cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24751597
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390
https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v
tldr, it’s a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
Mark Ruffalo, Actor
Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker
Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan
Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’
Brian Eno, Musician
Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist
Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist
Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian
Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep
Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords
Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA
…
Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.
There aren’t “instances” in the ActivityPub sense, where “instance” means single point of failure you’re married to (its name is literally part of your identity) which is simultaneously responsible for keeping your data available and curating your view of the rest of the network; AT Protocol decomposes these responsibilities so that they can be delegated independently to different operators.
See https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture and https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ for details.
There are many people running their own Personal Data Servers, AppViews, Labelers, and Feed Generators, but I’m not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on). I’m also not sure if you can actually create a
did:plcusing a self-hosted AppView or if maybe you need to usedid:webto create a new identity without using their AppView currently.The fact that there still isn’t any other relay besides thé Bluesky one isn’t a good sign. If cost of running it is so high, how are enthusiast supposed to be able to run their own, and thus “own the town square”?
There are multiple other relays running, and its pretty cheap nowadays, lowest I’ve seen is someone running a full network non-archive relay for 23usd/month
https://bsky.app/profile/edavis.dev/post/3lfdtegyzs22i
Very interesting, thanks! Is it possible for people to register on that relay?
(if I understand correctly) you don’t register on a relay, you register on a PDS (which you can easily self-host on a small computer at home). But, to register with a PDS, you need a DID, and to interoperate with the rest of bluesky it needs to be using one of their two currently-supported DID methods: either did:web or did:plc. The former is a thing which you can create using a domain you control, which gives you an identity that you lose control of when you lose control of that domain. The latter is the actually-centralized “placeholder” DID method implemented by an append-only log operated by BlueSky PBC, which is what most people are actually using. I’m not sure if/how you can create a
did:plcwithout first creating an account on a bsky.app PDS, but you can migrate it to your own PDS after creating one there. or, you can usedid:weband rely on your domain name registration instead of their centralized log.Further reading:
They can’t. At some point you have to wonder if this is a feature not a bug. You’ll always be beholden to the largesse of millionaires. Whether that’s a charity or not.