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Inspired by another recent post on ATProto I signed up for bsky, but all I see is endless American politics. I relentlessly click "less like this" but it doesn't seem to budge. Is this just what the platform is like? Being constantly barraged by the same predictable takes on today's bizarre overseas controversy is not very conducive to mental peace...
I still don't understand how this project meaningfully addresses the problem of identity and data ownership.
When it come to identities, either you have your own domain, or you use someone else's domain (say, Bluesky). Most people don't have domains, and so their identity will be owned by a third party.
You also have the same problem when it comes to the data itself. The moment Bluesky or some other server bans you, your repo is shut down and you lose the ability to move the data somewhere else.
In short, this is exactly like email. Unless you have your own domain and server you don't control anything.
Excellent explanation as always from Dan, and timely with the latest news from Bluesky on moving the PLC management.
We picked the same DID systems for https://fair.pm/ to decentralise WordPress plugin distribution (and general management for user-facing packages; think App Store rather than Cargo).
The Bluesky folks (especially Bryan) were super helpful in helping us out - even shipping Ed25519 key support so we could use libsodium.
(We’re designing our protocol on top of DIDs and using Bluesky’s stackable moderation, but chose not to use atproto directly - but the great thing is that DIDs are a W3C standard, and PLC isn’t tied to atproto.)
