -
A person, any person, can join the relevant developer chats, or find and ask people who are working on or have brought up their own servers, about how centralized or decentralized bsky is, but that does not seem to be the case for this person's research.
what does have a "big claim" that they have "no algorithm" is mastodon, which says so on its joinmastodon.org page and in its instance blurb. which just so obviously could not even possibly be true.
It is interesting that nobody comments on the "ownership" data point of the post.
> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round?
Yet that is the only thing that matters.
The technical pieces for a vast range of alternative designs for online interactions are already available. Decentralized, federated, distributed, peer-to-peer. Who cares? What matters is the outcome.
What is entirely missing in these silly "protocol wars" is any concrete and realistic vision of what that "good next generation Web" looks like, not technically, but economically, socially and politically. Who gets empowered and who gets exploited. Who gets (and how strong) a voice and who gets manipulated by that voice.
The prior norms, social contracts and institutions we used to have in the pre-digital era have been completely corrupted yet there is no visible replacement beyond some vague ideals.
The shape of the "next gen web" very much depends on who funds it, why (what incentives and expectations do they have) and how (what incentives and expectations do they create to the vast ecosystems of developers, entrepreneurs, moderators, users, etc).
Bluesky's claims to why they're better than anything always sound like crazy pill stuff to me.
Other services both centralize identity AND algorithms/operations.
This seems to centralize identity WITHOUT the second thing, which strikes me as the worst of both worlds.
It's just, we've already mostly "solved" the centralized identity problem with EMAIL. As often, the key is "fail elegantly," not be bulletproof. Email, in it's federated state, allows for individuals to more or less choose what kind of centralization they want -- and more importantly, to kill and restart accounts if needed. Thus, Mastodon is the best parallel.
What am I missing? What is the advantage of bluesky here?
I don't have the energy to put all of the advantages and argue for them here, but take a look at https://atproto.com and maybe look around at other blog posts and articles that contrast atproto and ActivityPub. Might just have to do some research, since it's been talked about ad nauseam already in other spaces.
To date decentralization is inversely correlated to good UX.
* nostr is very decentralized (keys) and has terrible UX (manual management of keys).
* Mastodon is medium decentralized (dependence on DNS; can't migrate accounts) and has bad UX (confusion about which instance to use; "Take Me Home" to interact with anything).
* Bluesky (atproto) is moderately decentralized (did:plc) and has great UX.
The main advantage that atproto has over the other two is that if someone solves the did:plc problem, it can become the first very decentralized/great UX social media platform over night.
Nostr's poor UX is a feature, not a bug. It serves as a reminder that life isn’t perfect.
Basic knowledge of manual key management should be essential for every internet user. Think about password managers.
What I love about Nostr is that individuals can actively participate in making it better. It’s fully open, allowing anyone to build whatever they wish on top of it. I agree it’s not perfect now, but it will improve over time and the progress already made can speak for itself that Nostr is here to stay and it's getting better and better each day. The more developers the Nostr ecosystem has, the faster it will evolve.
Personally, I enjoy using it. Cross-posting has been resolved, so I can’t even remember the last time I opened Twitter. Mastodon never really attract me much. Bluesky is yet another Twitter and it's not decentralized. They can read your DMs btw.
One of best features of Nostr is when you build something, you get users instantly and whenever I post on nostr I cross post to Mastodon and Bluesky as well. Reactions are also interchangeable :)
I think there is an interesting piece to be written about how prone bsky is to being captured by a single entity. It would look at how the reality of PDS today is 99.9999% (not the actual number, but ballpark) bsky hosted, also true for the relay. Then it would outline EEE scenarios, their likelihoods and whether bksy is sufficiently decentralized to fend them off.
I'm not sure how we can get the point that a centralized seamless UX experience is core to any platform though the thick skulls of people designing decentralized federated services.
Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time frequenting empty communities instead of merging it all together. Regardless of how the backend is handled, centralized or not, people need the same thing on the frontend. These valiant attempts at remaking popular sites for the people by the people are not only fighting every corporation that wants them gone as a concept but also their own dumb decisions, which will probably prove too much of a hurdle in the long run.
I wanted to like lemmy so bad. I lucked into a lifetime ban from Reddit after using it daily for 12 years, so you’d think it would be easy! But there’s just not enough people to make it interesting, not even close. I subbed to every damn instance I could find, and still no luck.
https://slrpnk.net is an exception in that it’s a cute place for activism and related news, but that’s obviously not the only thing I want to use the internet for, especially when I’m looking to relax.
So far, with an n of 5 days: BlueSky is what I was waiting for. Especially for scientific content - memes or otherwise!
> wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening
This is actually reason why I like Mastodon. There is barely anything happening. I get content from few niches - but I do not need it to be generating something every minute. I have no time for that.
But for people who prefer old Twitter experience, BlueSky is pretty good.
It's used in a not particularly advanced way - bluesky uses repositories per each user for all their public social activity (posts, likes, etc) and it creates a Merkle tree as an index for them and signs that index (this enables stuff like authenticated content addressing and efficient verification).
SQLite simply stores those posts and that signed Merkle tree. The PDS account host server also has another SQLite DB with a list of its accounts.
They have fancier stuff in their appview server and relay server
Bluesky's marketing is rather annoying on my opinion. They're not defederated in practice and they probably never will be, but that's okay. People don't want a new Mastodon, they want a new Twitter after Musk fucked that up worse than ever.
Their promises of portability may ring empty but so far their lack of AI algorithm and ad feeds are what people actually come to Bluesky for
If you want federation, ActivityPub is there and ready to go. You could probably hack together a bidirectional Bluesky <-> Mastodon bridge without too much effort (requiring an account on BS to post from Mastodon) and enjoy the portability of your main account while also being able to follow your friends and such on BS.
I ultimately came to the conclusion that both those who advocated for the fediverse as a Twitter replacement and those who complained that it was inadequate as a Twitter replacement were both wrong. People don't need “a Twitter” in the first place. It's a terrible website designed to maximize engagement, including negative engagement, for its profit.
95% of end users don't care; but Bluesky has the right bits built in anyway. There's a grand central aggregator of all 13 million accounts, but it's not _special_, someone else could run one (several hobbiests are processing this level of data). Migration works* (and works better than Mastodon, all your history and network move even better than a masto server move) (*okay, it's a weird command line tool at the moment, but as soon as someone cares that'll get cleaned up). You can run your own Personal Data Server and hook it in to the bsky network and then everyone can see your posts and interact with them. It's newer, only a couple years old, but all the right parts are headed in the right direction.
Close to nobody should need to understand what decentralisation means. This was/is a problem with Mastodon. When it was new it required understanding things most people didn’t want to know and arguably shouldn’t need to know.
I’m not sure that’s true. We have a lot of people who are invested in the protocol and the technology. I post threads about it periodically, and people are pretty engaged & excited: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y
Outside of tech circles I think that’s generally true. Few people understand what it means for something to be decentralised and fewer people are idealistic enough to care if it means compromising on features.
It’s all about the user experience. See also privacy and security.
People are going to nit-pic and while some of the concerns have some weight to them, so far they are trivial IMHO
The fact is we need an alternative to X because the current owner has done and will continue to do terrible things not just to the service but apparently on a personal and political level that is beyond distasteful to a HUGE chunk of the users (if not even greater than 50%)
And Threads isn't going to cut it for similar reasons.
So in an imperfect world Bluesky is what we get and it's a legit alternative that's better.
The fact a Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge exists says A LOT. Good luck ever getting something like that with X without paying a literal fortune for it.
Bluesky’s more accessible to the general public. I’m on both, though use Mastodon more (partially due to _far_ better third party clients available); it’s a very different crowd.
People on mastodon are so toxic. I tried to contribute code and content was threatened with lawsuits by people who don't understand that their protocol is explicitly designed for open data
I mean, Twitter itself borrowed most of its concepts from either the user base (@ mentions, replies, retweets, quote tweets were all informal behaviours before they were features) or other social media platforms, particularly Tumblr. It is very much a field where doing it well beats being the first.
Of course, if you’re earlier you have network effects, but Carface seems doggedly determined to compensate by driving the existing network away.
Glad this information is finally going mainstream. BlueSky users used to tell everyone it was more decentralized than Mastodon because of this DID thing.
It’s hard to imagine any upper bound on broken or useless or corrupt that would invalidate one more news feed.
The gates are open on Google Search shaping your information, on Meta shaping your fashion, on Amazon shaping your commercial instinct.
And on YC boosting tired legacies around AirBnB rather than contemporary realities like Garry “Die Motherfucker” Tan pimping Pear “ChatGPT that license” shit on X.
I’ve had a beer with Zuckerberg and one with Dorsey, I say it can’t get any worse.
Bluesky integrates with Mastodon better than Threads does at this point. I have bidirectional conversations with mastodon users, with notifications, using a bridge called BridgyFed. I can follow Mastodon users on Bluesky. I can’t with Threads.
I mean, Meta’s ActivityPub integration is one-way on public profiles. I think even Facebook used to allow you to get RSS feeds of your friends’ updates in the early days. Threads’s lip-service towards AP is barely better than that.
Read this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
AT Protocol works like the Web, where each user is a website and each application is a search engine. The apps crawl the network of hosts and aggregate activity. We have over 100 outside hosts and at least 3 aggregating apps out there. It’s a different model than ActivityPub, which is more akin to email.
We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. We have an open system for algorithms, which we and 3p devs can operate. We have a default algorithm for every user called Discover. It was one of our main concerns to have an answer to algorithms in a decentralized network.
For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. We also support the Web DID method, and if folks like this remain concerned we’re open to other DID methods. It’s important, but roughly similar to DNS or TLS issuers; supporting infra to the application network.
> We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from.
It comes from the people who don't know what an algorithm is but heard that Twitter has it and it's making them doomscroll so it's bad
(which is not to defend Twitter or other social media's algorithms, but to say that some people seem to have a blind hatred of them entirely due to misconceptions)
And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm.
You expressed it perfectly in word which i couldn't. People's hate for algorithm is so weird . Without the algorithm they can never find quality or content they are interest in .
The OP does not take issue with the algorithm part, but the claim of decentralization. I'm currently running my own instance of an ActivityPub server (GoToSocial), just for me, and it works like a charm. I would not know how to do the same with BlueSky, and I have tried to understand how.
If you’re trying to self host your account, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
If you’re trying to build an application, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/applications
If you’re looking to run the bluesky application, you need to run the codebases in https://github.com/bluesky-social.
If you want to dedicate a VM to it, bsky Personal Data Server has a pretty easy install
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
> For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN.
ICANN is rather centralized. This is the biggest concern I have with ATProto, I would have expected it to work over P2P i.e. IPNS, or even some sort of a blockchain rather than a centralized web server.
It's not really possible to avoid bootstrapping on a centralized authority in general, and DNS seems like a mostly reasonable backstop for that. As others have said, you can make your own DNS network and people have.
I central authority with escape hatches is okay, I think.
One could start their own DNS server with different records than the ICANN ones, thus ignoring their authority.
As long as that possibility exists, it’s fine.
(I've updated this post as I've learned more).
Thank you. ATProtocol is really cool, but I share some concerns about the centralized resolution of identities to custom servers and the conflict of interest in Bluesky's stewardship of ATProtocol development (what is good for the ATProtocol Network vs what is good for Bluesky).
If I understand Bluesky correctly:
When you follow users on Bluesky (even those on a hosted custom server), atprotocol allows you to follow them by a "URL" (DID:web) but by default you're following them by their DID:PLC, a kind of Decentralized Id that is resolved via an equivalent to a "name server" (see: https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc).
You give that name server a DID json representing a user you want to follow or are following, it will tell you the IP of the (custom atproto) server where that user's posts and replies are. By default Bluesky apps only know about PLC nameservers that are in Bluesky's registry.
And so even if I'm using custom hosting if Bluesky PLC nameserver delists my DID (or the nameserver that points to me?) most bluesky users will be unable to find me.
Bluesky is theoretically interested in moving this nameserver under a nonprofit consortium structure - where no one entity could prevent a nameserver from being listed - but no one is working on it, and BlueSky for years hasn't gotten around to it.
My questions are:
1. Is that right, or are there any promising nascent efforts to create a nameserver registry under a consortium structure?
2. Is it fair to ask users, potential users and developers to take it as an article of faith that BlueSky will fully support and partner with such a consortium (since it hasn't helped set one up already in the years of its development)?
3. If Bluesky has features that are not being "backported" to ATproto, does this not raise concerns about Bluesky's conflict of interest in its current stewardship of ATProtocol? One could imagine a situation where Bluesky "slow walks" contributions to ATProto out of its own private company interest in keeping its userbase on Bluesky servers.
I don’t work for bsky, but pay a lot of attention:
1. Basically, yeah. That said, I still think it may be a bit early to do this. A consortium would be useful if it was meaningfully independent of bsky, so you need to grow and gain interest first. Otherwise the “independent group” would be run by the same people, which is pretty meaningless. Plus, working on that means les time for working on other things. I would expect to see this happen once there’s another non-toy atproto application, and for representatives from it to be involved too. Before then feels premature to me, but I can appreciate others may feel differently.
2. I do. The team has continually set out a vision, and then executed on it, over and over. Including following through on things that actively reduce their control over things. Tons of folks asked a similar question previously: “they’re saying that you’ll be able to host your own PDS someday, but do you trust them to actually ship that and not just say they’re gonna a do it and put it off forever and keep control?” And then they shipped it.
3. Any application has semantics built on top of the underlying protocol: that’s what an application is, in some meaningful sense. But I do agree that without independent governance for atproto, doing things like that could stifle other users of atproto, sure. We’re back in the same realm as 1, imho. I’m following the devs of various other apps and none of them have expressed that they think bsky is hoarding the goods so far, at least.
To me the biggest problem with ATProto is to discover the current location of a user, you query https://web.plc.directory/resolve which is a centralized service
Second biggest is that while a PDS does decentralize the data, I belive bsky.app is still the place providing the 'frontend' that makes it all work.
Yes, of course Bluesky is federated. The hosts hold onto your keypairs. The DID:PLC is a substring of your first hash.
For those of you who are interested in solving this my first suggestion is to read the Scuttlebot docs which are still up at: https://scuttlebot.io/
Sometimes I think about a retro Scuttlebot revival. If you want to set sail on this kind of project, contact info is in my bio.
Always liked the ssb protocol and had an account but am just not much of a poster to ever add much value. Appreciate the design and open build process. Been following for a long time, hope you are doing well
Thanks Paul & all.
I also enjoyed Brian Newbold 's post from early August taking inventory of how Bluesky is doing so far at being decentralizable, and what's remaining,
https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/
There's some wildly negative often wildly in my view inaccurate posts down below slinging all kinds of things. So much of it is so wildly off base.
Atproto dev has a ton of strong wins already, and there's been a massive influx of dev interest in the past few weeks. Really looking forward to seeing this ecosystem bloom. I feel like we are at an inflection point.
I don’t understand what the naysayers want? They want an app that is decentralized, completely free, uses nothing remotely related to crypto, doesn’t serve ads, and where it starts day 1 with a robust ecosystem of applications using it.
These people are just winging for followers IMO.
I think you just described the fediverse. The naysayers want you use to use the fediverse instead of centralized crypto stuff.
Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. It doesn't solve some of the problems that come with centralization, it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server). And funnily, it doesn't even solve data portability entirely (you can't actually move your posts). Mastodon's "decentralization" is even worse than a "theoretical promise" of one, cause it's a just marketing promise when it literally just does not work that way in some aspects. You're still "centralized" to whatever server you signed up on, still with caveats that an actual centralized service would have. It's better, but it's truly not all it's made out to be. Definitely not to the point where such sneer and kind of just, speculatively making shit up, wouldn't look just ironic.
> it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server).
this isn’t a “problem” that needs to be solved. you’re not “at the will of the server” in a federated environment, its the actual literal opposite. if i don’t like the server operators or if i don’t like the servers it federates with, that’s totally ok. i start my own and federate with who i like.
this is a good thing, not a “problem.” the ability to freely move and the freedom to associate is incredibly important. and for some weird reason people keep pretending like these things aren’t important if it’s online. its ridiculous.
if i don’t want to spend my play time around eric, i should absolutely be able to move and play somewhere else without eric. that’s actual freedom. if you try to keep me in one place or force me to play with eric, you’re trapping me.
no, the ability to pick and choose how, why, where, and with who i spend my free time is important, its not a “problem”. that’s agency, and i wish people would quit arguing against agency and calling it a problem.
"Being at will of a server" is always a problem, but with federation you can choose which server you are at the will of. You still need trust, but that trust can be chosen by you based off of your needs (and that trust can be placed in yourself). You're on a different part of the trust gradient.
Meanwhile there's a certain quality of service that can be obtained with "mere" federation that is much tougher for many decentralized strategies. The actual topology matters, but federation is a pretty decent model IMO! There's a reason that e-mail has been so useful as a system for so long!
> (you can't actually move your posts)
You can export and import, I believe, for some instances but generically re-posting them to a new instance with the old date isn't currently feasible[0], correct.
You also need to re-federate them to get the "links" correct (and probably de-federate the old) which causes confusing results if your client doesn't handle backdated posts correctly (and most of the ones I was using in 2023 didn't.)
There's probably a solution[1][2] but I think it's something the ActivityPub people just haven't given much thought to just yet.
[0] No date field in https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create
[1] When I was importing a 10 year Twitter history to my Akkoma instance, I just tweaked the code to a) allow backdating posts, b) allow certain accounts to backdate posts and c) not federate backdated posts from those accounts. Doesn't really solve the full problem but worked for me.
[2] Obviously there's other problems such as people creating fake history, etc., if you're allowed to post backdated statuses.
A federated network is a decentralized network. You're probably thinking of distributed networks, which federation is not.
Federation is a form of decentralization. It has its issues but it doesn't mean it isn't decentralized. Moving towards distributed, peer-to-peer applications is the path forward.
> BlueSky's big claim is [they have] "no algorithm".
https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice Over a year ago, a blog claiming the opposite
> But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.
AFAIK People with did:web dids can make accounts and use bluesky
> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.
And one of the first investors was Jack Dorsey. They've used libraries and concepts that are only vogue amongst those with cryptography/cryptocurrency interests. This is not new, this is always been the case.
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A person, any person, can join the relevant developer chats, or find and ask people who are working on or have brought up their own servers, about how centralized or decentralized bsky is, but that does not seem to be the case for this person's research.
did:web is not a decentralized identifier. My understanding is that it was made for test suites but was taken out of that context for production uses.
what does have a "big claim" that they have "no algorithm" is mastodon, which says so on its joinmastodon.org page and in its instance blurb. which just so obviously could not even possibly be true.
It is interesting that nobody comments on the "ownership" data point of the post.
> And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round?
Yet that is the only thing that matters.
The technical pieces for a vast range of alternative designs for online interactions are already available. Decentralized, federated, distributed, peer-to-peer. Who cares? What matters is the outcome.
What is entirely missing in these silly "protocol wars" is any concrete and realistic vision of what that "good next generation Web" looks like, not technically, but economically, socially and politically. Who gets empowered and who gets exploited. Who gets (and how strong) a voice and who gets manipulated by that voice.
The prior norms, social contracts and institutions we used to have in the pre-digital era have been completely corrupted yet there is no visible replacement beyond some vague ideals.
The shape of the "next gen web" very much depends on who funds it, why (what incentives and expectations do they have) and how (what incentives and expectations do they create to the vast ecosystems of developers, entrepreneurs, moderators, users, etc).
Bluesky's claims to why they're better than anything always sound like crazy pill stuff to me.
Other services both centralize identity AND algorithms/operations.
This seems to centralize identity WITHOUT the second thing, which strikes me as the worst of both worlds.
It's just, we've already mostly "solved" the centralized identity problem with EMAIL. As often, the key is "fail elegantly," not be bulletproof. Email, in it's federated state, allows for individuals to more or less choose what kind of centralization they want -- and more importantly, to kill and restart accounts if needed. Thus, Mastodon is the best parallel.
What am I missing? What is the advantage of bluesky here?
I don't have the energy to put all of the advantages and argue for them here, but take a look at https://atproto.com and maybe look around at other blog posts and articles that contrast atproto and ActivityPub. Might just have to do some research, since it's been talked about ad nauseam already in other spaces.
> What is the advantage of bluesky here?
Fewer Nazis.
To date decentralization is inversely correlated to good UX.
* nostr is very decentralized (keys) and has terrible UX (manual management of keys).
* Mastodon is medium decentralized (dependence on DNS; can't migrate accounts) and has bad UX (confusion about which instance to use; "Take Me Home" to interact with anything).
* Bluesky (atproto) is moderately decentralized (did:plc) and has great UX.
The main advantage that atproto has over the other two is that if someone solves the did:plc problem, it can become the first very decentralized/great UX social media platform over night.
Nostr's poor UX is a feature, not a bug. It serves as a reminder that life isn’t perfect.
Basic knowledge of manual key management should be essential for every internet user. Think about password managers.
What I love about Nostr is that individuals can actively participate in making it better. It’s fully open, allowing anyone to build whatever they wish on top of it. I agree it’s not perfect now, but it will improve over time and the progress already made can speak for itself that Nostr is here to stay and it's getting better and better each day. The more developers the Nostr ecosystem has, the faster it will evolve.
Personally, I enjoy using it. Cross-posting has been resolved, so I can’t even remember the last time I opened Twitter. Mastodon never really attract me much. Bluesky is yet another Twitter and it's not decentralized. They can read your DMs btw.
One of best features of Nostr is when you build something, you get users instantly and whenever I post on nostr I cross post to Mastodon and Bluesky as well. Reactions are also interchangeable :)
I think there is an interesting piece to be written about how prone bsky is to being captured by a single entity. It would look at how the reality of PDS today is 99.9999% (not the actual number, but ballpark) bsky hosted, also true for the relay. Then it would outline EEE scenarios, their likelihoods and whether bksy is sufficiently decentralized to fend them off.
This post is not that and misses the mark for me.
This is a ludicrous paranoid screed that, thanks to the nature of Mastodon, will not be on the live internet in a decade's time.
I'm not sure how we can get the point that a centralized seamless UX experience is core to any platform though the thick skulls of people designing decentralized federated services.
Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time frequenting empty communities instead of merging it all together. Regardless of how the backend is handled, centralized or not, people need the same thing on the frontend. These valiant attempts at remaking popular sites for the people by the people are not only fighting every corporation that wants them gone as a concept but also their own dumb decisions, which will probably prove too much of a hurdle in the long run.
I wanted to like lemmy so bad. I lucked into a lifetime ban from Reddit after using it daily for 12 years, so you’d think it would be easy! But there’s just not enough people to make it interesting, not even close. I subbed to every damn instance I could find, and still no luck.
https://slrpnk.net is an exception in that it’s a cute place for activism and related news, but that’s obviously not the only thing I want to use the internet for, especially when I’m looking to relax.
So far, with an n of 5 days: BlueSky is what I was waiting for. Especially for scientific content - memes or otherwise!
> wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening
This is actually reason why I like Mastodon. There is barely anything happening. I get content from few niches - but I do not need it to be generating something every minute. I have no time for that.
But for people who prefer old Twitter experience, BlueSky is pretty good.
related: any high level architecture details on how BlueSky uses SQLite per user?
It's used in a not particularly advanced way - bluesky uses repositories per each user for all their public social activity (posts, likes, etc) and it creates a Merkle tree as an index for them and signs that index (this enables stuff like authenticated content addressing and efficient verification).
SQLite simply stores those posts and that signed Merkle tree. The PDS account host server also has another SQLite DB with a list of its accounts.
They have fancier stuff in their appview server and relay server
Bluesky's marketing is rather annoying on my opinion. They're not defederated in practice and they probably never will be, but that's okay. People don't want a new Mastodon, they want a new Twitter after Musk fucked that up worse than ever.
Their promises of portability may ring empty but so far their lack of AI algorithm and ad feeds are what people actually come to Bluesky for
If you want federation, ActivityPub is there and ready to go. You could probably hack together a bidirectional Bluesky <-> Mastodon bridge without too much effort (requiring an account on BS to post from Mastodon) and enjoy the portability of your main account while also being able to follow your friends and such on BS.
I ultimately came to the conclusion that both those who advocated for the fediverse as a Twitter replacement and those who complained that it was inadequate as a Twitter replacement were both wrong. People don't need “a Twitter” in the first place. It's a terrible website designed to maximize engagement, including negative engagement, for its profit.
I quite agree with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38445649
see: BridgyFed
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How did Musk "fuck [Twitter] up worse than ever"? It has more functionality and is more stable since Musk bought it.
Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works.
Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech.
If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.
95% of end users don't care; but Bluesky has the right bits built in anyway. There's a grand central aggregator of all 13 million accounts, but it's not _special_, someone else could run one (several hobbiests are processing this level of data). Migration works* (and works better than Mastodon, all your history and network move even better than a masto server move) (*okay, it's a weird command line tool at the moment, but as soon as someone cares that'll get cleaned up). You can run your own Personal Data Server and hook it in to the bsky network and then everyone can see your posts and interact with them. It's newer, only a couple years old, but all the right parts are headed in the right direction.
Close to nobody should need to understand what decentralisation means. This was/is a problem with Mastodon. When it was new it required understanding things most people didn’t want to know and arguably shouldn’t need to know.
I’m not sure that’s true. We have a lot of people who are invested in the protocol and the technology. I post threads about it periodically, and people are pretty engaged & excited: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y
Bluesky = 13m users, Mastodon = 9m users.
Bluesky hasn't released what their DAU/MAUs are but Mastodon's aren't that bad.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://mastodon-analytics.com
Outside of tech circles I think that’s generally true. Few people understand what it means for something to be decentralised and fewer people are idealistic enough to care if it means compromising on features.
It’s all about the user experience. See also privacy and security.
X seems to be working quite well. Especially considering the significant reduction in overhead since Elon's purchase.
People are going to nit-pic and while some of the concerns have some weight to them, so far they are trivial IMHO
The fact is we need an alternative to X because the current owner has done and will continue to do terrible things not just to the service but apparently on a personal and political level that is beyond distasteful to a HUGE chunk of the users (if not even greater than 50%)
And Threads isn't going to cut it for similar reasons.
So in an imperfect world Bluesky is what we get and it's a legit alternative that's better.
The fact a Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge exists says A LOT. Good luck ever getting something like that with X without paying a literal fortune for it.
I'm not really sure what the benefit of BS over Mastodon is anyway. Everyone interesting is on Mastodon
Bluesky’s more accessible to the general public. I’m on both, though use Mastodon more (partially due to _far_ better third party clients available); it’s a very different crowd.
People on mastodon are so toxic. I tried to contribute code and content was threatened with lawsuits by people who don't understand that their protocol is explicitly designed for open data
Can you share a link to where this happened?
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I mean, Twitter itself borrowed most of its concepts from either the user base (@ mentions, replies, retweets, quote tweets were all informal behaviours before they were features) or other social media platforms, particularly Tumblr. It is very much a field where doing it well beats being the first.
Of course, if you’re earlier you have network effects, but Carface seems doggedly determined to compensate by driving the existing network away.
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Glad this information is finally going mainstream. BlueSky users used to tell everyone it was more decentralized than Mastodon because of this DID thing.
It’s hard to imagine any upper bound on broken or useless or corrupt that would invalidate one more news feed.
The gates are open on Google Search shaping your information, on Meta shaping your fashion, on Amazon shaping your commercial instinct.
And on YC boosting tired legacies around AirBnB rather than contemporary realities like Garry “Die Motherfucker” Tan pimping Pear “ChatGPT that license” shit on X.
I’ve had a beer with Zuckerberg and one with Dorsey, I say it can’t get any worse.
Still waiting for my day 1 request to be considered for membership to come through. Don't think I made the cut.
You can just sign up now, you don’t need an invite.
Not sure how it is better than Threads.
At least Meta is delivering on their promise to integrate with Mastodon and move us closer to decentralised social networks.
Bluesky integrates with Mastodon better than Threads does at this point. I have bidirectional conversations with mastodon users, with notifications, using a bridge called BridgyFed. I can follow Mastodon users on Bluesky. I can’t with Threads.
I mean, Meta’s ActivityPub integration is one-way on public profiles. I think even Facebook used to allow you to get RSS feeds of your friends’ updates in the early days. Threads’s lip-service towards AP is barely better than that.
I have hard time believing Meta since both Facebook and Instagram are not open to public. But time will tell.