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Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

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Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#51

Post by inigyou »

throawayonthe wrote: post #49
snorremd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Say someone is sanctioned by the US, what stops Bluesky from pulling the plug on their DID thereby blocking and censoring this person from the network all together. How does IANA handle this with domain names? genuine question, i'm not sure. is it enough to have distinct registrars and distinct jurisdictions for some TLDs and so on?

They don't. All domains have US jurisdiction except the ones that are underneath country TLDs.

IANA could stop publishing country TLDs in their root zone file but it would probably split the internet in two, and everyone involved knows that. Several root server operators would refuse the update, and many recursive resolver operators would put them back in.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#52

Post by inigyou »

pjc50 wrote: post #43
paride5745 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nightmare of the Wsocial rollout is a testament of the massive control Bluesky has on the ATProto network. If Wsocial was on ActivityPub or Nostr nothing similar would have happened. ATProto has serious centralisation problems, baked into the design. And it makes sense, considering it came out of a Twitter R&D experiment to "decentralise" Twitter itself. Pure federation was never part of the initial design. Activ…

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.

Wsocial turned out to be a WEF honeypot or something.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#53

Post by darkwater »

bbg2401 wrote: post #44
Quothling wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you will find that a lot of people find that to be a feature of the federated networks. It's how society works outside of social networks. You aren't likely to see football fans of different teams sharing pubs here in Europe. You wouldn't see judgemental people be allowed in accepting roleplaying communities and so on. Why would a network of community controlled servers be any different than this? IRC was lik…

The village idiot analogy is misguided and unnecessarily accusatory. However, I do feel internet communities were better when they were smaller due to being special interest driven and self-policing. People wore different hats according to the community they were engaging with.

There was a very steep curve to access the Internet back then (both economically and technically), and that was a very big filter (although it let through many smart assholes anyway).

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#54

Post by tcfhgj »

p-e-w wrote: post #34
fsflover wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it is possible to join Bluesky without relying on the single point of failure, as Cory Doctorow highlighted here: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/05/executive-dysfunction/

The single point of failure is always the biggest instances or communities, which impose their rules on everyone else under threat of refusing to communicate with them. This has happened with every single federated platform, and it can’t be solved with technology because it’s fundamentally not a technology problem. People want to be where other people are, so once the community reaches a critical mass it inevitably d…

> People want to be where other people are

not neceessarily true, see Matrix where it pretty much doesn't matter where you are

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#55

Post by danabramov »

eqvinox wrote: post #25

Cool people use ActivityPub. Single vendor owned & controlled standards always turn out badly, just a question when.

>Cool people use ActivityPub.

ActivityPub solves a completely different (arguably, smaller) set of problems. This is like saying "Cool people use email instead of web".

I have a few diagrams here that may help see just how different they are: https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/#so...

>Single vendor owned & controlled standards always turn out badly, just a question when.

Yeah, which is why atproto is going to IETF: https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group. You can join the mailing list to participate in the discussions: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/atp/?gbt=1&index=.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#56

Post by danabramov »

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?

>that also runs the only viable instance?

This is a category error. There are no "instances" in atproto.

https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/

It segments the network differently (into "hosting" and "apps"), and on both axes anyone can run their independent app-agnostic hosting, as well as an independent hosting-agnostic app.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#57

Post by danabramov »

notpushkin wrote: post #30
herrkanin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATProto is closer to how RSS works than ActivityPub. In the same way talking about "RSS instances" makes little sense, the same goes for "ATProto instances".

It makes sense to talk about “RSS aggregators”. Especially it makes sense to talk about “RSS aggregators that speak a specific vocabulary on top of RSS, host 99% of content using that vocabulary, and if you host your own RSS feed with said vocabulary they’ll show it in their aggregator but can ban it any minute”. Did I just describe Apple Podcasts? Huh. Regardless, yeah, there’s no “ATProto instances” technically, bu…

The solution to that is to create more apps, and for one of them to become more popular. This is entirely in our hands as developers.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#58

Post by danabramov »

nar001 wrote: post #27
steveklabnik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an IETF Working Group these days https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group Those can't register trademarks, of course. > that also runs the only viable instance? This is false, both in the framing ("instances") and in the viability of running alternative infrastructure.

How do you mean? As in you can run different instances or as in it's a false open protocol?

It's a different network topology. ActivityPub couples three things into one box: community, hosting, and an app.

Atproto decouples them: there's app-agnostic hosting (which anyone can run), and there's hosting-agnostic apps (which anyone can run).

I wrote about it here: https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/#so...

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#59

Post by account42 »

ReptileMan wrote: post #26
sschueller wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what about the existing AT protocol modems use?

They use AT command set, not protocol.

... which is a protocol, thus pre-existing colloquial use of "AT protocol" that makes this trademark questionable.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#60

Post by danabramov »

kmeisthax wrote: post #14
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?

"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…

>First off, Bluesky doesn't offer any GUI tools for PDS migration. If you want to get off their PDS, you'll need to bust out command-line tools and possibly do some steps in advance of when you need to migrate in order for everything to work properly.

This is getting much better recently. I migrated to https://eurosky.tech/accounts/ with no command line — just needed to wait for a wizard in my browser to move my records. It could've been much faster and seamless (the app was confused after this and I had to re-login), but it's definitely accessible to non-technical people, and the share of independent hosting is growing.

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