With the news of the secret $100 million investment in Bluesky by Bain, I keep thinking about protocols.
Maybe the perceived "drawbacks" of #ActivityPub are ultimately strengths?
#ATproto handles identity in a way that allows a single sign-in across apps. But wouldn't this make it easier to profile you? Is this why crypto VCs are so attracted to it?
And ATproto has funding in the 100s of millions by VCs but at some point they'll want to turn a profit. There is ZERO pressure here to ensh*tt*fy
@_elena I keep asking for this "decentralized" protocol to help me move off of all infrastructure controlled by the Bluesky corporation, and I keep getting the answer "well…so…uh…actually…"
Unfortunately I'm not waiting around for the "exit from evil billionaire control" scenario Jay Graber talked about a year ago or whatever, because that's already happened. So if I can't use ATProto without Bluesky, I guess I won't use ATProto. 🤷🏻♂️
Attached: 1 image We now have a 10k+ community (likely more if you count lurkers) that could possibly survive by themselves if #Bluesky PBC was suddenly bought by Elon Trumpenberg and shut down #atproto
Yes, just to add, PDS is the easy part.
Here's a better way to view the network.
@stefan @everton137 That's a neat visualization, thanks.
Still want to reiterate that the PDS concept just doesn't interest me. It's like if you could move the 0s & 1s data storage of your emails & personal contacts off of Google hosting…yet still use Gmail and all of its UI & services thereof.
Why?
The reason I use Fastmail is because I want nothing at all to do with Google / Gmail. 😄
Yeah, definitely agree. Even if you host your own PDS, you have to have a lot of trust in people running each additional element of the ATProto stack.
I just don't, and that's in part not being too familiar with that community, but also, I'm getting strong "former NFT/web3 and/or former/current AI booster" vibes from some of the people.
Worth adding that there's a client that skips some of Bluesky's own infrastructure and connects directly to people's PDSes.
https://tangled.org/whey.party/red-dwarf/tree/aturilistservice.reddwarf.app
(But relies on some community tools, so back to the question of trust.)
@jaredwhite
I actually disagree, I think it'd be neat if ActivityPub had some form of PDS-like structure
move all of your emails & personal contacts off of Google hosting...yet still use Gmail
What if you take all your emails and contacts and move to something not dependent on Gmail? You no longer have the costs of leaving a Google service, because all your data is controlled by you.
Not a great comparison to the current AtProto ecosystem which is very dependent on Bluesky. But, I think the PDS itself is not to blame there.
Elena Rossini ⁂
Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊)
everton137
Stefan Bohacek
Tom Casavant