this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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FYI the bluesky protocol is open and there's plans to standardize. It's also federated (the sandbox network is open to 3rd parties)
There's lots of new privacy techniques from cryptography, stuff like differential privacy and MPC could help a lot with making it easier and safer to use collaboration tools.
I am skeptical of Bluesky. It's led by Jack and we've already seen how that goes. Second, there isn't really a good technical reason for it to exist as it's own protocol outside of the fact that they want to control it given that Fedi/Mastodon was already there and they could have just as easily contributed to that with the things they wanted, they just wouldn't have had full control. Similar to Threads promise to federate, I will be somewhat surprised if they ever do it.
Were Bluesky/Threads not a corporate effort, I have a feeling that it would have followed a similar pattern as the fediverse - build the protocol and release that, then the clients will follow. Bluesky still isn't federating even with its own protocol, and Threads isn't either. Given that's stuff that tiny teams with far, far fewer resources than the corps have accomplished, it's a little wild that neither have gotten there.
Especially with Bluesky, there doesn't seem to be a stated plan for how it's going to make money. And we're talking about a lot of the same people that destroyed the Twitter API and started locking things down even before Elon killed it completely and they're trying to convince us that they are pushing for an open environment.
As said many times before, Jack is now AWOL and left for nostr, he even deleted his bluesky account because the crowd didn't like him there. He doesn't have a majority on the board and don't own any majority stake either.
The motivation for a new protocol is there's architectural limits to activitypub. It's essentially email over http, it really behaves like public mailing list archives, as servers push each interaction as a message. This is part of why there's often a discrepancy between visible replies across servers because retries are limited. Account portability is also very limited as accounts and posts are tied to a server.
Bluesky switches to a content addressing model plus user ID based on a public key, allowing you to more easily move across servers as well as syncing data between servers such as thread replies, it's very much like git (user data is held in personal repositories signed by your key) with a shared CDN/cache (relay servers, previously called BGS) and "worker agents" (mostly driven by the "appview" which is the api endpoint for your client + feed generator servers). You post to your repository via your appview, it sends a ping to other servers and they sync new relevant entries.
They already have federation with 3rd parties in a sandbox network and the official server just switched on "internal federation" (used to be a single shared server, now there's 10 using the same protocol that open federation will later use)
The code is already open source, several servers in the sandbox is 3rd party reimplementations
Gotcha, thanks for the info. I'm def behind in following the goings on there. Do you have any insight on the revenue plan?
Not really.
Since handles are domain names (and your own DNS entry points to your account public key, DID) they have a referral deal with a registrar to let people easily get a custom domain and set it as a handle (otherwise your handle is a subdomain on the bluesky domain). But future plans are uncertain
Yeah, this is def a thing that is a big sticking point for me. I have a hard time supporting a company these days without a clear revenue plan because it's just kind of a bait-and-switch otherwise.