This is... the least charitable possible interpretation of the current state of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. It's not wrong, but it's not clear that it will be right either.<p>Personally I would have preferred if they implemented federation before going into beta because that is the whole point of a decentralized network. But OTOH there is an opportunity <i>right now</i> to lure people away from Twitter and that opportunity may not exist in a few months. I don't think progressive decentralization, over a span of months not years, is inherently evil.
> because of that they are tricking a lot of people into using them<p>This may come as a surprise.<p>But your average cool, interesting person doesn't care whether Bluesky has a decentralised protocol or the intricacies of its identity model.<p>The reason most people are using it is because it's the closest thing to a Musk-less Twitter.
The solution to the problem of centralization that Bluesky has been touted as tackling (and that Mastodon doesn't deal with in a satisfactory way) doesn't look anything like Bluesky or Twitter or Mastodon. Instead, it's just making RSS (read: Atom) suck less.<p>Crazy that no one in the relevant circles seems to have realized that microblog posts don't require anything more sophisticated than what a static site generator can produce. The heavyweight server-to-server protocols that we've seen are just way too heavy.
Bluesky's innovation over Twitter is to try and free itself from onerous regulation and scrutiny by governments. Their defense, over and over again, will be "just run 'govsky'", "just run 'chinasky'", "we can't censor you, no need to start Truth Social (lol), also no need to give us super burdensome regulatory requirements."<p>They're doing things a little backwards, building a gmail before there's a big SMTP network out there, but that's smart. The default state of this positioning now is that they'll slowly drain Twitter of their attention capital ( this is on purpose; their UX is the Twitter UX) so Elon has to respond somehow.
Very cool and very normal to crank off about decentralization/moderation and then have people in the author's comments section threatening people with violence. It's almost as if there are a lot of intricacies around making these networks work well for people and there's more problems to be solved than just raw unmoderated decentralization if you want to foster a healthy community that doesn't devolve into a tiny fraction of the worst people on earth.
> The DID itself is derived from the sha256 hash of the first operation in the log. It is then base32 encoded and truncated to 24 chars.<p><a href="https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#how-it-works" rel="nofollow">https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#how-it-works</a><p>They could be using public keys as identifiers, why are they using nonsense?
Not necessarily endorsing this (I haven't looked into the details of Bluesky myself) but one thing I don't understand is - how does Bluesky intend to make money? Have they announced a plan? It's a corporation, so obviously they have something in mind. But googling about it, I can't find a good answer. Centralized social networks bank heavily on the network effect, but you don't really have that if you make a genuinely decentralized network like Bluesky says they're trying to.
It’s fine to have a rational disagreement about systems design and deployment, but this borders on paranoid screed. Just because you don’t like something and other people do doesn’t mean it’s a scam.