The Public Ledger of Credentials directory is taking flight

Link: First steps of the PLC organization, by Public Ledger of Credentials Organization

Since Bluesky’s foundation, its mission has been to work on an open social media protocol that gives users a “credible exit” from any one company’s services while allowing them to continue participating in the network.

This has two important effects. The first is that users can feel safe investing in the network knowing they’re insulated from any one company’s individual business decisions (if their social media provider makes a boneheaded decision, they can move to another one without losing their networks or content). The second, which is even more important to me, is that the network is insulated against monopoly power.

When one company owns the way everyone communicates and learns, their incentives and priorities dominate how the network works, granting them unprecedented power over democratic discourse. The most obvious example is Elon Musk, who bought Twitter to spread his values and suppress those he disagrees with. But he’s not alone: the US attempted to co-opt TikTok because they were worried the Chinese government might have undue influence over content viewed by American citizens. In an open network, that level of control is much harder to obtain; anyone can start an alternative application provider, and anyone can migrate to it. In a fully decentralized network, no-one — not a would-be oligarch, nor a nation — can have outsized control.

One criticism of Bluesky has historically been that it’s not been fully decentralized. Originally, it provided the only application and datastore that sat on the network, and it was the only organization doing identity management — so, while there was an open protocol underneath it, in practice users couldn’t pick anyone else’s services or really migrate.

There have been alternative application and datastore providers for a while: Blacksky broke the ice with an application, algorithms, and data stores that allow communities to govern their own data and fund collective needs. Eurosky, which hosts and processes inside the EU, and Gander, a Canadian alternative, are some of the providers that followed. More are showing up every day.

Which left identity resolution — the underlying address book that takes a user’s ID on the network (their Decentralized Identifier) and figures out where their data is stored. That had previously been handled by Bluesky itself, but today’s announcement heralds the first steps of transferring it into the hands of an independent Public Ledger of Credentials Organization, headquartered in Switzerland.

This is exciting to see, and is another step towards having a fully decentralized network. Bluesky did a great job of attracting journalists, authors, and other people who want to discuss culture and society; those conversations are too important to be owned by any one entity. We’re closer than ever to a social media commons that really works.