Great write up by Paul Frazee of “Why isn’t Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?”, going back to his own roots and the “2014 generation of p2p”.1
Bluesky is a sort-of-federated model. Here’s a succinct description:
It might be even more accurate to call this a Cryptographic Data Web. Every user's data repository is, in essence, a website. The aggregating applications are, in essence, search spiders. The Web never quite mastered structured data for a variety of reasons; the AT Protocol embraces it fundamentally. Rather than fetching views from sites, you fetch records from users. Our aggregators produce data indexes rather than search pages.
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That’s 10 years ago and I think we’re still in the early days of distributed systems theory and cryptography being more widely known. The third innovation — seeing Bitcoin arise as a novel protocol — is shunned by many. ↩