undefined

points

[-]

> PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization (https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN.

And since that sounds like a massive centralization problem, how do we have a dozen more of them with independent governance that aren't all controlled by either the same legal entity or by whoever has legal leverage to compel that entity?

by danabramov1 days ago|

parent|

[-]

Well, I think you also need to consider what PLC is. It’s an open source implementation of an open source spec. The implementation holds zero private state and exposes a verifiable log of operations for audit. There’s ongoing work on mirrors and replicas. Also, its output itself is cryptographically self-verifying.

I get that it’s not ideal but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s not much you can mess up with it other than refusing to update requests. The threat model is very limited and it would immediately be obvious that this is happening, killing the credibility.

by pfraze1 days ago|

parent|

[-]

I’d also call out that activitypub has the same threat model in the form of ICANN, as it’s also heavily dependent on DNS for identity. I believe these are reasonable trades to make; realistically the alternative is to use a blockchain, which few people are keen to do.

by kuschku4 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Not necessarily – there are some activitypub instances without hostname, directly on IP addresses, and there are even some running in private DNS roots.

by inigyou8 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

ATProto has both PLC and ICANN

ICANN is a severe risk btw. Current new protocols should be designed to avoid DNS wherever possible.

by packetlost1 days ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

Based on my understanding, PLC is centralized primarily because there needs to be a global, authoritative source of truth for the current state of a given plc. You could in theory namespace a plc to a particular directory instance with a backwards reference or something, but I don't think it buys you anything when in theory you can just choose to trust a different PLC directory at the read/application layer if you really need.

At the end of the day, truly fully decentralized systems are literally impossible, there's always a centralized aspect (at least for bootstrapping) and it's usually DNS-shaped.

That being said, PLC directories are a problem that blockchains (yuck) actually solve very well: trustless, public ledgers. I would not be surprised if we see a separate implementation based on an architecture derived from such systems.