(2022-04-06) Bluesky: A Self-authenticating Social Protocol

Bluesky: A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol. Bluesky’s mission is to drive the evolution from platforms to protocols.

We started with a research-intensive process to learn what can be applied from existing decentralized protocols

There are many projects that have created protocols for decentralizing discourse, including ActivityPub and SSB for social, Matrix.org and IRC for chat, and RSS for blogging. While each of these are successful in their own right, none of them fully met the goals we had for a network that enables global long-term public conversations at scale.

Some of the most important objectives we have been evaluating are portability, scale, and trust

Portability

Portability is the ability to move between services without losing everything

identity, data, payments, and any other service.

With email, if you change your provider then your email address has to change too. This is a common problem for federated social protocols, including ActivityPub and Matrix. (Not if you use your own domain!)

Scale

Some people prefer smaller communities, and ActivityPub and SSB are great for those tight-knit groups, but with Bluesky we want to give users the option to participate in global conversations

Trust

Decentralized networks are complex. Providers need to manage spam and abuse without inadvertently creating biases which lose the trust of their users. This is even more important for the algorithms that drive our feeds.

The premise of Bluesky, however, is to work towards a transparent and verifiable system from the bottom up by building a network that is open by default

The conceptual framework we've adopted for meeting these objectives is the "self-authenticating protocol."

The three components that enable self-authentication are cryptographic identifiers, content-addressed data, and verifiable computation.

Portability is directly satisfied by self-authenticating protocols.

Self-authenticating data provides a scalability advantage by enabling store-and-forward caches

Finally, self-authenticating data provides more mechanisms that can be used to establish trust. Self-authenticated data can retain metadata, like who published something and whether it was changed. Reputation and trust-graphs can be constructed on top of users, content, and services.

We believe verifiable computation will present huge opportunities for sharing indexes and social algorithms without sacrificing trust, but the cryptographic primitives in this field are still being refined