Compare figure 3 here in the #atproto / #bluesky paper

The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable and dangerous features of the protocol, and makes it seem like theres a lot more choice than there is.

Since the design purposefully hides the architecture: you dont know where your feed generators are drawing from, or those used by your friends. So you cant know what the effect of choosing a different relay would be, aka the main relay is always indispensable. Importantly the relays subscribe to you, you dont push to the relay, and since you arent really supposed to operate your own data store, you can be dropped from the network without knowing - the relay serves as an unaccountable point of moderation.

They describe another real weakness in the protocol on page 4 that also makes the single relay indispensable: fedi has backfilling problems, but its possible to solve them because you can at least know who does have the complete picture - the OP server knows of all interactions (that it wants to). Since there are no backlinks, and PDSes are not dereferenceable by username, the only way the whole thing works is if someone has a relatively complete picture of the whole network - otherwise eg. you would have no idea who to deliver a post to.

Its this part for me that tells the whole story: #atproto was designed for a new kind of advertising market, and when their VC money and puttering domain registration revenue streams dry up, control over the main firehose relay is a big gaping profit vector waiting to be capitalized on.

They continue to misunderstand or refuse to acknowledge the risks of the protocol, and this paragraph is a decent example - you are free to choose a different service if you dont like something. Its a market, consumer choice solves. Notice the "well behaved" part though. Adversarial actors can and will follow you, and there's very little you can do about that since identity is so cheap on the protocol. You can just infinitely spawn accounts and troll someone into oblivion in a way that isnt possible on other mediums. You can simply block all new contact, but then that activity will likely still be visible to everyone else on the platform, shrouding everything you post in hate, spam, etc.

There is amazingly little detail - still - on how the labeling services, the core piece of safety technology on the protocol, work. Its one paragraph here. That speaks volumes.

I said this about 6 months ago when I first read the protocol, but as far as I can tell its still true: atproto is about as federated or decentralized as google alerts: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/110552684614320107

They make repeated allusions to designing the system like the web, but really they designed it like Google

Dr. jonny phd (@jonny@neuromatch.social)

so far, #BlueSky / #ATProtocol seems like a federated system the same way Google Alerts is a federated system. - you can self host your website or uses Google sites. - Google crawls you - People subscribe to algos/alerts - Google Alerts emails you the matches

Neuromatch Social

Unlike threads, I genuinely want atproto to work. Multiple protocols working concurrently with different ideas, collaborating or competing, is good! There are and were plenty of good people that I genuinely admire that worked on this thing. There's enough shallowness and magical thinking in the end result, though, and not enough self-criticism or means of critical feedback to actually address the glaring abuse vectors, that I am pessimistic about bluesky and atproto becoming another healthy neighbor. When you're explicitly and uncritically calling it a marketplace in your whitepaper, I'm not interested.

I am interested in speaking off the record with anyone who knows anything about the early to middle history of the protocol development, from when Jack summoned a bunch of bright people into a private chatroom through when public designs started appearing. Ive found the public matrix rooms and read a decent amount of them, so im talking about before that/in private alongside that. If thats u, hmu. I know its fresh history and people justifiably dont want to speak ill of their friends, my questions are all about the transition of ideas, what got ruled out, when certain ideas got cemented into place. Not shit talking, archaology.

In case anyone reaches the end of this and reads it as me abjectly shitting on the protocol as being equivalently bad to eg. Twitter, threads, facebook, etc. Thats not what I meant at all. First priority: get people out of surveillance platform traps. BSky is not that YET, and is a sort of decompression chamber with similar aggressive and desperate vibe to twitter. Breaking dependence is hard, bsky is harm reduction. There is a sort of intrinsic visceral truth to "first as a tragedy, then as a farce," once people see a pattern, it's easier to raise critical resistance. Second priority: build a healthy web, p2p the fedi.