5 ms·

There's basically only one instance. There's only one PLC directory. There's very few full relays (edit: appviews), none that I'm aware of that don't mirror b

There's basically only one instance. There's only one PLC directory. There's very few full relays (edit: appviews), none that I'm aware of that don't mirror bluesky censorship/moderation decisions.

iameli 4mo ago
There are many relays, here's a list of 13 but it's not comprehensive: https://tangled.org/firehose.club/community-firehose-list/blob/main/relays.toml https://tangled.org/firehose.club/community-firehose-list/bl... Bluesky's moderation actions are generally implemented as moderation labels which take effect at the AppView level. Sometimes they'll take down someone's PDS or censor from their relays, but I don't believe third-party relays are aware of those relay takedowns at all.
- RobotToaster 4mo ago
  You're right, I was probably confusing appviews with relays.
danabramov 4mo ago
- There's no "instances" so I don't know what you mean by this. - Re: PLC directory, indeed, there is only one of those. I think this is a legit point but it's worth considering the whole point of PLC directory is to be the single minimal stateless open source part that lifts identities out of apps and hostings. PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization (https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN. Here's more on that: https://youtu.be/9z0z-Qu66yM?si=_8Dcw1M3VSKFGZhm&t=493 https://youtu.be/9z0z-Qu66yM?si=_8Dcw1M3VSKFGZhm&t=493 - Re: full Relays, they're easy/cheap to run, and you can run one yourself if you think the other ones are coordinating with Bluesky and don't trust their decisions. You don't need to depend on something else to do that.
- JoshTriplett 4mo ago
  > PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization (https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN. And since that sounds like a massive centralization problem, how do we have a dozen more of them with independent governance that aren't all controlled by either the same legal entity or by whoever has legal leverage to compel that entity?
  - danabramov 4mo ago
    Well, I think you also need to consider what PLC is. It’s an open source implementation of an open source spec. The implementation holds zero private state and exposes a verifiable log of operations for audit. There’s ongoing work on mirrors and replicas. Also, its output itself is cryptographically self-verifying. I get that it’s not ideal but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s not much you can mess up with it other than refusing to update requests. The threat model is very limited and it would immediately be obvious that this is happening, killing the credibility.
    - pfraze 4mo ago
      I’d also call out that activitypub has the same threat model in the form of ICANN, as it’s also heavily dependent on DNS for identity. I believe these are reasonable trades to make; realistically the alternative is to use a blockchain, which few people are keen to do.
      - inigyou 4mo ago
        ATProto has both PLC and ICANN ICANN is a severe risk btw. Current new protocols should be designed to avoid DNS wherever possible.
        RobotToaster 4mo ago
        Or use multiple alternative DNS roots like OpenNIC.
tao_oat 4mo ago
Most decentralized systems I can think of tend to follow a power law distribution (roughly) where one or a few platforms dominate. In the fediverse that's mastodon.social (or maybe Threads), in email that's Gmail, in AP that's Bluesky. I'm not sure this is unique to the AT protocol?
- BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
  I think the centralization on mastodon.social is a bit over estimated. According to fedidb.com there are over 1.1M active users in the fediverse. Of these mastodon.social has about 273k. That means mastodon.social has about 1/4 of the active users. The rest are scattered over nearly 43k servers. So I'd say the fediverse is pretty decentralized. That would make it pretty resilient.
  - snailmailman 4mo ago
    This is the real strength of ActivityPub compared to ATProto. I follow a lot of accounts on mastodon, and only a handful of them are on mastodon.social. Globally though looks like 1/4 of the accounts are there. If the instance goes down, the network stays up and continues to work, minus only the accounts on mastodon.social. This is not the case on bluesky afaik. They got DDosed a few months ago and the whole network was down because of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802330 In ATProto there aren't 'instances', and its technically 'decentralized' but theres really only bluesky.
    - tao_oat 4mo ago
      When Bluesky got DDoS'ed then, many people switched to using another AppView like Blacksky and things worked just fine. But this is indeed somewhat technical; in an ideal world clients would automatically fall back to alternative AppViews.
- dokyun 4mo ago
  On fedi there are several distinct pockets apart from the mastodon crowd which although don't dominate in raw headcount have their own flavour and unique view of the network (in 2nd place is "dark fedi", which has more shitposters, hackers and free speech adjacents; there's also a contingent of Japanese users mostly on Misskey instances). What I get out of AT is that this wouldn't really happen, since the content distribution would dominate your view with Bluesky posts regardless of your relationship with the rest of the network.
runako 4mo ago
re: censorship & moderation, the folks @ BlackSky have been active in building out an alternative moderation structure (alongside running PDSes & AppViews).

There's basically only one instance. There's only one PLC directory. There's very few full relays (edit: appviews), none that I'm aware of that don't mirror bluesky censorship/moderation decisions.

iameli 4mo ago

There are many relays, here's a list of 13 but it's not comprehensive: https://tangled.org/firehose.club/community-firehose-list/blob/main/relays.toml https://tangled.org/firehose.club/community-firehose-list/bl... Bluesky's moderation actions are generally implemented as moderation labels which take effect at the AppView level. Sometimes they'll take down someone's PDS or censor from their relays, but I don't believe third-party relays are aware of those relay takedowns at all.

RobotToaster 4mo ago
You're right, I was probably confusing appviews with relays.

danabramov 4mo ago

- There's no "instances" so I don't know what you mean by this. - Re: PLC directory, indeed, there is only one of those. I think this is a legit point but it's worth considering the whole point of PLC directory is to be the single minimal stateless open source part that lifts identities out of apps and hostings. PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization (https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN. Here's more on that: https://youtu.be/9z0z-Qu66yM?si=_8Dcw1M3VSKFGZhm&t=493 https://youtu.be/9z0z-Qu66yM?si=_8Dcw1M3VSKFGZhm&t=493 - Re: full Relays, they're easy/cheap to run, and you can run one yourself if you think the other ones are coordinating with Bluesky and don't trust their decisions. You don't need to depend on something else to do that.

JoshTriplett 4mo ago
> PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization (https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN. And since that sounds like a massive centralization problem, how do we have a dozen more of them with independent governance that aren't all controlled by either the same legal entity or by whoever has legal leverage to compel that entity?
- danabramov 4mo ago
  Well, I think you also need to consider what PLC is. It’s an open source implementation of an open source spec. The implementation holds zero private state and exposes a verifiable log of operations for audit. There’s ongoing work on mirrors and replicas. Also, its output itself is cryptographically self-verifying. I get that it’s not ideal but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s not much you can mess up with it other than refusing to update requests. The threat model is very limited and it would immediately be obvious that this is happening, killing the credibility.
  - pfraze 4mo ago
    I’d also call out that activitypub has the same threat model in the form of ICANN, as it’s also heavily dependent on DNS for identity. I believe these are reasonable trades to make; realistically the alternative is to use a blockchain, which few people are keen to do.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      ATProto has both PLC and ICANN ICANN is a severe risk btw. Current new protocols should be designed to avoid DNS wherever possible.
      - RobotToaster 4mo ago
        Or use multiple alternative DNS roots like OpenNIC.

tao_oat 4mo ago

Most decentralized systems I can think of tend to follow a power law distribution (roughly) where one or a few platforms dominate. In the fediverse that's mastodon.social (or maybe Threads), in email that's Gmail, in AP that's Bluesky. I'm not sure this is unique to the AT protocol?

BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
I think the centralization on mastodon.social is a bit over estimated. According to fedidb.com there are over 1.1M active users in the fediverse. Of these mastodon.social has about 273k. That means mastodon.social has about 1/4 of the active users. The rest are scattered over nearly 43k servers. So I'd say the fediverse is pretty decentralized. That would make it pretty resilient.
- snailmailman 4mo ago
  This is the real strength of ActivityPub compared to ATProto. I follow a lot of accounts on mastodon, and only a handful of them are on mastodon.social. Globally though looks like 1/4 of the accounts are there. If the instance goes down, the network stays up and continues to work, minus only the accounts on mastodon.social. This is not the case on bluesky afaik. They got DDosed a few months ago and the whole network was down because of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802330 In ATProto there aren't 'instances', and its technically 'decentralized' but theres really only bluesky.
  - tao_oat 4mo ago
    When Bluesky got DDoS'ed then, many people switched to using another AppView like Blacksky and things worked just fine. But this is indeed somewhat technical; in an ideal world clients would automatically fall back to alternative AppViews.
dokyun 4mo ago
On fedi there are several distinct pockets apart from the mastodon crowd which although don't dominate in raw headcount have their own flavour and unique view of the network (in 2nd place is "dark fedi", which has more shitposters, hackers and free speech adjacents; there's also a contingent of Japanese users mostly on Misskey instances). What I get out of AT is that this wouldn't really happen, since the content distribution would dominate your view with Bluesky posts regardless of your relationship with the rest of the network.

runako 4mo ago

re: censorship & moderation, the folks @ BlackSky have been active in building out an alternative moderation structure (alongside running PDSes & AppViews).