Who owns your ATProto identity?
kevinak.se
kevinak.se
It’s solvable if you’re willing to self-host your PDS.
But I’m skeptical of the attempts to make a PDS an “everything account.” Why should you use the same PDS for your social media posts and your git repos and your blog posts? Seems like we need to get better at locking things down in practice before that kind of centralization?
I'm probably in the minority though.
Then create separate accounts?
For the current moment though you can just create an atproto account without creating a bluesky account. Tangled for example supports this on their site by creating one for their PDS and you can always move to another PDS in the future.
The over-arching idea isn't that your code is tied to your socials but rather that you can have a bunch of disparate services that you can interlink over a common identity layer and that those services are only loosely tied to the people/orgs hosting them but could be trivially hosted by anyone else.
Even with GitHub we don’t hand over our private keys to the GitHub server, though.
When I commit to my repos the commits are still signed by the private key that lives on my computer. Someone could take over my GitHub account and they wouldn’t be able to sign commits with the private key on my PC.
They could technically add a new public key and sign new commits with that key, but I could cryptographically point to the change and show that the key changed at time of takeover and disavow it.
If you're not signing them then hosting on GitHub gives GitHub the ability to do arbitrary commits in your name. The repo's HEAD is whatever GitHub says it is.
No one (not literally of course) self hosts their PDS. Like 99.9%, if not more, are using the Bluesky PDSes.
The author's concern seems to be more focused on impersonation
DNSSec is used to prevent unauthorized stealing of domains. Furthermore, if someone does steal one domain you own, they don't steal all your accounts across all domains. If they take over your hosting, that's a fixable problem -- you just repoint the domain.
Now, having said that, I designed the Safebox exactly to prevent these scenarios from happening, and create an actually solid foundation for decentralized social networking, AI workloads, etc. If anyone is interested, probably the best link to begin reading about it is: https://safebots.ai/about (If you do, I'd love to hear your thoughts)
You don't even have the frameworks that are available to protect domains. (Domain lock, transfer, etc.) And registrars are regulated by laws and frameworks in ways ATProto hosts aren't. Don't get me wrong, if a registrar transfers your domain due to a social engineering attack on the registrar, then you might lose it (an attacker almost did this to me once via a SIM swap, and I had to call GoDaddy to prevent the transfers). But that's not the same as, say, hacking the web hosting server.
In any case, tptacek, Safebox is supposed to solve these actual problems, by making sure no one can actually get into the box (no ssh, etc) so it's a "neutral ground" that no one can really "own", "redirect", steal keys or impersonate you. If you read https://safebots.ai/about you'll see what I'm talking about. If you do, I'd love to read any feedback you might have, given your background in security!
And regarding DNSSEC... if your domain is taken by the registrar (court order, ToS violation, etc.) or a government that can command the parent TLD to act, they can just revoke your old key and transfer the domain to someone else (or setup a placeholder under their own DNS) and now your protection and all concept of ownership is completely gone without your consent. This happened a few years ago with Epik seizing the soyjakparty and kiwifarms domains, including their hosting from a subsidiary company Terrahost... and KF has never even lost a lawsuit, but there are some specific people that really don't like them, and have gotten adept at claiming ToS violations via every possible company that touches them in order to try to make them go away.
Uh, no.
I can legally shoot and kill intruders due to castle doctrine and stand your ground laws in my physical home. And legal invasions require being in front of a judge and a search warrant.
A domain can be seized for 'terms of service' (aka kangaroo court) reasons. Stand your ground nor castle doctrine doesn't apply to your digital house.
How many houses were actually seized, repossessed, commandeered with "eminent domain", slowly taken over via "adverse possession", encroached on with easements and air rights, and whatever else? Versus how many domains?
There is no violence on the internet. You can't shoot intruders. And that's a great thing.
Put in legal terms, you do NOT have this level of ownership to your house... and you certainly do not have sovereign immunity on your land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title
Usually the best you can get is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_simple
You probably have something more like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freehold_(law)
What you are describing is more like the king of England being able to shoot people on his own property, and have full sovereign immunity (in theory, I mean recently a British prince was arrested on allegations of far less).
That means if you are a home invader, I can legally shoot and kill you. There'll be an investigation, but both statutes are affirmative defenses to killing.
Its not that I want to, or look forward to it. I don't, and I hope I never have to. But I will, if I'm forced.
For example shooting a 5 year old kid who trespassed on your property isnt covered
> Your PDS operator can post as you, like things as you, follow people as you, and it would be cryptographically indistinguishable from your real activity. The signatures are valid.
Your domain name owner or DNS provider cannot redirect your domain name to a different server and cryptographically impersonate you.
It's not exactly the same thing but it's close.
In a social protocol or context, I would expect a private key to be in the private control of the individual, such as when someone uses their private key to sign an email or git commit.
The purpose of signing your emails or commits is to provide a good indicator that it actually came from you, not someone who managed to get access to your email account at the time.
I do agree they're not the same but the trust and risk are very similar.
They are similar in that: jerks can be jerks. But one of the jerks I've trusted for 30 years and I hardly know the the other jerk.
That seems entirely normal. The PDS handles ATProto actions but it cannot modify the git signature (obviously!). It’s no different than the fact that GitHub can post that you’ve committed a “verified” badge commit by adding a new signing key to your account and signing new commits with it.
The storage entity can always claim power over this by reporting a new key and signatures with that key. Seems entirely normal.
This is true and it's still true in the ATProto ecosystem but in a different context.
It asserts that events and records are authored by your PDS, not by you specifically. Which is certainly closer to the intent of TLS certs.
And technically you can maintain a PDS proxy that can only host, broadcast events, and receive content but that doesn't have any keys or signing capabilities.
Then you can have a local PDS that does your signing and sends signed events and records (basically signed state updates) to the PDS proxy to actually emit to the network. This then allows you to lock your keys behind a hardware key to better lock everything down. Of course there are trade offs to this. If it requires physical auth then it can only work on one device at a time or you have to self host it homelab style at which point it might just make more sense to host the PDS yourself anyways.
There's a project thats working on this very thing but I've not kept up with it and I can't remember what the name of it is. If any ATproto people in the comments knows the name/link feel free to reply under this to enlighten me + everyone else.
Socially whether you can explain off that your PDS acted maliciously or that it was hacked or whatever is a different story but if you keep recovery keys for your DID you can take back control and undo everything your PDS did that you didn't authorise pretty trivially. The UX for it needs to be improved but technically the process is super simple/straight forward.
And those recovery keys provide a mechanism for declaring "hey i didn't do this I was hacked" on top of specific events but nothing for taking advantage of that cryptographic opportunity has been built out yet.
And for lower bandwidth tasks, Tor Onions can't be beat. Just make sure to use 2fa on services you offer to keep the trash out. Things like fail2ban don't work the way you intend.
If my DNS provider messes up, I revoke their DNSSEC keys and point my domain to a different provider.
Domain registration should be national public infrastructure.
Bluesky Social, PBC runs a PDS service (bsky.social) for free, there are a number of free public alternatives, and thousands of users self-host.
Self-hosting your own PDS can be done with Raspberry Pi or $5/mo VM and requires very little work. It runs in a Docker container with SQLite.
It's completely straightforward and it works. Tens of thousands of users are doing it successfully.
They hold the keys for your DID. If they don't allow you to move to another PDS, you can't move. The original theory was that you'd hold the private keys, but that's something that would hugely limit adoption so they decided to hold the keys themselves.
In terms of moving your backlog of posts to a new server, part of the issue is liability (not merely legal liability, but reputational as well). When you have a user on your platform and they're posting stuff, you're moderating them in real time. If they turn out to be a horrible troll, you've get the reports. Let's say a horrible troll has been on EvilServer and EvilServer has been ignoring the reports against them. They now want to move to your GoodServer and bring all their post history with them. As an admin of GoodServer, you can't see that everyone has been reporting this troll for years. They're now moving over lots of horrible, inflammatory, potentially illegal posts to your server.
Moderation tools arent limited to specific PDS's, labels are public. If an account has received many reports it will have been labelled by Bluesky's moderation account and other independent labellers. A PDS can check against these before allowing an account to migrate if they choose to. I'm not sure any are currently doing this, but this is something that can absolutely be improved in current implementations, not an inherent limitation of the architecture.
*requires your own PLC key, which the vast majority of users do not have, protonmail has good prior art here (imo)
I'm not aware of what Proton does here, I'll look into that.
Identity and your signing key https://cirrus.earth/concepts/identity/
> Cloudflare secrets are write-only: once set, they cannot be retrieved through the dashboard or the API. This is good for security and bad for recovery. The wizard prints the key exactly once during pds init. Save it then.
Also:
Back up your signing key https://cirrus.earth/guides/back-up-signing-key/
CAs have to prove they're not faking certs through the certificate transparency logs, there's no such limitation on Bluesky.
A more apt comparison is a shared host that does certificate management for you. Those are also often considered less secure, of course.
No idea why people have such a hard time joining and supporting the Fediverse.
This is just how the web works, and there is no easy around it without losing features people care about. Sure, you can do client-side encryption and pretend serve can't see the plaintext, but it's just a theatre, see Hushmail incident for example.
And having people export uber-key by default is pretty terrible idea. Sure, allow advanced users (like post author) to do it. But for the common person, the exported key is just another way to get account compromised, via malware or backup provider hacking. Or if they are not backing up stuff, then the key will get lost next time they upgrade.
Well, apart from using a separate email address for every single "provider"?
(Spoiler: there's no way I'm going to sign into your service with a shared email ... you get <youservice>@<me>.com)
Keeping a private keep on the client to sign your activity is a fundamental cryptography practice.
If you use a private key to sign your emails or git commits, it’s not security theater.
If you were to have to upload your private key to GitHub or your email provider, that would be severity theater.
> Is author new at the whole web thing?
Unnecessarily mean comment.
I personally have multiple regular PCs, sync the files around, do encrypted backups, and so on. I still have my files from 20 years ago, and I manage my personal keys.
But when I talk to other people, most people aren't like that! They don't do regular backups, they lose files all the time (phone broke -> files are gone), and when they transfer files, they do it via 3rd party, by emailing, dropboxing or uploading to Google Drive.
So how would they handle "private key"?
Most of then will never download the app, and will only use the website. I guess you can use browser web storage to store the key, but next time they run out of space and clear internet files, it would be gone. Or if their phone breaks. Or if the computer starts to behave strangely, so they wipe it all (not exaggerating, I've seen people do that). So keeping the key only in the browser is a terrible idea.
You can force them to download private key, but then what? Most people will simply forget it (after all, "I am just trying out this thing, no need to both with all the complex backups"), and the key will sit in Download folder until the PC/phone breaks. If you got lucky, they'll upload this to Google Drive/iCloud, so that megacrop will have a private key.
But the worst of all, even if you somehow magically get them to preserve the private key, it's useless. Remember, we are talking rogue operator here, and those are very likely the same people who are serving you the webpage and javascript blob that will obtain the key from local storage and decrypt. They will do the same thing hushmail did, which is to modify the webpage so it exfiltrates the private key.
(And yes, all of this can be worked around if you don't use web, and run the stuff locally. But this severely restricts users, and will kill the adoption)
I have nothing against people exploring alternative networking systems, but let's be clear: the only reason to run GNUnet (or Nostr, or SSB) is if you are interested in GNUnet/Nostr/SSB itself, or if you want to add exclusivity and wall your garden away from random visitors.
But many people have the opposite goal - they want their content to be accessible, and they want everyone to be able to participate, even if they are a high school student with 10 year old iPhone. And this means web.
So let's talk about how we can actually reach people, and this means figuring out how to get this web thing to work.
“The signing key is entrusted to the PDS so that it can manage the user's data, but rotation keys can be controlled by the user, e.g. as a paper key. This makes it possible for the user to update their account to a new PDS without the original host's help.”
Being able to tell who wrote something doesn't imply irrationality, panicking, or a reaction to new technology.
> like UFO sightings in the 1950s.
UFO sightings stayed confined to the 1950s and were a reaction to new technology?
Or were the UFO sightings in the 1950s the only UFO sightings that were a reaction to new technology?
I'm not sure how this being clarified will be able to explain how identifying the writer of text is the same as a UFO sighting in 1950, but I'm open to it, I try to stay rigorously rational (c.f. X does not imply Y in first pull quote)
> If ever it is still possible to "tell" AI writing, it soon will not be.
Why not?
n.b. I quit my job at Google to build an AI client and have been working on it full time for 3 years. I love AI. I don't think there's a rational argument that justifies the idea it's better to never opine the author of some writing was AI, and the arguments offered here are particularly weak, at their face. As an opinion, solely? Fair enough.
This is false, it is trivial to find humans with 99%+ accuracy[1] and there is a well-known service with 99%+ accuracy when analyzed by 3rd parties with no affiliation.[2]
> people are just guessing based on what they see in an unscientific way
As we see above, this is just guessing in an unscientific way. :) It's important to be rational! We all agree on that. :)
FWIW it did used to be true that the 3rd party services were junk. And I don't support the idea of humans just winging it when there's consequences. The case we're in is about the most mundane and consequence-free, the vast majority of us use AI daily and we're commenting on an internet aggregator that is aggregating a blog article.
[1] People who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks are accurate and robust detectors of AI-generated text - https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.267/
[2] Artificial Writing and Automated Detection” - https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insights/artificial-writing-and-aut...
Sorry but no, this is also false. AI is largely trained on human data. What it outputs is also largely what a human would output. We could both easily make up the exact same sentences (especially smaller ones) and there is NO way to tell what the real source of a sentence is, especially considering the source can be multiple things (AI and human) at the same time!
There is no amount of literature you could provide or anything you can do or say that would change my mind on this.
We have our own personal biases towards certain words and sentence structures that don’t match the same biases that post-training favors. We speak egoistically how we want to speak, not necessarily how the listener wants to hear.
We don’t polish every sentence, because not every sentence needs polish.
If a human wrote like this, I would be concerned that they’re spending too much effort into making me feel or thing something, and not enough effort into expressing their own thoughts and emotions. I would be concerned that they’re spending way too much effort into writing blog posts, and not enough effort thinking about the topic they’re writing about. I wouldn’t want to read that either.
I don't come from much and this reminds me of the rich girl who wondered how anyone could ever tell if anything is true ever in english class last year of high school. Real formative moment for me. It sounds debilitating, but at the very least comparatively to her, people acting like there's no such thing as certainty unless its 100%, and there's no sense in weighing things, allowed me to climb past them without paying the same tolls or having the same advantages.
(for those looking at rationality:
>> This is false, it is trivial to find humans with 99%+ accuracy [link]
> Sorry but no, this is also false...there is no amount of literature you could provide or anything you can do or say that would change my mind on this.
I have science, they have a tortured counter about the nature of certainty that belongs in freshman philosophy class, as it would obviate any discussion of anything ever)
But I say: who cares? The substance and the authenticity are what count. This article made some interesting points, and it was signed off on by a human author. Personally, I'm no more interested in whether the author used AI to produce the text than in whether they used a dictionary or thesaurus, as long as they stand by the words.
This whole "debate" has the feel of religion to it. I'm consistently surprised that there's so much woolly, unfalsifiable thinking on this subject. And here, of all places.
It’s not about authors using AI, it’s about authors not respecting the reader’s time.
Writing has a multiplicative force. The writer only needs to spend time writing it once. The text will reach thousands of readers who will collectively spend a lot more time on it than the author.
If even with that asymmetry, the author is not willing to put effort into writing it, I’m not going to bother reading it, regardless of the text’s substance. I’m just not interested.
Speaking for myself (as ever), I am just not bothered by what bothers you. Good writing is good writing. Bad writing is bad writing. Who or what generated it, and how much time it took, is immaterial.
You've already been told it's not a panic, and it's not cool you keep insisting it is. This is a sleezy tactic to make your opponent look less sane than yourself ("stop being so emotional", "calm down", "hey no need to be angry").
is a heading
edit:
>On ATProto, your PDS doesn't just store your Bluesky posts. It stores everything.
>Not just your Bluesky account. Your ability to post, commit, publish, or interact across every ATProto app.
>The repo data itself isn't the issue. It's all public anyway,
>An attacker, a state actor with a warrant, or a rogue employee doesn't just get read access. They get the signing keys
Not even sure why the PDS would require our signing key that just seems very sloppy to me. As you can tell I know very little about atProto, and I did participate in the development of the DID standard and I am dismayed to see such an inelegant solution in such a promising protocol.
So if the worst case scenario presented in this article took place where a PDS was falsifying information and pretending to be you, you could presumably somehow revoke the child key that you provided to the PDS. I'll have to look more closely at this
You could even publish a signed selective retraction (delete the fake posts or mark them as fake) with proof that you control the key 1 level above the key that posted them
I'm asking this not bc I like enshitification, but the app view design seems such a perfect fit for user data mining/targeting, that it's hard to believe it was not part of design consideration in day one.
The day Bluesky decides to enshittify there’s a very real possibility that they might also just stop allowing people to extract their keys and splinter off the network. The enshitification begins when VCs turn upp the heat it they start getting low on cash.
Anyway I think we can agree on enshitification is coming soon. I'm just looking for signs of that's actually happening (or a counter theory that it would not happen)
Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.
You get a reward for being a mining node, not just any node. Even then, do miners have much incentive to share blocks, other than the ones they mine?
I think the incentive is mutual for most nodes (aside from the mining aspect). People will set up a node to accept transactions in an automated manner, or to have higher confidence in the state of their accounts.
It's like being on the floor of the stock market. People participating want to be where all the information is (for their own benefit), and there is incentive to bring others in and share information (because it increases the amount of information you have).
I suppose you could be a "selfish" node. The bitcoin-equivalent of someone who leeches and never seeds. But the advantage is low relative to the amount of money moving around. Most people don't care about the bandwidth of running a bitcoin node, they care about latency. Unlike bittorrent, there isn't a de-facto finished version of the file being synced: it's a constantly-updating list that everyone wants to have the latest version of. I can't find the words, but this seems to be the fundamental difference.
How would that even work?
Poor people don't deserve rights on the blockchain anyway, it's not like they can afford the transaction fees, if they didn't want their account stolen they should have tried being rich, or buying into nearer the top of the pyramid.
Don't worry about people who pass away or lose internet for an extended period, we'll deal with that in v2, when we get "proof of death" and "proof of internet disconnectivity" on the blockchain somehow.
/s if it's necessary
I think the key thing to recognise with petname systems is that there doesn't need to be this sort of "top-level consensus" as opposed to ecash systems.
You can have two instances of namecoin, say Namecoin1 or Namecoin2. You can just have different domains like alice.nmc1 and bob.nmc2 and have them interoperate properly. You can just keep forking blockchain-based petname systems to overcome the bandwidth/fee problem.
What this means is that Namecoin1 full nodes don't need to synchronize all the domain names on Namecoin2 and vice-versa. Similar to TLDs on DNS. We can imagine that there might be different petname TLDs for different global regions, and they might be merge-mined.
This isn't true for money applications like bitcoin or eth, because by forking BTC or ETH or something, you are creating new coins.
For example, you could set your petname up so it can be controlled by a single keypair, which can be overridden after a certain time by a ring signature based on keypairs held by friends, family, peers, and trusted computing devices you leave in a safe deposit box.
Or maybe you could trust your identity with some centralized entity, but only as part of a 2-of-3 multisig with yourself and another trusted entity.
Basicially namecoin with bitcoin-like scripting controls.
If you're okay with another side of the triangle, where all of the identities are keypairs, then you don't need a petname system or any name system. the name system is an optional convenience layer on top of the web of trust.
What I see here doesn't look good.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
Never mind the pivot to reddit.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/bluesky-twitter-rival-reddit...
Source: Bluesky COO https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/growth-and-su... (somewhere towards the end in the Q&A section).
One way they failed hard is that they talked about how they were against the investors and VC incentives, then they took $100M from Bain Capital (PE) just after peak user count, but didn't tell us for almost a year. They could have put up a simple $5/month to support the cause, but they took investor money instead. This is why I left.
Bluesky has ~50M registered users and has sustained ~5M monthly active users for long while. There's no reason to believe it will fall substantially below this level.
It is also in the process of adding (decentralized) subcommunities, which I expect to be really cool and have a large impact on growth.
Registered users is not at all meaningless. Bluesky has those user's email addresses, the mobile app is still installed on many of their devices, they have accounts, and they can potentially be reactivated.
For example, if Bluesky announced a feature exciting enough, like subcommunities, it could email those 50M users and possibly bootstrap a serious open network competitor to Reddit.
https://bsky.app/profile/tyggero.cz/post/3moskpisnuc2t
Source: https://sifa.id/stats
Statement from Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3mmp27wwnic2j
The stats page you linked to explains exactly what's going on. These spam PLC identities have nothing to do with with the tens of millions of real Bluesky registered users.
Either you misunderstood or you're being intentionally dishonest.
At current rate it will 50M in 6 months.
That shape doesn’t seem great for a social media company.
eg. I personally had more than a dozen accounts
Most users signed up by downloading the app or visiting the web site and created a single account.
As a point of reference, the official Google Play store independently verifies that the Bluesky app has had 10M+ installs.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.blueskyweb...
There are no official stats on the iOS app or web but those are both likely similar or larger sources of users.
The reality is that a significant chunk (>50%) was Blue MAGA, or turned off by them, and I see little prospect that they will reactivate. Outside of the Bluesky echo chamber, there is a deep brand association with Bluesky being primarily political refugees. They see Bluesky as the left-wing Truth Social. I've asked hundreds of people IRL if they have heard of Bluesky, they are far more likely to have this brand association than to have heard of "atproto" (more than half vs 1-2% / can count on one hand).
Right now, Bluesky has one large community, which is already great for some people but not most people. Once Bluesky adds Communities, new communities can form, making it interesting to the other 90% of people who were excited initially and then turned off by it being "one note".
If you'd like to crawl the network to get real data, I built this a while ago https://github.com/verdverm/atmunge (it will take a few days to get sufficient data to do analysis, due to rate-limits)
Certainly Bluesky has stats about mobile app installs / usage. If they were good, they would be sharing those instead of the /users/accounts/ number that feels good but hides the reality. The first step (imo) would be to stop trying to deny reality and start asking why it is the reality. Only then can corrections be made. I don't think the core issues are technical, a missing feature, or a social media modality that was supposed to be built in the atmosphere. (other than my strongly held opinion that public-by-default was the wrong choice and bolting on permissioned spaces now is not a right answer)
I'm personally waiting on the next attempt that learns from AP/AT/Nostr, but makes privacy first core. I think it will be a few years still. Right now more people are shunning social media across the board, it's all so toxic and polarizing regardless of modality and where you use it.
Bluesky did something ActivityPub/Mastodon never did, which is reach a mainstream audience of non-technical people. But its growth has been severely limited for one reason: the network is niche and uninteresting to most people.
Communities are a potential solution to this problem. If they work, it is plausible that tens of millions of users reactivate and, eventually, hundreds of millions of people join the network.