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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

Free Our Feeds: "it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24751597

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390

https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v

tldr, it's a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’

Mark Ruffalo, Actor

Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker

Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan

Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’

Brian Eno, Musician

Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist

Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist

Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian

Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep

Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords

Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA

...

Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.

37 comments

  • Is there any instance other than Bluesky where people can register?

    • Is there any instance other than Bluesky where people can register?

      There aren't "instances" in the ActivityPub sense, where "instance" means single point of failure you're married to (its name is literally part of your identity) which is simultaneously responsible for keeping your data available and curating your view of the rest of the network; AT Protocol decomposes these responsibilities so that they can be delegated independently to different operators.

      See https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture and https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ for details.

      There are many people running their own Personal Data Servers, AppViews, Labelers, and Feed Generators, but I'm not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on). I'm also not sure if you can actually create a did:plc using a self-hosted AppView or if maybe you need to use did:web to create a new identity without using their AppView currently.

      • I’m not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on).

        The fact that there still isn't any other relay besides thé Bluesky one isn't a good sign. If cost of running it is so high, how are enthusiast supposed to be able to run their own, and thus "own the town square"?

  • Isnt Bluesky like duplicative of what the Feddy is going for?

    • Theoretically, not really. Realistically, no not at all. My understanding, being corporately backed. They want every server to host everything. So that they theoretically have access to everything to datamine and advertise on. In the fediverse. You can see and interact with all the content. But your server doesn't aggregate it unless you interact. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

      Basically what this means, is that you could spin up and host your mastodon or Lemmy server on an SBC laying in a drawer spare. Somewhat like Action Retro did with bitbang.social. If you want to run a bsky server. Theoretically you can. You will just need quite a lot of storage, bandwidth, and server hardware. Activity Pub is decentralized. The AT protocol technically can be decentralized in a way. But not really.

      • they didn't do it that way for no reason though, and they did do some stuff to alleviate the problems it causes.

        • it allows for better discoverability, no missing comments in threads, good global search, ect. Basically solves most all of the papercuts the fediverse has.
        • there isn't a "server" you host, per se. There are 3 components, the appview (ui, self-explanatory) and decides how your algorithm is, the relay (hard to run, does the federation and outputs everything it sees as a "firehose") and the pds (personal data server), which hosts account data and is the "home" for your account. I host my own pds, and you can migrate your account between pds's. The only hard part to run is the relay.

        also everything bluesky is open source

37 comments