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arXiv:2402.03239cs.DC

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

Martin Kleppmann, Paul Frazee, Jake Gold, Jay Graber, Daniel Holmgren, Devin Ivy, Jeromy Johnson, Bryan Newbold, Jaz Volpert

Abstract

Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.

arXiv comments
Journal reference
Proceedings of the ACM Conext-2024 Workshop on the Decentralization of the Internet (DIN '24), December 9-12, 2024, Los Angeles, CA, USA
DOI
doi:10.1145/3694809.3700740
Subjects
cs.DCDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing cs.SISocial and Information Networks

On Hacker News

Linked by 7 identifiable commenters in 7 comments across 6 threads, from Feb 2024 to Apr 2026. Found in 1 HN submission from Feb 2024 to Feb 2024. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments6 threads

  1. Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day 1 comment

    • > If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally" Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick. It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses…

      rimunroeView on HNParent context

  2. Publishing on the ATmosphere 1 comment

    • I believe that https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosyste... is the canonical link, it's not the one I read originally, but is linked from the "related work" section of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239

      steveklabnikView on HNParent context

  3. Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay" 1 comment

    • No. This isn’t true. Bluesky has always been very transparent about exactly what flavor of decentralization they offer. The whole thing is swappable microservices you can host yourself, including the relay if you really care. The relay is an optimization to make their app…

      anon7000View on HNParent context

  4. ATProto for distributed system engineers 1 comment

    • Yes and no. The relay is run by Bluesky, but only as a matter of practicality because it requires a large footprint to subscribe to all the PDS events. Others have written custom AppViews and clients already. I run a "one man relay" that only scrapes my PDS, puts it into an…

      GaryNumanVevoView on HNParent context

  5. Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters 2 comments

    • I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. It's also, seemingly, good enough that they're building very useful things on top of it like PDS, migrating users, etc. ActivityPub (AP) felt a bit like "good…

      unshavedyakView on HNParent context

    • > sound more like 'custom feeds' which users can define based on global content, using predefined criteria determined by a client (web app) which don't really a way to control the behavior of. Which makes this feature only truly operate on the global layer, and 'custom' rather…

      danabramovView on HNParent context

  6. Bluesky signups are now open to the public 1 comment

    • This is a big milestone for Bluesky! We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well. There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs…

      jakebskyView on HNParent context

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