this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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My tenuous understanding from an article I read about the AT protocol but barely remember is that it can't be fully decentralized. I think you have to use bluesky for user authentication. And I think it said the hosting hardware requirements would be significant to the point where it's not very feisable. I welcome corrections/clarifications.
Point is, assuming that's reasonably correct, true decentralization isn't possible. And by it's nature as a big corporate owned site, enshittification is inevitable.
Yes, apparently their protocol sends everything to every node, so it would overwhelm anything but a very powerful and expensive server. The Fediverse's ActivityPub protocol is more efficient and only sends traffic where it is needed.
This was true for a while but they're updating the sync protocol to support sharding etc. people are running full network relays off a raspberry pi
The authentication parts uses a standard w3c developed format called DID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier it's basically a more general form of a url that must point to a specially formatted file. There are several did methods. atproto supports did:web which stores the doc at a user-set http URL path, and also did:PLC which stores the doc in a special database controlled by bsky. They plan (hopefully) add more methods in the future.
But yeah, the currently supported did:web authentication method is fully independent of bsky inc
It's federated in name only.
I blame ActivityPub. W3C didn't get their shit together when they invented the standard and now we are paying the price.
Or just users being too stupid. I do not see any real problems with AP
it requires a very large investment to run a node, but the fact that it’s possible means it’s open by necessity, which means we can bridge to mastodon etc
this means that it will be a lot easier for people to migrate, since they don’t have to give up their entire social network
imo it’s a good jumping off point: people clearly have problems with the mastodon “on ramp” and are having no issues with bsky, so imo it’s a step in the right direction and we can’t let perfect be the enemy of better