Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

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pfraze I appreciate that you take the time to engage here. I understand that you thought that ActivityPub had challenges (rightly so) and that's why you decided to develop ATProto. ActivityPub is far from perfect and needs to be improved. But the decisions you made with ATProto so far make real federation almost impossible.

I disagree that data hosting is the most important part. I think switching "servers" and still being part of the network is the most important part.

You are right that ATProto is open-source, but you ignore the fact that there's only one company controlling the development of ATProto. You can decide to close it down tomorrow, or you can decide which contributions to accept and decide the general direction of ATProto at your own discretion.

This is all fine, you can do whatever you want, but don't try to hide behind detailed technical discussions when comparing ActivityPub to ATProto. Because the difference is much more fundamental than the question how much RAM my server needs if a post goes viral.

Don't say Bluesky is decentralized and federated, because it is not today.

I understand that you are not one of the founders and you probably see this from a naive technical perspective. But working for a company that needs to show VC-level returns, I think you are being ignorant of how the future will look like.

Finally: If the team at Bluesky sincerely thought that ActivityPub is not good enough, why not work with the ActivityPub team to improve the standard and address the challenges? Or, why not give ownership of ATProto to an independent standards organization? I understand that you don't want to do this because you want to control how to develop the protocol, you want the speed and flexibility. That's fine. But don't act like ATProto is the same as ActivityPub in terms of openness.

Sorry for the long post :-)

Back in 2012, I was the first developer to join Dominic Tarr on Secure Scuttlebutt. I built Patchwork, the first client. If you’re not familiar with SSB, give it a look! It’s an aggressively anarchist technical model. After a year and a half, I had serious concerns about our ability to attract users. I realized that any activist effort needs a theory of change. For a software technology, that’s the market. We need to make better products if we want our technological goal to succeed.

The model we follow is more federal more than confederal. We use strong leadership that can be replaced. We use that in the governance, the technical design, and the execution. We also follow a kind of separation of powers through modularity, and an aggressive focus on the right to exit. SSB was “no authority ever” and it failed to scale. ATProto is “no permanent authority.”

Give the essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness a read sometime. I’ve worked in open source for my entire adult life and I’m now 38. There’s always somebody in charge. It’s not better when you don’t know who.

> There’s always somebody in charge. It’s not better when you don’t know who.

This is not black and white. And to be honest, it is telling that you throw this statement into the room. Of course, there are also organization / people who have more weight in saying into which direction standards like ActivityPub should be developed, but this is a far cry from the protocol roadmap being owned by a single for-profit company.

> I realized that any activist effort needs a theory of change. For a software technology, that’s the market. We need to make better products if we want our technological goal to succeed.

I agree, and Bluesky is obviously a great product. It is very likely that building on a truely decentralized protocol like ActivityPub has too many drawbacks to build a mass product in today's world. This is beside the point, though.

> The model we follow is more federal more than confederal. We use strong leadership that can be replaced

It can be replaced in almost the same way as you are replacing Twitter. Or any service can be replaced by another. At best, ATProto is a glorified import / export feature in this context.

Your work history has nothing to do with Bluesky's future. Bluesky is not owned by you, and while you currently might have some say, as soon as the VC ROI pressure starts building, nobody will care.

To be clear, I don't doubt your personal intentions. But it is very naive to believe that a protocol developed by a for-profit company that has just taken in $ 23 million is somehow incentivized to build a network for the good of the people first and not for their own profit. And don't tell me that those two are the same thing or aligned somehow, please.

I just would like to know this: How you can say that Bluesky is decentralized while the reality is that all your 20 million users sit on the same service run by the company behind Bluesky. And no, the ability to self-host your own data does not equate to being decentralized.

PS: I will read up on those topics you mentioned.

> Bluesky is not owned by you, and while you currently might have some say, as soon as the VC ROI pressure starts building, nobody will care.

Bluesky is a PBLLC which pretty severely limits the rights of their investors.

No, the fact that it's a PBC does not necessarily limit the right of their investors. PBC just means that they need to commit a certain percentage of their profit to a cause. It's still a for-profit company owned by shareholders. They have not publicly disclosed their charter or other information.

That is not what this means at all. Legally, it means that the company has other priorities that it must consider equally to creating profit. This means that investors have a much higher standard to have standing to sue the company or oust the CEO if they don't return a profit or don't return profits directly to investors.

A good example of what this means in practice is developer awards from Bluesky Social. As I understand it, once Bluesky PBC starts making some profit they are planning to begin placing something akin to bounties on successful app projects within the protocol. I believe Graber called this "Coopetition" at some point, where developers are "competing" within the ecosystem but simultaneously working together to make the protocol's foundation stronger.

This is something that a PBC structure makes immeasurably easier to do. Why? Because the company has more responsibilities than simply returning profit to shareholders. The shareholders can't simply sue the company or oust Graber because of this, since Bluesky Social also has a legal responsibility to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation". Please do get read on what it actually means to be a PBC.

> Legally, it means that the company has other priorities that it must consider equally to creating profit.

Ok, so it's even more vague than how I understood it. This could mean anything.

Venture capital does not care about profits, they just care about selling their share at a considerably higher price than they bought it within ~ 7 years. In reality, most of the time, this happens through an acquisition. Many times this happens without the acquired company making a single cent of profit.

So how does it matter that Bluesky Social is a PBC in this context? It is still owned and controlled by shareholders, many of them venture capitalists. It can still be sold at an uncapped profit to the share holders.

I think you should reread my comment, as I have already answered this. The "control" that shareholders have over the company is severely limited, and they have limited legal recourse against company leadership if they decide to use profits in a manner they disagree with, but fulfills their charter. It should be fairly obvious in my example that it is not in the best interests of the shareholders to quite literally give away profits.

You live in a dream world if you think VCs that just gave $23 M to Bluesky have limited control just because it says "PBC" next to the company name.

Look at what happened at OpenAI, and that was structured as a non-profit...

BLUESKY SOCIAL, PBC is registered in Delaware. Here's the relevant law: https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/

> a public benefit corporation shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.

There is no language about committing a percentage of profits to a cause.

You are right that it's not specifically required do donate a certain percentage of your profits. It's even more vague than that. It basically just means that you need to commit to a certain "public benefit" in your certificate of incorporation:

"The Certificate of Incorporation of a benefit corporation commits the company to spending some of its profits or resources (or both) in support of a specific public benefit. If a benefit corporation decides to stop doing business and dissolves, the shareholders receive the proceeds of the sales of assets, after liabilities are paid." (from https://www.delawareinc.com/blog/non-profit-corporation-vs-p...)

I fully agree that a PBC isn’t a panacea. That doesn’t change the fact that you’re confidently asserting incorrect things. I don’t expect that you’ll change your mind, so I’m not trying to convince you, I just want to make sure that the facts are laid out.

That I change my mind about what?

What I'm saying is that very likely Bluesky will grow for a few years without making a cent of profit, and be acquired by another company. And this has not much to do with if they are a PBC or LLC or whatever...

> But the decisions you made with ATProto so far make real federation almost impossible.

This kind of stuff.

> very likely Bluesky will grow for a few years without making a cent of profit, and be acquired by another company.

Or this bit.

It's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. I see things differently. I just mean I'm not trying to convince you of that stuff.

% of VC-funded tech startups that exit via appreciable >$0 acquisition is actually not particularly high relative to total failure/success, which makes sense if you think about it. The odds would seem even lower in this case just for mentioning the word "federated," regardless of the tech.

you're just factually wrong on this, sorry.

How am I wrong? If I'm wrong it's that even more vague what a PBC needs to legally do to support its public cause, but in reality many PBCs end up with donating a certain % of their profits. But my understanding is that there are also other ways to support your public cause.

We don't know what Bluesky Social PBC has committed to in their certificate of incorporation.

A standard C corp (and more relevantly its officers) is legally obligated to maximize profit for shareholders at the expense of any mission.

For a B-corp if the investors sue the board or CEO for breaching fiduciary duty for not maximizing profit, the response is "we were following the mission (and you knew we would be following the mission going in), GFY"

Who cares about profit? We're in the VC world now, where many companies grow quickly without making a cent of profit and then get sold off. How does a B corp help here?

Just gonna throw out a link to this whitepaper co-authored by the now-CEO of Bluesky and one of the lead authors of ActivityPub https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535398

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