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This early rather than focus on technical problems I would have liked to see the essential question addressed first, how Bluesky will deal with the issue that m

This early rather than focus on technical problems I would have liked to see the essential question addressed first, how Bluesky will deal with the issue that moved us from protocols to platforms to begin with. The reason the internet is now increasingly in vertically integrated platforms is governance. Companies can innovate quickly. The question any protocol driven approach must answer is how it is going to develop and push its protocol forward in the face of dynamic competition from proprietary systems. The reason why we're all now on Slack or Discord or Signal and Whatsapp rather than on IRC or Activity Pub social networks is because firms, that is to say top-down organizations can push features quickly. Decentralization comes at very high costs. If a protocol is too slow in offering more features what will naturally happen is that closed systems will come, fracture it and eat their lunch. This is exactly what already happened once. And given that it already happened, how that can be avoided ought to be answered first.

jaredcwhite 5y ago
Talking about IRC in particular, the reason I'm on Discord is: (a) UX far beyond anything I've seen with IRC (b) super easy for people to create new Discord "servers" (c) super easy to discover or link to Discord servers Talking about social microblogging/commenting (aka Twitter), the reasons I joined then later exited the ActivityPub "fediverse": (a) Twitter's discovery is massively better (b) My "identity" was not portable between instances (that's different from user on Network A interacting with user on Network B), also no easy way to link multiple instance identities If bluesky can solve all these identity/discovery/onboarding UX issues in the context of an open protocol, it'll be a massive step forward.
- rglullis 5y ago
  > My "identity" was not portable between instances (that's different from user on Network A interacting with user on Network B), also no easy way to link multiple instance identities That is by design. It's a federated system! Just like you don't need multiple phone numbers to talk with people in different networks, or different email addresses depending on the recipient, you don't need different identities to communicate with different servers. Unless you want to keep your identities separate, there is no point in having multiple accounts.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    > Unless you want to keep your identities separate, there is no point in having multiple accounts. Until an instance goes down either temporarily or permanently and it was your only account. Then you'll wish you'd had a few extras. How many email addresses do you have? From how many independent providers? Accounts aren't portable but there's no inherent reason that accounts need to map 1:1 to identities. In fact they already don't, a single identity already commonly has multiple accounts. The software just isn't aware of this fact and has no standardized way to communicate it.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      > Until an instance goes down either temporarily or permanently and it was your only account. That's a technical problem, but not a UX or system design one. If a server goes down, my backup account is only going to allow me to keep participating, but it is not going to save the conversations I had on the lost one. > Accounts aren't portable but there's no inherent reason that accounts need to map 1:1 to identities. Again, you are talking about identity portability, which is not the same as "creating one different identity for each different server". In any case, I totally understand the use case and I tried to get the Pleroma devs to focus on this idea as well: https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891 https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891
      - d110af5ccf 5y ago
        > my backup account is only going to allow me to keep participating, but it is not going to save the conversations I had on the lost one. The same issue exists for other services including email, irc, and matrix. The obvious simple and immediate solution is to retain copies of things you care about locally instead of expecting a particular service to stick around forever. With email this used to be standard practice before the rise of webmail. Even now most desktop clients sync to and retain a copy of everything on the local device. > > Accounts aren't portable but there's no inherent reason that accounts need to map 1:1 to identities. > Again, you are talking about identity portability, which is not the same as "creating one different identity for each different server". It seems like it is though? Servers need a way to handle authorization so they presumably need accounts. With a simple protocol, accounts map 1:1 to identities as far as the software and protocol are concerned. If you make a new account then you also make a new "identity" from the perspective of the software. The obvious way to solve that is to map any number of accounts to one (or possibly multiple) identities, where an account is the thing the server is concerned with and an identity is something else such as a private key. There's an additional question about the mechanisms for account creation and authentication. Maybe you don't want to maintain an email and password based login for a long list of accounts that are each tied to the same backing identity. There are multiple approaches available there as well, from oauth providers to public key based authentication possibly including things like cross signing.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  > Twitter's discovery is massively better Do you mean recommendation algorithms, or just the number of users ie network effects? > My "identity" was not portable between instances Your identity isn't portable between email servers either. Or between HN and Reddit. Isn't that part of what Keybase is about? I can imagine a couple ways of achieving this but it runs into a number of thorny issues regarding namespaces. Regardless of the approach taken truly portable identities would require lots of refactoring of lots of software in a FOSS ecosystem with fairly limited developer resources available. Merely linking identities should be much easier but still each piece of software has to support it. Simpler just to link to your other accounts in your bio the same as on any other website.
  - leetbulb 5y ago
    > Isn't that part of what Keybase is about? was
d110af5ccf 5y ago
> because firms, that is to say top-down organizations can push features quickly I'm not convinced that's the case. I think it's more an issue of resource investment. Firms are capable of funding things. Twitter at a low level barely has more "features" than email if you stop and list off what you actually need in order to do what it does. But it has reams of UX stuff built on top of the base functionality, recommendation algorithms, moderation tools, lots of servers, technicians to maintain those servers, etc, etc. FOSS stuff is continually at a resource disadvantage in most domains.
rglullis 5y ago
All of these problems go away the moment that we stop accepting non-free software. If we as consumers start saying "no, even if your product is better I will not sacrifice my long-term freedoms for the short-term advantage and convenience of your product", companies would still innovate, but they would be playing in a more leveled field.
- krapp 5y ago
  How about free software creators start innovating first, instead of insisting people should simply be willing to put up with poor quality because "freedom?" This way of thinking is the reason Gimp will never be a viable competitor to Photoshop. Meanwhile, Blender is actually used by professionals because its quality makes it worth the effort.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Who said anything about "putting up with poor quality"? > This way of thinking is the reason Gimp will never be a viable competitor to Photoshop. Have you contributed to Gimp in any way? How do you expect a barely funded project to compete with a multi-billion dollar company?
    - krapp 5y ago
      > Who said anything about "putting up with poor quality"? you did... >> If we as consumers start saying "no, even if your product is better I will not sacrifice my long-term freedoms for the short-term advantage and convenience of your product (...)" >Have you contributed to Gimp in any way? No. I don't have the time or the specific domain knowledge, and as a tool I don't find it useful enough to use. Have you? I didn't see a name on the contributors' page[0] that resembles your username. >How do you expect a barely funded project to compete with a multi-billion dollar company? I don't know. I do know that isn't an argument that's going to convince anyone using Photoshop to switch over to Gimp. Maybe one of the millionaires that hang out here can do it. [0]https://www.gimp.org/about/authors.html https://www.gimp.org/about/authors.html
eternityforest 5y ago
Decentralization can push features very fast, and support all kinds of extensions and variants that spread and become standards. ActivityPub and all the rest are either not decentralized, or they are blockchainful with all the associated disadvantages. Namely, it doesn't work on isolated LANs, throwing away one of the coolest killer apps of P2P. Federated protocols often tie your identity to some random hobby scale project server. What stops P2P from adding feaures is just the fact that it's a lot of work and nobody seems all that interested, and most P2P projects are held back by a very narrow defined scope, wheras companies like Facebook go for the kitchen sink. The other thing that slows dev is multiple unrelated apps. If you control everything(Which is totally possible in FOSS, if one group is the de facto leader that most people go with), you can update as fast as you want, as long as your protocols have primitives for arbitrary message types. If Tox or Jami had a million dollars, or SyncThing were interested in expanding scope, or a few dozen people wanted to make a social network on BitTorrent they could do just fine, but everyone wants to build yet another Etherium token, or doesn't have the resources to support all platforms and continually add features.
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
The wireless telecom industry does this on the regular. It requires tons of collaboration, tons of design & specification, tons of testing & verification, etc. etc. With all that, I suspect the reason why Bespoke Walled Garden 5G Wireless™ doesn't become a regular occurrence is because the barrier to entry in both buying spectrum and rolling out infrastructure is so incredibly high. I have no idea what if any lessons there are to learn from that, but it is at least an example of where an entire multi-vendor, multi-layer industry migrates forward more akin to the "protocol" model mostly all together.
pfraze 5y ago
Yeah this is a really interesting question. It's the point Moxie brings up when people ask why signal isn't federated or otherwise decentralized. You basically have to solve multi-stakeholder collaboration. You want projects/companies to have the flexibility to add features, but you also don't want subtle incompatibilities to plague the system like "I can't see the picture on your tweet because you use the MediaEmbeds schema and I used the EmbeddedMedias schema." This is the topic I get nerd-sniped about a lot. There are a couple of ideas I want to try. One is machine-readable schemas that get published on the network. That's kind of conceptually similar to what smart contracts represent; there's a program that essentially "lives on the network" and which people can build against, reference by hash/pubkey, etc. It's a coordination primitive. I like how intuitive that feels. Another idea is schema negotiation, essentially metadata that says "this post uses MediaEmbeds, here's what needs to happen if you don't support it." A third idea is using graphs of fact-triples like RDF, which gives you a lot of flexibility but I worry may not solve coordination well enough. And a fourth idea is to use lenses like Ink and Switch talked about with Project Cambria. I think this is a really interesting topic, I hope we find some good answers.
cvwright 5y ago
Fair point. But OTOH Twitter isn’t really innovating anymore either. Arguably the “move fast and break things” phase is over. Now we’re heading into the “monetize or commoditize” phase.

jaredcwhite 5y ago

Talking about IRC in particular, the reason I'm on Discord is: (a) UX far beyond anything I've seen with IRC (b) super easy for people to create new Discord "servers" (c) super easy to discover or link to Discord servers Talking about social microblogging/commenting (aka Twitter), the reasons I joined then later exited the ActivityPub "fediverse": (a) Twitter's discovery is massively better (b) My "identity" was not portable between instances (that's different from user on Network A interacting with user on Network B), also no easy way to link multiple instance identities If bluesky can solve all these identity/discovery/onboarding UX issues in the context of an open protocol, it'll be a massive step forward.

rglullis 5y ago
> My "identity" was not portable between instances (that's different from user on Network A interacting with user on Network B), also no easy way to link multiple instance identities That is by design. It's a federated system! Just like you don't need multiple phone numbers to talk with people in different networks, or different email addresses depending on the recipient, you don't need different identities to communicate with different servers. Unless you want to keep your identities separate, there is no point in having multiple accounts.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  > Unless you want to keep your identities separate, there is no point in having multiple accounts. Until an instance goes down either temporarily or permanently and it was your only account. Then you'll wish you'd had a few extras. How many email addresses do you have? From how many independent providers? Accounts aren't portable but there's no inherent reason that accounts need to map 1:1 to identities. In fact they already don't, a single identity already commonly has multiple accounts. The software just isn't aware of this fact and has no standardized way to communicate it.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    > Until an instance goes down either temporarily or permanently and it was your only account. That's a technical problem, but not a UX or system design one. If a server goes down, my backup account is only going to allow me to keep participating, but it is not going to save the conversations I had on the lost one. > Accounts aren't portable but there's no inherent reason that accounts need to map 1:1 to identities. Again, you are talking about identity portability, which is not the same as "creating one different identity for each different server". In any case, I totally understand the use case and I tried to get the Pleroma devs to focus on this idea as well: https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891 https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891
    - d110af5ccf 5y ago
      > my backup account is only going to allow me to keep participating, but it is not going to save the conversations I had on the lost one. The same issue exists for other services including email, irc, and matrix. The obvious simple and immediate solution is to retain copies of things you care about locally instead of expecting a particular service to stick around forever. With email this used to be standard practice before the rise of webmail. Even now most desktop clients sync to and retain a copy of everything on the local device. > > Accounts aren't portable but there's no inherent reason that accounts need to map 1:1 to identities. > Again, you are talking about identity portability, which is not the same as "creating one different identity for each different server". It seems like it is though? Servers need a way to handle authorization so they presumably need accounts. With a simple protocol, accounts map 1:1 to identities as far as the software and protocol are concerned. If you make a new account then you also make a new "identity" from the perspective of the software. The obvious way to solve that is to map any number of accounts to one (or possibly multiple) identities, where an account is the thing the server is concerned with and an identity is something else such as a private key. There's an additional question about the mechanisms for account creation and authentication. Maybe you don't want to maintain an email and password based login for a long list of accounts that are each tied to the same backing identity. There are multiple approaches available there as well, from oauth providers to public key based authentication possibly including things like cross signing.
d110af5ccf 5y ago
> Twitter's discovery is massively better Do you mean recommendation algorithms, or just the number of users ie network effects? > My "identity" was not portable between instances Your identity isn't portable between email servers either. Or between HN and Reddit. Isn't that part of what Keybase is about? I can imagine a couple ways of achieving this but it runs into a number of thorny issues regarding namespaces. Regardless of the approach taken truly portable identities would require lots of refactoring of lots of software in a FOSS ecosystem with fairly limited developer resources available. Merely linking identities should be much easier but still each piece of software has to support it. Simpler just to link to your other accounts in your bio the same as on any other website.
- leetbulb 5y ago
  > Isn't that part of what Keybase is about? was

d110af5ccf 5y ago

> because firms, that is to say top-down organizations can push features quickly I'm not convinced that's the case. I think it's more an issue of resource investment. Firms are capable of funding things. Twitter at a low level barely has more "features" than email if you stop and list off what you actually need in order to do what it does. But it has reams of UX stuff built on top of the base functionality, recommendation algorithms, moderation tools, lots of servers, technicians to maintain those servers, etc, etc. FOSS stuff is continually at a resource disadvantage in most domains.

rglullis 5y ago

All of these problems go away the moment that we stop accepting non-free software. If we as consumers start saying "no, even if your product is better I will not sacrifice my long-term freedoms for the short-term advantage and convenience of your product", companies would still innovate, but they would be playing in a more leveled field.

krapp 5y ago
How about free software creators start innovating first, instead of insisting people should simply be willing to put up with poor quality because "freedom?" This way of thinking is the reason Gimp will never be a viable competitor to Photoshop. Meanwhile, Blender is actually used by professionals because its quality makes it worth the effort.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Who said anything about "putting up with poor quality"? > This way of thinking is the reason Gimp will never be a viable competitor to Photoshop. Have you contributed to Gimp in any way? How do you expect a barely funded project to compete with a multi-billion dollar company?
  - krapp 5y ago
    > Who said anything about "putting up with poor quality"? you did... >> If we as consumers start saying "no, even if your product is better I will not sacrifice my long-term freedoms for the short-term advantage and convenience of your product (...)" >Have you contributed to Gimp in any way? No. I don't have the time or the specific domain knowledge, and as a tool I don't find it useful enough to use. Have you? I didn't see a name on the contributors' page[0] that resembles your username. >How do you expect a barely funded project to compete with a multi-billion dollar company? I don't know. I do know that isn't an argument that's going to convince anyone using Photoshop to switch over to Gimp. Maybe one of the millionaires that hang out here can do it. [0]https://www.gimp.org/about/authors.html https://www.gimp.org/about/authors.html

eternityforest 5y ago

Decentralization can push features very fast, and support all kinds of extensions and variants that spread and become standards. ActivityPub and all the rest are either not decentralized, or they are blockchainful with all the associated disadvantages. Namely, it doesn't work on isolated LANs, throwing away one of the coolest killer apps of P2P. Federated protocols often tie your identity to some random hobby scale project server. What stops P2P from adding feaures is just the fact that it's a lot of work and nobody seems all that interested, and most P2P projects are held back by a very narrow defined scope, wheras companies like Facebook go for the kitchen sink. The other thing that slows dev is multiple unrelated apps. If you control everything(Which is totally possible in FOSS, if one group is the de facto leader that most people go with), you can update as fast as you want, as long as your protocols have primitives for arbitrary message types. If Tox or Jami had a million dollars, or SyncThing were interested in expanding scope, or a few dozen people wanted to make a social network on BitTorrent they could do just fine, but everyone wants to build yet another Etherium token, or doesn't have the resources to support all platforms and continually add features.

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

The wireless telecom industry does this on the regular. It requires tons of collaboration, tons of design & specification, tons of testing & verification, etc. etc. With all that, I suspect the reason why Bespoke Walled Garden 5G Wireless™ doesn't become a regular occurrence is because the barrier to entry in both buying spectrum and rolling out infrastructure is so incredibly high. I have no idea what if any lessons there are to learn from that, but it is at least an example of where an entire multi-vendor, multi-layer industry migrates forward more akin to the "protocol" model mostly all together.

pfraze 5y ago

Yeah this is a really interesting question. It's the point Moxie brings up when people ask why signal isn't federated or otherwise decentralized. You basically have to solve multi-stakeholder collaboration. You want projects/companies to have the flexibility to add features, but you also don't want subtle incompatibilities to plague the system like "I can't see the picture on your tweet because you use the MediaEmbeds schema and I used the EmbeddedMedias schema." This is the topic I get nerd-sniped about a lot. There are a couple of ideas I want to try. One is machine-readable schemas that get published on the network. That's kind of conceptually similar to what smart contracts represent; there's a program that essentially "lives on the network" and which people can build against, reference by hash/pubkey, etc. It's a coordination primitive. I like how intuitive that feels. Another idea is schema negotiation, essentially metadata that says "this post uses MediaEmbeds, here's what needs to happen if you don't support it." A third idea is using graphs of fact-triples like RDF, which gives you a lot of flexibility but I worry may not solve coordination well enough. And a fourth idea is to use lenses like Ink and Switch talked about with Project Cambria. I think this is a really interesting topic, I hope we find some good answers.

cvwright 5y ago

Fair point. But OTOH Twitter isn’t really innovating anymore either. Arguably the “move fast and break things” phase is over. Now we’re heading into the “monetize or commoditize” phase.