11 ms·

The network is designed to be "locked open" in a way that prevents this. The architecture is designed to work like the web.

yupyup54133 3y ago
Nothing against Bluesky, but I think we are all a little jaded after seeing decades of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern.
- lolinder 3y ago
  This would be more "create, extinguish", because there's no existing AT protocol network to embrace.
  - hardcopy 3y ago
    "embrace" would be the rise of decentralized social media
    - lolinder 3y ago
      If there can exist an "extinguish" step for the concept of decentralized social media itself then decentralized social media has already failed. The whole point is supposed to be about changing hearts and minds to embrace self-governance, a rug pull should just result in people moving somewhere else.
      - secstate 3y ago
        But that's sort of why Bluesky is not really decentralized, just federated. It's a pretty significant difference. Mastodon is federated and decentralized. Twitter is non-federated and centralized. Bluesky is trying to be the federated, centralized option. Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's nothing like the disaster my online life was before I gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social media functions against my person.
        steveklabnik 3y ago
        How is BlueSky centralized? I could see that argument before this feature shipped, but "BlueSky is trying to be the federated, centralized option" goes counter to what the team has said directly. I could maybe see an argument not based on technical premises, but instead something like "it will defacto become one because running a relay is too expensive" or such. Is that what you're going for?
        Balladeer 3y ago
        I'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to pay back the money it owes investors. I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes. Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness. I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed. - [1] https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-culture-is-the-dominant-term/ https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu...
        secstate 3y ago
        Yes. In the sense that Mastodon is decentralized because there is no one Mastodon server. One may accumulate more users or be the "default" for the community of users, but there is no Mastodon server (much to the chagrin of many new users). We don't even need the hypothetical "it will defacto become..." because Bluesky Social was, up till now, the ONLY way to participate in the community. They had 3 million users before federation, and now we can start to hook into what they've built, but the idea from the start was clearly not built around federation and decentralization, otherwise it would have been federated from day one, as Mastodon was. They can HOPE now, that people accept the federation concept, but there's enough gnashing of teeth around the pain of running Mastodon instance that it seems really clear that going from central to decentral is, if we're being intellectually honest, a bridge too far for most to cross.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Being jaded is understandable, but because this critique is generic, it is applicable to literally anything and everything. I don't see how you can ever get something that's considered good if you always assume it will turn into something bad regardless of its current stance.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Actually it's very hard, and becomes tiring after some point. I personally always keep a hope that I'll be wrong in the long run. Sometimes I'm spot on, sometimes I stand corrected. The problem is, as time goes, your free time reserve starts to decline. You optimize things, consolidate services, etc., and these kind of migrations start to take tons of time. Because of this, I gave "big web" up and moved to "small web", and always have plans to evacuate any service in a moment's notice. It's like being a doomsday-preparer from a point, but at least I have backups and backup plans for everything.
  - itsanaccount 3y ago
    Thats easy, you don't have a structure made with a single large actor capable of changing the rules of the game mid flight. You get something good system by sharing power, not by once again falling for "trust us bro." You get it by understanding power imbalances and avoiding them the same way my dog avoids objects with large amounts of potential energy, because they're predictably dangerous.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      I understand this, yet, when presented with exactly this, the response was "well what about EEE."
    - preciousoo 3y ago
      The protocol and hosting mechanisms are open source. There’s one actor currently sure, but it seems like bluesky is not holding onto that.
    - mcherm 3y ago
      So presumably today's announcement that they are now supporting self-hosted instances is welcome news to you -- it is a huge stride in the direction you are advocating for.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
what binds this? I have no interest in joining if Jack can sell to Elon again and a switch gets flipped
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  That specific scenario is impossible, in my understanding, because Jack does not have an ownership stake in the company. This release, of federation, is in my mind a major answer to the real question you're asking, which is the same but with "the employees" instead of "Jack," as they have the equity stake. Once things are federated, other folks gain power over the protocol, by virtue of usage. If Bluesky PBLLC starts to do shady things, the other instances can refuse to do so, and talk to each other instead. This is why the split between AT and BlueSky is important, and why this news matters, as it is meaningfully delivering on the desire to protect against such a thing.
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    Right I didn't mean to get into the business aspect, but essentially "what prevents someone from undoing this for money." Thanks for the detail.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      It's all good. The Jack thing is, in my mind, a bit sensitive, because a lot of people criticizing BlueSky talk as though Jack runs the place, owns it, etc, all of which seems factually incorrect. He has a board seat, but seemingly cares about it so little that he deleted his account. From what I hear, nostr is his focus, but I'm not on there so I can't speak to that personally.
      - mort96 3y ago
        Jack has certainly been successful in building a general perception that bsky is "the Twitter founder's" next social network project, intentionally or otherwise
  - 3y ago
jorams 3y ago
In the same way that Google stopped federating by no longer accepting connections from others, as long as most people keep their stuff at Bluesky they can also just close themselves off from others again. I don't necessarily think it is a big risk, but the only reason the web is resilient to this is that no single ISP controls enough of the network to take it "private". Basically, until atproto is much bigger than bsky.app, the situation is not very different.
mort96 3y ago
How can it "lock open"? If 90+% of users are on the official bluesky servers, what could possibly technically prevent bluesky from just no longer federating with other hosts?
Repulsion9513 3y ago
> A central directory server collects and validates operations, and maintains a transparent log of operations for each DID. (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/R... linked from https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation)
stonogo 3y ago
So is Signal, and yet here we are
torginus 3y ago
You are not in control of what you see in your feed, it's the algorithm that chooses for you. So while technically all kinds of content can exist, most users will only see what's officially approved.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  BlueSky literally allows for users to create their own feeds with whatever algorithms they want, and to share them with others. You can follow them as easily as you can follow an account. I'm already following several.

yupyup54133 3y ago

Nothing against Bluesky, but I think we are all a little jaded after seeing decades of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern.

lolinder 3y ago
This would be more "create, extinguish", because there's no existing AT protocol network to embrace.
- hardcopy 3y ago
  "embrace" would be the rise of decentralized social media
  - lolinder 3y ago
    If there can exist an "extinguish" step for the concept of decentralized social media itself then decentralized social media has already failed. The whole point is supposed to be about changing hearts and minds to embrace self-governance, a rug pull should just result in people moving somewhere else.
    - secstate 3y ago
      But that's sort of why Bluesky is not really decentralized, just federated. It's a pretty significant difference. Mastodon is federated and decentralized. Twitter is non-federated and centralized. Bluesky is trying to be the federated, centralized option. Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's nothing like the disaster my online life was before I gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social media functions against my person.
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        How is BlueSky centralized? I could see that argument before this feature shipped, but "BlueSky is trying to be the federated, centralized option" goes counter to what the team has said directly. I could maybe see an argument not based on technical premises, but instead something like "it will defacto become one because running a relay is too expensive" or such. Is that what you're going for?
        Balladeer 3y ago
        I'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to pay back the money it owes investors. I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes. Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness. I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed. - [1] https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-culture-is-the-dominant-term/ https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu...
        secstate 3y ago
        Yes. In the sense that Mastodon is decentralized because there is no one Mastodon server. One may accumulate more users or be the "default" for the community of users, but there is no Mastodon server (much to the chagrin of many new users). We don't even need the hypothetical "it will defacto become..." because Bluesky Social was, up till now, the ONLY way to participate in the community. They had 3 million users before federation, and now we can start to hook into what they've built, but the idea from the start was clearly not built around federation and decentralization, otherwise it would have been federated from day one, as Mastodon was. They can HOPE now, that people accept the federation concept, but there's enough gnashing of teeth around the pain of running Mastodon instance that it seems really clear that going from central to decentral is, if we're being intellectually honest, a bridge too far for most to cross.
steveklabnik 3y ago
Being jaded is understandable, but because this critique is generic, it is applicable to literally anything and everything. I don't see how you can ever get something that's considered good if you always assume it will turn into something bad regardless of its current stance.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Actually it's very hard, and becomes tiring after some point. I personally always keep a hope that I'll be wrong in the long run. Sometimes I'm spot on, sometimes I stand corrected. The problem is, as time goes, your free time reserve starts to decline. You optimize things, consolidate services, etc., and these kind of migrations start to take tons of time. Because of this, I gave "big web" up and moved to "small web", and always have plans to evacuate any service in a moment's notice. It's like being a doomsday-preparer from a point, but at least I have backups and backup plans for everything.
- itsanaccount 3y ago
  Thats easy, you don't have a structure made with a single large actor capable of changing the rules of the game mid flight. You get something good system by sharing power, not by once again falling for "trust us bro." You get it by understanding power imbalances and avoiding them the same way my dog avoids objects with large amounts of potential energy, because they're predictably dangerous.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    I understand this, yet, when presented with exactly this, the response was "well what about EEE."
  - preciousoo 3y ago
    The protocol and hosting mechanisms are open source. There’s one actor currently sure, but it seems like bluesky is not holding onto that.
  - mcherm 3y ago
    So presumably today's announcement that they are now supporting self-hosted instances is welcome news to you -- it is a huge stride in the direction you are advocating for.

micromacrofoot 3y ago

what binds this? I have no interest in joining if Jack can sell to Elon again and a switch gets flipped

steveklabnik 3y ago
That specific scenario is impossible, in my understanding, because Jack does not have an ownership stake in the company. This release, of federation, is in my mind a major answer to the real question you're asking, which is the same but with "the employees" instead of "Jack," as they have the equity stake. Once things are federated, other folks gain power over the protocol, by virtue of usage. If Bluesky PBLLC starts to do shady things, the other instances can refuse to do so, and talk to each other instead. This is why the split between AT and BlueSky is important, and why this news matters, as it is meaningfully delivering on the desire to protect against such a thing.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  Right I didn't mean to get into the business aspect, but essentially "what prevents someone from undoing this for money." Thanks for the detail.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    It's all good. The Jack thing is, in my mind, a bit sensitive, because a lot of people criticizing BlueSky talk as though Jack runs the place, owns it, etc, all of which seems factually incorrect. He has a board seat, but seemingly cares about it so little that he deleted his account. From what I hear, nostr is his focus, but I'm not on there so I can't speak to that personally.
    - mort96 3y ago
      Jack has certainly been successful in building a general perception that bsky is "the Twitter founder's" next social network project, intentionally or otherwise
- 3y ago

jorams 3y ago

In the same way that Google stopped federating by no longer accepting connections from others, as long as most people keep their stuff at Bluesky they can also just close themselves off from others again. I don't necessarily think it is a big risk, but the only reason the web is resilient to this is that no single ISP controls enough of the network to take it "private". Basically, until atproto is much bigger than bsky.app, the situation is not very different.

mort96 3y ago

How can it "lock open"? If 90+% of users are on the official bluesky servers, what could possibly technically prevent bluesky from just no longer federating with other hosts?

Repulsion9513 3y ago

> A central directory server collects and validates operations, and maintains a transparent log of operations for each DID. (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/R... linked from https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation)

stonogo 3y ago

So is Signal, and yet here we are

torginus 3y ago

You are not in control of what you see in your feed, it's the algorithm that chooses for you. So while technically all kinds of content can exist, most users will only see what's officially approved.

steveklabnik 3y ago
BlueSky literally allows for users to create their own feeds with whatever algorithms they want, and to share them with others. You can follow them as easily as you can follow an account. I'm already following several.