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Who owns your ATProto identity?

kevinak.se

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Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#101

Post by quasigod »

opem wrote: post #29
jacobgold wrote: post #16

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 run…

Except it isn't as straightforward as most people would think. The last time I checked this, I think there were some issues with Bluesky app view and it didn't show accounts from a self hosted PDS

When was the last time you checked that? That is definitely not currently true and hasnt been for as long as I've used Bluesky.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#102

Post by ascorbic »

jacobgold wrote: post #16

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 run…

You can host it for free on Cloudflare using my Cirrus PDS: https://cirrus.earth/

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#103

Post by verdverm »

jacobgold wrote: post #87
ftfish wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never said that, though, plus provided sources. Just adding context for what the total number of users means.

You still seem to be implying the number of real registered users on Bluesky isn't ~50M, which it is. The PLC identity spam you referenced is not being counted in this number.

It is confusing to say "users" when it is actually "accounts", humans tend to associate "user" with another human, where as "account" can cover people and bots (many on atproto)

eg. I personally had more than a dozen accounts

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#104

Post by quasigod »

pocksuppet wrote: post #78
skybrian wrote: post #13

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 P…

The whole claimed point of ATProto is to avoid stuff like this. If centralization isn't a problem, just use GitHub, or X, because platforms that don't try to decentralize work better.

Atproto gives users choice for where their data is hosted as well as the ability to migrate their data to a new host. Users who dont want to put trust in a provider can host it themselves. How is that not an improvement over being locked in to a single centralized provider?

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#105

Post by ascorbic »

Sure, somebody else holds your identity, but it's pretty easy to control it yourself. By its nature if you're using somebody to host your stuff, you're trusting them with it. I made Cirrus so you can self-host your PDS for free, but you still need to trust Cloudflare to run it.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#106

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #30
skybrian wrote: post #13

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 P…

This "social coding" thing Tangled has going on is cool but I don't want it. I hear they're figuring out private repos but for me, I don't want the same account I use for social for my code. I'm probably in the minority though.

Note that you don't have to have a social account. And there's work on the semi-distant horizon for creating sub-accounts which are independent but all under a common top level account kinda like how GPG conceptualizes subkeys or cryptocurrencies handle derivation keys.

For the current moment though you can just create an atproto account without creating a bluesky account. Tangled for example supports this on their site by creating one for their PDS and you can always move to another PDS in the future.

The over-arching idea isn't that your code is tied to your socials but rather that you can have a bunch of disparate services that you can interlink over a common identity layer and that those services are only loosely tied to the people/orgs hosting them but could be trivially hosted by anyone else.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#107

Post by [deleted] »

mdasen wrote: post #31
jacobgold wrote: post #16

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 run…

You have the ability to move, as long as Bluesky Social PBC allows it. They hold the keys for your DID. If they don't allow you to move to another PDS, you can't move. The original theory was that you'd hold the private keys, but that's something that would hugely limit adoption so they decided to hold the keys themselves. In terms of moving your backlog of posts to a new server, part of the issue is liability (not m…

[deleted]

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#108

Post by jacobgold »

verdverm wrote: post #103
jacobgold wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still seem to be implying the number of real registered users on Bluesky isn't ~50M, which it is. The PLC identity spam you referenced is not being counted in this number.

It is confusing to say "users" when it is actually "accounts", humans tend to associate "user" with another human, where as "account" can cover people and bots (many on atproto) eg. I personally had more than a dozen accounts

That's a fair distinction to make but my (educated) guess is that something like 95% of users have a single account on Bluesky.

Most users signed up by downloading the app or visiting the web site and created a single account.

As a point of reference, the official Google Play store independently verifies that the Bluesky app has had 10M+ installs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.blueskyweb...

There are no official stats on the iOS app or web but those are both likely similar or larger sources of users.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#109

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
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

This cheap criticism of the headline doesn’t actually apply to the problems brought up in the article: > Your PDS operator can post as you, like things as you, follow people as you, and it would be cryptographically indistinguishable from your real activity. The signatures are valid. Your domain name owner or DNS provider cannot redirect your domain name to a different server and cryptographically impersonate you.

Kind of. Your PDS can impersonate you but you can have higher ranked "recovery keys" that can undo/recover all the damage.

Socially whether you can explain off that your PDS acted maliciously or that it was hacked or whatever is a different story but if you keep recovery keys for your DID you can take back control and undo everything your PDS did that you didn't authorise pretty trivially. The UX for it needs to be improved but technically the process is super simple/straight forward.

And those recovery keys provide a mechanism for declaring "hey i didn't do this I was hacked" on top of specific events but nothing for taking advantage of that cryptographic opportunity has been built out yet.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#110

Post by quasigod »

mdasen wrote: post #31
jacobgold wrote: post #16

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 run…

You have the ability to move, as long as Bluesky Social PBC allows it. They hold the keys for your DID. If they don't allow you to move to another PDS, you can't move. The original theory was that you'd hold the private keys, but that's something that would hugely limit adoption so they decided to hold the keys themselves. In terms of moving your backlog of posts to a new server, part of the issue is liability (not m…

You can register a recovery key which allows overriding the signing key. This allows users to move from an adversarial PDS. I do think Bluesky should push for more users to add a recovery key, but I also understand why they haven't.

Moderation tools arent limited to specific PDS's, labels are public. If an account has received many reports it will have been labelled by Bluesky's moderation account and other independent labellers. A PDS can check against these before allowing an account to migrate if they choose to. I'm not sure any are currently doing this, but this is something that can absolutely be improved in current implementations, not an inherent limitation of the architecture.

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