> why is a centralized “burn” able to completely prevent me from interacting with people using Bluesky?
Presumably to stop credential reuse attacks on Bluesky itself?
Bluesky is one instance and they should enforce security on that instance. If you use a previously burnt ID, they have no way to tell it's you (indeed that's the whole point!)
I've done some work in the DID space. Not really a fan, and the space is full of half working implementations like this post documents.
We should only build peer to peer social protocols.
Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control).
{Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}.
Bluesky and Mastodon are the wrong architecture.
The web, fancy javascript UI/UX, and microservices shouldn't be the focus. The protocol should be the focus.
A fully distributed protocol would dictate the solution to this exact problem.
Bluesky is designed the way it is because of scale. How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Bsky is designed so that the microservices themselves can be decentralized and so multiple different types of apps can be built on the same protocol/infra.
Obviously, it’s early days, and hopefully there is even more experimentation in the p2p space. But atproto architecture is a very fair experiment in this space. I can store my data on my own server, use a client app I wrote, subscribe to a specific aggregation/feed service I prefer, use the moderation list I want… all while still being connected to the larger protocol & network. It’s pretty neat.
So I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes.
What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.
Complexity acts like a gate. When we make the code too hard to understand, we are telling regular people that they are not allowed to participate. True ownership of your data is only possible if you can actually afford to host it yourself. We should focus on making things simple enough for anyone to use.
Indeed, it's a pity that the author placed so much focus on a cool looking font that they forgot to take basic properties like "good readability" into account. Form should follow function, not the other way around.
fair enough, the did:web flows are not documented even for technical atproto developers, and there needs to be a self-serve way to heal identity/account problems elsewhere in the network (the "burn" problem).
I do think that did:plc provides more pragmatic freedom and control than did:web for most folks, though the calculus might be different for institutions or individuals with a long-term commitment to running their own network services. But did:web should be a functional alternative on principle.
I'm glad that the PDS was easy to get up and running, and that the author was able to find a supportive community on discord.
I wrote a Bluesky app in preparation for a client project. ATProto is over-engineered for my purposes, though probably justifiably carefully engineered for the purposes of a big social Twitter-like thing. But since I didn't have to do the engineering, so what? It's a very solid platform for many kinds of multi-user information-sharing systems.
This article does give me the impression that I should make and use more test accounts than I currently do when mucking around with ATProto/Bluesky.
My experience using ATProto is that it is somewhat like how the nascent blockchain apps were when they first came out: there's no written content that is viable. Instead, you're supposed to use ephemeral conversations and read a widely disparate set of notes in order to use it. In the end, the upshot of all this is that you get to use a slightly worse form of Twitter - which is already rather unpleasant to use for me because there's a lot of rage content there.
Microblogs are fun, and very often I can't justify a whole blog post, but I have seen that others just post their thoughts intermingled and it makes me wonder if perhaps that is what I should do. There's not that much utility to the wide audience anyway. Talking to people who understand you is much nicer anyway.
This continues to confirm for me that there's nothing particularly valuable about ATProto, and that some of the percieved "flaws" in models like Mastodon's model are features just as much as bugs.
Honestly, this is making me go further in the other direction, can we just do "twitter but owned by a trust" or something?
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?
Key management shouldn't have to be difficult. Consider another open microblogging protocol nostr. There a keypair is crucial to the experience and every client automatically generates one if you don't have one to import.
I think this part of the UX is just being neglected by bluesky.
> why is a centralized “burn” able to completely prevent me from interacting with people using Bluesky?
Presumably to stop credential reuse attacks on Bluesky itself?
Bluesky is one instance and they should enforce security on that instance. If you use a previously burnt ID, they have no way to tell it's you (indeed that's the whole point!)
I've done some work in the DID space. Not really a fan, and the space is full of half working implementations like this post documents.
But this particular criticism seems unfounded.
It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
Peer to peer, not federation, is the way forward.
We should only build peer to peer social protocols.
Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control).
{Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}.
Bluesky and Mastodon are the wrong architecture.
The web, fancy javascript UI/UX, and microservices shouldn't be the focus. The protocol should be the focus.
A fully distributed protocol would dictate the solution to this exact problem.
Bluesky is designed the way it is because of scale. How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Bsky is designed so that the microservices themselves can be decentralized and so multiple different types of apps can be built on the same protocol/infra.
Obviously, it’s early days, and hopefully there is even more experimentation in the p2p space. But atproto architecture is a very fair experiment in this space. I can store my data on my own server, use a client app I wrote, subscribe to a specific aggregation/feed service I prefer, use the moderation list I want… all while still being connected to the larger protocol & network. It’s pretty neat.
So I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes.
What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.
Complexity acts like a gate. When we make the code too hard to understand, we are telling regular people that they are not allowed to participate. True ownership of your data is only possible if you can actually afford to host it yourself. We should focus on making things simple enough for anyone to use.
"View -> Page Style -> Basic Page Style" is required to read any of the text.
Indeed, it's a pity that the author placed so much focus on a cool looking font that they forgot to take basic properties like "good readability" into account. Form should follow function, not the other way around.
> Form should follow function, not the other way around.
According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.
I don't have any issues with it but I've been computing since the 8 bit days which basically looked exactly like that :)
Or just toggle reader view (Firefox).
fair enough, the did:web flows are not documented even for technical atproto developers, and there needs to be a self-serve way to heal identity/account problems elsewhere in the network (the "burn" problem).
I do think that did:plc provides more pragmatic freedom and control than did:web for most folks, though the calculus might be different for institutions or individuals with a long-term commitment to running their own network services. But did:web should be a functional alternative on principle.
I'm glad that the PDS was easy to get up and running, and that the author was able to find a supportive community on discord.
I wrote a Bluesky app in preparation for a client project. ATProto is over-engineered for my purposes, though probably justifiably carefully engineered for the purposes of a big social Twitter-like thing. But since I didn't have to do the engineering, so what? It's a very solid platform for many kinds of multi-user information-sharing systems.
This article does give me the impression that I should make and use more test accounts than I currently do when mucking around with ATProto/Bluesky.
My experience using ATProto is that it is somewhat like how the nascent blockchain apps were when they first came out: there's no written content that is viable. Instead, you're supposed to use ephemeral conversations and read a widely disparate set of notes in order to use it. In the end, the upshot of all this is that you get to use a slightly worse form of Twitter - which is already rather unpleasant to use for me because there's a lot of rage content there.
Microblogs are fun, and very often I can't justify a whole blog post, but I have seen that others just post their thoughts intermingled and it makes me wonder if perhaps that is what I should do. There's not that much utility to the wide audience anyway. Talking to people who understand you is much nicer anyway.
ATProto can be used be used for a lot more than just microblogs
https://tangled.org/
That is a really cool project, thanks for posting
>you get to use a slightly worse form of Twitter
The protocol can support all sorts of other social networks. People are building things akin to instagram, tiktok, medium, allrecipies, etc
I'm building a place review system.
This continues to confirm for me that there's nothing particularly valuable about ATProto, and that some of the percieved "flaws" in models like Mastodon's model are features just as much as bugs.
Honestly, this is making me go further in the other direction, can we just do "twitter but owned by a trust" or something?
BlueSky has to be centralized right now because the quality of the federated network is too poor right now.
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.
> 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?
If Bluesky wants to be taken seriously they need to invest in decentralization themselves and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.
How many users actually care about decentralization?
Unfortunately most people couldn't care less. Bluesky has been lying about being decentralized since day 1, and yet they have millions of users.
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Key management shouldn't have to be difficult. Consider another open microblogging protocol nostr. There a keypair is crucial to the experience and every client automatically generates one if you don't have one to import.
I think this part of the UX is just being neglected by bluesky.