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when I reviewed how the protocol that bluesky uses worked, I would say that it could offer decentralization, but the servers are like mini groups, where the network is only divided into parts and each person who hosts those servers is the one who has control of those groups, for example. so there the users are still subject to the rules that each server has, if you only change to another, you will not be free, it's just changing moderators.

As someone who spends time between Bluesky, Nostr, Farcaster. Interesting dynamics happening. Some folks were bummed Farcaster was “giving up” on social. Then went ham on a user for asking about decentralization & censorship potentials Nostr accepts person in. Priving why decentralization good. Farcaster Build your own client of gtfo 😂 Mastodon 🤷‍♂️ View quoted note →

I think the idea that the PDS servers "should" be neutral is unrealistic. If community servers are acting as de-facto infrastructure and you suppose that they "should" do something, well then, there's always an implicit enforcement mechanism standing behind the word "should". If you still need to invoke a centralized authority to make the players in a supposedly decentralized system work together, well, back to square one then. I will admit I myself have fallen into this kind of wishful "should" thinking before. And I think the reason why it's so easy to fall into is because the early internet had a lot of self-selected people that naturally aligned idea on certain values like curiosity, not assuming things about people, etc. But it's a different game now. I do think nostr is closer to a workable solution than bluesky, because nostr is fundamentally oriented toward redundancy/exit, not consistency/consensus. Notice that biological systems mirror this architecture.

Pushing for enforced common carriage (Title II style) on PDS operators misses the point of portability and competing providers. Those obligations only apply where users have no real alternative. If you can switch PDSes or self-host without losing anything, operators get reciprocal choice too. Take that away and you don't achieve neutrality; you just swap voluntary communities for coerced ones. Mutual and multiple selection is the real check on power here.

I've been working on a protocol design that could solve these issues. What I'm seeing in a lot of the critiques of social media infrastructure boils down to the power dynamics that emerge when infrastructure and community ideology are bundled, when the protocol layer and application layer are built together and are designed to depend on each other. Bluesky was designed FOR the communities on the "Blue" end of the spectrum (Western, liberal) as an alternative to centralized social media platforms that censor or allow infiltration by people with opposing ideologies, and the decisions on how the protocol layer works are colored by that initial intention. The goal was to create an alternative to Twitter, but not necessarily to address the underlying issue that plagues all of our social media options right now. Blacksky was explicit in trying to create a safe online space for the Black community, mitigating harms like racism. To do that, they built their own PDS, a custom Relay and custom feed generators. This tied the infrastructure design goals to the community the application was being designed for, meaning that the ideological purity is built into those deepest infrastructure layers. Nostr is much closer to the ideal, separating identity and message transmission away from any centralized authority. But the Achilles' heel is the same. Relays, like the PDS nodes of AT Protocol are volunteer silos with the node managers and hosts doing the work of deciding what to host, or giving up that kind of power and authority and letting it be a free for all without an economic incentive. Anyone can spin up a Nostr relay node and open it up to the world, or close it off to a specific set of users. I'm seeing a need to fill the incentive gap by creating a financial incentive at the storage layer that would guarantee neutrality, basically turning data storage into a utility service. This would allow community based applications to be built tapping into this storage layer and performing the ideological filtering and curation without the operator needing to feel the pressure to censor or gatekeep the storage infrastructure itself. They way this could happen is by using the metadata tags on the content itself, which would identify the creator, the topic, and whatever else the application being used is designed to add to the tag details. This would change the negative filter (I don't want XYZ) into a positive filter (I DO want ABC), without changing anything at the protocol layer itself.

Maybe PDS servers shouldn't have keys to decrypt the messages.

In the Nostr world, I think relay providers should be able to pick and choose what they relay, and also there should be some type of independent scoring/rating mechanism so there's transparency.

Nodes should relay all, let all (adult) users decide whether to read/mute, individually.

I personally think that Bluesky's PDSs should have remained neutral infrastructure. Before, when they were like that, you could effectively build out your own platform using Bluesky's infrastructure for hosting, kinda bootstrapping the protocol and letting anyone build a platform with the rules of their choosing. Now that Bluesky moderates at the PDS layer AND the relay layer, and since they host the vast majority of AT Proto infrastructure, they've more or less locked the entirety of AT into Bluesky's community guidelines. (Who'd want to build a platform on AT with different guidelines, if no user of Bluesky - which is practically the entire network - could partake in said alternative AT platform?) As far as other platforms though, I'm more agnostic on neutral PDSs - if I understand the issue with that controversy it was with Blacksy. If an alternative platform moderates at the PDS layer that's not going to effectively apply the rules to all of AT like Bluesky can. Once a protocol is more widespread individual instances of it can have a diverse set of rules, but if one instance (e.g. Bluesky Corporate) can apply it's rules to the entire network before it expands, then the protocol could be captured and prevented from expanding beyond that initial niche base that captured it. My 2c anyway.