I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says “a world without Caesars” in Latin.
But on frontpage.fyi, if you want to sign up, you have to sign up through Bluesky. They direct you to bsky.app to create your account.
I just don’t see how this is a real functional example of a portable account. Maybe it is not supposed to be - if so, is the decentralized nature of accounts demonstrated anywhere in a practical way?
I struggle to understand things I cannot see.
Yeah I would say they likely just aren’t using the protocol properly, that being said I’m not sure I know of an example who is.
Why are we acting like this is a detail.
Why did I have to burrow all the way down to this spot to see this?
The conversation should begin, or very nearly begin with this as it puts EVERYTHING ELSE around bluesky hype into question, it transmutes the castles you are describing into constructions of sand that might topple any moment to forces of money, greed and effective (even if not explicit) centralized control.
sigh I don’t mean to attack you personally, but this conversation feels so warped sometimes.
I know this convo was 2 weeks ago, but they published a great article that includes how Identify is handled that answers our questions.
https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-ethos
Effectively identify is as the PDS level. So if Bluesky goes down and your account were through Bluesky you’d lose your identity ?*
If your account is held through another platform like Spark or your own self hosted PDS your identity would remain live.
*My question that sparked from this is if Bluesky went down and you’re already logged into a second platform, when you log into that second platform does it duplicate your DID? I’m assuming not and you’d still lose it because logins are through OIDC and the keys still exist on Bluesky.
Regardless the true path to decentralization should be everyone hosting their own identity on their own PDS w/ identity but that might be a longshot. The path to decentralization is effectively allowed but will people take advantage of it?
You can login with any pds (personal data server) on frontpage, i can self host my own one, and login with it on frontpage.
Okay, that’s more interesting! Thanks!
Its still not really decentralised, because all the pds’s need to be crawled by a relay, but its still a pretty cool technology. Someone made flushes.app which I think is a good demonstration of how it can be used.
Cool.
It’s funny how one of the main criticisms of ActivityPub is that it’s too difficult to implement, yet after all this attention the best the ATmosphere has managed to come up with is a toilet flushing repository. But I see the value of the portable identity. I think.
Well, its easy to build an app on atproto, but lord forbid you want to do anything with a pds. The activitypub spec is so much easier to read and understand than the pds spec.
Also, portable identity is possible on activitypub as well, its just not implemented in many projects.
That’s because its new. ActivityPub has been around for 7 years now, and I’d argue its totally stagnated on Mastodon to the point that the fediverse is mastodon to most people, and the norms of message passing are ruled by mastodon. Whereas atproto has been around for 2 years, one of which was in a very small and restricted alpha stage to get the core blocks stable. Now we see so many projects getting off the ground, some of the ones I mentioned being the most mature. With that said they are all earlydays, as is the protocol.
If we really want to talk about massive leaps, and a vibrant dev community thats actively build and expanding the protocol even faster than atproto, than its Nostr. Problem with them is the community building it 😅