**github.com/did-method-plc/did-…**

"We originally titled the method "placeholder", because we didn't want it to stick around forever in its current form. We are actively hoping to replace it with or evolve it into something less centralized - likely a permissioned DID consortium. That being said, we do intend to support did:plc in the current form until after any successor is deployed, with a reasonable grace period. We would also provide a migration route to allow continued use of existing did:plc identifiers."

the road to software hell is paved with "actively hoping to replace it"

GitHub - did-method-plc/did-method-plc: A cryptographic, strongly-consistent, and recoverable DID method

A cryptographic, strongly-consistent, and recoverable DID method - did-method-plc/did-method-plc

^GitHub

And, they just announced subscriptions. Here comes the rent!

bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post… (direct link to the sub subskeet) has a bunch of cheerleaders replying “take my money”, as if that will forestall the inevitable degradation of service, as if they weren’t secretly planning this business model shift all along, as if the VCs will just *disappear* if enough people pay $5 per month

that $15M VC investment is not a *loan*, it's a 100-to-1 *bet* on getting out with $1.5B, and they will squeeze and cheat and do whatever it takes to win that bet

it’s #enshittification stage 2: charge rent for full functionality, then add ads to the free tier

(first self-promos, then "offers" (demands) to buy subs, then “partners” (advertisers) including crypto scams from their new co-owners, and influencer-hustling pickaxe salesmen (the real profiteers of the gold rush))

then they'll add ads to the paid tiers too

that’s stage 3, right @pluralistic ? it’s hard to keep the stages straight since they’re all happening so quickly these days)

#bluesky

Here’s another, better, even deeper dive into how #ATProtocol handwaves at true decentralization while failing to implement it:

neuromatch.social/@jonny/11336…

And here’s a discussion of my top post here (😳I’m flattered☺️) on hackernews news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

which actually has some good back-and-forth with some actual #BlueSky devs and others. I think the #BlueSky devs and #ATProtocol hobbyists have some good ideas and good intentions, but they’re also being used and confused by a company that’s owned by assholes and driven by greed.

jonny (good kind)

2024-10-25 01:13:52

@jdp23 I don't see how partial relays would be possible in atproto. say some catastrophic event happens where people were dead set on splitting off from bsky the corporation. assume it's truly the top priority and nothing else goes until it happens. assume further still this is some unimaginable proportion of the userbase acting in concert - hell, say 25% want to go all at once. best case scenario for making an independent relay.

you create a new relay, migrate data to new PDSes, get that new relay to crawl the PDSes, so far so good. Now what tho? everyone on the new relay is invisible to everyone on the old relay and vice versa. you are back to 0 appviews and 0 feed generators because they all are listening to the main relay. every single appview and feed generator now needs to choose to listen to the new relay. but why would they? you're still responsible as an appview or feed generator for the content you distribute, and you don't know who this new relay is. that's assuming there's no ill will in such a massive split.

so you set up a new basic set of appviews and feed generators. do they also listen to the main relay? do you mirror the old relay in the new relay? do you let the old relay crawl the pdses too? if so, what was the point of the split? now you need to redesign all the existing appviews and feed generators in flight to deduplicate records, which is possible since they're content addressed, but i would doubt they're designed to handle multiple relays because none have existed before now.

what about DIDs? most of the existing infrastructure is designed to just use PLC, which is just a lookup table that bsky also owns. shoot. but we're saved by magic here, because remember there is no acrimony in this enormous network redefining split! So say bsky the corporation is kind enough to keep letting people register DIDs with PLC. we didn't quite make the clean break we were after, but hey it's only the fundamental ability to exist on the network that we were unable to leave behind, and we'll always be reliant on bsky's goodwill for that until someone makes a DID method that works and then we redesign all the appviews and feed generators again.

So now after all that... we're still invisible to most people on the main relay?! oh right because bsky the corporation also provides the default feeds, and despite the high numbers claimed in the press releases, alternate feeds are actually only sparsely used and as a rule very simple hashtag/account feeds because doing anything else is ridiculously expensive. Bluesky the appview is provided by bluesky the corporation, and that's what's actually fetching and hydrating the feeds for us anyway, so even if the feed generators swap over, we'd still be invisible to everyone still on bsky the app. More magic! bsky the appview chooses to crawl and hydrate our posts. We're pretty far from our initial intention of a clean break, but what choice do we have? Now we're partially viewable, some of the time, on some non-default feeds, and there's no way at all to tell within the interface which those are. All it took was totally redesigning most of the network and an enormous amount of goodwill.

What about labels? What about all the automated content moderation bsky the appview does like scanning images and etc? Who moderates? How? Who's paying for all this anyway? The new relay is bound to be extremely expensive - either it's too small and you don't have the critical mass to make any of the above happen, or it's very large and you run into exactly the same problems of scale that necessitate bsky the corporation to need seed funding and eventually make a revenue model on. Where on fedi people pay for servers and donate to their instance because it's a visible part of their experience with moderators they know and like, now all that labor is diffused among a bunch of anonymous service providers - this is by design! It was supposed to depersonalize the network and make it so everyone is just an interchangeable part that you can shop around between. What keeps people donating to the new PDSes, the new relay, the new appviews, the new feed generators? How would they even know how to do that?Meanwhile the network is continuing to tack on features with some combination of bsky corporation fiat, behind the scenes server magic, and so on, so the best we can hope for is partial compatibility and an always-inferior experience.

And that's just to get to 2 relays. what about 3? Remember how much people complained about how hard it was to find an instance? That's absolutely nothing to the combinatoric complexity of PDS * relay * feed generator * app view. How on earth will anyone know how to follow and talk to their friends? To see your friend's post, if they are not on the main relay, you need to get just the right combination of parameters. Even in this perfect scenario with unlimited resources, attention, goodwill, and organization, we couldn't even manage to make a clean break and still have to be reliant on bsky for basically the entire stack, at least partially.

So maybe some small, closed group could make subnetworks, and that is lovely! i'm glad that tech is out there. There's no such thing as privacy on those networks unless they redesign indigo, but hey it's a start! But that looks nothing like the interoperable paradise that's on the label.

In reality we don't get perfect conditions though, and so we'll get stuck at step one: new relay, zero appviews, zero feed generators, zero visibility, and zero people. Again I don't think alternate relays are possible with atproto -- if they were, then there would be no reason to invest $13 million dollars in bluesky.

#atproto #bsky #bluesky #fediverse

Another interesting perspective on whether Bluesky's is decentralized is @rwg's Decentralization or Noncentralization, Bluesky or the Fediverse?.

My perspective is that while Bluesky's and AT's approaches to decentralization is different than the Fediverse's instance-oriented approach (or a pure P2P networks) -- and the differences are important -- it's still decentralized in the computer science sense of the term. Yes, it's got power-centralizing tendencies ... but so does ActivityPub: larger instances see more of the conversation so search and hashtags work much better. It's one of the reasons Meta looked at ActivityPub and said "yum"! And it's one of the reasons that Mastodon gGmbH changed the default on the mobile apps and the joinmastodon.org landing page to send people to mastodon.social (which also happens to be owned by Mastodon gGmbH).

The people developing for Bluesky/AT that I talk to aren't particularly naive. In Part 3 of Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space talks about the "implicit feudalism" of Bluesky and AT. There's lots of conversation there (even from Blueksy engineers) about the company as a future hostile actor. It's a tradeoff.

Would you rather be developing for a fast-growing ecosystem that's easier to program against and optimized for scalable flat all-public applications (even knowing the company's likely to be exploitative at some point) -- or an ecosystem that isn't growing, has huge compatibility problems between apps, is challenging to program against, and where key influencers are welcoming Meta's plans to embrace, extend, and exploit? Opinions differ (and there's plenty of good stuff going on in ActivityPub as well) but I can certainly see why there's so much enthusiasm about AT.

@possibledog

Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space (Part 3)

We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology. - Black Panther Party 10 Point Program

^{Rudy Fraser (Rudy's Blog)}

Thanks for tagging me on this. I added a couple of new sections to privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky…, one on "Some people in the ActivityPub Fediverse very much do not welcome Bluesky" (I've attached a screenshot from the start of that section) and another on "Are Bluesky and the ATmosphere decentralized?" (which also links to posts from @rwg, @possibledog, @rysiek, @jonny, @Kye, and a couple of people saying that Mastodon isn't decentralized (!)).

A couple suggestions for your article ...

• in terms of how many accounts are federating from Threads, @laurenshof estimated at about 50,000
• the point about people suggesting changing Bridgy Fed to opt in are ignoring informed consent is a good one. It'd be helpful to also quote Mastodon's perspective that allow-list federation is "contrary to Mastodon’s mission of decentralization"
• the point about Mike M's work on nomadic identity is also a good one, although it's also important to highlight that when Bluesky surveyed the landscape in 2020-21, the ActivityPub standard and every ActivityPub implementer other than Mike had ignored this existing work and users' long-stated desire for data portability.

Also, when you talk about how Bridgy Fed is "confusing less knowledgeable people about whether or not BS is part of the Fediverse or not", I'd appreciate you linking to my post to clarify just who you're insulting here -- not just me, but also Marco Rogers, Dr. Matt Lee of Gnu social, and the others in the attached screenshot who see Bluesky as part of today's Fediverse.

@oblomov

@jdp23 typo spotted:

> And hostility coming fromm people who don't want

should be:

> And hostility coming from people who don't want

@rysiek @jdp23
also an extra " in the link text to my article (updated, BTW).

FWIW, I wouldn't put, say, Wordpress or Vivaldi with the likes of Meta and BS.

Thanks, fixed now ... and thanks for updating.

Agreed that Vivaldi shouldn't be there, I replaced them and Fastly with Cloudflare. Wordpress is a billion-dollar "open core" company with $300 million in venture funding whose CEO is currently abusing his power to extort money from a company in their ecosystem (at the expense of other companies in the ecosystem) ... if and when Bluesky goes down the greedy profit maximization path, to me that's the most likely comparison.

Agreed that Meta is worse, there's another section the article talking about Bluesky as a counterweight to Meta where I say

"Of course, Bluesky is far from perfect. They're venture-funded, so likely to end with an exploitative business model. They've got a surveillance-capitalism friendly all-public architecture. It's great that Jack Dorsey's no longer on the board but he was. Then again Meta's had exploitative surveillance business models for years, along with a track record of discrimination, privacy invasion, lying, assisting authoritarians and insurrectionists, and contributing to genocide ... and it's great that Peter Thiel is no longer on their board but he was, Marc Andreessen is still on the board, and so is Mark Zuckerberg."

@oblomov @rysiek

I guess we see it differently. If you think that it's intellectually consistent to argue that Fediverse should welcome a large venture-funded company led by shitty CEOs who are currently abusing their power, but not Bluesky, I can footnote that.

@oblomov @rysiek

OK how about this for a footnote.

Although as always in the Fediverse, opinions differ: Oblomov suggests that it's intellectually consistent for people in the Fediverse to welcome Wordpress but not Bluesky. We agree that Wordpress is a large big tech company with hundreds of millions of venture funding whose CEO is currently abusing his power by attempting to extort revenue from a company in the ecoystem (at the expense of other companies in the ecosystem). In Oblomov's view, though, Wordpress "has very limited technical means to prevent an ecosystem shift", and there's a key difference between that and Bluesky's "choke-point redesign of “decentralization”, and choice for an entirely separate protocol."

@oblomov @rysiek