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This reminds me of when some NFTs were stolen and OpenSea delisted them. Like yeah, they still exist out there on the blockchain, but when a central authority c

by viccis 1y ago

This reminds me of when some NFTs were stolen and OpenSea delisted them. Like yeah, they still exist out there on the blockchain, but when a central authority can gatekeep peoples' ability to view them, how decentralized are they actually? Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good essay [1] about "Web3" that highlighted a few of these kinds of issues, and I think it applies to anything like Bluesky claiming to be "decentralized" when it's prohibitively difficult to access it any way other than the biggest central service. 1: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Karrot_Kream 1y ago
This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point. Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system. The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all. I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.
- hobs 1y ago
  This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations. Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    In fact, I'd argue that blue sky encouraged this by nerfing federation from the beginning. Rather than adopting ActivityPub, they made their own boutique protocol and put up barriers for third parties to use that protocol.
    - blackqueeriroh 1y ago
      ActivityPub is a bad protocol.
  - didibus 1y ago
    I have to disagree a little. You might be right simply that no one actual cares about any of this, and 99% of people don't care at all who gets banned or censored and who doesn't. And they'd all just stick around to the one place where everyone else is and that's that. But this is an argument against the idea that people care or don't. Assuming people do care, then Bluesky is the first protocol attempt that could actually work, because it lets you move your existing account freely to any alternatives easily, and because it also allows you to control your own recommendation algorithms. If people don't care, than, people don't care, and that's that. But if people do care, you need to achieve the above behavior, and that becomes a technical challenge that tech can solve.
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    Why wouldn't they? You join the platform, make friends with folks who say stuff like "Vance and Singal shouldn't be here but the people that give them death threats should", then they tell you to hop onto "Cleansky" which has its own Appview that filters out Vance, Singal, and platforms your buddies. You don't need to make a new account or anything. The default experience just needs to be good enough. Beyond that folks with strong opinions will filter into moderation communities that offer them the curation they want. That's the technical side of this at least. There's larger problems around community culture but unrelated to tech.
    - FreeTrade 1y ago
      The decentralization problem in BlueSky is not filtering out users, but rather hearing from users that BlueSky has decided to filter out.
- extraduder_ire 1y ago
  Moderation labels are applied at the client level, not at appview level. Forks of the official client (e.g. deer.social) allow you to completely remove the official moderation labeller.
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    Yes. Sorry, I was imprecise in my explanation.
tshaddox 1y ago
There are plenty of criticisms of Web3, but this doesn't seems like a particularly valid one. What could the people who designed the relevant blockchains and smart contracts have done differently to prevent one marketplace from becoming dominant?
- LikesPwsh 1y ago
  The users could reject exchanges and trade entirely on-chain, but that's expensive/complicated/risky. It is a serious concern for cryptocurrency that most users don't even get the touted benefits because of reliance on exchanges.
  - bryceneal 1y ago
    OpenSea is very nearly "entirely on-chain" if I'm understanding your point correctly. It's powered by smart contracts. It's not custodial like Coinbase or Robinhood. Users custody their assets in their own wallets. They trade by submitting transactions directly from their wallet to a smart contract address on-chain which facilitates fulfillment of the trade. The code for these smart contracts is open source and verifiable. It may not be obvious to more casual observers, but there is a lot of trading volume happening on on-chain exchanges these days (as in easily 10B+ in trading volume per day with most of this coming from futures).
    - LikesPwsh 1y ago
      Anyone can generate an NFT, including IP you don't own or existing collections. Hundreds of wallets might contain a the same monkey picture (or same hash and IPFS link to nitpick). What matters is that Opensea says you have the "real" one. Their database is the real list of who owns what, the blockchain is a distraction. You can see it in their anti-theft systems. NFTs get hidden and blocked from trading after a police report, even if it's still there on the chain.
      - bryceneal 1y ago
        I would disagree with that characterization. There are dozens of NFT marketplaces which all have access to the same underlying data. An NFT is denoted by its address on chain, which is trivial to find. Similarly anyone can create a website that looks like Google, but the "real" google is the DNS entry at "google.com".

by viccis 1y ago

Karrot_Kream 1y ago

This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point. Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system. The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all. I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.

hobs 1y ago
This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations. Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
- cogman10 1y ago
  In fact, I'd argue that blue sky encouraged this by nerfing federation from the beginning. Rather than adopting ActivityPub, they made their own boutique protocol and put up barriers for third parties to use that protocol.
  - blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    ActivityPub is a bad protocol.
- didibus 1y ago
  I have to disagree a little. You might be right simply that no one actual cares about any of this, and 99% of people don't care at all who gets banned or censored and who doesn't. And they'd all just stick around to the one place where everyone else is and that's that. But this is an argument against the idea that people care or don't. Assuming people do care, then Bluesky is the first protocol attempt that could actually work, because it lets you move your existing account freely to any alternatives easily, and because it also allows you to control your own recommendation algorithms. If people don't care, than, people don't care, and that's that. But if people do care, you need to achieve the above behavior, and that becomes a technical challenge that tech can solve.
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  Why wouldn't they? You join the platform, make friends with folks who say stuff like "Vance and Singal shouldn't be here but the people that give them death threats should", then they tell you to hop onto "Cleansky" which has its own Appview that filters out Vance, Singal, and platforms your buddies. You don't need to make a new account or anything. The default experience just needs to be good enough. Beyond that folks with strong opinions will filter into moderation communities that offer them the curation they want. That's the technical side of this at least. There's larger problems around community culture but unrelated to tech.
  - FreeTrade 1y ago
    The decentralization problem in BlueSky is not filtering out users, but rather hearing from users that BlueSky has decided to filter out.
extraduder_ire 1y ago
Moderation labels are applied at the client level, not at appview level. Forks of the official client (e.g. deer.social) allow you to completely remove the official moderation labeller.
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  Yes. Sorry, I was imprecise in my explanation.

tshaddox 1y ago

There are plenty of criticisms of Web3, but this doesn't seems like a particularly valid one. What could the people who designed the relevant blockchains and smart contracts have done differently to prevent one marketplace from becoming dominant?

LikesPwsh 1y ago
The users could reject exchanges and trade entirely on-chain, but that's expensive/complicated/risky. It is a serious concern for cryptocurrency that most users don't even get the touted benefits because of reliance on exchanges.
- bryceneal 1y ago
  OpenSea is very nearly "entirely on-chain" if I'm understanding your point correctly. It's powered by smart contracts. It's not custodial like Coinbase or Robinhood. Users custody their assets in their own wallets. They trade by submitting transactions directly from their wallet to a smart contract address on-chain which facilitates fulfillment of the trade. The code for these smart contracts is open source and verifiable. It may not be obvious to more casual observers, but there is a lot of trading volume happening on on-chain exchanges these days (as in easily 10B+ in trading volume per day with most of this coming from futures).
  - LikesPwsh 1y ago
    Anyone can generate an NFT, including IP you don't own or existing collections. Hundreds of wallets might contain a the same monkey picture (or same hash and IPFS link to nitpick). What matters is that Opensea says you have the "real" one. Their database is the real list of who owns what, the blockchain is a distraction. You can see it in their anti-theft systems. NFTs get hidden and blocked from trading after a police report, even if it's still there on the chain.
    - bryceneal 1y ago
      I would disagree with that characterization. There are dozens of NFT marketplaces which all have access to the same underlying data. An NFT is denoted by its address on chain, which is trivial to find. Similarly anyone can create a website that looks like Google, but the "real" google is the DNS entry at "google.com".