---
title: January 23rd, 2024
date: 2024-01-23, 21:14:20 -08:00
section: journal
link: https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-p2p
tags:
  - Bluesky
  - p2p
  - ATProtocol
---
Great write up by Paul Frazee of [“Why isn’t Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?”](https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-p2p), going back to his own roots and the “2014 generation of p2p”.[^distsys]

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.

[^distsys]: 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.