cabbage

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But on frontpage.fyi, if you want to sign up, you have to sign up through Bluesky. They direct you to bsky.app to create your account.

I just don’t see how this is a real functional example of a portable account. Maybe it is not supposed to be - if so, is the decentralized nature of accounts demonstrated anywhere in a practical way?

I struggle to understand things I cannot see.

Yeah, they will use their domains, and they can sign in with Bluesky. So it is the same account to a pretty significant degree. What I’m wondering is if the Frontpage user would break if Bsky.app disappeared, or if the user could still sign in as the identity is somehow truly decentralized.

As for domains as user names, I guess ActivityPub could achieve something by allowing users to have verified websites (mastodon style) appear as their user names. I don’t really see what would have to change on a protocol level to make this possible.

I guess that’s fair, as a way to make users identifiable with the same user name all over the internet, no matter which platform they are on.

When people sign in using bluesky on https://frontpage.fyi/, they are still bluesky accounts? Or does the account somehow transform into something that exists between both sites?

Is there any real innovation here beyond a combination of “sign in with x service” and having your domain appear as your user name?

Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.

The fact that we don’t see this yet, and that Bluesky has accepted the amount of money they have from actors I would not want to be associated with, makes me doubt this is possible.

Even if a non-profit wanted to operate with good intentions, the expense of running an AT proto hub would eventually prove a challenge, and the non-profit would either go under or need to start looking around for money. Meanwhile people can self-host their Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi.

Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub, I have tried and failed to understand exactly which feature is the AT proto folks so desperately wanted that they found it impossible to achieve through ActivityPub. The whole thing with having a mobile identity or whatever seems like a nothing burger to me - at the end of the day it just means that your user name is your DID number, and that web addresses can redirect towards that one. It’s hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol.

As much as I hate to be that guy, it’s worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.

ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It’s better to leave your money elsewhere.