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Yeah I’m the guy quoted in the opening of the article. Yes. Be wary of Bluesky. That’s our whole point. Run the infrastructure on your own. Build separate comp

by pfraze 8mo ago

Yeah I’m the guy quoted in the opening of the article. Yes. Be wary of Bluesky. That’s our whole point. Run the infrastructure on your own. Build separate companies. Most of the complaints here are just about the cost of scale. You are able to fetch the whole network and its history, and that costs time and money. The only structural centralization is PLC, which is being factored into an independent org.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
bjoli 8mo ago
Considering how hard it has been, and to some extent still is, to run your own Bluesky instance, the main problem is that it automatically becomes centralised in a way that no open protocol will solve. If 97% of your users are on one instance it is not a distributed platform. Applying this to mastodon, I am pretty sure most people would consider it a problem if mastodon.social started getting more than 40% of active users (currently at about 15 iirc).
evbogue 8mo ago
I'd like to encourage anyone who is wary of Bluesky to check out Paul (and Dominic's) back-in-the-day project Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from by using content addressable storage and signing key cryptography correctly. The actual SSB codebase has been kind of broken since 2020, but I have a fork on my own Github that works and comes with a basic client that you can vibe/claw on top of: https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc I'm happy to supply pub invites to anyone who wants to play around with the old sbot with me as we work towards making social media distributed again.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  > Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from I've heard Paul speak about this the other way around, that the experience from SSB informed the design of ATProto. I.e. ATProto solves most of the issues in SSB For clarity, ATProto is the protocol, Bluesky is one dozens of apps, obv the biggest and most well known outside of the ATmosphere.
  - evbogue 8mo ago
    Bluesky does solve a lot of SSBs problems. Both projects can learn from each other. The past can become the future and the present inform the past. This isn't just on Paul, Jay has publically stated that she doesn't believe users (even powerusers) can be trusted with keypairs.
    - yellowapple 8mo ago
      Jay's unfortunately not wrong about that. Hitting that balance between “so secure even I can't access it anymore” v. “so convenient that cybercriminals can access it, too” is less trivial than a lot of the “just use keypairs” crowd likes to admit — even for those of us with many years of experience working with SSH and PGP keys, let alone people who haven't the slightest idea what a “keypair” even is.
      - evbogue 8mo ago
        It can be both.
      - advael 8mo ago
        Keypairs are fairly easy to use if you're on a reasonable unix-like OS and if you're not then frankly nothing is easy to use. Unfortunately this does mean that your statement is true for the majority of devices people use to access social media
- sydbarrett74 8mo ago
  Kudos, evbogue. Thank you for the hard work you've done to keep this alive.
kevinak 8mo ago
Moving the PLC to an independent org doesn't make it decentralized.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  I don't seem any claim in GP's comment that it would make it decentralized. It does seem, by looking across your comments in this thread, that (1) You feel very strongly about what decentralized means w.r.t. social media, bluesky, and the PLC (2) ATProto accepts that it's not planned to be as decentralized as some want, and that it is currently centralized with secondary validators. (3) No answer or plan for the PLC is going to satisfy you. Nor is any argument you make going to change the plans for identity in ATProto for the foreseeable future. This is all fine, people can have different perspectives and work/play in different ecosystems, no one is right or wrong. This is precisely why there are multiple protocols out there and bridges between them. May I then ask why you keep making comments to the same effect aas those you made in the post and multiple times here ~12h ago?
  - kevinak 8mo ago
    The whole premise of a free social media protocol is that it is resistant to hostile takeovers. All issues stem from this. 1. I absolutely feel very strongly about decentralization. If there is a part of the stack that isn't it opens up the whole project to the kind of issues I'm talking about in the blog post. 2. Then it is not made to be resistant to the above problems 3. Actually, this is where you are wrong! If atproto implemented a more robust, decentralized default identity system I would be a very happy camper. I make comments because I care about the subject, obviously. I use Bluesky a lot and I don't want it to end up like Twitter.
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      There is not one right answer and being hostile towards atproto doesn't earn you friends or support for your ideas. I recommend adjusting how you argue for your position, especially the tone. If you want to pay it forward, and repair some the damage to your ability to make proposals within the atmosphere, I would further recommend you write an alternative version with a leading apology and take down the antagonistic version you have published.

by pfraze 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

bjoli 8mo ago

Considering how hard it has been, and to some extent still is, to run your own Bluesky instance, the main problem is that it automatically becomes centralised in a way that no open protocol will solve. If 97% of your users are on one instance it is not a distributed platform. Applying this to mastodon, I am pretty sure most people would consider it a problem if mastodon.social started getting more than 40% of active users (currently at about 15 iirc).

evbogue 8mo ago

I'd like to encourage anyone who is wary of Bluesky to check out Paul (and Dominic's) back-in-the-day project Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from by using content addressable storage and signing key cryptography correctly. The actual SSB codebase has been kind of broken since 2020, but I have a fork on my own Github that works and comes with a basic client that you can vibe/claw on top of: https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc I'm happy to supply pub invites to anyone who wants to play around with the old sbot with me as we work towards making social media distributed again.

verdverm 8mo ago
> Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from I've heard Paul speak about this the other way around, that the experience from SSB informed the design of ATProto. I.e. ATProto solves most of the issues in SSB For clarity, ATProto is the protocol, Bluesky is one dozens of apps, obv the biggest and most well known outside of the ATmosphere.
- evbogue 8mo ago
  Bluesky does solve a lot of SSBs problems. Both projects can learn from each other. The past can become the future and the present inform the past. This isn't just on Paul, Jay has publically stated that she doesn't believe users (even powerusers) can be trusted with keypairs.
  - yellowapple 8mo ago
    Jay's unfortunately not wrong about that. Hitting that balance between “so secure even I can't access it anymore” v. “so convenient that cybercriminals can access it, too” is less trivial than a lot of the “just use keypairs” crowd likes to admit — even for those of us with many years of experience working with SSH and PGP keys, let alone people who haven't the slightest idea what a “keypair” even is.
    - evbogue 8mo ago
      It can be both.
    - advael 8mo ago
      Keypairs are fairly easy to use if you're on a reasonable unix-like OS and if you're not then frankly nothing is easy to use. Unfortunately this does mean that your statement is true for the majority of devices people use to access social media
sydbarrett74 8mo ago
Kudos, evbogue. Thank you for the hard work you've done to keep this alive.

kevinak 8mo ago

Moving the PLC to an independent org doesn't make it decentralized.

verdverm 8mo ago
I don't seem any claim in GP's comment that it would make it decentralized. It does seem, by looking across your comments in this thread, that (1) You feel very strongly about what decentralized means w.r.t. social media, bluesky, and the PLC (2) ATProto accepts that it's not planned to be as decentralized as some want, and that it is currently centralized with secondary validators. (3) No answer or plan for the PLC is going to satisfy you. Nor is any argument you make going to change the plans for identity in ATProto for the foreseeable future. This is all fine, people can have different perspectives and work/play in different ecosystems, no one is right or wrong. This is precisely why there are multiple protocols out there and bridges between them. May I then ask why you keep making comments to the same effect aas those you made in the post and multiple times here ~12h ago?
- kevinak 8mo ago
  The whole premise of a free social media protocol is that it is resistant to hostile takeovers. All issues stem from this. 1. I absolutely feel very strongly about decentralization. If there is a part of the stack that isn't it opens up the whole project to the kind of issues I'm talking about in the blog post. 2. Then it is not made to be resistant to the above problems 3. Actually, this is where you are wrong! If atproto implemented a more robust, decentralized default identity system I would be a very happy camper. I make comments because I care about the subject, obviously. I use Bluesky a lot and I don't want it to end up like Twitter.
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    There is not one right answer and being hostile towards atproto doesn't earn you friends or support for your ideas. I recommend adjusting how you argue for your position, especially the tone. If you want to pay it forward, and repair some the damage to your ability to make proposals within the atmosphere, I would further recommend you write an alternative version with a leading apology and take down the antagonistic version you have published.