[theschmed]

Thanks for making yourself available to answer questions! Hopefully this is not a dumb question.

Is plc.directory a single point of failure for BlueSky users who want to take advantage of the benefits of a did:plc? And if so, is that a permanent thing or down the road will there be multiple interoperating did:plc directories?

[__justplaying]

yes it's a SPOF. not sure about the second question, but i do know there are plans to transfer its ownership to an independent foundation

[pfraze]

Transferring to an independent org is what we're talking about now, yes.

The backstory to PLC is that we picked up the DID standard and looked for an existing registry-method that would satisfy requirements¹. None of them really did. We then surveyed mechanisms for decentralized operation: DHTs, open blockchains, permissioned blockchains, and federated databases. Of them, the two blockchain variants seemed perhaps promising, but still premature since (as of 2022) you there's cost variability due to load and in some cases bad transaction latency (eg 10 minutes).

We decided the best decision was to create PLC, which matches all of the requirements except for longterm meta governance. The way we designed it was to make the registry mechanics transferrable to a different protocol in the future, so that if for instance we decided (say) a DHT was suitable (it's not) we'd be able to use the same identifiers but change resolution and mutations to a new process. Then we started talking to other SMEs to get their take.

Ultimately the solution that's gotten the most favorable response has been setting up an ICANN-style independent organization to operate it. This can be joined with a couple of interesting systems, such as mirrors which tail a certificate-transparency-style audit log, and which could even serve as transaction witnesses to indicate when the core registry might be rejecting updates ("write censorship").

What can I say, some things take time and stakeholder-building. Look up the history of DNS and Network Solutions Inc for a bit of a wild ride that people have forgotten about. One other thing I should point out is that the DID spec enables multiple registry methods. Atproto currently supports did:web, and if other methods show up which satisfy the requirements then we are interested.

¹ Secure against manipulation by the registry operators, longterm meta governance, highly available, reasonable transaction latency, reliably low cost that's not dogged by token speculation, low ecological impact.