A Look at Bluesky.Home

A Look at Bluesky

An overly complicated social networking platform

Bluesky is a platform that competes with Mastodon. It runs the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, atproto. Atproto is a new protocol like ActivityPub for federated, decentralized, social networking. In atproto, usernames are domains which lead to cryptographic urls called DID. DID which stands for Decentralized Identifier is another specification. That all just means that my username would be @juliette.page and my DID would be something like at://did:plc:1231. A benefit of atproto users is that they are transferable without needing an active server, so for example if your server goes down thats not a problem you can just migrate to a different one and you’re all good! All of the user data is stored in data repositories.

A problem with the system of having a domain as a username is that people can claim it who don’t have access to that username. For example, someone was able to get the AWS S3 domain as their handle!

Data repositories are signed, “git like”, public databases. Everything in them can be verified by other sources. However, that means interactions, such as user likes, blocks, follows, etc are all public. With no means to make them private. Which could lead to harassment!

Atproto also has the ability to create custom algorithms for timeline sorting! Which is a neat feature. But runs into the problem of algorithms being hijacked to show inappropriate/offensive/bigoted content.

Overall, Bluesky has some features that make it better than Mastodon, for example the algorithms and the ability to migrate servers while the server being done. But also it’s a group of overly complicated specifications that could’ve just been extensions to the ActivityPub protocol rather than a whole new protocol!

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