ATProto Isn't What You Think

I believe the Bluesky experiment is already over, and it was not successful.<p>1. Bluesky was advertised as a very open, resilient platform because of AT, impossible to fully censor, with moderation at the user level, not platform level. In reality, &quot;Bluesky Social&quot; is what everyone uses (not AT), which performs bans at the core levels (PDS &#x2F; Relay &#x2F; user account level). So it&#x27;s just like any other social media platform. Still better than the Mastodon Reddit-style mod abuse problem, but not fundamentally more open than other social media platforms.<p>2. The second promise is that if anyone hosts their own PDS, anyone else can build their own relay and their own social media app that gets around the bans. In reality, I don&#x27;t see much appetite for using someone else&#x27;s distributed key-value JSON schema design. The value add isn&#x27;t clear enough. Other social media platforms build their own systems, which is an intuitively natural choice.<p>If Bluesky is not a highly open platform, and AT has low adoption (no killer app, hasn&#x27;t realized the promise&#x2F;benefit of being able to aggregate data from multiple publishers) then I don&#x27;t think it has a future.

For me, the most meaningful test of decentralization is whether one player can decide what most of the users can see. And that is entirely the case with Bluesky. You can own your information alright, but what is it good for when the single centralized app can decide what to do with them? If the single centralized app gets sour, you will be left with the impossible task of coordinating all your contacts to move elsewhere. If the single centralized app is down, nobody sees anything. How is this progress?<p>Meanwhile, the Fediverse has dozens of thousands of independent nodes and dozens of independent implementations.

I still immediately think of the Hayes (AT) command set every time I see &quot;ATProto&quot;. I suspect the former will outlive the latter, so I&#x27;m not making much effort to break the habit.

I know next to nothing about Bluesky or ATProto outside of what this article told me, but: as I was reading the part about the need to trust who&#x27;s controlling the PLC directory, I kept thinking that this could be a proper problem for trust-less cryptographic data storage mechanisms (like cryptocurrency ledgers) to solve. Isn&#x27;t that right? You would shift the risk from &quot;the entity hosting the PLC directory goes rogue and you can&#x27;t update your data anymore&quot; to &quot;a sybil attack can boot you off the network&quot;

I’d encourage everybody to read the article, which gives a fairly thorough and nuanced view of atproto in its current state

I&#x27;m now the ATmosphere&#x27;s biggest fan of Charlie the Owl. He&#x27;s a weird one.