9 ms·

How Does Bluesky Work?

248 points by steveklabnik 3y ago

NoPedantsThanks 3y ago
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oDot 3y ago
Why not use ActivityPub? ActivityPub is a federated social networking technology popularized by Mastodon. Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data. Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors). from https://atproto.com/guides/faq https://atproto.com/guides/faq
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aatd86 3y ago
  Domain usernames is a very good point.
  - Diti 3y ago
    Until trademark laws come into play, and you find yourself obligated by law to give up your domain username to a big corporation. (A famous example in France is “Milka vs. Kraft Foods”, the court favored the big corporation’s registered trademark over Mrs Milka’s name.) Granted, my comment doesn’t add much to the discussion, since this domain ownership issue would have been a problem in ActivityPub too.
    - samatman 3y ago
      That's also not how atproto domain usernames are implemented. The identity is just a public key, basically. There's a resolution service which uses domains, but you can move the identity, with all the data, to another one.
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      Seems still better than the current status quo, where twitter can just decide to give your handle to kraft because they feel like it. At least there's already a relatively established dispute mechanism for domains.
    - jakebailey 3y ago
      > Until trademark laws come into play, and you find yourself obligated by law to give up your domain username to a big corporation. This wouldn't be a big deal in practice (besides losing the domain). Domain usernames are just the combo of you telling Bluesky "I intend to use this domain name" and then you placing a TXT record on the domain to prove you own it. If you want to change domains (or, are forced to), you just give them the new domain name and you set another TXT record (just like if you had set up a domain name as a username for the first time). The underlying DID is still yours.
    - pests 3y ago
      Didn't GitHub or Twitter or someone force someone to give up @Kik or similar?
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        No, npm themselves chose to take the name away from someone and give it to someone else.
      - omoikane 3y ago
        That was npm, which lead to a left-pad incident. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870 - Kik, left-pad, and npm (2016)
    - 3y ago
- mariusor 3y ago
  Using double-@ user identifiers for actor discovery is not an ActivityPub feature. It's a bastardization of webfinger resource search added and popularized by Mastodon. In ActivityPub URLs are the identifiers, be it for actors or anything else. And the URL can be just of a domain, therefore it's perfectly possible to have domain named identifiers.
skybrian 3y ago
I believe there’s currently a single relay. When there are multiple relays, each will have a different view of the network, and the one that includes more posts will be better than the others. It might be quite hard to get relay diversity rather than using a single dominant relay, sort of like attempting to get traction for an alternative DNS system. Then, if your posts don’t get picked up by the dominant relay then it seems like you’re out of luck? But it’s still very early, so perhaps it won’t work out that way. And even if there is a dominant relay, well, GitHub isn’t so bad, and there are alternatives.
- wmf 3y ago
  I would expect every relay to have everything (modulo different opinions about illegal content). Why do you think they would have different views of the network?
  - s1gnp0st 3y ago
    It's virtually guaranteed that different relays will take different views regarding disinformation, harm, etc. This is probably good, too. I personally don't want my hand held, but recognize that others justifiably want someone else to filter out gore, or even opinions they find sufficiently off-putting. I don't want to ram particular content down anyone else's throat, but I'm 100% opposed to anyone making that decision for me.
    - wmf 3y ago
      My understanding is that relays will not filter anything except really illegal material (child porn). Moderation is based on labeling, not deleting.
      - layer8 3y ago
        Is it possible for a relay to filter individual posts, or do the Merkle trees prevent that? (They would if they need to be signed by the originating user.)
      - 3y ago
paholg 3y ago
This seems incredibly well thought out, and seems like it solves some of the bigger issues with ActivityPub. I had no interest in Bluesky before; now I think I'll make an account.
- city41 3y ago
  Had a similar response. Dusted off my account and finally posted something.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Same, actually. The fact that I can get the @stavros.io handle just by adding a DNS record is a nice touch.
- remram 3y ago
  My main problem with Bluesky and the AT protocol is not their apparent technical merits so much as the strong "not invented here" approach. Like their "domain as identity" instead of using user@host like everyone else and established protocols like WebFinger. Like using their own mechanism for that instead of looking at how ACME already does it for certificates, leading to someone owning the s3.amazon.com domain [1]. Like using their brand-new RPC protocol, "XRPC". Like whatever Lexicon is, a weird code-generation-based data schema whose only benefit over protobuf and jsonld is that it's newer. It is hard to trust an "open network" that demonstrates time and time again that they don't respect and don't want to talk to anyone else. It also makes you wonder how many more common mistakes have slipped in the design simply because they reject common knowledge. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/138hlf2/s3_domain_claimed_on_bluesky_by_someone_who/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/138hlf2/s3_dom...
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    Your comment could have been more constructive if you have included more "common mistakes" than things you just don't like, the only exception being handle squatting. Like, what is a specific benefit of `user@host` as opposed to a single domain---which can be generated on demand---as an identity? (And who is "everything else" here? Almost all non-Mastodon social networks don't use them.) Also a value of the common schema language is not that high, especially when that language is coupled with the serialization format and prevents any improvement.
KerrAvon 3y ago
I'm skeptical about third-party labelers. How do you prevent that from being abused?
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  What kind of abuse are you talking about? I'd be happy to give you my take, but it's a bit too broad for me to know how to answer.
- edavis 3y ago
  Users choose which 3p labelers they subscribe to. If a labeler service starts abusing their position, users can drop it. https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0002-labeling-and-moderation-controls https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0002-l... is a deep-dive on how Bluesky sees labelers fitting into the ecosystem.
- arcalinea 3y ago
  We'll be publishing a lot more about moderation soon, but the basics of labelers: - anyone can label anything in the network — including other labelers - apps can surface labelers for users to subscribe to, similar to how custom feeds currently work in bluesky - apps can exercise curation over how labelers get surfaced and ranked, similar to how custom feeds get surfaced (currently ranked by popularity expressed through likes and saves)
1905 3y ago
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taion 3y ago
A fun bit of Bluesky trivia is that it’s also named after a person, apropos that post from a bit ago – the CEO’s first name is literally “blue sky” in Mandarin.
- arcalinea 3y ago
  Twitter named the project bluesky before I got involved, funnily enough. Coincidence. But my middle name does mean bluesky in Mandarin.
taion 3y ago
One thing I’m curious about here is how BlueSky can credibly commit to only use the open portions of the protocol. BlueSky appears to be de facto quite centralized – given that, it seems like there’s no technical reason why first-party BlueSky clients have to be ATProto clients. Obviously it would be a major betrayal of user trust to do so any time in the near-to-medium-term future, but it seems like the de facto decentralization of ActivityPub gives stronger guardrails here.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  What are first party BlueSky clients? Do you mean that a first party relay and PDS could communicate over a different protocol. I don't really understand what you are worried about. 2 activitypub clients could talk to each other over a protocol that is not activitypub.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  I mean, the code for everything is open source. It's credible because they're doing it. If they started changing to not do it, people would notice, very quickly.
  - taion 3y ago
    That makes sense. So first they have to go closed-source before that attack vector is even feasible, and doing so would be sufficient on its own to raise alarms.
jrm4 3y ago
While I appreciate them getting to the "speech v. reach" thing; Mastodon still feels long-run smarter out of simplicity (if short-run less fun or useful because Mastodon feed curation is definitely harder) The main question, to me, is: If a hypothetical (likely wealthy or powerful) bad actor wants to put their thumb the scales here, how can they? And this article REALLY hand-waved that away very poorly, with the whole "oh, I don't really know how the feeds work" bit. Makes me very suspicious that they know good and darn well not only how the feeds will work, but that they understand that this is where the power and/or money is and will try to keep a hold of that.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Which part implied we don't know how feeds work? They're open source, and exist today, and you can run them. > wants to put their thumb the scales here Which scales, and in which sense? There's a lot of moving parts here.
- vlz 3y ago
  I don't think "oh, I don't really know how the feeds work" is the best summary. Let me quote the author: > Feeds are a recent addition to atproto, and therefore, while they do exist, they may not be feature complete just yet, and may undergo some change in the future. We’ll see. They’re working just fine from my perspective, but I haven’t been following the lower level technical details. One paragraph above for some more context: > This to me is one of the killer features of BlueSky over other microblogging tools: total user choice. If I want to make my own [feed] algorithm, I can do so. And I can share them easily with others.
  - danabramov 3y ago
    Here’s some docs and some code that give an overview of how feeds work: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator
throwaway290 3y ago
Does this mean if bluesky stop supporting did:plc then all preexisting plc identities go kaput? Since plc involves pinging their service...
- edavis 3y ago
  https://plc.directory https://plc.directory can be mirrored and this new mirror would become the authority if something like this happened
BlueTemplar 3y ago
> For example, if every time I post a new update on BlueSky, if I had to send my post to every single one of my followers’ repositories, that would be extremely inefficent, and make running a popular repository very expensive to run. Of course it would be inefficient, the Internet is not a broadcast medium ! Which is why AFAIK typically the only thing that is pushed (in large scale applications) is the existence of a message (and maaaybe a short title), your "followers" then pull the message when they want to see it. (Some of course might be big enough "fans" of you that they decide to "subscribe", and set up an "AI" to automatically pull all of your messages as soon as published.) So it seems to be a weird strawman of a solution nobody would even try to use at large scale, or am I missing something ??
avinassh 3y ago
This short comic is also great - https://bsky.social/about/welcome-to-bluesky-comic https://bsky.social/about/welcome-to-bluesky-comic
mariusor 3y ago
With all due respect to Steve, he only demonstrates how the AT protocol ecosystem has ways of passing the buck from content creator to (uncreative but rich) middlemen, for dissemination, moderation, content curation, etc. That is antithetic to what the indie web should be in my opinion: allowing corporations, because let's face it who'll be able to scale better, to control who sees what I post and who I see is not what I want from my social media. We have enough of that as it is.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  I am going to be honest, I do not see how I demonstrated that. Can you be more specific?
  - mariusor 3y ago
    > if I had to send my post to every single one of my followers’ repositories, that would be extremely inefficent, [..] an additional kind of service, called a relay, that aggregates information in the network, and exposes it as a firehose to others Therefore a company with money/resources to build this relay will be in control if/how the firehose presents my content as a content creator/pds owner. This will create the same imbalance of power you find today with Youtube/Twitch/Instagram/etc. The solution is not to add intermediaries, but to make this dissemination to all of those followers less inefficient. Designing a whole protocol to cater to the .1% of users that might get into the million followers is another level of premature optimization, in my opinion. For the others, sending requests to 10k followers should be plenty reasonable to do with off the shelf computing without requiring protocol level intermediaries like relays. AT protocol, in my opinion, caters to the "scale" crowd and in doing that puts all the power in the hands of the few that can do it better. Instead of democratizing social media, which what a federated protocol would imply, it actually maintains the status quo albeit by changing the companies holding the power.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      Okay, thanks. I think the fact that you can run your own relays mitigates this, but I can understand some skepticism.
est 3y ago
How does it compare to Nostr?
- sph 3y ago
  They're actually more similar than I expected. Nostr seems to have gotten lost in trying to be a decentralised store of everything [1], while BlueSky is focusing on Twitter-style social media and its challenges—moderation, portability, etc. (though I'm unsure if ATproto can support other types of decentralised content) Nothing wrong with being a store of everything like Nostr, it's just that a totally open model of contribution with no direction or oversight (well, except fiatjaf) tends to end up bogged down following a million different and often competing ideas. It's very active, but moving in 196 directions: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls
  - evbogue 3y ago
    https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/26.md https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/26.md NIP-26 (and if there is anything else similar) is one to point to here. Once you, the developer, are required to implement (thiskey === thatkey) a relay operator has to index the entire network before a post can be rendered in compliance with that NIP. It does bog it way down, as you mentioned. this public key does not equal that public key either as much as we might wish they could.
grey_earthling 3y ago
> The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a federated protocol for large-scale distributed social applications. Well, there's the problem: large-scale and social are incompatible. Humans evolved to be sociable with maybe a few hundred people. No-one has ever made a good restaurant by inventing a system to deliver millions of calories per second to each diner.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  The scale is the whole system, so many different groups of people. To take your restaurant comparison that'd be like saying McDonalds is an average sized restaurant, which might be true for each individual McDonalds, but not for the entire system of the McDonalds chain of restaurants.
Angostura 3y ago
The idea of users choosing their moderation provider which is independent of their hosting provider so they don’t have to worry too much about choice of instance sounds cool, except that I imagine that instances will still have to moderate to avoid falling foul of hosting locally illegal content. This feels like it could end up being quite difficult for people running instances and end up as a big of a mess. It may be that I have misunderstood, however.
- davidgerard 3y ago
  you haven't. Bluesky decentralisation is fake. A PDS is a reasonable Ubuntu box, but even this post admits that a relay is a huge expensive central point of control. What's the Bluesky plan for spam? Block it at the relay, maybe. The DID server is the other central point of control. But sure, go wild with PDSes.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  It is true that folks who host content will have to deal with the legal repercussions of the content that they host, and that inevitably, they will have to deal with this. That's true no matter what protocols you're using to host, however.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    Yeh, but part of the promise of Bluesky is 'your moderation regimes is picked by you and it's not linked to your host'. Except it is so now your moderation regime is determined by two entities, not one.
xg15 3y ago
> Moderation tools fall under the “reach” layer: you take all of that speech, but provide a way to limit the reach of stuff you don’t care to see yourself. Sometimes, people say that BlueSky is “all about free speech” or “doesn’t do moderation.” This is simply inaccurate. Moderation tooling is encoded into the protocol itself, so that it can work with all content on the network, even non-BlueSky applications. Moreover, it gives you the ability to choose your own moderators, so that you aren’t beholden to anyone else’s choice of moderation or lack thereof. Ah yes, the famous "if you don't want to see this content, just close your eyes" approach to moderation. I know this philosophy is well-liked in Silicon Valley, but I think it's fundamentally flawed: There are legitimate situations in which you want to prevent unrelated other people from talking about a certain thing or acquiring certain content. Classic examples are cybermobbing, doxxing and revenge porn: Two or more people talking about how to hurt a third person, publishing private, unflattering or false information about the person, etc. Removing this information from the victim's feed is completely useless (in fact it likely won't appear in their feed in the first place) as the harm comes from the fact that other people view the content or engage in the discussion. Nevertheless, the harm is real. In a system with traditional moderation, a moderator could stop this kind of behaviour by deleting the posts for everyone and/or banning the perpetrators. None of this is possible in a "just hide the content" system. Shared blocklists or "labels" won't work either as the consumers of the content don't have any motivation to block it - indeed, they want to see the revenge porn. The one who wants to block it is the victim, but it has no power to force everyone to use a particular blocklist. (The whole idea behind this system is to no one can force a blocklist on someone else)
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  There is more stuff in this space coming; I am focusing on the normal cases in this post, and not the bad cases. The team has considered stuff like this, “consulted with experts,” even, but it’s ongoing work and so I don’t feel qualified to talk about it. The “labels won’t work because they want to see it rather than block it” is a part of the problem space I’ve seen them acknowledge explicitly. EDIT: see here too: https://lobste.rs/s/shseqz/how_does_bluesky_work#c_vjvmei https://lobste.rs/s/shseqz/how_does_bluesky_work#c_vjvmei

248 points by steveklabnik 3y ago

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oDot 3y ago

Why not use ActivityPub? ActivityPub is a federated social networking technology popularized by Mastodon. Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data. Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors). from https://atproto.com/guides/faq https://atproto.com/guides/faq

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aatd86 3y ago
Domain usernames is a very good point.
- Diti 3y ago
  Until trademark laws come into play, and you find yourself obligated by law to give up your domain username to a big corporation. (A famous example in France is “Milka vs. Kraft Foods”, the court favored the big corporation’s registered trademark over Mrs Milka’s name.) Granted, my comment doesn’t add much to the discussion, since this domain ownership issue would have been a problem in ActivityPub too.
  - samatman 3y ago
    That's also not how atproto domain usernames are implemented. The identity is just a public key, basically. There's a resolution service which uses domains, but you can move the identity, with all the data, to another one.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Seems still better than the current status quo, where twitter can just decide to give your handle to kraft because they feel like it. At least there's already a relatively established dispute mechanism for domains.
  - jakebailey 3y ago
    > Until trademark laws come into play, and you find yourself obligated by law to give up your domain username to a big corporation. This wouldn't be a big deal in practice (besides losing the domain). Domain usernames are just the combo of you telling Bluesky "I intend to use this domain name" and then you placing a TXT record on the domain to prove you own it. If you want to change domains (or, are forced to), you just give them the new domain name and you set another TXT record (just like if you had set up a domain name as a username for the first time). The underlying DID is still yours.
  - pests 3y ago
    Didn't GitHub or Twitter or someone force someone to give up @Kik or similar?
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      No, npm themselves chose to take the name away from someone and give it to someone else.
    - omoikane 3y ago
      That was npm, which lead to a left-pad incident. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870 - Kik, left-pad, and npm (2016)
  - 3y ago
mariusor 3y ago
Using double-@ user identifiers for actor discovery is not an ActivityPub feature. It's a bastardization of webfinger resource search added and popularized by Mastodon. In ActivityPub URLs are the identifiers, be it for actors or anything else. And the URL can be just of a domain, therefore it's perfectly possible to have domain named identifiers.

skybrian 3y ago

I believe there’s currently a single relay. When there are multiple relays, each will have a different view of the network, and the one that includes more posts will be better than the others. It might be quite hard to get relay diversity rather than using a single dominant relay, sort of like attempting to get traction for an alternative DNS system. Then, if your posts don’t get picked up by the dominant relay then it seems like you’re out of luck? But it’s still very early, so perhaps it won’t work out that way. And even if there is a dominant relay, well, GitHub isn’t so bad, and there are alternatives.

wmf 3y ago
I would expect every relay to have everything (modulo different opinions about illegal content). Why do you think they would have different views of the network?
- s1gnp0st 3y ago
  It's virtually guaranteed that different relays will take different views regarding disinformation, harm, etc. This is probably good, too. I personally don't want my hand held, but recognize that others justifiably want someone else to filter out gore, or even opinions they find sufficiently off-putting. I don't want to ram particular content down anyone else's throat, but I'm 100% opposed to anyone making that decision for me.
  - wmf 3y ago
    My understanding is that relays will not filter anything except really illegal material (child porn). Moderation is based on labeling, not deleting.
    - layer8 3y ago
      Is it possible for a relay to filter individual posts, or do the Merkle trees prevent that? (They would if they need to be signed by the originating user.)
    - 3y ago

paholg 3y ago

This seems incredibly well thought out, and seems like it solves some of the bigger issues with ActivityPub. I had no interest in Bluesky before; now I think I'll make an account.

city41 3y ago
Had a similar response. Dusted off my account and finally posted something.
- stavros 3y ago
  Same, actually. The fact that I can get the @stavros.io handle just by adding a DNS record is a nice touch.
remram 3y ago
My main problem with Bluesky and the AT protocol is not their apparent technical merits so much as the strong "not invented here" approach. Like their "domain as identity" instead of using user@host like everyone else and established protocols like WebFinger. Like using their own mechanism for that instead of looking at how ACME already does it for certificates, leading to someone owning the s3.amazon.com domain [1]. Like using their brand-new RPC protocol, "XRPC". Like whatever Lexicon is, a weird code-generation-based data schema whose only benefit over protobuf and jsonld is that it's newer. It is hard to trust an "open network" that demonstrates time and time again that they don't respect and don't want to talk to anyone else. It also makes you wonder how many more common mistakes have slipped in the design simply because they reject common knowledge. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/138hlf2/s3_domain_claimed_on_bluesky_by_someone_who/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/138hlf2/s3_dom...
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  Your comment could have been more constructive if you have included more "common mistakes" than things you just don't like, the only exception being handle squatting. Like, what is a specific benefit of `user@host` as opposed to a single domain---which can be generated on demand---as an identity? (And who is "everything else" here? Almost all non-Mastodon social networks don't use them.) Also a value of the common schema language is not that high, especially when that language is coupled with the serialization format and prevents any improvement.

KerrAvon 3y ago

I'm skeptical about third-party labelers. How do you prevent that from being abused?

steveklabnik 3y ago
What kind of abuse are you talking about? I'd be happy to give you my take, but it's a bit too broad for me to know how to answer.
edavis 3y ago
Users choose which 3p labelers they subscribe to. If a labeler service starts abusing their position, users can drop it. https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0002-labeling-and-moderation-controls https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0002-l... is a deep-dive on how Bluesky sees labelers fitting into the ecosystem.
arcalinea 3y ago
We'll be publishing a lot more about moderation soon, but the basics of labelers: - anyone can label anything in the network — including other labelers - apps can surface labelers for users to subscribe to, similar to how custom feeds currently work in bluesky - apps can exercise curation over how labelers get surfaced and ranked, similar to how custom feeds get surfaced (currently ranked by popularity expressed through likes and saves)

1905 3y ago

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taion 3y ago

A fun bit of Bluesky trivia is that it’s also named after a person, apropos that post from a bit ago – the CEO’s first name is literally “blue sky” in Mandarin.

arcalinea 3y ago
Twitter named the project bluesky before I got involved, funnily enough. Coincidence. But my middle name does mean bluesky in Mandarin.

taion 3y ago

One thing I’m curious about here is how BlueSky can credibly commit to only use the open portions of the protocol. BlueSky appears to be de facto quite centralized – given that, it seems like there’s no technical reason why first-party BlueSky clients have to be ATProto clients. Obviously it would be a major betrayal of user trust to do so any time in the near-to-medium-term future, but it seems like the de facto decentralization of ActivityPub gives stronger guardrails here.

charcircuit 3y ago
What are first party BlueSky clients? Do you mean that a first party relay and PDS could communicate over a different protocol. I don't really understand what you are worried about. 2 activitypub clients could talk to each other over a protocol that is not activitypub.
steveklabnik 3y ago
I mean, the code for everything is open source. It's credible because they're doing it. If they started changing to not do it, people would notice, very quickly.
- taion 3y ago
  That makes sense. So first they have to go closed-source before that attack vector is even feasible, and doing so would be sufficient on its own to raise alarms.

jrm4 3y ago

While I appreciate them getting to the "speech v. reach" thing; Mastodon still feels long-run smarter out of simplicity (if short-run less fun or useful because Mastodon feed curation is definitely harder) The main question, to me, is: If a hypothetical (likely wealthy or powerful) bad actor wants to put their thumb the scales here, how can they? And this article REALLY hand-waved that away very poorly, with the whole "oh, I don't really know how the feeds work" bit. Makes me very suspicious that they know good and darn well not only how the feeds will work, but that they understand that this is where the power and/or money is and will try to keep a hold of that.

steveklabnik 3y ago
Which part implied we don't know how feeds work? They're open source, and exist today, and you can run them. > wants to put their thumb the scales here Which scales, and in which sense? There's a lot of moving parts here.
vlz 3y ago
I don't think "oh, I don't really know how the feeds work" is the best summary. Let me quote the author: > Feeds are a recent addition to atproto, and therefore, while they do exist, they may not be feature complete just yet, and may undergo some change in the future. We’ll see. They’re working just fine from my perspective, but I haven’t been following the lower level technical details. One paragraph above for some more context: > This to me is one of the killer features of BlueSky over other microblogging tools: total user choice. If I want to make my own [feed] algorithm, I can do so. And I can share them easily with others.
- danabramov 3y ago
  Here’s some docs and some code that give an overview of how feeds work: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator

throwaway290 3y ago

Does this mean if bluesky stop supporting did:plc then all preexisting plc identities go kaput? Since plc involves pinging their service...

edavis 3y ago
https://plc.directory https://plc.directory can be mirrored and this new mirror would become the authority if something like this happened

BlueTemplar 3y ago

> For example, if every time I post a new update on BlueSky, if I had to send my post to every single one of my followers’ repositories, that would be extremely inefficent, and make running a popular repository very expensive to run. Of course it would be inefficient, the Internet is not a broadcast medium ! Which is why AFAIK typically the only thing that is pushed (in large scale applications) is the existence of a message (and maaaybe a short title), your "followers" then pull the message when they want to see it. (Some of course might be big enough "fans" of you that they decide to "subscribe", and set up an "AI" to automatically pull all of your messages as soon as published.) So it seems to be a weird strawman of a solution nobody would even try to use at large scale, or am I missing something ??

avinassh 3y ago

This short comic is also great - https://bsky.social/about/welcome-to-bluesky-comic https://bsky.social/about/welcome-to-bluesky-comic

mariusor 3y ago

With all due respect to Steve, he only demonstrates how the AT protocol ecosystem has ways of passing the buck from content creator to (uncreative but rich) middlemen, for dissemination, moderation, content curation, etc. That is antithetic to what the indie web should be in my opinion: allowing corporations, because let's face it who'll be able to scale better, to control who sees what I post and who I see is not what I want from my social media. We have enough of that as it is.

steveklabnik 3y ago
I am going to be honest, I do not see how I demonstrated that. Can you be more specific?
- mariusor 3y ago
  > if I had to send my post to every single one of my followers’ repositories, that would be extremely inefficent, [..] an additional kind of service, called a relay, that aggregates information in the network, and exposes it as a firehose to others Therefore a company with money/resources to build this relay will be in control if/how the firehose presents my content as a content creator/pds owner. This will create the same imbalance of power you find today with Youtube/Twitch/Instagram/etc. The solution is not to add intermediaries, but to make this dissemination to all of those followers less inefficient. Designing a whole protocol to cater to the .1% of users that might get into the million followers is another level of premature optimization, in my opinion. For the others, sending requests to 10k followers should be plenty reasonable to do with off the shelf computing without requiring protocol level intermediaries like relays. AT protocol, in my opinion, caters to the "scale" crowd and in doing that puts all the power in the hands of the few that can do it better. Instead of democratizing social media, which what a federated protocol would imply, it actually maintains the status quo albeit by changing the companies holding the power.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Okay, thanks. I think the fact that you can run your own relays mitigates this, but I can understand some skepticism.

est 3y ago

How does it compare to Nostr?

sph 3y ago
They're actually more similar than I expected. Nostr seems to have gotten lost in trying to be a decentralised store of everything [1], while BlueSky is focusing on Twitter-style social media and its challenges—moderation, portability, etc. (though I'm unsure if ATproto can support other types of decentralised content) Nothing wrong with being a store of everything like Nostr, it's just that a totally open model of contribution with no direction or oversight (well, except fiatjaf) tends to end up bogged down following a million different and often competing ideas. It's very active, but moving in 196 directions: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls
- evbogue 3y ago
  https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/26.md https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/26.md NIP-26 (and if there is anything else similar) is one to point to here. Once you, the developer, are required to implement (thiskey === thatkey) a relay operator has to index the entire network before a post can be rendered in compliance with that NIP. It does bog it way down, as you mentioned. this public key does not equal that public key either as much as we might wish they could.

grey_earthling 3y ago

> The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a federated protocol for large-scale distributed social applications. Well, there's the problem: large-scale and social are incompatible. Humans evolved to be sociable with maybe a few hundred people. No-one has ever made a good restaurant by inventing a system to deliver millions of calories per second to each diner.

SahAssar 3y ago
The scale is the whole system, so many different groups of people. To take your restaurant comparison that'd be like saying McDonalds is an average sized restaurant, which might be true for each individual McDonalds, but not for the entire system of the McDonalds chain of restaurants.

Angostura 3y ago

The idea of users choosing their moderation provider which is independent of their hosting provider so they don’t have to worry too much about choice of instance sounds cool, except that I imagine that instances will still have to moderate to avoid falling foul of hosting locally illegal content. This feels like it could end up being quite difficult for people running instances and end up as a big of a mess. It may be that I have misunderstood, however.

davidgerard 3y ago
you haven't. Bluesky decentralisation is fake. A PDS is a reasonable Ubuntu box, but even this post admits that a relay is a huge expensive central point of control. What's the Bluesky plan for spam? Block it at the relay, maybe. The DID server is the other central point of control. But sure, go wild with PDSes.
steveklabnik 3y ago
It is true that folks who host content will have to deal with the legal repercussions of the content that they host, and that inevitably, they will have to deal with this. That's true no matter what protocols you're using to host, however.
- Angostura 3y ago
  Yeh, but part of the promise of Bluesky is 'your moderation regimes is picked by you and it's not linked to your host'. Except it is so now your moderation regime is determined by two entities, not one.

xg15 3y ago

> Moderation tools fall under the “reach” layer: you take all of that speech, but provide a way to limit the reach of stuff you don’t care to see yourself. Sometimes, people say that BlueSky is “all about free speech” or “doesn’t do moderation.” This is simply inaccurate. Moderation tooling is encoded into the protocol itself, so that it can work with all content on the network, even non-BlueSky applications. Moreover, it gives you the ability to choose your own moderators, so that you aren’t beholden to anyone else’s choice of moderation or lack thereof. Ah yes, the famous "if you don't want to see this content, just close your eyes" approach to moderation. I know this philosophy is well-liked in Silicon Valley, but I think it's fundamentally flawed: There are legitimate situations in which you want to prevent unrelated other people from talking about a certain thing or acquiring certain content. Classic examples are cybermobbing, doxxing and revenge porn: Two or more people talking about how to hurt a third person, publishing private, unflattering or false information about the person, etc. Removing this information from the victim's feed is completely useless (in fact it likely won't appear in their feed in the first place) as the harm comes from the fact that other people view the content or engage in the discussion. Nevertheless, the harm is real. In a system with traditional moderation, a moderator could stop this kind of behaviour by deleting the posts for everyone and/or banning the perpetrators. None of this is possible in a "just hide the content" system. Shared blocklists or "labels" won't work either as the consumers of the content don't have any motivation to block it - indeed, they want to see the revenge porn. The one who wants to block it is the victim, but it has no power to force everyone to use a particular blocklist. (The whole idea behind this system is to no one can force a blocklist on someone else)

steveklabnik 3y ago
There is more stuff in this space coming; I am focusing on the normal cases in this post, and not the bad cases. The team has considered stuff like this, “consulted with experts,” even, but it’s ongoing work and so I don’t feel qualified to talk about it. The “labels won’t work because they want to see it rather than block it” is a part of the problem space I’ve seen them acknowledge explicitly. EDIT: see here too: https://lobste.rs/s/shseqz/how_does_bluesky_work#c_vjvmei https://lobste.rs/s/shseqz/how_does_bluesky_work#c_vjvmei