The thing that is telling to me about DMs is that we *have* federated direct message protocols like XMPP which have been around for ages; if Bluesky wanted to they could have tacked that on pretty quickly, E2EE or not.

[cwebber@social.coop]

At any rate, one way or another, you can presumably use did:plc to move yourself from one server to another so in the interest of "credible exit" this is a good choice

Though, one might take a moment to ask: who controls the keys if you *do* want to move?

[cwebber@social.coop]

Bluesky has identified, I'd say correctly even, that key management for users is an *incredibly* hard thing to do.

But the solution, once again, ends up pretty centralized: for all users on Bluesky's main servers at least, Bluesky generates and manages the keys for them.

[cwebber@social.coop]

I am, once again, kinda sympathetic and kinda unsettled simultaneously.

- Sympathetic: key management *is* hard and we just don't have the UX answers to solve that, and Bluesky is once again trying to deliver to Twitter refugees
- Unsettled: it's centralized, but... there's something *more* troubling

[cwebber@social.coop]

The big promise here, the "credible exit" side of things is that for most users, the vision they have is that if Bluesky gets bought by a big evil company, no problem, move somewhere else

But for those same users, Bluesky still *controls their keys* and thus *controls their destiny*

[cwebber@social.coop]

Regardless, Bluesky has this "your domain is your id!" thing, and that's pretty cool, the domain maps to your DID and your DID maps to your domain

Well, I'm not gonna get into this in detail here, I do on the blogpost if you wanna read it but, the cyclic dependency might be an actual cycle

[cwebber@social.coop]

tl;dr on that UX part:

- users only know domains, they don't know the DIDs
- turns out that's a phishing attack when those can change at any time
- if bsky.app ever goes down how do you actually know I *really* mapped to that name
- and a whole lot of "liveness" problems that enter there

[cwebber@social.coop]

in addition to this long-ass thread there is a long-ass article and if you care about things like "zooko's triangle" maybe read that version, the rest of y'all can move on we've got other stuff to cover here

[lutindiscret@mastodon.libre-entreprise.com]

@cwebber I don't get it. You are saying did:web is centralized because it relies upon DNS which is centralized. So Bluesky is centralized. Fair.

But, fediverse instances are hosted to a domain and my AP handle has a DNS too so ActivityPub is centralized too?