"The Organization is a Future Adversary"

November 23, 2024 1:45 PM

How decentralized is Bluesky really? Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-author of the ActivityPub standard, wrote about ATProto, the protocol underlying Bluesky.

Blaine Cook said that the correct version of ActivityPub and the correct version of ATProto are "the same picture" at one point. This is true insofar as I believe addressing the serious issues of both converges on a shared direction: the fediverse needs to adopt content addressing and portable identity (criticisms of Bluesky's approach to this latter one aside at the moment), Bluesky needs to support a messaging architecture such that participating meaningfully and fully in decentralization does not mean needing to host everything (adopting such a solution will probably mean adopting something that ultimately looks a lot like ActivityPub). And of course, I think both need to move towards supporting privacy and stronger collaboration tools with capability security. While others have argued that these are "different approaches" -- and perhaps this is because I am overly ambitious in what I think decentralized networks should do -- to me this is because both are not being all they could be. Instead to me it feels that there is a "fixed point" of resolving these issues to iterate towards.

Lemmer-Webber also wrote a summary on Mastodon with additional details not in the post.

First of all, before I say anything else, my goal here is NOT to be mean to Bluesky's devs. I know there's a lot of fediverse-Bluesky rivalry, but I have enormous respect for Jay Graber and her team and I know they believe in their vision!

This started because I got some very kind encouragement by @bnewbold to write something. I'm trying to be technical in my analysis, not unkind. I hope that can be recognized, really and truly.

RFC 8890 - The Internet is for End Users

[...] As the Internet increasingly mediates essential functions in societies, it has unavoidably become profoundly political; it has helped people overthrow governments, revolutionize social orders, swing elections, control populations, collect data about individuals, and reveal secrets. It has created wealth for some individuals and companies while destroying that of others.

All of this raises the question: For whom do we go through the pain of gathering rough consensus and writing running code?

After all, there are a variety of parties that standards can benefit, such as (but not limited to) end users, network operators, schools, equipment vendors, specification authors, specification implementers, content owners, governments, nongovernmental organizations, social movements, employers, and parents.

Successful specifications will provide some benefit to all the relevant parties because standards do not represent a zero-sum game. However, there are sometimes situations where there is a conflict between the needs of two (or more) parties.

In these situations, when one of those parties is an "end user" of the Internet -- for example, a person using a web browser, mail client, or another agent that connects to the Internet -- the Internet Architecture Board argues that the IETF should favor their interests over those of other parties.

A clip from Tantek Çelik's talk at Personal Democracy Forum 2014: Why We Need the IndieWeb (Invidious)

What happened in 2003? Well, one thing that happened were the RSS/Atom wars. This was a huge distraction among all the technologists between, say, 2003 and 2007 or so, at least. We had the arrogance to think that debating protocols was more important than debating interaction with people. We debated formats rather than talking about, well, how do we actually connect friends and family. And, we really missed the point here. If you focus on the plumbing, then the people will ignore you. And that's what happened.

posted by chinesefood (1 comment total)

Christ the Atom vs RSS business was a waste of time. Meanwhile Facebook and Twitter ate the internet.

Philip Greenspun used to say that if EMTs worked the way programmers do, they’d have satisfying arguments about the optimal design of a tourniquet while each patient bleeds out.

Ha ha only serious. Worse is better.
posted by apathy at 3:10 PM on November 23 [1 favorite]