First Steps of the PLC Organization – Independent Public Ledger of Credentials (blog.plcred.org)
30 points by embedding-shape 3 hours ago
ACCount39 2 hours ago
This might be one of the closest things I've seen to actually being able to own your account - instead of having it not just owned by a second party in every way that matters, but also beholden to a third party via an e-mail or a phone number you can't possibly own in any meaningful way.
That's pretty important in a world where the likes of Google can and will just reject your attempt to log in with a valid password on the grounds of "we don't like you", and force you to "confirm" yourself using a phone number that's defunct since 2009.
The issue is, as often is the case, adoption.
ForHackernews 2 hours ago
How does this compare to Persona? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona
verdverm 2 hours ago
did:web is closer to owning your own identity, this is a central database controlled by an organization
The PLC makes it easy for Bluesky to be a custodian and onboard new users
FiloSottile an hour ago
Sort of.
I like to insist that the PLC Directory collects and distributes updates to highlight how it's different from a database. The latest state of the account is signed by the key that created it, or by a key that succeeded it. The directory can't inject any values, it's just a low-complexity solution for data availability: the "how do I learn about updates" part.
It could decide to hide/reject updates, but then it could just as well be forked and replaced if it did that. If downstream applications decide to get their account updates somewhere else, that's the directory now, without any loss of continuity for the accounts.
You don't get that from a simple database.
One could argue domain registrations, and so did:web, are more of a database controlled by a (large, international) organization than PLC. Plenty of tradeoffs of course.
someonebaggy 28 minutes ago
verdverm an hour ago
cmjs 20 minutes ago
Nobody owns a domain name. You rent it, subject to the whims of the registry. Miss a single payment and you loose it forever. Even if you always pay up on time, despite price rises etc, they can still decide to take it away: https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
PLC is imperfect, like every solution to identity so far, but it's a lot better (in terms of ownership / control of your own ID) than DNS.
ACCount39 an hour ago
Doesn't did:web suffer from the same flaw as e-mail on your own domain - not being able to actually own a domain?
verdverm 12 minutes ago
birdsongs 2 hours ago
Just curious, how is this different from something like a PGP key server?
cmjs 25 minutes ago
A PGP key server hosts PGP keys; the PLC directory hosts DID documents.
copperx 2 hours ago
The same difference between Dropbox vs an FTP account.
ForHackernews 2 hours ago
Better than the eyeball-scanning ghouls.
tehnoslow an hour ago
I have to agree
verdverm 2 hours ago
atproto is currently permissionless world readable, that seems worse to most people (I asked low 100s) than being in a siloed platform with some amount of control over who can see their content
oh, maybe you mean Sam Altman's World with their eye scanning for identity, that is quite dystopian
ForHackernews 2 hours ago
Yes I was referring to Altman's "WorldCoin" eyeball-scanning scheme.