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" (freeourfeeds.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] Sanctus@lemmy.world 27 points 3 weeks ago

Or they could use ActivityPub

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago

have you read about why they didn't?

[-] MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 18 points 3 weeks ago

Whatever reason they don't isn't a very good one when there's already excuses being made around AT proto not being scalable beyond a single app.

ActivityPub works today and we are using it right now. There's basically no incentive to make a new protocol if you aren't willing to support more than 1 platform that uses it.

I'm not even a bluesky hater, but you have to question why they're choosing to reinvent the wheel other than disliking the lack of agency that comes with making a (essentially) proprietary protocol. You have to wonder if they ever truly plan to federated at all or if it's all just lip-service.

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

but you have to question why they’re choosing to reinvent the wheel

you don't have to wonder why if you take the time to read about why; see the links in my other comments in this thread if you're curious.

[-] ericjmorey@discuss.online 2 points 3 weeks ago

Federation and decentralization is not what the users of bsky want. It's (for some) a nice to have thing but way down on the list of what they value.

[-] Sanctus@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago

Does the why matter when the end result is another recreation of an xkcd comic?

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago

In my opinion, yes, the why does in fact matter. This blog post i've linked in other comments in this thread is by one of the authors of the ActivityPub spec. If you care enough to comment about it i recommend reading her analysis of what AT Proto gets right and wrong in comparison with ActivityPub.

[-] Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago

We're still left with multiple competing standards that then need maintainers for the bridges. IMO if we want to truly break from the walled gardens of yore a single federation standard would be more helpful towards that goal. Its cool they want to build Twitter 2. Thats not what most of us on the fediverse are looking forward to tho.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 3 weeks ago

The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky's purposes, but on the economics alone it's going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.

[-] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago

Reading through it, I'm not seeing much in favor of ATP. It basically says ATP will never be decentralised. What exactly are the points you're trying to make here?

[-] Mac@mander.xyz 4 points 3 weeks ago

Where do they say?

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago

They mention ActivityPub in a few places, such as this blog post.

But I'd recommend https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ instead, which is the best discussion I've seen so far of the pros and cons of each of the two approaches.