1年前

Mediated networks and power dynamics in ATproto

merveilles.town L. Rhodes (@lrhodes@merveilles.town)

Attached: 1 image So… @jdp23@blahaj.zone drew my attention to this: https://berjon.com/ap-at/ and as you might imagine, I have some thoughts—though not really about running AP on top of ATProto. I'm more interested in the quote below, which is, I'd say, a pretty solid encapsulation of one of the sa...

Interesting thread that summarizes it well.

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I came away from reading over the AuthTransfer protocol and its handling of moderation/enabling users with a very major sense of, "We outsource almost everything!"
As L. Rhodes writes:
[...] One effect of ATproto's structure is to multiply the number of administrative relationships for which each user must decide for themselves—often on little to no information—who deserves their trust. The complexity of its infrastructures seems like it would sometimes make it difficult to assess when that trust has been betrayed, and by whom.
So Bluesky may redistribute some technical power from host admins to users, but it also gives them much more to navigate. It makes their need for power more desperate, and I'm not at all sure that the power trickling down to them through those other layers of infrastructure will be sufficient to the need. No doubt many will compensate by sticking to the parts of the network operated by Bluesky itself—apparent choice, de facto lock-in.
- I came away from reading over the AuthTransfer protocol and its handling of moderation/enabling users with a very major sense of, “We outsource almost everything!”
  Indeed, or rather the difficult and legally tricky parts are off-loaded to 3rd parties but the profitable parts (algorithmic indexer and the app view with advertisements) are very much still in the hands of BlueSky the company.
  
  It’s smart to offload the legally tricky parts. Versus here those fall onto admins
  
  In ATproto they fall on the admins as well, just not on the admins of the commercial company that runs Bluesky and profits from it.
  
  [...] but the profitable parts (algorithmic indexer and the app view with advertisements) are very much still in the hands of BlueSky the company.
  Yeah, we'll have to see if/when they fully enable third parties to run their own indexers and app views to see how committed they are to all this, and even then as the thread you linked indicates, there would remain many questionable architectural problems to AuthTransfer.

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