nihili.st
166 posts
47 followers
22 following
Getting Started
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also I'm defining success as the network fully functioning in a usable manner without bsky llc, and I think the bluesky team has defined it that way themselves as well
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2) bluesky themselves. why run your own infrastructure when it's not even going to make a difference for your users? how will you even attract users if you can't set yourself apart? when the baseline experience is already the best, the only way to force decentralisation is to be evil on purpose
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I agree, I think the greatest benefits to the UX are the things holding it back:
1) inability for core services to change UX. it ensures consistent experiences, but stops network operators from adding value or collecting ad revenue, which is how the internet currently works, for better or worse
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the idea is that labellers can provide third party moderation. the problem is that there's no incentive to provide a global scale moderation service, so you'll likely either need to pay for access or rely on a new steward (e.g. Google, meta) who can sink the resources in exchange for control
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implying anything here was well thought out 😏
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if you're just going to admit you lack empathy then any conversation with you about anything is a complete non starter. you do not get an opinion on this.
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how do you have all that shit in your bio but lack basic compassion? why would you ever say people who get scammed deserve it?
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this reflects my general feelings about bsky and atproto where they seem to be creating a wildly complex system that leaves us where we already were and does nothing to wrest control of social media from what really killed it (capital) and that is largely why i am sceptical of their whole project
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i haven't seen many technical details (and idk typescript lol) so maybe this is a non-issue. they're clearly trying to set up something that vaguely resembles decentralisation but if bsky is adversarial, there doesn't seem to be another org that can handle these "general" verifications
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further, if someone is part of an org now, but then separates, how is that handled? i'm thinking of someone like AOC here, obviously affiliated with the US house, but if she were to hypothetically not seek re-election, who would vouch for her identity? she would still be a known public figure
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when i think about big names on this website i don't think of people who are tied to an org in that way. mark hamill, mark cuban, george takei. these are people who undeniably need the protection of the verified tick, but who other than bsky is supposed to vouch for them?
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i'm well aware that i'm not an anarchist, and i don't recall saying that i am, so i'm still not sure what point you think you're making
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do you think i'm an anarchist? i'm not sure what principle you think i'm betraying here
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better on what grounds? relying on reactive defences to phishing sounds significantly worse to me. social hierarchies are going to outlive bluesky and everyone using it. i would rather do more to protect actual living people from material exploitation today than design it for an idealised future
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it's a very basic safety feature that mitigates things like phishing by reducing the need to spend time researching if an account really is who it claims to be
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nope, it's completely impossible because of the technology underpinning bluesky. they own their data, which includes following you, and nobody can edit that on their behalf
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these are both completely impossible to implement because of the experimental technology that underpins bluesky. everyone owns their data, which includes who they follow and what lists they've created, and nobody else can edit that data on their behalf
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why reinvent the wheel? if there's a symbol that's widely used and understood to mean "this account is verified", i don't see a reason not to use it. i see it as a measure to prevent phishing, so i would like it to be as easily understood and accessible as possible
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i agree about the shapes being similar being an issue, but the blue checkmark is used all over the internet by now, even in gmail. it only makes sense to use the same symbol for the same feature when the goal is instant readability
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not everyone knows every famous person's domain name or could easily parse fakes, especially users who would be vulnerable to phishing attacks
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you can look at an account and know instantly that someone's checked that they are who they claim to be. this is something that domain verification could never have done unless you happened to know everyone's domain name or were willing to research it, which is bad ux
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domains only verify you if you have a well known domain associated with your identity, but most people don't. like who even knows what mark hamill's domain name is?
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they have to "invent new technologies" to make private stuff possible. it really is a much harder problem than it seems
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i was only talking about visually, e.g. the label in the post/account views, since that's enough to fix this issue. but the spec does say handles should be lowercased and case insensitive in general, and goat already follows that behaviour, so who knows
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i will be charitable and say it doesn't have a label in the popup that appears when you start typing a handle. there's a million other things going wrong for that account to even exist
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using .toLowerCase() in the client is hard. they need to invent new technologies to do it
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that's my account and i still occasionally get random @s from people trying to yell at the actual google social media intern
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you seriously need to log off permanently for your own mental health. you clearly can't handle being online. this is not a normal or healthy thing to say to someone, especially when you literally did the same thing you're mad at me for. it's embarrassing and antisocial for you to act like this.
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these semantics are not interesting to me. my point still stands that there are people who are able to modify user accounts without permission, however you want to refer to them. i have no experience with this host, so i can't say if that includes the person renting the service or not.
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account transfer is still at the direction of the PDS owner for almost every account. with a 2 line change to the code, their accounts would be stuck
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user keys are stored on the PDS (both for repo and PLC) so the PDS owner can do whatever they want with users' accounts
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this is the *only* foreseeable outcome in my mind. there's negative incentives to play nice (especially if an appview dev needs to mirror user data anyway as cache, may as well just own + monetise it) and so much room to deceive users with the ridiculously opaque architecture.
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there's really only theoretical benefits to running a PDS at this point. it's just another service to manage that you will never notice unless it goes down and you can't access bluesky anymore
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this site has been culturally abysmal since it was invite-only. it's a big reason i don't like to come here
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yeah, that is strange. they seem to have been in two different mindsets when making both of those features
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it would break the protocol to enforce it at any level other than the app. it's like a dnt header, you just have to pray that the other end respects your wishes
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i'm unaware of what mitigations exist for your PDS refusing to sign PLC operations that would migrate your account, or abusing its status as an appview proxy to serve you bad data, or committing to your repo on your behalf
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yeah, the PDS has the power to be remarkably evil. pretty much every big promise of atproto lives or dies on your PDS being nice and letting you do it
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tbf i think that's media failure. i saw so many headlines that were at best ambiguous on the relationship of flashes to bluesky
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fuck off
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there's literally no benefit. it's just another thing to maintain
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i don't personally know how it could be possible, but i'm not super well versed in this field. they've said they're working on it though, and their most recent estimate (that i've heard) was that it would take a year to implement it
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the natural impulse is "just encrypt it", but posts aren't fetched from the PDS, they are processed and cached by the appview. how would that work with encrypted data? how will you rotate keys if a private account needs to block someone? and if that account has a huge number of followers?
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it's hard. atproto events are basically globally broadcasted, anyone who wants to listen to them can do so. so you'd need to devise a system that can properly route private data, but totally out in the open, and hopefully without too much identifying metadata
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you need to use your actual account password to do PLC operations