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SE Radio 651: Paul Frazee on Bluesky and the AT Protocol
Paul Frazee, CTO of Bluesky, speaks with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung about the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATProto) used by the Bluesky decentralized social network. They discuss why ATProto was created, as well as how it differs from the ActivityPub open standard, the scaling limitations of peer-to-peer solutions, cryptographic decentralized identifiers, and creating a protocol based on experience with distributed systems. They also examine the role of personal data servers, relays, and app views, the benefits of using domain names, allowing users to create algorithmic feeds and moderation tools, and the challenges of content moderation. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Paul Frazee, CTO of Bluesky, speaks with SE Radio’s Jeremy Jung about the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATProto) used by the Bluesky decentralized social network. They discuss why ATProto was created, as well as how it differs from the ActivityPub open standard, the scaling limitations of peer-to-peer solutions, cryptographic decentralized identifiers, and creating a protocol based on experience with distributed systems. They also examine the role of personal data servers, relays, and app views, the benefits of using domain names, allowing users to create algorithmic feeds and moderation tools, and the challenges of content moderation.
Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Show Notes
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number.
Jeremy Jung 00:00:18 This is Jeremy Jung for Software Engineering Radio and today I am talking to Paul Frazee. He’s the current CTO of Bluesky and he previously worked on other decentralized applications like Beaker and Secure Scuttlebutt. Paul, welcome to Software Engineering Radio.
Paul Frazee 00:00:34 Oh, thanks for having me.
Jeremy Jung 00:00:35 For people who aren’t familiar with Bluesky, what is it?
Paul Frazee 00:00:38 So Bluesky is an open social network, simplest way to put it, designed in particular for high scale. That’s kind of one of the big requirements that we had when we were moving into it. And it is really geared towards making sure that the operation of the social network is open amongst multiple different organizations. So we’re one of the operators, but other folks can come in, spin up the software, all the open-source software and essentially have a full node with a full copy of the network active users and have their users join into our network. And they all work functionally as one shared application.
Jeremy Jung 00:01:17 So it sounds like it’s similar to say Twitter, but instead of there just being one Twitter, there could be any number and there is part of the underlying protocol that allows them to all connect to one another and act as one system.
Paul Frazee 00:01:34 That’s exactly right. And there’s a metaphor we use a lot, which is compared to the web and search engines, which actually kind of matches really well. Like when you use Bing or Google, you’re searching the same web. So on the AT Protocol and Bluesky, you use Bluesky, you use some alternative client or application, all the same. We call it the atmosphere, all one shared network.
Jeremy Jung 00:01:53 And more than just the client. Because I think sometimes when people think of a client, they’ll think of, I use a web browser, I could use Chrome or Firefox, but ultimately, I’m connecting to the same thing. But it’s not just people running alternate clients, right? It’s also running their own social networks in a way.
Paul Frazee 00:02:11 Their own full backend to it. That’s right. Yeah. The anchoring point on that being the fire hose of data that runs the entire thing is open as well. And so you start up your own application, you spin up a service that’s just pipes into that fire hose and taps into all the activity.
Jeremy Jung 00:02:28 And so talking about this underlying protocol, maybe we could start where this all began so people get some context for where this all came from.
Paul Frazee 00:02:39 All right, so let’s wind the clock back here in my brain, we started out 2022, right at the beginning of the year we were formed as an essentially a consulting company outside of Twitter with a contract with Twitter. And our goal was to build a protocol that could have run Twitter, much like the way that we just described, which set us up with a couple of pretty specific requirements. For one, we had to make sure that it could scale. So that ended up being a really important first requirement. And we wanted to make sure that there was strong kind of guarantees that the network doesn’t ever get captured by any one operator. So the idea was that Twitter would become the first adopter of the technology, other applications, other services would begin to take advantage of it and users would be able to smoothly migrate their accounts in between one or the other at any time.
Paul Frazee 00:03:31 And it’s really anchored in a particular goal of just deconstructing monopolies, getting rid of those moats that make it so that there’s a kind of a lack of competition between these things. And making sure that if there was some kind of reason that you decided you’re just not happy with what direction this service has been going, you move over to another one, you’re still in touch with all the folks that you were in touch with before. You don’t lose your data, you don’t lose your follows. Those were the kind of initial requirements that we set out with. A team by and large came from the decentralized web movement, which is actually a pretty large community that’s been around since, I want to say around 2012 is when we first kind of started to form. It got really made more specifically into a community somewhere around 2015 or 16 I want to say.
Paul Frazee 00:04:16 When the internet archives started to host conferences for us. And so that gave us kind of a meeting point where it all started to meet up. There’s kind of three schools of thought within that movement. There was the blockchain community, the federation community, and the peer-to-peer community. And so blockchain you don’t need to explain that one. You got Federation, which was largely ActivityPub Mastodon, and then peer-to-peer was IPFS, that Protocol Secure Scuttlebutt. Those kinds of bit Torrent style of technologies really, they were all kind of inspired by that. So these three different kinds of sub-communities we’re all working independently on different ways to attack how to make these open applications. How do you get something that’s a high scale web application without one corporation being the only operator. When this team came together in 2022, we’ve largely sourced from the peer-to-peer group of the decentralized community.
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