this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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AT has a lot of nice parts, and a lot of "wtf why" parts.
It makes sense: AT was designed to be "Twitter, but also federateable" rather than ActivityPub's "Federateable, so you can build things like Twitter". ActivityPub is modular and much more customisable than AT, which was built closer to existing social media concepts.
I've read somewhere that Friendica is working on an AT implementation, so I guess we'll see how well federation actually works once that's done.
Yeah, from some cursory glances and following of AT devs, some things I understand the logic of and some things I'm thinking "isn't this a bit over-engineered?"
My basic question is whether the problems that needed solving about Twitter and other corporate social networks really have anything to do with software engineering at the end of the day.
Writing the code is honestly the easiest part in all probability. It is the other parts like community ownership, resiliency against corporate capture and human moderation that takes into consideration complex contexts etc… that are the truly hard parts and Bluesky really says almost nothing (at least worth trusting as more than words) new along those vital metrics (chiefly because it is an investor backed for-profit venture).
I think the moderation will be an uphill battle for Bluesky. I haven't seen a clear answer over how legal issues are going to be handled and generally, people want some form of moderation. Maybe not the extent that the fediverse has with its blocking drama.
But the resiliency against corporate capture and community ownership, meh I'm not really worried. I work with and use open-source projects that have been backed by corporations, Mastodon.social has already said they wish to federate with Threads, and there are corporations sponsoring (in the case of mastodonapp.uk) or outright owning instances (in the case of Flipboard, Mozilla Social and Vivaldi Social). Bluesky seems to be built on the notion that it too will be a possible adversary in the future, so the protocol is being built with that in mind.
You have to explain to me why you think massive tech corporations are going to behave differently here than they always do. Every large tech company behaves like Microsoft after a certain size in terms of values and actions, and they will do their best to mine the valuable aspects of the fediverse out and silo them away in a way that can be monetized.
I consider Flipboard or Mozilla owning instances to be a far different question because these are relatively small corporations, they aren’t Meta, they don’t have more cash on hand than entire countries.
Moderation is the hard part about social media, who gets to moderate, how moderation is handled between communities and how much human moderation genuinely happens from within the context of communities are all the important questions.
Again, what happens when Bluesky’s investor’s come knocking and want monetization? At that point is the CEO really just going to say “we can’t do that, it would give us more profits but it would be wrong to undercut the openness of Bluesky!”. It is frankly ridiculous to assume this would happen, the same story will play out that always plays out here.
You can either make huge amounts of money off of social media and payback your investors or you can make a healthy community, pick one. Unless you are a massive corporation with a lottttt of investors to please, then there was never really a choice no matter how long your investors let you attempt to fool your customers into thinking so before you hit the gas on cashing in (Reddit).
This all implies Bluesky can be considered a massive tech corp (which it honestly isn't even with investors, definitely not compared to Meta, or even Mozilla at this point), and can even be monetised.
In the event that they do attempt that, users can move to a different PDS and not lose any of their data - that's how AT was built. While on AP, it's dependent on if the software powering the account supports migration, and even then I've not seen an implementation that carries over all of the user's data (Mastodon only does followers/following, Lemmy has no migration whatsoever). That's not to say it's impossible, but I've not seen it happen.
But what is the business model here? Can you honestly tell me with a straight face that you trust them?
After a certain point I don’t care about technical arguments about how the AT protocol is better than AP or how technical aspects of it make it impervious to being controlled, there are always ways. The way we stop it is political, not technical, and just trusting Bluesky will be benevolent towards its federated users indefinitely is not a winning political strategy here in terms of the power dynamics between the ruling class (people like Jack Dorsey) and the rest of us.
Further I bet most of the people involved in Bluesky are really passionate and genuine in their desire, but ultimately their good intentions don’t interface at all with the reality of the structure they are operating in, i.e. an investor backed corporation seeking to profit off of a social network backed by some of the richest most powerful people in the tech world (even if they haven’t directly poured huge amounts of capital into it, they could, the option is there).
You have to ask, why the hell would they be genuinely offering us the future we want for the fediverse? It makes no sense for them too since they simply stand to lose by creating that future for us.
Bluesky's development has been pretty democratic, moreso than Mastodon where one guy basically leads the entire trajectory of the fediverse (at least from a mainstream perspective) from what I heard.
As for Jack, hasn't been on Bluesky for a while now - he prefers Nostr. Even though he's on the board, he's not attended any meetings nor has he dictated how the platform should go. He just threw money at it and ran after the community didn't take him seriously.
Who owns it though? Who are the investors? How are they planning to recoup their investment?
Jay Graber is the CEO, dunno about the investors but I don't care tbh. If Bluesky does go to shit, the protocol lets me move away without losing my data.
Ok well similarly I don’t care about the supposed promises of longterm openness with Bluesky or how that openness is “locked in” by a bunch of technical details that seem to me there a million ways to undermine at a later date when again, investors come knocking.
It will be interesting to see what Friendica devs come up with!
I've just started looking at the AT protocol. What sort of WTF things are in there?
The inclusion of some kind of web3 identifier that never seemed to get used for web3 things comes to mind. The methodology of most federation work also seems to indicate that hosting an alternative server may require significantly more resources compared to an ActivityPub server, though this may be outdated information.
I also don't particularly like their moderation strategy. It seems very Nostr-like, and it's more about hiding things than actually blocking things.
They also felt like they needed to invent their own notation language to describe their protocol, which makes reading the protocol spec kind of weird.
They also decided to use Javascript's 53 bits of integer precision as an upper bound for their protocol. I certainly wouldn't have designed my cross-platform protocol around the programming language I happened to choose.
Lastly, Bluesky offers a flag to suggest clients hide your profile and posts, but doesn't have the ability to hide that data. With ActivityPub, you can simply refuse to list posts and maintain some amount of privacy (especially combined with enabling follow requests), but AT doesn't seem to care much about that.
not the OP, but
i was going to point to the did:plc thing they made up and went with. but since the last time i looked, it looks like they support (and prefer) did:web, so that's sorted out.
the "wtf" i have is more to do with actually running a community with atproto. you need a central crawler service that knows about all the PDSes you want to be friends with (this is presumably why you need to sign up in their discord right now, they gotta tell their crawler to look at your PDS)
but i think the crawler has to grab the entire PDS for everyone it knows about? if you want a large community, it seems pretty resource-intensive since the ceiling is "infinity posts". bsky's open source code suggests they have chosen not to deal with this problem.
with most AP services (e.g. mastodon), you can prune the data and the only consequence is "you don't get full text search for super old posts received from other services that we pruned", so there are ways to limit the cost other than "limit the number of users in our community".
but this may just be an implementation detail and not an issue with atproto, e.g. git shallow clones are a thing, and the PDS is also storing a big merkel tree. i am not sure if the indexer relies on having the complete history or not (since you do need it for certain operations). bsky's own code just shrugging suggests maybe limiting it is challenging, i dunno.
What you note about the crawler appears to be essentially by design:
In their section on so-called "Big World" design:
Emphasis mine.