Compare figure 3 here in the #atproto / #bluesky paper
https://bsky.social/about/bluesky-and-the-at-protocol-usable-decentralized-social-media-martin-kleppmann.pdf
To the diagram here:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable and dangerous features of the protocol, and makes it seem like theres a lot more choice than there is.

Since the design purposefully hides the architecture: you dont know where your feed generators are drawing from, or those used by your friends. So you cant know what the effect of choosing a different relay would be, aka the main relay is always indispensable. Importantly the relays subscribe to you, you dont push to the relay, and since you arent really supposed to operate your own data store, you can be dropped from the network without knowing - the relay serves as an unaccountable point of moderation.

@maegul
Right. Portability is a red herring though. Its effectively meaningless - who cares if i can move my website host. Who cares if its technically possible to block google from crawling me if everyone i know can only find me through that. Worse, if they can only find me through something that doesnt tell anyone where it gets its websites from. What benevolent organization has the resources to crawl everything without ulterior motive, and again how would i even know? If we organize a mass movement away from the main relay because its downright dangerous to have everything public, we would also need to make that relay break the protocol to be private access to similarly safe feed generators and app views, host our own PLC resolver - breaking the chain that makes migration possible, even if i still technically hold the git repo with the right hash, they own the means of finding it.

It all seems nice until you think about how any of it would actually play out. It would be cool to be wrong, id love to see a web utopia spring up from a platform billionaires pocket change, it would be such sweet irony. but seeing the same focus on account portability trotted out again and again without answering any of the hard questions keeps demonstrating how shallow this pipe dream really is. Moving accounts on the fedi is too hard, true, but to still think thats the main barrier and the answer being to give me literally only that and my ability to shop for a new algorithmic slop bucket as agency is just demonstrably wrong the second you think twice about it.

App views invert identity, and thats sort of interesting for a minute - instead of me subscribing to a platform, the platform subscribes to me. Except wait wasnt a series of platforms that mine all my data to serve me targeted shit the whole problem in the first place? Why is it compelling to require any indie app view to require me to surrender literally all my data to something they literally and uncritically call the firehose to be viable? Even if the indie app view is beautiful and lovely, it structurally depends on Sidechannel Information Leaks As A Service where now instead of a single platform having to win my trust to harvest my data, to merely exist online i literally must allow literally everyone to harvest it so i can have the privilege of them telling me what to look at.

They talk about how many thousands of algorithms have been created, but take a look at the list of them, it shows you how many people subscribe to them, sorted by popularity, descending. Compare that to the number of accounts on bluesky. Try and find the source code for the most popular feeds. If you can, are they doing anything more interesting than a manually curated list of accounts or posts that contain a hashtag? Try and find an algo that does actual account-level recommendation. Are there any? Youll find a handful of open source ones that have shut down. Try and run one. What happens? Who has the resources to run something like that? For how many accounts? Sample the firehose for a week, including all your feeds. Compare the number of accounts and posts that show up there to the number of accounts active in the firehose. If it really worked, youd expect to see a lot of different algorithms serving a lot of different posts from a lot of different people to a lot of different people. Evaluating how far that is from reality is left as an exercise to the reader.

And thats the network working as designed - saying nothing about the intrinsic impossibility of safety given the identity model.

I find very little of it compelling. I was interested in lexicons until i saw how they are used in practice as a wildly ineffective and repetitive API spec. I was interested in the use of DNS and DIDs for lightweight identity beacons until i saw how almost a year (?) later there are no viable plans to replace PLC with anything but Identity As A Service. I was interested in the PDS as a signed data store until i saw how it was only discoverable and useful by being crawled by a single public relay. Its a hodgepodge of half finished ideas that could be cool if any critical feedback would actually affect the design.

As i always say when i talk about this, id love to be wrong, and if it turns out to be really cool ill happily join.
#bluesky #atproto