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Free Our Feeds: "it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app" (freeourfeeds.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24751597

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390

https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v

tldr, it's a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’

Mark Ruffalo, Actor

Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker

Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan

Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’

Brian Eno, Musician

Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist

Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist

Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian

Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep

Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords

Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA

...

Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The only hard part to run is the relay.

So what prevents the relay from being bought by a billionaire, who would then decide on the content of the output?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

you can just run another one, currently nobody does but if the main relay gets bought out, the community can band together to run one, it's a couple hundred bucks a month, expensive, but not unsustainable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Decentralized in theory, but not in practice is just centralized.

Also:

So how challenging is it to run those? In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Aren't the top few lemmy servers about that much to run?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

No, instances can be run by enthusiasts and keep operating based on donations

https://feddit.org/post/2600584

The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky's purposes, but on the economics alone it's going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/