How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really?

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

Now if we look at AS/AP ecosystem, there is a problem as the storm of discussion on vNext of the protocol or choosing alternative directions, goes on unabated, and no one seems to be coming to any kind of real consensus.

It almost looks like we once again must leave that to the vendors to sort out, when they enter the 'fedi market' en masse.

Ideally we want to have multiple commons-controlled focused and productive working groups that elaborate various themes of the social web.

7/..

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@cwebber

Thus I had the idea to write a proposal to start, what I call, a fellowship that runs an open social web laboratory, and is able to separate the general discussion to focused input for working groups to quickly iterate on a theme, in a similar way to how BS operates now.

See for info: https://discuss.coding.social/t/proposal-start-a-fellowship-to-explore-the-social-web/571

The idea is follow-up to "Vision for fedi spec" feedback gathering that @helge initiated, as a means to cope with the broad subject area.

See: https://discuss.coding.social/t/wiki-vision-for-a-fedi-specification/563/24

/end

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@cwebber @helge

Tangential, but to add some more spice to this..

We need more fellowships like this, who explore yet other areas together.

Like for object capability social web at scale.

A couple of years ago, when you were still on Spritely Project, you sent out a toot out in which you sighed that once spritely technology would be mature enough for widespread use, it would probably be already too late.

The institute to the rescue, I guess. Valid and prudent choice.

1/..

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@cwebber @helge

It is still hard to hook on to spritely unless you have deep technical expertise. That means most others (large group) are in wait-and-see necessarily.

Choice is perfectly valid, because its the foundation team's own initiative.

Is it the best tech introduction strategy? Best technology adoption model to use?

Your community and ecosystem have to catch up, once you say "it's time for fun".

Randy's community pattern language might serve to unlock upper-stack stakeholders now.

Evan Prodromou

@cwebber @bnewbold

Hey, Christine.

Did you consider that it's in Brian's and Bluesky's interest to position the difference between ActivityPub and AT Proto as one of technology and not of governance?

And to get the editor of AP to do it?

Also, did you think about getting your hands dirty with a proprietary protocol that has no patent or other licensing grants?

I intentionally have not done either of these things. I think Brian encouraged you to do this for his and Bluesky's own benefit.

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@cwebber @helge

Because that is highly tangential from spritely core technology, fanning out into vast scope, you might offload that to a fellowship that can facilitate multiple independent initiatives at the same time, not just spritely but also see an ecosystem of convergance and increasing alignment, rather than fragmentation as per the norm.

Evan Prodromou

@cwebber @bnewbold I hope Bluesky Inc. made a big donation to the Spritely Institute for this huge amount of work you did.

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@cwebber

Calling @Chartodon

Chartodon

@smallcircles

Your chart is ready, and can be found here:

Things may have changed since I started compiling that, and some things may have been inaccessible.

In particular, the very nature of the fediverse means some toots may never have made it to my instance, in which case I can't see them, and can't include them.

The chart will eventually be deleted, so if you'd like to keep it, make sure you download a copy.

damon

@Gaelan
This is largely how Nostr operates

damon

@cwebber we shouldn’t gloss over the decentralised talk regarding Nostr lol

Gaelan Steele

@damon is nostr any good? I like some of the (very limited) technical stuff I've heard about it but get the impression the people are largely blockchain/free-speech-absolutist types

damon

@cwebber was this answered?

Evan Prodromou

@cwebber omg, I skipped all the way to the end and OBVIOUSLY you look at this situation from every conceivable angle, including governance, because it wouldn't be a Christine Lemmer-Webber post without it.

I appreciate the depth of analysis. I do still think that Bluesky should make a donation to Spritely if @bnewbold asked you to make a 25-page report, though.

Evan Prodromou

@cwebber I also don't share your optimism about cross-pollination. There's a reason that W3C specifications have to only have normative dependencies on specs from recognized standards bodies. Too many minefields unless you have a clear license.

I'm glad that @bnewbold is in the SocialCG and I hope we can find some opportunities to publish reports with some or all parts of the AT Proto stack.

damon

@Gaelan
Good is obviously subjective. I will highlight what I find to be “good” it’s a very simple protocol: pretty much JSON+ relays and clients. Identify are keypairs which are unfortunately left up to the users to manually handle but they can be plugged into any frontend. You prefer a blog, image-sharing, link aggregate over Twitter just use any of those kind of clients.

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damon

Nostr is very grassroots but seems to function well, they use NIPs which are like FEPs.
Culturally, yes it’s a lot of cryptocurrency & Bitcoin folks but you can filter that noise on a client or relay level. I do and there’s still a surprising amount of quality content & non crypto bro users.

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@Gaelan

Robert W. Gehl

@cwebber I was definitely surprised how journalists called it “decentralized” right when it started. Now I hear journalists call it “federated.” Bluesky has good PR, for sure.

Steve Bate

@cwebber I'd like to hear more about AP follows the (Hewitt) Actor Model of Computation, if that's the one you mean. Just having message passing and an inbox and a thing called an "Actor" doesn't make the thing a unit of computation. Given the stated importance to AP, I don't see Hewitt's actor model mentioned in the spec or in any of the WG transcripts, so I'm curious what I'm missing.

Actor Model of Computation: Scalable Robust Information Systems

Abstract page for arXiv paper 1008.1459: Actor Model of Computation: Scalable Robust Information Systems

arXiv.org (arxiv.org)

#ActivityPub

Erin 💽✨

@cwebber Some notes:

(Also choosing sha256 over sha256d, there’s maybe the question of length extension attacks, but I suppose the parsing of the document means this is maybe not a problem, I’m not sure.)

So a fun thing amout merkle-damgård hash functions is that they’re only subject to length extension attacks if used at full length. If truncated they’re not vulnerable. So SHA-256 and SHA-512 are vulnerable, but SHA-224 (which is SHA-256 with different constants and truncated to 224 bits) and SHA-384 (which is SHA-512 with initial different initial constants and truncated to 384 bits) are not. Back in 2012 NIST standardised SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 which are similarly truncated versions of SHA-512 with different initial constants which also sidestep the length extension attack issue.

Anyway this is to say that because they truncated the hash in did:plc identifiers (to a level which feels unwise to me too!) they’re immune to length extension attcks.