The authors’ difficulty is legitimate and real, but there are less than 50 functioning did:web identities total on the planet.

Working outside of did:plc is a choice - this project is on the very ragged, least baked edge of Atmosphere development.

▲ mdasen 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Working outside of did:plc is a choice

What you're saying is: working outside of centralization is a choice. did:plc is a centralized database controlled by Bluesky.

Bluesky talks a big game about decentralization when it's extremely centralized. Everyone uses the centralized did:plc because it's the one way to really make it function. Until very recently, everyone used the centralized Bluesky AppView - and even now, well over 99% do. Bluesky will say things like "the protocol is locked open", but Bluesky could decide to shut off their firehose at anytime (leaving third parties cut off) and could decide to stop taking incoming data from third parties (leaving anyone on non-Bluesky servers cut off from basically everyone).

In a lot of ways, Bluesky is more like Twitter a decade or so ago. It offers APIs that third parties can use to build off of - but at any time, Bluesky could shut down those APIs. Back then, you could read the Twitter firehose and store the tweets and create your own app view with your own front-end if you wanted. Tweets would need to be sent to the Twitter APIs, but that's not really different than your third-party PDS server sending them to Bluesky if you want anyone else to read them.

You aren't open if someone controls the vast majority of a system because at any time they can decide "why are we doing this open thing? we could probably force the <1% of people elsewhere to migrate to our service if we cut off interoperability." Google Talk (GChat) offered XMPP federation and a lot of people bought into the platform because it was open. At some point, Google realized that the promise of openness had served its purpose and closed it off.

And it's important to think about the long-run here. Twitter was that benevolent dictator for a long time. Bluesky is still early and looking to grow - when they want people building off their system, giving them engagement, ideas, and designs they can copy. We're around year-5 of Bluesky. A decade from now after Bluesky builds its popularity on the back of "we're open and decentralized" while making decentralization extremely difficult, will that change? If Bluesky gets to a few hundred million users and then a third party starts looking like a potential threat, maybe they'll cut that off before they have genuine competition.

Maybe that won't happen with Bluesky. Maybe their investors won't care about the potential for a pay day. But if they have control (either through centralization like did:plc or by controlling the vast majority of the network), there will always be the potential for them to break interoperability. If they start monetizing Bluesky, why should they keep hosting, processing, and serving all that data for third party clients they can't monetize? Why shouldn't they stop federating with third parties before a third party becomes competition?

▲ wmf 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If Bluesky wants to be taken seriously they need to invest in decentralization themselves and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.

▲ Kwpolska 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How many users actually care about decentralization?

	▲	direwolf20 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		None, and it's okay to make a centralised platform but I wish people wouldn't fall for the decentralised marketing hype.

▲ bramhaag 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unfortunately most people couldn't care less. Bluesky has been lying about being decentralized since day 1, and yet they have millions of users.

▲ danpalmer 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Bluesky has been asymptotically approaching full decentralisation. A few years ago the gap was everything except a decentralised design, then it was AppViews, now it's "tooling and documentation" for the bit of the PKI that only 50 entities have done.

Meanwhile I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once, couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance, lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on, all classic signs of centralisation.

▲ bramhaag 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

  > all classic signs of centralisation.

No, these are classic signs of decentralization.

  >  I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once

Your posts still exist on every server that federated with you, there's just no central authority to coordinate reclaiming them.

  > couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance

Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization.

  > lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on

That's just how paying for services works. You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access.

On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely. On Bluesky, the author deleted an empty test account and is now blacklisted network-wide until Bluesky support decides to help. That is a classic sign of centralization.

	▲	danpalmer 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Being beholden to a particular server I have no control over sounds like what happened with Twitter/X. The posts might exist, but they aren't associated with me. Why not? Because I was locked into somewhere and unable to vote with my feet and go elsewhere. Maybe I stopped paying because the instance owner enforced sanctions against my country? Why should I lose my identity because of that? > Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization. Compatibility issues means lock-in to instances under individual control. Shared protocols means lock-in to a protocol, but ultimately freedom to move. We know that open protocols trumps opt-in collaboration by private entities for freedom. > You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access. See also: instances not federating with other instances that are too small. You technically can, but in practice it goes nowhere. > On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely. Bluesky is not perfect, but where it's approaching full decentralisation quickly on a solid foundation, ActivityPub has become the Mastodon show, and is less a decentralised social network, and more a federated set of centralised services with little accountability to users. You can't move, you can't control the content you see, you can't even search. It's a reversion to the days of 14 year olds drunk on power as a mod on a phpbb forum, or the Reddit mods of today.

▲ direwolf20 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I honestly can't tell if this comment is trolling.

▲

danpalmer 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I'll admit it's a bit charged, but I'm frustrated with bad faith takedowns of ATProto/Bluesky, while Mastodon (and it is Mastodon, not ActivityPub) solves almost none of the actual problems. I tried implementing my own ActivityPub server and the spec is so hilariously lacking that it's understandable that everyone just uses the Mastodon API instead.

▲

direwolf20 4 hours ago | parent [-]

ActivityPub isn't actually the spec of Mastodon. Treat claims of "Mastodon is ActivityPub" the same as you treat claims of "Bluesky is decentralised."

Just expose the same interface Mastodon does and you'll be fine. Noting that almost nothing cares about the exact URLs you use, except for webfinger, but does care about the domain being the same as the right side of the @ sign.

	▲	danpalmer 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Treat claims of "Mastodon is ActivityPub" the same as you treat claims of "Bluesky is decentralised." Not sure if you meant this in the way I read it, but I believe that Bluesky is pretty much decentralised and tidying up the last bits of that, and I also believe that Mastodon is functionally ActivityPub and probably mopping up the last bits where the open spec meant anything. The problem with ActivityPub is that it was missing at least half of what would be necessary to do anything with it, maybe more. You certainly can't create clients with it, it doesn't define anything about writing, etc. It's good that it's an open spec, but I see it as closer to Open Graph tags on web pages than it is to a social network foundation. That's fine... but we treat "Mastodon" as open because of ActivityPub, when in reality almost the entire system is defined by a Rails API implementation and its idiosyncrasies. I see it as a problem that you can't participate in the network without implementing an API with one implementation, rather than by implementing to a spec.

▲ wolvoleo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think a lot of those users do care but they don't know they've been lying.