And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing that “almost nobody does” problem. The fact that such a thing is even possible, and that it's seamless to move from one to the other, gives ATproto a massive leg-up compared to even other federated systems, let alone its non-federated predecessors.
Bsky offers an on-ramp to a more decentralized experience, but most people won't pay the money and experience the friction to move take that ramp. Platforms like Mastodon are entirely decentralized, but that means the friction of decentralizing happens immediately upon sign-up. The people who don't want to self-host PDSes never signed up for Mastodon to begin with.
I try to be skeptical, but I feel like bsky (or something like it) is the best way can do re: bringing decentralization to the masses.
If there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing a problem, and yet nobody fixes it, then there's something is stopping them.
Might not be a technical impossibility, or a gun in their head. Could be as simple as inertia or addiction.
But saying "the problem is totally solvable" just because there's a solution available, is pretty naive. Solutions have costs themselves, and not all are created equal or equally feasible.
Yes. Be wary of Bluesky. That’s our whole point. Run the infrastructure on your own. Build separate companies.
Most of the complaints here are just about the cost of scale. You are able to fetch the whole network and its history, and that costs time and money. The only structural centralization is PLC, which is being factored into an independent org.
The actual SSB codebase has been kind of broken since 2020, but I have a fork on my own Github that works and comes with a basic client that you can vibe/claw on top of: https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc
I'm happy to supply pub invites to anyone who wants to play around with the old sbot with me as we work towards making social media distributed again.
I've heard Paul speak about this the other way around, that the experience from SSB informed the design of ATProto. I.e. ATProto solves most of the issues in SSB
For clarity, ATProto is the protocol, Bluesky is one dozens of apps, obv the biggest and most well known outside of the ATmosphere.
This isn't just on Paul, Jay has publically stated that she doesn't believe users (even powerusers) can be trusted with keypairs.
If 97% of your users are on one instance it is not a distributed platform. Applying this to mastodon, I am pretty sure most people would consider it a problem if mastodon.social started getting more than 40% of active users (currently at about 15 iirc).
(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.
Then there's "decentralized" in the sense that the protocols that govern are open and anyone can plug in without permission. This is how email works in practice. Most people do not choose to run their own email servers, but they nonetheless benefit from the fact that people who are interested can do so and provide email service.
Bluesky is the second kind of decentralized.
is really to find a good enough middle ground that has competitive enough UX to get people off of the fully centralized, locked in social media providers. In the broader context, ATProto to me means user choice and provenance, which ATProto does better than any other protocol. See all the parts beyond just data hosting, where the entire distributed system is plug-n-play. [1]
ATProto not being purist, preferring pragmatism, is what attracts me over alternatives like AP and Nostr.
[1] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
They're the first alternative full stack, the first alternative AppView, and that is something that the author should have mentioned. However, it weakens the argument so they left it out.
"Number of contributors" has never meant impact. You wouldn't dismiss openssl or curl, ya know?
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.
People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.
The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.
25G < PLC postgres < 100G, depending if you want to keep all the spam operations (> 50%) and/or add extra indexes for a handle autocomplete service (like me, takes it over 100GB with everything)
Repo data (records) is in the double digit TB range (low end, without any indexing, just raw)
Blobs are in the Petabyte range.
I aim to find out current and accurate details soon.
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.
Joking aside, I think what we see in the larger scheme is a fracturing of social media. More choice, more competition.
This is a good thing
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.
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.
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.
Archived: https://archive.ph/PsTrp
In the meantime the article is also on Nostr if anyone wants to read it: https://habla.news/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzql5ujf9w2f2ujkj9f552a...
Thanks for the heads up!
Sounds like he was worried so much he left Bluesky already.
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.
I'd rather be optimistic than nihilistic about it. It's still early and there are a lot of good things happening.
> [..] 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!
At the scales these systems run at, you need large indexes. Distributing those indexes across many nodes would require a breakthrough in federated queries, and if you have one of those lying around I’d pay good money for it.
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.
Yeah, I left.
(And in fact I am wary of all social media.)
They already ban signups using email aliases, and apparently block alias emails to their unban support address too.
But they migrated to Bluesky, right? So it played out fine?
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.
I should add a time stamp to the blog.
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?
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.
If people can both be an origin for content and a relay for content, and modulate the extent to which they want to do either of those things, there's not really much of a difference between "federation" and "true" p2p. Some people will be all relay, and some people will be all content. Some content people might be paying relays, and some relays might be paying content people. Some relays will be private and some relays will be public. Some people will maintain all of their own content locally, and some people will leave it all on a specialized remote server as a service and not even care about holding a local copy.
Also, browsing would either have to be done through a commercial or public service (federation again), or through specialized software (no one will ever use this and operating systems will intentionally lock it out if they see it as a competitor.)
The problem with wishing this all into existence, though, is that bittorent (not dead) exists and is completely stagnant. There is often a lot of talk about improving the protocol, and the various software dealing with it, and none of it gets done. If bittorrent would just allow torrents to be updated (content added or removed), you could almost piggyback social media on it immediately. It's not getting done. Nobody is doing it, just writing specs that everybody ignores for decades.
So I guess my belief is that "true p2p" is a meaningless term and target when it comes to creating recognizable social media. "True p2p" would be within a private circle of friends, on specialized software. Might as well be a fancy e.g. XMPP group chat; it's already available for anyone who wants it. Almost nobody wants it. Telegram, Whatsapp, and imessage are already good enough for that. They may not be totally private, but they're private enough for 99.9999% of people's purposes, and people are very suspicious of the 0.0001% who want something stronger.
I actually think you're using "true p2p" here to sort of handwave a business model into existence (trying to imply mutuality, or barter, or something.) Whereas I think the business model is the part that needs to be engineered carefully and the tech is easy.
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.
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.
https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
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.
But you are right back to the same UX issue that prevented crypto mass adoption, i.e. lose your keys, lose everything
Very few want to own that risk.
The other challenge that AP has as an ecosystem is that they have been hostile to anyone wanting to build an index or business. People need to eat and they turned off a lot of developers who'd love to make their living building social media tech outside of the corporate oligarchy.
ATProto welcomes all, even if there is the occasional drama or hostility.
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.
1. Non-profit (separate entity from Bluesky)
2. Moving to Switzerland (get the f' out of the US)
3. Consortium control (proof-of-authority)
A PLC read-only mirror implementation was released the last week. I've been running one for a almost a year, redoing my hardware right now, so it's currently down. There are others out there.
you don't have to like it, that's fine, you have Nostr as an alternative
but when Nostr people come around bad mouthing everyone else, you make people want to use Nostr less
[1] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
[2] https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
* 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:
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.
Wizards can be difficult to develop and maintain. Writing a working, useful, functional, robust, informative, environment-agnostic, and re-entrant script (or GUI/TUI) can take scads of effort. Now that LLMs abound, much of that grind is quickly solved. For example, here's a vibe-coded script that to get dovecot, postfix, and virtual users set up on my new server with mailboxes copied from an old server:
https://autonoma.ca/mail-setup.txt
To vibe code it, the prompt included content from:
https://xtreamsolution.net/complete-email-server-setup-tutor...
After a few kicks at the can (run script, capture errors, feed errors to LLM, repeat), it finally configured a working system. Reviewing the script, yes, it's beyond painful. It doesn't have to be, though; the authors of complex software could produce similar guided installers.
I've run my own since the 1990's, it is certainly possible, there are many others who have done the same. I have no issues with email deliverability.
> everyone gives up on this.
Not everyone gives up on it, some do, some don't.