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@danabra.mov I'm struggling to grasp how a user's ATProto identity can survive changes in domain/hosting/etc without too much centralization on the registry. As far as I understand, it seems like the registry just... is? Centralized? Maybe it's fine. But I'm curious if you have more insight.

2/2/26, 10:48 pm0 reposts4 likes

dan

@danabra.mov

2 Feb

i wrote a compressed explainer about it in overreacted.io/a-social-fil..., not sure if this helps?

dan

@danabra.mov

2 Feb

basically, it's centralized (and that has downsides, see updates.microcosm.blue/3lz7nwvh4zc2u) but it's also pretty far from most centralized registries (like npm for example) because: - it's entirely open source - it holds no private data at all - every update is recursively auditable

dan

@danabra.mov

2 Feb

so there is no technical difficulty in anyone spinning up a successor into which every existing user can log into and continue to stay in control of their identity. the difficulty would be in getting everyone to agree which successor is "the" one. which is a good reason to make current one neutral

dan

@danabra.mov

2 Feb

the longer term plan is to make it a legally independent org, kind of like ICANN. not sure what the progress on this has been: docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-dir... if that happens, hopefully there isn't really a good reason for fragmentation later since technically it is not sophisticated