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#key#don#domain#own#social#account#private#bluesky#github#pds
Discussion (74 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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?
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.
I'm probably in the minority though.
Then create separate accounts?
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
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.
https://atproto.com/specs/did
It's completely straightforward and it works. Tens of thousands of users are doing it successfully.
https://blue.mackuba.eu/stats/
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.
https://secushare.org/broken-internet
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.
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)
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.
No idea why people have such a hard time joining and supporting the Fediverse.
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...
Bluesky has almost 50M registered users, sustained 1M+ daily active users, and 3M+ monthly active users for roughly two years. 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.
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
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.