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Thoughts on Bluesky

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Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#31

Post by elfprince13 »

shafyy wrote: post #29
pfraze wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2012, I was the first developer to join Dominic Tarr on Secure Scuttlebutt. I built Patchwork, the first client. If you’re not familiar with SSB, give it a look! It’s an aggressively anarchist technical model. After a year and a half, I had serious concerns about our ability to attract users. I realized that any activist effort needs a theory of change. For a software technology, that’s the market. We need to…

> There’s always somebody in charge. It’s not better when you don’t know who. This is not black and white. And to be honest, it is telling that you throw this statement into the room. Of course, there are also organization / people who have more weight in saying into which direction standards like ActivityPub should be developed, but this is a far cry from the protocol roadmap being owned by a single for-profit compa…

> Bluesky is not owned by you, and while you currently might have some say, as soon as the VC ROI pressure starts building, nobody will care.

Bluesky is a PBLLC which pretty severely limits the rights of their investors.

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#32

Post by elfprince13 »

shafyy wrote: post #27
pfraze wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I'm really happy to debate the substance of these designs, because it is interesting and should drive decisions. > The relay isn't secondary. proof of the matter is, bluesky last week went down because it was down. Mmm kind of. The data is primarily stored in the PDSes and there can be a plurality of relays and appviews, none of which are considered authoritative / primary. If a relay goes down, anybody downstr…

pfraze I appreciate that you take the time to engage here. I understand that you thought that ActivityPub had challenges (rightly so) and that's why you decided to develop ATProto. ActivityPub is far from perfect and needs to be improved. But the decisions you made with ATProto so far make real federation almost impossible. I disagree that data hosting is the most important part. I think switching "servers" and still…

Just gonna throw out a link to this whitepaper co-authored by the now-CEO of Bluesky and one of the lead authors of ActivityPub https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535398

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#33

Post by elfprince13 »

S0y wrote: post #24
pfraze wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well. > Very nice way to say "AP isn't centralized enough". You seem to be operating under the misconception that having large secondary indexing services in the system is the same thing as binding the system to single organizations. Anybody can run a relay or appview, same as anybody can run a PDS. > What's your current timeline to start accepting incoming account migrations back into the bluesky hosted PDS? Wh…

I Appreciate you taking the time to properly respond. >large secondary indexing services We've talked about this before. The relay isn't secondary. proof of the matter is, bluesky last week went down because it was down. >Anybody can run a relay or appview, same as anybody can run a PDS. That's just saying anybody can fork the network if they're not happy. that's not very collaborative and social. >When the software…

> I think you're overestimating how taxing going "viral" is on an ActivityPub server. if one of your posts goes viral, it doesn't get hit for every follower you have. It'll only be a request per instance. Plus, task queues exist. Yes going viral is taxing on a server. it doesn't mean the solution is just to offload that burden to some centralized server.

I run a single-user Mastodon instance and replying to a viral post took me offline for like 24 hours.

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#34

Post by shafyy »

elfprince13 wrote: post #31
shafyy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s always somebody in charge. It’s not better when you don’t know who. This is not black and white. And to be honest, it is telling that you throw this statement into the room. Of course, there are also organization / people who have more weight in saying into which direction standards like ActivityPub should be developed, but this is a far cry from the protocol roadmap being owned by a single for-profit compa…

> Bluesky is not owned by you, and while you currently might have some say, as soon as the VC ROI pressure starts building, nobody will care. Bluesky is a PBLLC which pretty severely limits the rights of their investors.

No, the fact that it's a PBC does not necessarily limit the right of their investors. PBC just means that they need to commit a certain percentage of their profit to a cause. It's still a for-profit company owned by shareholders. They have not publicly disclosed their charter or other information.

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#35

Post by purlane »

shafyy wrote: post #34
elfprince13 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bluesky is not owned by you, and while you currently might have some say, as soon as the VC ROI pressure starts building, nobody will care. Bluesky is a PBLLC which pretty severely limits the rights of their investors.

No, the fact that it's a PBC does not necessarily limit the right of their investors. PBC just means that they need to commit a certain percentage of their profit to a cause. It's still a for-profit company owned by shareholders. They have not publicly disclosed their charter or other information.

That is not what this means at all. Legally, it means that the company has other priorities that it must consider equally to creating profit. This means that investors have a much higher standard to have standing to sue the company or oust the CEO if they don't return a profit or don't return profits directly to investors.

A good example of what this means in practice is developer awards from Bluesky Social. As I understand it, once Bluesky PBC starts making some profit they are planning to begin placing something akin to bounties on successful app projects within the protocol. I believe Graber called this "Coopetition" at some point, where developers are "competing" within the ecosystem but simultaneously working together to make the protocol's foundation stronger.

This is something that a PBC structure makes immeasurably easier to do. Why? Because the company has more responsibilities than simply returning profit to shareholders. The shareholders can't simply sue the company or oust Graber because of this, since Bluesky Social also has a legal responsibility to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation". Please do get read on what it actually means to be a PBC.

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#36

Post by steveklabnik »

shafyy wrote: post #34
elfprince13 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bluesky is not owned by you, and while you currently might have some say, as soon as the VC ROI pressure starts building, nobody will care. Bluesky is a PBLLC which pretty severely limits the rights of their investors.

No, the fact that it's a PBC does not necessarily limit the right of their investors. PBC just means that they need to commit a certain percentage of their profit to a cause. It's still a for-profit company owned by shareholders. They have not publicly disclosed their charter or other information.

BLUESKY SOCIAL, PBC is registered in Delaware. Here's the relevant law: https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/

> a public benefit corporation shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.

There is no language about committing a percentage of profits to a cause.

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#37

Post by elfprince13 »

shafyy wrote: post #34
elfprince13 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bluesky is not owned by you, and while you currently might have some say, as soon as the VC ROI pressure starts building, nobody will care. Bluesky is a PBLLC which pretty severely limits the rights of their investors.

No, the fact that it's a PBC does not necessarily limit the right of their investors. PBC just means that they need to commit a certain percentage of their profit to a cause. It's still a for-profit company owned by shareholders. They have not publicly disclosed their charter or other information.

you're just factually wrong on this, sorry.

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#38

Post by elfprince13 »

shafyy wrote: post #7
rvz wrote: post #4

> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on. I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next. Best part is the instance…

The issues you describe are integral parts of decentralized protocols, and they can't be solved by technology. The reason Bluesky does not have these problems is because they are de facto centralized. No confusion of choosing servers if there's only one server, right? > having to tell your followers where to go next. On Mastodon, you can set up an automatic forwarding so your followers automatically follow your new a…

Mastodon migration is not atomic and requires the instance you are migrating from to remain operational (and non-adversarial) long enough for all of your friends' instances to notice you have moved and update their contacts. It doesn't preserve your follows. On Bluesky you just need to push your repo onto a new PDS and sign a new DID telling the network which PDS has your data. Everything else is seamless and atomic.

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#39

Post by [deleted] »

shafyy wrote: post #7
rvz wrote: post #4

> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on. I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next. Best part is the instance…

The issues you describe are integral parts of decentralized protocols, and they can't be solved by technology. The reason Bluesky does not have these problems is because they are de facto centralized. No confusion of choosing servers if there's only one server, right? > having to tell your followers where to go next. On Mastodon, you can set up an automatic forwarding so your followers automatically follow your new a…

[deleted]

Re: Thoughts on Bluesky

#40

Post by eviks »

> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on.

But this isn't true, there already were horror stories where users were held hostage by non-cooperating server blocking the transfer - because you can't easily switch as described here, your data doesn't belong to you, that's one big area where bluesky is architectured much better

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