Technology

Have you read their blog post titled Composable Moderation?

imo it is the ActivityPub world that is cosplaying decentralization.

AT Protocol (BlueSky) seems sort of like AP except if it were designed by people who knew about cryptography and content adressability and who saw that using those tools allows for building systems where where users don't need to rely so heavily on the node operators.

Right now, if your AP server changes their policies in a way you don't like, or simply disappears, your only recourse is to make a new account elsewhere. If your old server is able and willing to facilitate it, you can leave a pointer to your new identity, but you can't take your history with you.

This gives the (mostly hobbyist sysadmin) server operators that most people rely on enormous power, not to mention responsibility.

Having cryptographic identities that are not permanently tied to whatever provider you selected is the solution to this problem, and that is the main reason why ATP exists.

BlueSky hasn't actually turned on federation or public signups yet; it remains a centralized invite-only website right now. But I'm pretty confident that both of those things will be changing soon, because the point of the project is to build a resilient decentralized protocol.

It had 4K users a couple weeks ago, and 50K today.

They implemented the "block" feature yesterday. This is what it looks like:

(Like any system where you are publishing things that are public-by-default, the "they will be prevented from seeing yours" part can of course be easily circumvented, but, like twitter and mastodon etc they are adding a speedbump that will help in many circumstances.)

BlueSky also already has a system for flagging different categories of sensitive content, much like Mastodon's CWs. This is what it looks like currently:

If your complaint is that "node operators will have no agency in the system"... lol, i guess that is kind of the entire point of it? Of course ATP server operators will have the agency to not host content or users that they don't want to, and to provide their users with whatever moderated views of content anyone wants to build. But, they won't have the agency to hold users hostage to the admins' whims like they do today in AP.

With ATP, the idea is that users (most of which are not going to be node operators, in either system), instead of admins, have the agency to change their decision about who to rely on to keep their data available, and also the agency to define what they want to see and what they want to not see (without having to start over when someone else changes their policies).

But the user-and-or-server agency I think you are worried about BlueSky taking away is not related to the technical differences, but rather the social/cultural ones: it's the false promise of agency that Mastodon promotes by pretending it's possible to have the benefits of a public-by-default conversation without the negative effects of it being searchable/discoverable (aka public). One could actually build things with that philosophy on top of ATP as effectively as it has been done on AP, and perhaps someone will, but indeed the current developers seem unlikely to run an anti-search-ethos server themselves.