knowtheoryOpen Social
Wow, I always imagined Activitypub to be the better protocol and AT a cheap knock-off, but reading this article made me realize at is, actually, way better - primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity. This is really a great feature to have! This article was a real mind-opener for me.
Does that mean there is a centralized identity service?
You have two choices of identity service: did:plc, which is, and did:web, which is not.
In theory additional dids could come into existence too, those are just the two that blueksy supports at the moment.
That’s correct. PLC is being split into an independent entity but that is ongoing: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org
It’s worth noting that PLC can’t fake your data because each edit is recursively signed. So you can verify a chain of updates. However, PLC can in theory deny you service or ignore your updates.
Creating an Independent Public Ledger of Credentials (PLC) Directory Organization | Bluesky
The Bluesky Social app is built on an open network protocol that refers to each user by a unique Decentralized Identifier, or DID (a W3C standard). The most popular supported DID method was developed in-house by Bluesky Social, and is called "Public Ledger of Credentials", or PLC. The PLC identity system currently relies on a global directory service to distribute identity updates, and that directory service has been operated by Bluesky as well.
it's def not doing that right now lol, more than half the ops are adversarial and still accepted (the vast majority contain invalid contents)
Yeah, there are tens of thousands of records referencing a PDS with a certain… controversial president's name in the hostname, which doesn't actually exist at all.
Also someone from Nostr made a tool that let you upload image files and encode them (split into parts) into plc directory records…