Free Our Feeds: "it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app"
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/24751597
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/24748390
bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.…
tldr, it's a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:
Jimmy Wales, Founder of WikipediaShoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
Mark Ruffalo, Actor
Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker
Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan
Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’
Brian Eno, Musician
Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist
Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist
Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian
Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep
Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords
Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA
...
Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.
Free Our Feeds: "it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app"
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/24748390bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.…
tldr, it's a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:
Jimmy Wales, Founder of WikipediaShoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
Mark Ruffalo, Actor
Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker
Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan
Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’
Brian Eno, Musician
Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist
Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist
Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian
Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep
Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords
Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA
...
Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.
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in reply to Arthur Besse • • •cheese_greater
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Eldritch
in reply to cheese_greater • • •Theoretically, not really. Realistically, no not at all. My understanding, being corporately backed. They want every server to host everything. So that they theoretically have access to everything to datamine and advertise on. In the fediverse. You can see and interact with all the content. But your server doesn't aggregate it unless you interact. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
Basically what this means, is that you could spin up and host your mastodon or Lemmy server on an SBC laying in a drawer spare. Somewhat like Action Retro did with bitbang.social. If you want to run a bsky server. Theoretically you can. You will just need quite a lot of storage, bandwidth, and server hardware. Activity Pub is decentralized. The AT protocol technically can be decentralized in a way. But not really.
Blisterexe
in reply to Eldritch • • •they didn't do it that way for no reason though, and they did do some stuff to alleviate the problems it causes.
also everything bluesky is open source
bluesky-social
GitHubBlaze (he/him)
in reply to Blisterexe • • •So what prevents the relay from being bought by a billionaire, who would then decide on the content of the output?
Blisterexe
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •moonpiedumplings
in reply to Blisterexe • • •Decentralized in theory, but not in practice is just centralized.
Also:
dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent…
How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
dustycloud.orgCorkyskog
in reply to Blisterexe • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to Corkyskog • • •No, instances can be run by enthusiasts and keep operating based on donations
feddit.org/post/2600584
dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent…
How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
dustycloud.orgKichae
in reply to Blisterexe • • •The thing is, the discoverability issue on the fediverse disappears if we stop treating it like it's a centealized space. Everything looks the same, and everything uses the visual language of centralized social media. And we encourage people to "join Mastodon" or "join Lemmy", which is like saying "join WordPress" and "join Joomla".
We need to be promoting specific websites that people can join, for the reason of wanting to communicate with people on those websites. We need to treat federation as a value-add, not the whole damn value proposition.
Until we do, we're just going to be navel gazing.
Sanctus
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Arthur Besse
in reply to Sanctus • • •Mac
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Arthur Besse
in reply to Mac • • •They mention ActivityPub in a few places, such as this blog post.
But I'd recommend dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent… instead, which is the best discussion I've seen so far of the pros and cons of each of the two approaches.
Bluesky: An Open Social Web - Bluesky
BlueskySanctus
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Arthur Besse
in reply to Sanctus • • •How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
dustycloud.orgSanctus
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •AwesomeLowlander
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Arthur Besse
in reply to AwesomeLowlander • • •See the "BlueSky's strengths" section, particularly the last paragraph of it. Content addressability is absolutely essential for building something that will last, and BlueSky gets that right. Decoupling the many responsibilities which an ActivityPub instance operator has (especially for identity) is also essential, i think, and while BlueSky's identity solution is less than ideal it's much better than ActivityPub and I expect it to improve.
If you're interested in the topic you probably want to also read the followup post from the same author (after reading the linked reply from someone on the BlueSky team).
Christine's analysis is by far the best I've read on the topic, but I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that people will actually build things using ATP in a manner more like ActivityPub (where there doesn't need to be a global view). It's also poss
... show moreSee the "BlueSky's strengths" section, particularly the last paragraph of it. Content addressability is absolutely essential for building something that will last, and BlueSky gets that right. Decoupling the many responsibilities which an ActivityPub instance operator has (especially for identity) is also essential, i think, and while BlueSky's identity solution is less than ideal it's much better than ActivityPub and I expect it to improve.
If you're interested in the topic you probably want to also read the followup post from the same author (after reading the linked reply from someone on the BlueSky team).
Christine's analysis is by far the best I've read on the topic, but I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that people will actually build things using ATP in a manner more like ActivityPub (where there doesn't need to be a global view). It's also possible/likely that ActivityPub will eventually evolve to adopt content addressability (Christine actually built a proof-of-concept of doing that years ago, linked in her blog post, but there doesn't appear to be any recent progress in that direction), and decouple identity from responsibility for data availability, and adopt something like BlueSky's composable moderation.
Given their respective advantages over the other, i'm pretty sure that both ATP and AP will make changes which make them more like the other in the coming years.
Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
dustycloud.orgMoogleMaestro
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Whatever reason they don't isn't a very good one when there's already excuses being made around AT proto not being scalable beyond a single app.
ActivityPub works today and we are using it right now. There's basically no incentive to make a new protocol if you aren't willing to support more than 1 platform that uses it.
I'm not even a bluesky hater, but you have to question why they're choosing to reinvent the wheel other than disliking the lack of agency that comes with making a (essentially) proprietary protocol. You have to wonder if they ever truly plan to federated at all or if it's all just lip-service.
Arthur Besse
in reply to MoogleMaestro • • •you don't have to wonder why if you take the time to read about why; see the links in my other comments in this thread if you're curious.
ericjmorey
in reply to MoogleMaestro • • •technomad
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •TORFdot0
in reply to Sanctus • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Arthur Besse
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •There aren't "instances" in the ActivityPub sense, where "instance" means single point of failure you're married to (its name is literally part of your identity) which is simultaneously responsible for keeping your data available and curating your view of the rest of the network; AT Protocol decomposes these responsibilities so that they can be delegated independently to different operators.
See docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-gu… and dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent… for details.
There are many people running their own Personal Data Servers, AppViews, Labelers, and Feed Generators, but I'm not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on). I'm also not sure if you can actually create a
did:plcusing a self-hosted AppView or if maybe you need to usedid:webto create a new identity without using their AppView currently.Federation Architecture | Bluesky
docs.bsky.appBlaze (he/him)
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •The fact that there still isn't any other relay besides thé Bluesky one isn't a good sign. If cost of running it is so high, how are enthusiast supposed to be able to run their own, and thus "own the town square"?
ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •wisdomchicken
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •There are multiple other relays running, and its pretty cheap nowadays, lowest I've seen is someone running a full network non-archive relay for 23usd/month
bsky.app/profile/edavis.dev/po…
Blaze (he/him)
in reply to wisdomchicken • • •Arthur Besse
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •
... show more(if I understand correctly) you don't register on a relay, you register on a PDS (which you can easily self-host on a small computer at home). But, to register with a PDS, you need a DID, and to interoperate with the rest of bluesky it needs to be using one of their two currently-supported DID methods: either did:web or did:plc. The former is a thing which you can create using a domain you control, which gives you an identity that you lose control of when you lose control of that domain. The latter is the actually-centralized "placeholder" DID method implemented by an append-only log operated by BlueSky PBC, which is what most people are actually using. I'm not sure if/how you can create a
(if I understand correctly) you don't register on a relay, you register on a PDS (which you can easily self-host on a small computer at home). But, to register with a PDS, you need a DID, and to interoperate with the rest of bluesky it needs to be using one of their two currently-supported DID methods: either did:web or did:plc. The former is a thing which you can create using a domain you control, which gives you an identity that you lose control of when you lose control of that domain. The latter is the actually-centralized "placeholder" DID method implemented by an append-only log operated by BlueSky PBC, which is what most people are actually using. I'm not sure if/how you can create a
did:plcwithout first creating an account on a bsky.app PDS, but you can migrate it to your own PDS after creating one there. or, you can usedid:weband rely on your domain name registration instead of their centralized log.Further reading:
* How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) (from November last year)
* minimal AppView example
* "self-hosting entire bluesky" with docker-compose (including AppView, apparently)
How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) — alice.bsky.sh
alice.bsky.shwarmaster
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Serge Matveenko
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Arthur Besse
in reply to Serge Matveenko • • •