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Top-level
 @moira There will be no sudden-but-inevitable betrayal with Bluesky. There can't be. The tech is so open that the network could move on without the Bluesky PBC. Even if the company went rogue or disappeared overnight, the network would still be possible to run without them. That's the difference between atproto and ActivityPub. You lose everything if your instances goes belly-up overnight. You lose nothing on atproto. 19 comments
@moira No, it's true right now. Nearly every part of the infrastructure is open source.  @MikeBeas I'm unaware of any other... what do they call them, collector nodes? The stream collectors through which everything must pass. I mean, _I have seen people running BlueSky instances talking about this_, and they were saying that they don't exist yet, that everything has to go through central. I mean, it's possible they're _also_ out of date, but I'd think people actually running their own instances would be caught up on this stuff. @MikeBeas (Also also I'm not beating up on them for not having portable identity figured out with only a quasi-functional placeholder in its stead. Last I heard it was even called something like PH for PlaceHolder, which I found pretty amusing. That's a hard problem and good luck to them getting a real version to work.) @moira PLC, and it's not a placeholder anymore. It's now a backronym for "Public Ledger of Credentials" and they're looking to hand it off to a web standards body so they don't control it.  @MikeBeas @moira Hey, guys? Heuristics are a thing. Here's a helpful heuristic: "Tech billionaires don't build commercial entities that can work just as well without them." That's my helpful heuristic. Thank you for coming to my #HelpfulHeuristic Talk. @moira (Even if they retain control of PLC forever, all of the data is public so anyone could just mirror the data and it would be possible to point at that mirror instead of the official ledger, and nothing would be amiss) @moira Relays. Nobody is currently running one because nobody needs to, but people have spun them up locally and done proofs-of-concept with them to show that it can be done. @MikeBeas I suppose I want to say: _I'm not rooting against them._ I just think that they're never going to be the kind of distributed that AP can be and that creates a particular set of types of problems that can't be handwaved away, once of which being the _reliance_ on Relay. Thanks for the update on portable identity. Assuming it's still blockchain-record based (as it was supposedly going to be) maybe it'll be the first actually _good_ use of that technology. (2/2) @moira It may be a lot of money for you or me, but it’s relatively inexpensive for someone trusted like Cloudflare or the Internet Archive to run. The intent was never for everyone to run their own separate relay, or for individual users to manage them. @moira The thing is, if bsky the company is behaving well, there's really no *need* for a second relay right now. if they go rogue, having the ability for the community, or some other org, or anybody else to stand up a replacement is a huge win. even just a partial relay for specific types of events, which the devs have said is fully supported and something they would expect instead of full relays, would be useful. but there's no need to use the fire escape unless there's a fire. @MikeBeas ...you say that like it's _easy_. hooooooooly shit it's not that will be an _adventure_. It will be much harder and take much longer than I think you think. But at least it will be possible, so at least there is that. @moira luckily it doesn't need to happen right now, but i suspect if it did, you would probably see a coordinate effort in the community to get one up and running as quickly as possible. there are already a number of apps besides bluesky using the protocol, so people do have an interest in keeping the network alive. @MikeBeas I'm sorry that "identity still centralised" was kinda mean on my part. I mean, I'm not wrong, but in real terms it's basically "DNS for AT Proto Social Media" and I just look forward to all the old jokes about DNS being repurposed for use whenever something with PLC is fucked up. xD @moira dns is a very good system! lol but technically they do support did:web alongside did:plc. you have to set it up yourself, and because your did is your permanent identity, you can't migrate between methods, but it is supported and there are a few people in the production bluesky network using it right now.  |
Gregory's Server
@MikeBeas Except that's not true - at least not _yet_.
They're promising it, but unless I'm very out of date, they have not yet delivered it.
I'm aware it is theoretically possible to do this. But there are leagues between "theory" and "reality," and last I heard, they still don't even have a real plan for actually _implementing_ portable identity.
(eta: To be clear, if they actually manage to pull it off: great! _I'm for it_. But they haven't _yet_, and there exist what historically have been very strong pressures _not_ to actually follow through. I'd love to see those pressures fail this time.)
@MikeBeas Except that's not true - at least not _yet_.
They're promising it, but unless I'm very out of date, they have not yet delivered it.
I'm aware it is theoretically possible to do this. But there are leagues between "theory" and "reality," and last I heard, they still don't even have a real plan for actually _implementing_ portable identity.