This is a post about the current mishegoss related to Hugging Face and Bluesky's firehose, and how both companies are largely fucking over their users.
I didn’t have such a deep understanding of privacy with BlueSky but first of all, this is an excellent article, congrats 🙏
These privacy issues aren't just limited to BlueSky and even if BlueSky solves it, others will still come up. I think the only way to truly tackle this is by finding solutions where we, as users, have full control over our own data. These could be self-sovereign apps. One example of this is the Calimero Network, which I follow. I believe this is the only way we can prevent these kinds of issues.
Haven't heard of the Calimero Network, but self-sovereign has its own issues and challenges. I've written about those as well.
The truth is, I don't think there's a silver-bullet answer to any of these problems -- it's going to take many things working together to address the brokenness of our systems and structures.
Okay, so Calimero is like many of the self-sovereign things I've seen before -- it's very technical and cool for developers to play with and dork out on the crypto / ZKP / blockchain stuff, but not particularly practical for anyone not in that very niche cohort. It's the latest fancy version of PGP, with all the same problems.
Maybe something will come out of it, sure, but right now there's a big flashy website, two demo projects that haven't been updated in 6 months and some use-cases that impact 0.0001% of the world.
To sell me on SSI / blockchainy stuff, I want to see an app or problem it solves that can meaningfully impact normal people's lives. For all its warts, WhatsApp is successful precisely because it uses technology to solve a real-world problem (Signal does it better, of course, but it's less popular).
Thank you to Prof. Michael Veale and @iamgregb for clarifying a few points, and correcting a 404 error, respectively! I love my readers and colleagues in this community.
I didn’t have such a deep understanding of privacy with BlueSky but first of all, this is an excellent article, congrats 🙏
These privacy issues aren't just limited to BlueSky and even if BlueSky solves it, others will still come up. I think the only way to truly tackle this is by finding solutions where we, as users, have full control over our own data. These could be self-sovereign apps. One example of this is the Calimero Network, which I follow. I believe this is the only way we can prevent these kinds of issues.
Haven't heard of the Calimero Network, but self-sovereign has its own issues and challenges. I've written about those as well.
The truth is, I don't think there's a silver-bullet answer to any of these problems -- it's going to take many things working together to address the brokenness of our systems and structures.
It's definitely solvable, but it won't be easy.
Okay, so Calimero is like many of the self-sovereign things I've seen before -- it's very technical and cool for developers to play with and dork out on the crypto / ZKP / blockchain stuff, but not particularly practical for anyone not in that very niche cohort. It's the latest fancy version of PGP, with all the same problems.
Maybe something will come out of it, sure, but right now there's a big flashy website, two demo projects that haven't been updated in 6 months and some use-cases that impact 0.0001% of the world.
To sell me on SSI / blockchainy stuff, I want to see an app or problem it solves that can meaningfully impact normal people's lives. For all its warts, WhatsApp is successful precisely because it uses technology to solve a real-world problem (Signal does it better, of course, but it's less popular).
Thank you to Prof. Michael Veale and @iamgregb for clarifying a few points, and correcting a 404 error, respectively! I love my readers and colleagues in this community.