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Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

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Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#81

Post by ray_v »

sschueller wrote: post #15
pfraze wrote: post #7

> Bluesky recently acquired the rights to the trademark for “ATPROTOCOL” and its variants—including “AT Protocol” and “atproto”—from another company that was threatening to take legal action preventing the company and others from using the term. Now that Bluesky owns it, the atproto community’s continued use of the mark can be protected. The policy around usage is shared in the rest of the post but the goal is to mak…

So what about the existing AT protocol modems use?

I had to shake my head for a moment as I was instantly transported back to 1998 with that comment lol

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#82

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

snorremd wrote: post #46
kmeisthax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Only viable instance" is not really the correct framing - Bluesky doesn't have instances . Anyone using ATProto without Bluesky will still be "on Bluesky". When you go to bsky.app, you're interacting with the Bluesky AppView ; one key feature of ATProto is that any AppView can interact with any (consenting) Personal Data Server (PDS). So you can self-host your PDS but still use bsky.app if you so choose. But critica…

The PLC governance not having been moved yet is my one main gripe against ATProto/Atmosphere now. There is so much being built on top of this protocol, and I truly believe it has the chance to make the social web more decentralized while keeping everything connected. The PLC being controlled by one major commercial entity allows them to pull the plug so to speak. Say someone is sanctioned by the US, what stops Bluesk…

Technically it has moved (last year actually) but it just doesn't really look all that different in the day to day.

https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#83

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

paride5745 wrote: post #78
pjc50 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What went wrong with Wsocial? I don't mind the quasi-central nature of bsky, it's more of a problem that it's so heavily dominated by US politics.

https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ Basically, because they didn't warn Bluesky that they were going live, they had their traffic heavily trottled and they were unable to function. So long for decentralisation if you need to talk to the owner of the protocol you are trying to use...

It's not that they didn't warn bluesky specifically. It's that they didn't warn relay operators in general. And IIRC they just needed to coordinate with a single relay operator who is reasonably trusted (ex blacksky or eurosky) but they didn't do that either.

The default rate limits are quite reasonable but big launches will blow past them so you gotta coordinate with someone.

And note that the relay federation/gossip agreements are largely manual configuration at the moment. Until someone pushes a proposal for an automated/dynamic topology management algorithm that doesn't get plagued with spam issues it'll stay this way.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#84

Post by inigyou »

paride5745 wrote: post #79
inigyou wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wsocial turned out to be a WEF honeypot or something.

That is not the point. The point is that without talking with Bluesky, you cannot start your own ATProto product or you'll get throttled from the network.

Almost like the network is centralised.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#85

Post by paride5745 »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #83
paride5745 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ Basically, because they didn't warn Bluesky that they were going live, they had their traffic heavily trottled and they were unable to function. So long for decentralisation if you need to talk to the owner of the protocol you are trying to use...

It's not that they didn't warn bluesky specifically. It's that they didn't warn relay operators in general. And IIRC they just needed to coordinate with a single relay operator who is reasonably trusted (ex blacksky or eurosky) but they didn't do that either. The default rate limits are quite reasonable but big launches will blow past them so you gotta coordinate with someone. And note that the relay federation/gossi…

No such problem on Mastodon/ActivityPub.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#87

Post by rudyfraser »

Chiming in to say as the CEO of Blacksky that not only do we have an independent AT Protocol implementation in Rust (https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky)

Not only do we run a fully independent stack (https://docs.blacksky.community/readme/list-of-our-services)

Not only are we getting paid by other orgs to stand up independent app view servers.

We also received a license from Bluesky for the atproto trademark.

There are no qualms in the ecosystem from people making money, getting users, and providing new experiences about this.

It’s not “AT Protocol fans” who aren’t taking issue with this. It’s business with employees and organizations making a positive impact.

It’s easy to criticize if you’re not actively shipping things.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#88

Post by kube-system »

sedatk wrote: post #16
1shooner wrote: post #3

>We plan to transfer that ownership to an appropriate, independent protocol governance organization in the future. I never realized there is no independent governance org that should have registered this. So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity, that also runs the only viable instance?

> So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity A Public Benefit Corporation to be precise. So they are legally obligated to favor public benefit.

No, public benefits are allowed to include public interest reasons in their decision making, they are not required.

This structure was created to allow a business to protect the interest of the public when it conflicts with the interests of their shareholders

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#89

Post by demosthanos »

danabramov wrote: post #68
account42 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "gotcha" might get cheers from your fellow AT proto fans but only eye rolls from everyone else.

I don't mean it as a linguistic gotcha ("ha, you said instances! but we call them something else"). I'm saying this is a category error because the network topology is different. This is like saying that web is not free because people aren't running Google-scale indexes in their garages. Tried to clarify this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932956

I don't think the Google comparison is doing you any favors in resolving the concern behind the category error, though. What I'm hearing is that AT is like the web if Google had started the web themselves and designed it around their index as the primary means of accessing anything on the web. Sure, they still have Don't Be Evil as their motto at this stage, and in the 90s maybe we would have been naive enough to believe them.

But in the 2020s, after watching what Google did to the web without being able to control the protocol from the beginning, a comparison of Bluesky to Google doesn't really assuage the concern people have about centralization.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#90

Post by d1sxeyes »

paride5745 wrote: post #77
anon7000 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think decentralization is just not something users care about generally. - many people wish they could control what they see and who they talk to. (Eg control the algorithm, avoid censorship from big tech) - some people care about owning their data so it doesn’t go away when a company fails - technical people are interested in building more types of social apps that aren’t just twitter posts etc - nearly everyone j…

But Bluesky does not solve these points: - content not in line with the political left is censored - sure, you have your data in your PDS, but it is de-facto useless if the central identity server of Bluesky goes down - ActivityPub and Nostr solve this already without being owned by a company - you cannot easily and cheaply have an ATProto instance. AP and Nostr solve this already

> - content not in line with the political left is censored

What do you mean? Individual apps can choose to censor I guess, but you can fairly trivially run an AppView with no filtering whatsoever if that's what you fancy.

> - sure, you have your data in your PDS, but it is de-facto useless if the central identity server of Bluesky goes down

That's not correct. You can use plc, which Bluesky operates the largest directory for, but you can also use web, which completely bypasses Bluesky all together.

> - ActivityPub and Nostr solve this already without being owned by a company

What's 'this' here?

> - you cannot easily and cheaply have an ATProto instance. AP and Nostr solve this already

The terminology here of 'ATProto instance' doesn't really make sense. If you're talking about a PDS, you can use one of thousands of free PDS hosts, or host your own for free on Cloudflare (https://cirrus.earth/) or on your own hardware (there are PDS implementations which fit comfortably onto a Raspberry Pi, or an old phone, etc.)

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