atproto is currently permissionless world readable, that seems worse to most people (I asked low 100s) than being in a siloed platform with some amount of control over who can see their content
oh, maybe you mean Sam Altman's World with their eye scanning for identity, that is quite dystopian
Spaces are in alpha and implemented in at least 4 PDS codebases. Until then there's a lot of use cases where world readable is not a problem, like personal blogs or instagram/twitter style social media.
I think a model where public really means public and private means private is more clear to users than a closed platform where neither is true. Facebook is actively using your private posts for ad targeting and they can remove your public content at any time for no reason. With atproto that can only happen if you pick a bad hosted PDS out of many.
This might be one of the closest things I've seen to actually being able to own your account - instead of having it not just owned by a second party in every way that matters, but also beholden to a third party via an e-mail or a phone number you can't possibly own in any meaningful way.
That's pretty important in a world where the likes of Google can and will just reject your attempt to log in with a valid password on the grounds of "we don't like you", and force you to "confirm" yourself using a phone number that's defunct since 2009.
Nobody owns a domain name. You rent it, subject to the whims of the registry. Miss a single payment and you loose it forever.
Even if you always pay up on time, despite price rises etc, they can still decide to take it away: https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
PLC is imperfect, like every solution to identity so far, but it's a lot better (in terms of ownership / control of your own ID) than DNS.
The problem with ENS is only Brave and Opera support it. That's less that 5% of users. If Chrome had a way to add custom domain resolvers in extensions it would be a lot more useful because you wouldn't need to tell people they have to install a whole new browser.
You can still own an email. Some people out there have their own domain and successfully self-host, despite the challenges.
If you're interested in this but uncomfortable exposing your mailserver to the world, there are proxies that can help (eg. SpamHero) and which could theoretically be swapped out to a competing service if needed while still retaining ownership and control of your domain / address / message history.
I came in thinking it was P(rogrammable) L(ogic) C(ontroller), but this is something I've never seen before. Is there anyone who could explain this PLC to me?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 50.4 ms ] threadoh, maybe you mean Sam Altman's World with their eye scanning for identity, that is quite dystopian
I think a model where public really means public and private means private is more clear to users than a closed platform where neither is true. Facebook is actively using your private posts for ad targeting and they can remove your public content at any time for no reason. With atproto that can only happen if you pick a bad hosted PDS out of many.
That's pretty important in a world where the likes of Google can and will just reject your attempt to log in with a valid password on the grounds of "we don't like you", and force you to "confirm" yourself using a phone number that's defunct since 2009.
The issue is, as often is the case, adoption.
The PLC makes it easy for Bluesky to be a custodian and onboard new users
PLC is imperfect, like every solution to identity so far, but it's a lot better (in terms of ownership / control of your own ID) than DNS.
If you're interested in this but uncomfortable exposing your mailserver to the world, there are proxies that can help (eg. SpamHero) and which could theoretically be swapped out to a competing service if needed while still retaining ownership and control of your domain / address / message history.
https://overreacted.io/open-social/
https://overreacted.io/where-its-at/
https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/