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The Bluesky team has an academic paper describing the protocol that’s a pretty good high level but somewhat technical overview. It includes how they see Bluesky compares to Secure Scuttlebutt, Nostr, Farcaster, and ActivityPub/Mastodon. I think folks who are building Nostr apps or advocating for it in comparison to Bluesky would do well to read it to understand what they’re doing and how we’re different. We should also write up one for Nostr.
arXiv.org
Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
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 ...

Replies (35)

Bluesky only works with Bluesky's own code. Thanks for reading my paper.
rabble's avatar rabble
The Bluesky team has an academic paper describing the protocol that’s a pretty good high level but somewhat technical overview. It includes how they see Bluesky compares to Secure Scuttlebutt, Nostr, Farcaster, and ActivityPub/Mastodon. I think folks who are building Nostr apps or advocating for it in comparison to Bluesky would do well to read it to understand what they’re doing and how we’re different. We should also write up one for Nostr.
arXiv.org
Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
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 ...
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↩ replying to Vitor Pamplona
We’ve submitted a proposal to an international society to organize a conference on decentralized social networks, with Nostr as the main topic. Fortunately, the proposal has been approved, and we’re now working out the details. I’m actively trying to align the conference dates and location with next year’s Nostr events. The goal is to introduce Nostr to academics and promote further research. Hope everything goes well.
WTF, they actually gave up entirely on sovereign identity?! "In principle, the cryptographic keys for signing repository updates and DID document updates can be held directly on the user’s devices, e.g. using a cryptocurrency wallet, in order to minimize trust in servers. However, we believe that such manual key management is not appropriate for most users, since there is a significant risk of the keys being compromised or lost. The Bluesky PDSes therefore hold these signing keys custodially on behalf of users, and users log in to their home PDS via username and password. This provides a familiar user experience to users, and enables standard features such as password reset by email."
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I'm not sure what they're getting at with their description of Nostr "Communication (e.g. reply threads) is only possible between users who have at least one relay in common" That's true of any client-server architecture no?
↩ replying to tf
80% of nostr misunderstanding (particularly wrt scaling) comes from not understanding how something like outbox would work. which is fucking retarded. the “public square” use case of nostr basically implies (something like) outbox; it’s like saying nostr can’t work because people can’t do math that quickly since the spec doesn’t mention computers.
Thanks for the share, as a fellow protocol nerd it looks like an interesting read. On writing a Nostr breakdown paper I'd potentially be interested in collaborating on something like that of anybody was looking for volunteers - though it's important to note I've written zero academic papers (unless college essays count). Though I did write a blog post comparison of the big three a bit back. An earlier version of it actually got featured in the O'Reily trend newsletter (May of '24) which was super cool. But definitely not anything academic.
Microblogging Protocols Compared v2
Update: September 20th, 2024: I was incorrect regarding AT’s (BlueSky) inability to fully delete things, the protocol DOES support fully dele...