Backdating posts opens up a world of social engineering scams. You can create an account that appears to have predicted a lot of past events, sports scores, or stock prices with timestamps prior to those events occurring. The scam is to create an account that appears to have great stock advice or sports betting predictions and then charge people for it.
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/bluemigrate.com/post/3lc3r4fqen62l
You can also link Twitter to Bluesky with either OAuth, or a Twitter post with a Bluesky challenge to prove you have control of the account.
https://katharinabrunner.de/2024/02/archiving-websites-the-i...
https://x.com/paulmcgorrery/status/1178561480385421312 (Dyno Nobel Inc v Orica Explosives Technology Pty Ltd (no 2) [2019] FCA 1552)
https://www.michbar.org/journal/Details/Old-websites-seldom-...
https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/insights/legal/b/though...
Twitter posts are only available to authenticated users, and the API is really quite expensive now - that was one of the many reasons people have wanted to move off it!
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/lul4.bsky.social/post/3kgaesbxs7f25
(if you work for bsky please don't add a flag to that, it's my favorite party trick)
Some of my favourite backdated posts are from the years 1776 and 1.
I’m cackling over here. How have I never heard this when people talk about blue sky?
<troll> The definition of dictionary is just "Words about words" (source: Urban Dictionary), so I'd say that Urban Dictionary qualifies. </troll>
"sky tweet" is also a stupid name since a tweet is already the name for a post on a very specific platform.
Though in practice I think "skeet" was a bit of a fad to be provocative, and most people just call them tweets, even on bluesky.
Go on, tell us what you think an "actual dictionary" is.
I don't think it's important. What is important is using a sane environment. X is completely crazy.
You can do whatever you want with the the software. It's right here: https://github.com/bluesky-social
You cannot do whatever you want on someone else's hosted website. They don't allow you to delete other users and edit other people's posts because everyone agrees that would make it useless.
The whole thing with Bluesky and decentralized protocols is no server can enforce special rules.
Sure, they could come up with something that says "our PDS will not accept backdated events", but they will not be able to stop someone else to set up a server that does that without any issue.
You would need some form of distributed consensus mechanism, but then you either end up with some exclusive club to implement Paxos or you will need some blockchain-y solution, no?
Then can we drop the pretense that ATProto is actually usable without Bluesky's AppView? [0]
> posts on the Bluesky app itself have valid dates
Who's to say what is a "valid date" in a decentralized system that (in theory) does not have a central authority nor depends on a consensus mechanism?
You do still get the benefits of being able to interoperate between different apps that may not know each other exist without the disadvantages of having server-specific namespaces, which is of course the point.
“A valid date” would be determined by said server (BlueSky’s or yours). You could choose to write a server that enforces consistent dates or one that does not, and the definition of a valid date would be different per AppView.
I acknowledge the other way of doing it which ActivityPub uses has some benefits as well.
There is no "goodwill". Bluesky's plan (from day one!) has been to create something that could have been used by Twitter to keep them as the gatekeeper of the data while removing them from any liability for custody. They know that their moat is on their expensive indexer and they will not take any measure that gives this power to end users.
Without strong and deliberate efforts to maintain a culture of openness and freedom, IT is a heartless cager of men.
The fact it's a subkey means that you are also able to rotate the key that the PDS has access to and modify your repo back to pre-defaced state if need be.
Imagine if Github worked this way, then I wouldn't have to worry about storing my ssh keys on my local machine. Imagine the possibilities if Github could pull my repo instead of me having to go through all that darned trouble of pushing it.
That said, the PDS is effectively also your private key custodian. Most people who aren't nerds are happy to let Bluesky PBC manage their keys. But if that's your threat model, you should absolutely move to a self-managed PDS.
The protocol also actually allows you to manage your keys differently. You could in theory have a "read-only" PDS, and generate all your posts locally using a local key (conceptually much closer to a crypto wallet.)
In that scenario, the validity of posts as originating from a known identity is extremely strong.
There's ways around it... the identity mechanism supports multiple keys so you could have a backup in escrow.
But most people don't want to worry about key management at that level. Hell, I know exactly how everything works, and key management still scares me. The consequences of a mistake are huge.
Edit: or we could backup the key.
The PLC registry supports an override key for adversarial migrations, which was our chosen alternative
I'll look into the registry override too, maybe I can hack something together around that.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/how-to-become-a-fake-...