(Blacksky is the/one of the furthest along in building competing versions of each part of the AT proto stack.)
I do think it's a critical omission to not address the main player(s?) who are working on key parts of this, and where they may yet run into problems.
A system or protocol is whatever the easiest user journey is. Anything outside of that will never be seen by many users unless there is some value to be gained by going there. And that value has to be something gained now, not a hypothetical like insurance against future closing of the network. People don’t like to buy insurance.
Keep in mind, twitter got rid of their API. Google got rid of XMPP federation. Bluesky breaking or defederating atproto wouldn't impact most users, so they'd probably get less outcry than those examples.
However I think the view you expressed there is misguided. If Bluesky locked out third party infra tomorrow presumably the vast majority of people would not move. Thus vendor lockin via network effects remains. (Ie you are always free to leave but you'd be moving from a metropolis to a backwater.)
The only scenario where this isn't true is one where no more than a few percent of the people you interact with reside on any given node. By that metric small AP nodes pass while large ones such as the flagship Mastodon node fail. Similarly Gmail and Outlook fail while any self hosted mail server passes.
It's not an easy problem to solve.
> [..] machine-readable archive of information associated with your account in HTML and JSON files. [..] including your profile information, your posts, your Direct Messages, your Moments, your media ([..]), a list of your followers, a list of accounts that you are following, your address book, Lists that you’ve created, are a member of or follow, [..], and more.
(Note that I actually elided some additional things that are included in the export, for readability's sake.)
https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/accessing-your-x...
edit: also, thanks for clarifying!
But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the majority of people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well. But also I don't understand why any of this is a reason to be "wary", it's a great place to be with some unique technical properties - it is way more "open" than any other platform of similar scale.
The post discusses why, when all is not well, it will be too late.
The real test for the AT Protocol will be whether it can truly decouple from Bluesky PBC before the pressures of monetization or an exit strategy kick in. Right now, we’re benefiting from the "honeymoon phase" of a platform that needs growth more than revenue, but history suggests that the bridge to true decentralization needs to be fully built before that dynamic inevitably shifts.
Yeah, it played out with my whole social circle leaving, as evidenced by the fact that all my friends link me to the bluesky post whenever there's something happening now.
Who would've thought true decentralization means everyone hosting their own server? Yes, each user would have to pay and maintain it, but that's the cost of decentralization. ATProto at least makes it easy to jump ship if shit hits the fan and not have to start from scratch. Try doing that with Twitter/Instagram/Etc.
They already ban signups using email aliases, and apparently block alias emails to their unban support address too.
Yeah, I left.
(And in fact I am wary of all social media.)
1. Strongly encourage backups.
2. Force users to migrate off the "official" PDS until it has less than, say, 40% market share.
3. Make the mobile apps use third-party relay/appview by default (could be randomized).
Or invert this, and make it local-first. It's your data, and publishing it to a network is a form of backup. Either that, or the client holds a local copy by default.
* Overusing verbs
* Poor structure
* Bad transitions between grafs
* Passive voice
And even bigger-picture stuff, like "you might want to zoom in here" or "this section isn't paying off". I've only in the past few months started using it for proofreading, and it's pretty solid.
But if you take any of its words, you're infecting your writing with Claude's tone, and it will show.
It's super useful as a reader of your writing. It's a terrible collaborator, unless you're writing for an audience of middle managers.
I don't think it's trustworthy.
> His answer:
It's true that many p2p attempts have failed, but it's also the only solution that doesn't require someone running servers for free. There's evidence of success as well: napster (and bittorrent). Both were wildly successful, and ultimately died because of legal issues. It might work when the data is yours to share.
I don't care if Bluesky goes away, gets bought, whatever.
Social media is disposable like a retail outlet. I'm sad if the coffee shop around the corner goes out of business, but there are 99K coffee shops in the US. I can go to another one.
As it is, I don't use Meta or X.. because they're led by despicable beings. Bluesky gets a pass for now, and has enough interesting people that I show up and have a chat. Like a coffee shop or a bar.
Social media should be treated as disposable. Anything that is not yours (as in, is hosted by someone else - for free) should be disposable. In fact id even argue that any media should be treated as disposable. You wouldn't hoard all the material things your accumulate in life, why would you hoard random tweets, comments and reactions forever?
If its worth it, surely you'll find a way to keep it in a way that doesnt demand a third party to do it for you for eternity, no?
"Switching costs" man... people move between countries with vastly different languages and cultures and they adapt, make new relationships, refresh ideas. Is switching from database A to database B that difficult really?
Because of network effects, more users is generally more interesting. Blue Sky has "enough" at this point for me to be happy there. Programmers like antirez, my bike racing people like inrng, my city's mayor and one of our city councilors, and also a bunch of urbanists.
Edit: you lose some connections moving around, but I've also had friends I've known since the days of IRC. I think I'm mostly resigned to picking whatever works best in the moment and being willing to move (like abandoning Twitter) when it's not working.
which is not opposed to you being on Bluesky or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever.
If you don't want to get your own domain and run a server (not practical for most people) you can still protect yourself from being stuck in a single silo by broadcasting to many social media sites.
Imagine if Bluesky decides to ban you, and continues to ban accounts you create elsewhere. Atproto ensures non-Bluesky PDS can see you, but you've lost 99% of the userbase.
The Wikipedia page says "Nostr is primarily popular with cryptocurrency users, primarily Bitcoin users."
That's not my crowd.
And since you mentioned primarily Bitcoin users those are the crypto folks that seem to be very against the idea of tokenizing everything.
From what I understand by posting something on Nostr you are posting signed events to a list of dumb relays. These events can be of many types and include hints of discoverability. There is no blockchain and no token and the thing they call zap is just a link to a lightning address that is up to the client to show.
Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of a power tripping administrator.
It seems like the perfect nesting ground for non corporate user content and pocket islands of communities. Nothing prevents someone from implementing a relay or community that bans any talk about Bitcoin or crypto. I for one would love to see closed content focused relays in Nostr.
Don't they have to give you your data upon request? And the cheapest way is to offer an export function? Wasn't this thanks to the EU (GDPR Article 20)?
I can export decades of web browsing history, bookmarks, logins, etc. and import into any other browser with almost no trouble at all. Try to export your mainstream social network (facebook, twitter, insta, tiktok, etc.) content and connections and import it into another social network and let me know how that goes.
Will normal people do it, no. But you can.
As others have said, the data has to be publishable to be useful. We do have data export laws. The format is known to be ready to use interoperably, not some private schema--atop the PBC commitment, which will at least have moderate legal costs if not a guarantee. It has unequivocally set a new high bar.
They seem pretty locked in to doing what they committed to. The day may come when they turn. It may come first by friction, but the turn has to be pretty complete, because the data is pretty open. What's needed to view it, use it at all, is pretty close to what's needed to host it.
"The site whose value prop is sharing your posts and data with other apps may stop sharing your posts and data with other apps." Yeah, it's possible. It's also possible they just close.
Several people have mentioned that "you can just own your own data, so that's enough, right?"
Interoperating with Bluesky requires you to either 1) opt into the did:plc standard, which is a centrally controlled certificate transparency log, or 2) have all your users create did:web accounts by manually setting DNS records.
So it is not possible to build on Bluesky at all without opting into this centrally controlled layer. This original post covers this, but maybe not in enough detail to stop commenters from missing the point.
Bluesky the company controls 95%+ of PDSes in the system, which control users' private keys, and they're extending PDSes to include more functionality that prevents users from easily exiting the network, e.g. private data is being implemented in a way where Bluesky LLC can see all your activity. The protocol changes often and with limited community input.
This is being done because "there are no other ways to do it" and "our users are okay with it". The community does pretty consistently attack people who dissent (e.g. look at what happened when Mastodon leaders objected). There's a lot of cheerleading for people who do opt into the system, and there's really no incentive for informed criticisms.
It's not really decentralized or neutral infrastructure; it's a great network for a number of specific subcultures who have a nice space away from X, and I hope the team embraces that.
This is a for-profit company running this service. It ain't free to operate.
If you don't like that, go elsewhere.
If there is one thing that has been a resounding success on the internet it is this: free services that you pay for with your clicks. Just look at the plethora of free services you get.
In no other economy would that be even remotely possible.