The good news here is that Bluesky has made enormous progress in true federation. The cost of operating a full Bluesky stack has fallen from tens of millions of dollars per year to tens of dollars per month
Great!
But Bluesky, the company, still needs serious work.
As things stand, Bluesky has very bad terms of service that every user who creates an account has to subject themselves to. In particular, Bluesky’s ToS contain a “binding arbitration” waiver that forces users to surrender the right to sue Bluesky no matter how the company harms them. This is so pro-enshittificatory, it’s like a landing strip for the sole use of Enshittification Airlines, which can land a 747 full of enshittfying nonsense on Bluesky’s users every 10 minutes, around the clock, without worrying about any legal repercussions.
This is less great.
Edit: Wait, what?
The new waiver says that you don’t have to arbitrate for “claims that fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence by Bluesky caused death or personal injury.” That sounds good! It also sounds like everything that someone might sue Bluesky for, leaving me to wonder what Bluesky will make you arbitrate for.
What’s more, if the point of a binding arbitration waiver is to reduce nuisance suits and threats, this completely nullifies that tactic, because all a nuisance litigant has to do is claim that they are suing because of “fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence,” and Bluesky is back in court.
I think he has written about some of the better technical aspects of ATproto vs ActivityPub, but the one thing holding it back was how hard/expensive it was to host. Now apparently that final hurdle has been resolved.
(NOTE: I am not an expert, just trying to recall from a little reading elsewhere)
Now apparently that final hurdle has been resolved.
He says so in this article, but afaik you won’t get a full bluesky node, just parts of it. So it’s not fully decentralized. But you’re not under their TOS apparently.
Cory Doctorow on new Bluesky TOS
Great!
This is less great.
Edit: Wait, what?
I’m more confused now.
Interesting that he’s so optimistic about bluesky vs mastodon
I think he has written about some of the better technical aspects of ATproto vs ActivityPub, but the one thing holding it back was how hard/expensive it was to host. Now apparently that final hurdle has been resolved.
(NOTE: I am not an expert, just trying to recall from a little reading elsewhere)
He says so in this article, but afaik you won’t get a full bluesky node, just parts of it. So it’s not fully decentralized. But you’re not under their TOS apparently.
Actually, you can host a full-network relay for $34 a month: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y (article by a bluesky engineer).
All the other pieces are self hostable, PDSes are trival to host, and would cost less than $5 a month.
No I think they still have control over the decentralized identifiers, ironically
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Also: a lot of stuff from that article isn’t really accurate anymore.
yeah, honestly I wish them luck
You can use a web did.
But yeah, did:plc is a joke.