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Who owns your ATProto identity?

kevinak.se

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Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#11

Post by vid »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #5
scyclow wrote: post #4

This is where non-financial use of blockchain could really shine, IMO. Self-sovereign identity management with a smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked. Blockchains are pretty out of favor these days, but I really don't see a better solution for decentralized identity management.

What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain? Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.

What's the incentive for people to participate in file sharing networks? To some degree it's access to a world of free media (same as access to a world of decentralized identities), but to a large degree it's an interesting hobby/excuse to be interested in tech. Some people have racks of hard drives dedicated to hobbies like this, just because it's interesting and is worthy.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#12

Post by SkiFire13 »

scyclow wrote: post #4

This is where non-financial use of blockchain could really shine, IMO. Self-sovereign identity management with a smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked. Blockchains are pretty out of favor these days, but I really don't see a better solution for decentralized identity management.

> smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked

How would that even work?

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#13

Post by skybrian »

Most people don’t worry about it for the same reason they don’t worry about GitHub abusing their GitHub account and are even willing to use “login with GitHub” to access their other accounts. Account takeover by a third party is a bigger risk. If you’re concerned about supply chain risks, there are more important concerns than “what if GitHub itself is a bad actor.”

It’s solvable if you’re willing to self-host your PDS.

But I’m skeptical of the attempts to make a PDS an “everything account.” Why should you use the same PDS for your social media posts and your git repos and your blog posts? Seems like we need to get better at locking things down in practice before that kind of centralization?

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#14

Post by webdevladder »

Noaidi wrote: post #8

Centralization is always a trap. No idea why people have such a hard time joining and supporting the Fediverse.

Higher friction and fragmentation are Fediverse features (not bugs) that give it a different grain. ATProto has different tradeoffs that lead to a different form of social media. I'm glad both exist, and bridging efforts are worth paying attention to for anyone frustrated with the distinctions.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#15

Post by pessimizer »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #3
verdverm wrote: post #2

Probably doesn't matter for the "40M+ users", most of them have churned at this point and growth is negative. This is good critique for the next iteration of open social protocols, but fundamentally atproto did not fail because of technical reasons. The next iteration should make privacy the default and core to protocol, and be very mindful of how the leadership / social dynamics played out.

Based on all the traffic and development activity I'm not sure on what basis one would say "failed"

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#16

Post by jacobgold »

One of the core features of AT is the ability to move your repo hosting provider (PDS) at any time. This is the "data portability" problem that ActivityPub never solved.

Bluesky Social, PBC runs a PDS service (bsky.social) for free, there are a number of free public alternatives, and thousands of users self-host.

Self-hosting your own PDS can be done with Raspberry Pi or $5/mo VM and requires very little work. It runs in a Docker container with SQLite.

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#18

Post by jimmydoe »

It seems most ppl who dislike X has already settled, a small amount moved to DeSo like atp or ap, most just stayed or went offline. Unless China GFW magically collapsed, there seems no reason ATProto user base will continue to grow. So, when will the monetization/enshitification phase begin?

I'm asking this not bc I like enshitification, but the app view design seems such a perfect fit for user data mining/targeting, that it's hard to believe it was not part of design consideration in day one.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#19

Post by jacobgold »

verdverm wrote: post #2

Probably doesn't matter for the "40M+ users", most of them have churned at this point and growth is negative. This is good critique for the next iteration of open social protocols, but fundamentally atproto did not fail because of technical reasons. The next iteration should make privacy the default and core to protocol, and be very mindful of how the leadership / social dynamics played out.

Bluesky / AT is the most successful open social network in history and the only one to become culturally significant. It has been adopted by presidents, celebrities, journalists, and mainstream users.

Bluesky has ~50M registered users and has sustained ~5M monthly active users for long while. There's no reason to believe it will fall substantially below this level.

It is also in the process of adding (decentralized) subcommunities, which I expect to be really cool and have a large impact on growth.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#20

Post by PunchyHamster »

rbren wrote: post #17

Who owns your domain name? Hint: it’s probably not you. Your hosting provider could take down your domain, or even steal traffic and direct it to their own IPs

But without private keys they can't pretend to be the same you. There is a very big difference here.
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