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I was right about ATProto key management

notes.nora.codes

61–70 of 198 posts

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#61
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions? And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.

If you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone. If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingesti…

I still think that any content anyone is paying for you to see is necessarily spam.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly can't tell if this comment is trolling.

I'll admit it's a bit charged, but I'm frustrated with bad faith takedowns of ATProto/Bluesky, while Mastodon (and it is Mastodon, not ActivityPub) solves almost none of the actual problems. I tried implementing my own ActivityPub server and the spec is so hilariously lacking that it's understandable that everyone just uses the Mastodon API instead.

ActivityPub isn't actually the spec of Mastodon. Treat claims of "Mastodon is ActivityPub" the same as you treat claims of "Bluesky is decentralised."

Just expose the same interface Mastodon does and you'll be fine. Noting that almost nothing cares about the exact URLs you use, except for webfinger, but does care about the domain being the same as the right side of the @ sign.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#63

BlueSky has to be centralized right now because the quality of the federated network is too poor right now.

I am not convinced that is not by design.

It is in a sense by design because the focus was creating a decentralize-able/federate-able protocol and infrastructure that can scale more or less indefinitely first and foremost, community second.

The community is working on actually decentralising the network now that things mostly "just work" (assuming you are using did:plc/generally a happy path user).

- Building out PDS communities that are trusted takes time and nowadays there's a few outside of bluesky PBC (one or two big ones and a bunch of smaller ones). People are eager to move off because a lot of users really really don't like bluesky PBC leadership but it's a matter of waiting for these third party communities to reach critical mass.

- Relay infra is already pretty much decentralised. Lots of people still rely on the main relay but it's trivial to use a third party relay and there's more of them than you can count.

- There are a lot of really high quality third party clients and afaict a lot of users do actually use third party clients but there's basically no metric for tracking these stats.

- Appviews are expensive currently and there's work on making them easier to host but there's already one "full" alternative appview for bluesky.

- There are a lot non-bluesky apps/services that are genuinely high quality experiences and they are gaining their own communities.

The main technical barrier to true decentralisation outside of improving UX is introducing other did:methods and/or spreading trust of did:plc across the community (ex: clustered via raft or paxos across major operators) but there's just not a reason to pursue this over the other fires that need fighting in the ecosystem right now (and keeping did diversity low reduces another source of complexity the space just doesn't need to tackle yet).

--------------

TLDR: it is intentional because the goal is to in order of priorities:

1. get the architecture for eventual decentralisation right.

2. make it exist.

3. make it good.

4. make it easy to use for normal people.

5. build community.

6. focus on decentralisation.

Decentralisation in theory is the first priority but in practice it's the last priority. Being able to decentralise is always the utmost importance but forcing it to happen is not ever the top priority because that's on the community, not on the developers.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone. If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingesti…

I still think that any content anyone is paying for you to see is necessarily spam.

I don't agree. I think the chief problem with advertising is that it is extremely repetitive. I'm not, in principle, opposed to being informed about new things relevant to my interests existing. In a world that is completely oversaturated with content, it is hard to gain traction on something new with word-of-mouth alone, even if it is of very high quality. There is a point to being informed about something existing for the first time (maybe I'll use it), and there is a reason why people would have to pay to make use of that informational system (the barrier to entry is necessary to make the new thing stand out in the ocean of garbage).

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#65

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 thei…

Thanks for responding, Brian. While I don't agree with a lot of decisions Bluesky and the broader ATProto community have made, I am very excited that progress towards real decentralization is happening; Blacksky's app view, for instance, was the trigger for me to try to finally try to set up an account. I would love to see more of a focus on the parts of the system that make this difficult, so that myself and other p…

Thanks for the response Nora.

Because of your blog post I went through the process of setting up a did:web account myself this afternoon, and it was painful. Eg, I found a bug in our Go SDK causing that "deactivated" error (https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/pull/1281). I kept notes and will try to get out a blog post and update to 'goat' soon.

We've also been making progress on the architecture and governance of the PLC system. I don't know if those will assuage all concerns with that system immediately, but I do think they are meaningful steps in reducing operational dependency on Bluesky PBC.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#67
post #29
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mas…

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.

> What do you think is wrong about Mastodon?

The same problems as always. Allow federation and you get...

- federation wars and moderators conducting these wars using their own users as hostages - I left Mastodon years ago when some particularly dumb morons decided to do bitchfights regarding Israel / Palestine. No I'm not interested in your pointless squabble, but I do care when I suddenly don't see posts from a bunch of users without even getting a notification...

- Mastodon-specific, when you move your account from one instance to another (e.g. as response to above-mentioned BS) your followings and followers migrate - but all your posts and media do not

- spam, trolls and griefers abusing the system, up to and including sending around CSAM material that inevitably gets sucked in by your instance, making you liable in the eyes of the law

- security issues. Mastodon has been full of these, no thanks I don't have the time to be constantly on guard lest I be exploited from above-mentioned griefers.

- other instances not giving a flying fuck about moderation or abuse going out from their instances.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#70
post #29
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mas…

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.

ActivityPub supports a less compelling user experience for many people: you only have a partial view of the network (you won’t see all the replies to the posts of people you follow on other servers), no global search, etc
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