I could be missing something, but in principle, I don't see why a bad actor couldn't deploy a PDS that syncs Spaces from other PDS normally, but makes its local copy of that Space available to accounts that haven't been authorized by the space authority (i.e. the account that created that Space). Basically, you'd have a Trojan horse account that gains access on behalf of everyone hosted on the same PDS.
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Oh, wait! I guess Syncers are a mix of push and pull? Each PDS sends out write notifications that tell other PDS that the hash of a Space has changed to that they know to crawl the repo and get all of the new data. That cuts down unnecessary attempts to pull data, but also seems like a bit of a kludge for the fact that Spaces are attempting to do something ATproto never intended PDS to do.
Space deletion muddies the ownership question a bit. In practice, each member of a space hosts their own contributions to that space in their own repositories, but the original creator of a space can delete that space, at which point their PDS sends out a notification that they're no longer authorized to maintain that space. The other users keep their own messages, but they're no longer linked to a shared space, and thus unreadable to everyone else.
I foresee a lot of drama arising from this.
Okay, moderation. Moderation services have to be authorized to moderate a space. But PDS admins are responsible for adhering to any legal requirements for moderation in their host region. So it's reasonable to expect some PDS to require moderation service access to any spaces their users create. Unless they're handling all moderation themselves, that opens spaces to third-party observation.
This also feels like a potential Pandora's box for the spread of unmoderated material on the ATmosphere.
Who runs the most commonly used moderation services on the ATmosphere? Is it the Bluesky LLC? If so, that's a pretty tempting backdoor for admins to open into the spaces they host on the PDS's they operate.
@lrhodes yes, and in fact Bluesky's is the only moderation service for spam, malware, and CSAM. So, very hard to imagine people running anything other than small Spaces, without enabling that.
@jdp23 IIRC, some monitoring (like CSAM and DRM) is built into Bluesky-produced PDS, right? So their services may have access to user-created spaces by default.
@lrhodes not sure. The PDS certainly applies takedowns for illegal and malicious content, I thought it was applied by the moderation service but don't know exactly how the layering is.
Anyhow my assumption is that one way or another Bluesky PBC will have access to information in permissioned spaces on Bluesky PBC-hosted PDSs; and, at least for the time being, in practice is also likely to have access to on most if not all of the non-Bluesky-hosted PDSs.
