[HN Gopher] Bluesky's at Protocol: Pros and Cons for Developers
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Bluesky's at Protocol: Pros and Cons for Developers
Author : steveklabnik
Score : 49 points
Date : 2024-11-07 20:02 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thenewstack.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (thenewstack.io)
| tedunangst wrote:
| Are there any examples of apps that bluesky's 13 million users
| can login to?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The best known ones right now are:
|
| * Hacker News clone: https://frontpage.fyi/
|
| * Events app: https://smokesignal.events/
|
| * Blog platform: https://whtwnd.com/
|
| There's toooons of alternative clients, but that's not the same
| thing as "independent application."
| querez wrote:
| As someone who's currently on the brink of signing up to bluesky:
| what's the recommended way of picking a handle, then? Are there
| any downsides to going with a normal `@name.bsky.social` thing
| first and later switching if I feel there is a need? Or should I
| best use my own domain from the get go?
| pfraze wrote:
| Nope, you can switch domains at any point. It'll break web
| links to your profile, but the network won't struggle to keep
| track of who you are.
|
| The reason for this is that domain names are aliases. Your
| permanent ID is the DID, which the domain name maps to.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It's truly up to you. Swapping to your domain won't affect
| anything, so you can do so whenever you'd like. I was known as
| steveklabnik.bsky.social for a couple of weeks before I changed
| it to steveklabnik.com.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I would seriously consider building my next startup using AT, but
| how does bluesky solve the problem of building your castle in
| another man's kingdom?
|
| if I do something controversial or using regulatory arbitrage,
| I'm interested in how AT is useful for managing that risk.
| cowsup wrote:
| > how does bluesky solve the problem of building your castle in
| another man's kingdom?
|
| Bluesky (the platform) doesn't, and they acknowledge that. It's
| centrally owned, and is prone to all of the risks that any
| other centralized platform offers.
|
| > if I do something controversial or using regulatory
| arbitrage, I'm interested in how AT is useful for managing that
| risk.
|
| AT is completely decentralized, like email.
|
| If your account is @motohagiography.example.com, other AT
| instances will make a DNS query to example.com to see if that
| has an entry that the AT protocol recognizes. If so, it will
| make a connection to that instance, and gather your content for
| display.
|
| However, if a particular instance sees their a volume of
| unwanted accounts from example.com, they could blacklist that
| domain from interacting with their instance, so, even with this
| setup, you are at the mercy of the "big players" respecting you
| -- just like if you try to send email to users using Gmail and
| Google decides you're suspect.
|
| And, if you violate the laws of where you're located, law
| enforcement will handle that the same as they would if you
| violating the laws over HTTP or over email.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| A useful mental model for AT is the web:
|
| * Your PDS is like your own website.
|
| * Bluesky is like a search engine.
|
| * plc.directory is like DNS.
|
| If you choose to have someone host your own web site, then it's
| up to them what happens to it. You're using their servers after
| all. If you have your own host, you get to decide what happens
| there.
|
| Likewise, a search engine can say "hey, I don't like what's
| happening on that website, so I won't surface it in results,"
| but they cannot shut your website down.
|
| Now, the only twist here is that currently, atproto is _kind of
| like_ if there was only one real DNS server, and it was also
| owned by your search engine. That is, BlueSky the company runs
| plc.directory. So in the maximal sense, "if you run your own
| server" is technically "and you only get an IP address, not a
| domain name," that is, if plc.directory decides to unlist you,
| then folks can't find your posts. There is an alternative to
| plc.directory, but basically nobody actually uses it at the
| moment.
|
| Okay, so on a technical level, that's the rough explanation. On
| the social level:
|
| Here's what they have to say:
| https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/atproto#speech-re...
|
| > Atproto's model is that speech and reach should be two
| separate layers, built to work with each other. The "speech"
| layer should remain permissive, distributing authority and
| designed to ensure everyone has a voice. The "reach" layer
| lives on top, built for flexibility and designed to scale.
|
| > The base layer of atproto (personal data repositories and
| federated networking) creates a common space for speech where
| everyone is free to participate, analogous to the Web where
| anyone can put up a website. The indexing services then enable
| reach by aggregating content from the network, analogous to a
| search engine.
|
| On the PDSes that Bluesky hosts, they will remove illegal
| content, but nothing else. That's the "speech" part. However,
| they do moderate Bluesky itself, and there's a gradient there:
| they will remove some things, they will also tag some things,
| allowing users to decide if they want to see it or not.
|
| As far as the "DNS problem," they've stated that they wish to
| move it into an external foundation, to build additional
| safeguards there. I personally believe them, because they have
| promised many things, including things that have reduced their
| own power and control over the network, many times, and then
| followed through. You can choose to believe them or not, or
| wait until it's the case before getting invovled.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| After some insightful sharing from Bsky devs in some other
| threads on here I am definitely reconsidering it....especially
| around the usefulness of the domain-centric identity model. But I
| remain concerned about Bsky developing their features slowly in
| the open. Which leaves it lacking (if you're looking to hit the
| ground running with a full fledged social network, not repeat the
| years of growth from early twitter), and also open to weird
| loopholes like some ppl realized you could use an archive of
| tweets with some scripts from a dev on github and _backdate_
| posts into Bluesky. Meaning you could write wacky tweets like
| from Sept 11 2001 etc and they 're all sitting there on the
| network like they 'happened' weirdly with comments from 2024. And
| one of the developers in the replies of one of the jokey posts
| alarmingly saying we need to fix this ... _in March 2024_ (not
| yet fixed, still being exploited).
|
| As Doctorow writes, putting the energy into building up your
| contact list all over again is not appealing at all and so remain
| wary of this. Similar reasons not to go all in on Mastodon which
| wasn't _it_ or any of the other centralized Twitter clones that
| popped up a year or two ago which have now started to shut down
| etc.
| BadHumans wrote:
| > and also open to weird loopholes like some ppl realized you
| could use an archive of tweets with some scripts from a dev on
| github and backdate posts into Bluesky. Meaning you could write
| wacky tweets like from Sept 11 2001 etc and they're all sitting
| there on the network like they 'happened' weirdly with comments
| from 2024
|
| This sounds like a critical issue that should've been fixed as
| soon as possible.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| > not yet fixed, still being exploited
|
| It is actually fixed. Tweets have been showing up with their
| "Indexed On" date instead of the actual authoring date. The
| thing that isn't implemented is showing both dates for tweets
| with separate dates.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Ed Zitron has an interview with Mike Masnick (Techdirt, board
| member of Bluesky) on the latest ep of the _Better Offline_ [0]
| podcast. Pretty interesting, though I wasn't entirely convinced
| that Bluesky will deliver the solution we need. But it's
| encouraging to see progress in the various efforts to wrest
| control of the web from big corporations. I'm a fediverse fan,
| myself.
|
| [0] https://www.betteroffline.com
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