Authenticated Data Experiment code released

published on 2022/05/05

Bluesky, Twitter’s open-source offshoot, has released early code for a decentralized social network protocol. The system is dubbed the Authenticated Data Experiment (or ADX) and is available on GitHub for developers to test, although Bluesky emphasizes that it’s incomplete. It’s one of the most substantive windows into Bluesky’s workings since the project was conceived in 2019 and formally incorporated in early 2022.

The Verge

The GitHub repo comes with the following warning

Please do not try to build anything with this! Interfaces and data structures are likely to radically change, and we took some shortcuts on features still in development (key management, schemas, indexing, to name a few). This experiment is primarily confined to the data & authorization layer with hints at some of the other systems.

A decentralized social network protocol is a worthy goal. There are many attempts to build such systems in the past decade. This latest experimental offering is worth investigating.