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Mike McCue

What is the future of identity on the social web? Could it span federation protocols and be baked into the internet itself? What could it look like to everyday users and how would it be used?

There’s no better person to ask than @jay.bsky.team CEO of Bluesky. Jay's extensive experience and deep knowledge about the promise, products and protocols underlying the fediverse is legendary.

If you’re building for the this conversation will get you thinking and inspired. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on our PeerTube instance:

flipboard.video/w/ophhJTECuL7f

@mike@flipboard.social @jay.bsky.team It might be the old curmudgeon in me but I can't really get behind Bluesky as a federation protocol. It all just seems too centrally guided and somewhat closed off. I understand Jay is an exceptionally gifted forward thinker and tech executive but I remain apprehensive. I very much wish Bluesky would've just become a leader in the activity pub world, or at the very least offered a native bridge.

@mike@thecanadian.social @mike@flipboard.social I likewise have a lot of respect for @jay.bsky.team but think @mikedev has a more sustainable philosophy to federation of both identity and content. With AT protocol it is easy enough to self host a PDS but the overall architecture seems a fair bit more complex than the fediverse. When it comes to processing the firehose of data (running a relay, app view, indexer, feed generator, labeller, etc) looks potentially very daunting and resource intensive.

When you need to rely on enterprise grade infrastructure provided by corporations (non profit or otherwise) you don't have a truly interconnected social web...it is just sparkling distributed centralisation.

@msh @mike@thecanadian.social @jay.bsky.team @mikedev Thanks for the reminder, Mark. I need to learn more about @mikedev approach.

@mike@thecanadian.social @jay.bsky.team It's unfortunate that the fediverse is built on two different protocols right now. That said, it's not too late to architect a common approach to identity that would transcend protocols and make it seamless for people to connect with each other despite the underlying protocol -- Sort of like how a common email namespace meant you could send and receive email regardless of whether your email server used POP3 or IMAP.

@mike@flipboard.social @jay.bsky.team Not to belabour the point but BlueSky to me feels more like AOL mail.

@mike I’ve not yet listened to the episode (looking forward to it, as always), but reading the show notes it appears there was not any discussion of Bluesky’s business plan.

As exciting as I find Bluesky’s vision and technical achievements to be, their long term success (and non-enshittification) hinges entirely on their ability to become a profitable company.

Why wasn’t this part of the discussion?

We cannot keep treating sustainability like a negligible afterthought. You are what you sell.

@erlend The Fediverse mostly gives no care about sustainability

@damon @erlend We didn't touch on this much but I agree that healthy business models and sustainability for the fediverse are an important and timely topic. I'll see if we can dedicate an episode to this topic soon. Thanks for listening!

@mike @damon @erlend

regarding sustainability:

on fediverse every people/organization with an already paid internet connection, can #selfhost his own node and connect to everybody.
Not even needed to be always online, instances can queue messages.

The problem is that, with current software, just very few people has the technical skill to do so.
It does not have to be that way, in theory every smartphone is powerful enough to be an activitypub server itself for a not famous person.

And every organization/famous person with his own web server on the internet, has already the infrastructure to selfhost.

@mike listened to the episode now; great stuff as always! 🙏

On a journalistic note though, instead of asking in the affirmative - ‘it’s all open source, right?’ - I think it would’ve been better to ask ‘is any part of Bluesky *not* open source?’

I’m getting some good answers from the community with that query: bsky.app/profile/erlend.sh/pos

I’m not saying it all *has* to be open, but it’s important to understand what isn’t, and why.

Bluesky Social · Erlend Sogge Heggen (@erlend.sh)What parts of the Bluesky service as a whole are *not* open source? Surely some infrastructure layers are closed. Probably some anti-abuse stuff. I heard something about the appview being proprietary as well. Would love to see these “known secrets” enumerated. @pfrazee.com @bnewbold.net

@mike @jay.bsky.team What we need to begin with is for banks, schools, government offices (e.g. driving license and passport issuers) to provide basic OAuth services, if only to demonstrate that a certain person is real. It almost certainly will be a negligible cost to them.

@mike @jay.bsky.team Great interview. Giving an insight into what is possible. 🙂

i thought this was a great discussion between the 2 of you. Constructive about the way forward and the principles both aiming for, rather than a spat between ActivityPub & AT protocols. Great work.

@gpollara.bsky.social Happy to hear that Gabriele! I also learned a lot listening to Jay.

Not sure I understand the question. The web was built on hyperlinks. I can post a link on my social media profile(s) to my blog, and vice versa. If there’s a link in both directions, then it’s pretty likely it’s the same person/entity behind both.

So far, the DIDs on Bluesky are either 1) a custom domain name, or 2) a Decentralized Identity provider - which it looks like people may be able to self-host(?) but of course few will do so.

Curious what potential advantages there are over just bidirectionally linking to stuff - other than it potentially creating a new ‘single sign on’ for data harvesting?