I have returned, with tea

Christine Lemmer-Webber

There will be a lot of pressure soon from investors: run ads, make premium accounts that do not actually make sense in a decentralized way, so on and so on.

In this way, "credible exit" is the most important thing for Bluesky the organization and its community to push on *today*

𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)

@cwebber

Why give them soooooo much space?
Why talk soooo much about bluesky?

Did they pay you for it?
I havent seen you do this for other platforms, especially when mastodon and even nostr exist that are way more decentralized. It seems kinda weird and unexpected

Christine Lemmer-Webber

What I will *not* accept is the goalposts being moved on decentralization and federation. Bluesky is neither decentralized nor federated.

If Bluesky wants to become so, it has an enormous amount of work to do, particularly in terms of architectural design.

Blogs are decentralized, Google is not.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

Bluesky will face every pressure to be enshittified. Bluesky has even, correctly, acknowledged this. It is up to Bluesky and its community to rise to the challenge of "credible exit" knowing that this is a likely, perhaps inevitable, risk.

The org is indeed a future adversary. So what now?

Christine Lemmer-Webber

And here it is. We have reached the final part.

I am not even going to take a tea break. I am not even going to go to the bathroom. I kinda have to, but we are powering through.

We have reached the conclusion of this megathread, and "summary" of an equally long article.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

I laid out definitions of "decentralization" and "federation", and Bluesky meets neither, without major rearchitecting or moving the goalposts on those terms, which I cannot accept.

However, "credible exit" is a good goal for Bluesky. Bluesky created that term and it's a good and feasible goal.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

I laid out a strong critique, but let me end on a call to empathy.

Bluesky is built by good people, and the fediverse is built by good people. Neither reflect the designs I presently would like to see today, but ultimately these are built by humans trying their absolute hardest.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

The infrastructure we build reflects our social dynamics, and our social dynamics are made possible by our infrastructure.

This thread has been long, and I have said everything I have to say. Thanks for listening. I hope we can build a good future for each other.

damon

@serapath Interesting that you come at someone that actually knows the people, politics and technologies on both sides. Also, very interesting to put Mastodon and Nostr in the same sentence as vast majority of Nostr stakeholders would tell you that Mastodon is not in fact decentralised

Erlend Sogge Heggen

@cwebber

> Decentralized identity on top of ~mutable CAS storage

Is there anything like a spec stub for that somewhere? I think we stand a good chance of checking all these boxes in #leafprotocol by @zicklag

Zicklag (@[email protected])

Slowly while working on our #leafprotocol we've realized that it shares a lot of similarities with both #activitypub and #atproto. We just finished a blog post that explains how Leaf compares with its alternatives: https://blog.muni.town/leaf-atproto-activitypub/

Mastodon (mastodon.social)

Lutin Discret

@cwebber now refill that cup of tea now and do nostr 🥺

Joke aside, thanks for this thread I think the whole debate is spoiled by the lack of vocabulary, we should stop using "decentralized" and coin some more strictly defined terms

Zicklag

@erlend @cwebber This is actually the one thing that I hadn't figured out how to do on top of the #willowprotocol yet. but I really want to find a way to do it eventually. I think it's tricky so we'd need a good protocol / algorithm for it I think.

Currently we're just using public keys as identity which can be resolved through domains.

The rest of it is all stuff we've already got or that we're working on, other than the fact that we aren't using OCaps exactly because Willow has Meadowcap.

NextGraph

@zicklag @erlend @cwebber

Erlend and Zicklag, you both know already that @nextgraph is implementing just that (Decentralized identity on top of ~mutable CAS storage) among other things, and will be compatible with ActivityPub thanks to the collab with @activitypods .
So at some point it would be nice to recognise the efforts done by others, specially since I am trying to reach out to everyone in the field and build cooperation and collaboration (and I am mostly ignored so far)

Erlend Sogge Heggen

@nextgraph @zicklag certainly!

Zick is currently in the process of drafting a blog post in response to Christine’s ‘Correct Fediverse’ outline in the context of Leaf.

You’re in a great position to do the same for NextGraph, with the added bonus of being innately AP compatible!

Nomadic Identity is complicated and many separate ventures are saying ‘we do this’. Such statements need to be accompanied with explanations of the flows and trade offs involved, as that makes all the difference.

fanf42

@cwebber I read to the end and e2ee is not touched again (totally OK, the subject massively hard in a decentralized context, and the thread is, hum, not short already).
I suppose you're aware of that, but just in case, and for other readers : @soatok gave himself the challenge to deliver that, up to the federated key management protocol spec : https://soatok.blog/2024/10/12/ambition-the-fediverse-and-technology-freedom/
(Independently from w3c and, it seems, with strong view about how it should be done)

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@fanf42 @soatok It's linked in the blogpost!

Dmitri | 🇺🇦

@cwebber Hey, for what it's worth. @bengo and i are working on exactly that for the Fediverse! We've got the FEPs written, a content-addressed zCap powered storage backend MVPd, and are now working on fedi integrations!