In a very abstracted sense. The general idea of the web being made up of many websites, yes. Hooking more of them up to AT Protocol, no. AT Protocol was built by cryptohead libertarians who made everything public, to the point that anyone can easily search up an automated list of users who’ve blocked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and that’s not a good foundation for anyone to build on.
2 Likes
Yeah, totally agreed there. Making everything public as they have is a decision that can seriously endanger people. I know they’re working on getting private data in PDSes, but I suspect even once that exists they’ll be keeping blocks and follows public so as to not break existing software. Honestly with the way they’ve designed it, I’m not sure how private blocklists would work. I think at the very least any AppView would have to be able to request the blocklist so they can actually prevent the blocked person from interacting with your posts (for just hiding their posts there’s a “mutelist”, which is already private fwiw). But then someone could just spin up a malicious AppView that publishes everyone’s blocklists.
I think you’ve changed my mind a little. That does make bluesky feel less good web / good faith to me. I think my opinion on AtProto as a whole still holds though, as the whole shared data and identity between apps, especially once they finally release encrypted data, still holds so much potential imo (although maybe something like solid would be better? Or some protocol that doesn’t exist yet?).
1 Like
A deny-list on a public post is flawed from the start, but the users must have really wanted it.
Thanks for hearing me out.
I understand that the AT Protocol project is doing some things technologically that are novel enough to be interesting, but to me those things aren’t worth the tradeoff. Especially not when data exports/imports between LJ-likes have already been an option on Dreamwidth for ages.
Anyway, to bring it back home, how we got on this subject began with Brennan’s reflections on trust – and I think a lot about how Bluesky/AT was designed is best contextualized in light of the libertarian ethos of cryptocurrency, with its emphasis on “trustless” blockchains. (For those unfamiliar, my go-to rec on this subject is Line Goes Up [transcript] by Folding Ideas.)
To my recollection blocks were added in April 2023 in the wake of how some users responded to Matt Yglesias.
2 Likes