I can't tell why the writers feel that Bluesky's AT protocol is somehow the technologically best, or most politically strategic foundation, for a viable open mechanism for this kind of communication.
This article does seem to have the effect of being an endorsement of Bluesky, though.
(What I mean by endorsement: "Why would this progressive political operator be saying that we need to focus on freedom safeguards for this Bluesky platform, if it wasn't obviously the place for progressives to be. And no mention of anything else, like W3C standard ActivityPub, so that's right out. Clearly we must once again get behind a platform that someone owns. And then work from a position of weakness, like activists. Since that went so well for the co-author's former MoveOn.org, as evidenced by the incoming administration. And we can keep telling people they are under attack, and keep raising donations from them, to continue the fight.")
Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally around Bluesky and its AT Protocol, which is promising federation but has yet to deliver. Not to mention it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.
Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.
And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.
Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling (because most of the current mouths are, um, the same people ranting about the incumbents. )
I don't disagree that the same process leads to the same outcome. I personally don't think bluesky will ultimately be any different to the rest.
But the no-money approach of mastodon means its a very very slow burn, which will take a decade or more to succeed, and even then may not be what we expect when a billion people show up.
IMO what kills Mastodon is what us nerds say is the single important point about Mastodon: federation.
Stay with me...
So: federation is very cool in principle, and it's extremely cool in that it in theory means we don't have Just One Batshit Master of all our content... but in the way it's being done with Masto, it IMHO makes for a weak proposition.
Why?
Mainly because people (normal people, not us lot) don't understand or care what "federation" is. They expect (because it's been the norm for every other service), a SINGLE place where they can go to find their mates and celebs and politicians.
What they instead get is a thing where:
1) They can't search a global place and find all those people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't have this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)
2) They find someone on one "instance" (not understanding what an "instance" is) and then can't (easily) follow them from their own instance without having to think about namespaces and all that
3) They naturally gravitate towards the biggest one - probably mastodon.social - and then we're right back at the beginning, with everyone on a single instance, beholden to the possibly loony who might shut it down / monetise it / etc
Moving between instances is much harder than it is claimed to be (you lose all sorts of stuff like your history, or at least you did when I tried it).
Federation also brings all manner of hard things to those trying to run an instance - I tried, as "medium level nerd" and ended up walking away from the complexity of just not understanding why some content didn't seem to be getting from my instance to others, etc etc.
If I was the Mastodon team, I'd be focusing all my attention on global search, and on never using the word "federated" in any of their marketing ever again. It might well be the coolest thing, but it's a non-marketable thing.
Of course all this is predicated on "a good outcome" being "everyone on Mastodon" and I do appreciate those who don't want that. It's definitely the case that less people tends to make for better online social spaces, and maybe small niche groups leads to better things all round.
> They can't search a global place and find all those people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't have this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)
Amen and hallelujah! This is why I gave up on Mastodon. I read that not allowing full text search across instances was actually a design decision in order to discourage brigading. But, more crucially it undermines discovery.
Full-text search is now allowed, but it only searches for posts you've interacted with (in:library) and those associated with accounts that have opted-in to it.
Only available on instances willing to pay the hosting costs for an Elasticache cluster.
If someone want full-text search across the entire fediverse, who is going to pay for it? Bluesky has a business model that makes that attractive to them as a value add to pay for. ActivityPub has instances running on RPis in a shoebox. (This is a great thing, it's part of where ActivityPub federation works well.)
Of course, that's also before you get into the sociopolitics that many instances don't want full text search and are concerned about brigading and pulling old microblog posts out of context for nefarious reasons; some of which is why some instances left services like Twitter and have no interest in services like Bluesky.
> They find someone on one "instance" (not understanding what an "instance" is) and then can't (easily) follow them from their own instance without having to think about namespaces and all that
The people you describe wouldn’t use Mastodon in a web browser and this is a solved problem on the apps.
I can't find data for it but my prior would be that the overwhelming majority of "normal" users use Twitter primarily through the smartphone app as opposed to the web interface.
The only person I know who regularly uses Twitter says she has never visited the site in a browser and is quite sure that everyone in her circle uses the app. But that's just anecdote
No, that's not what I meant. What I found strange is the premise that most people use websites so little they'd be confused by what amounts to a URL or email address.
It's not a matter of using websites so little. It's a matter of not understanding how stuff works and most people don't. Most people open "the internet" (their browser defaulting to google), type "facebook" and then click on the first link they get. Most people don't even notice that there is some cryptic stuff at the top (or bottom) full with slashes and weird words and browsers have tried to hide the URLs for some time now anyway. Even if some people notice, they quickly dismiss it as a techie thing they don't have to understand; facebook works for them and that's all they need.
> Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.
Which is a good thing from the spec point of view but maybe bad from a user adoption point of view. Even for the later you'd be wrong, as Threads is supposed to be an ActivityPub application.
I don't really care whether it's got a ton of people though. I do care if it's truly free and federated.
It's for the same reason I don't recommend Signal to anyone in my circle. I don't want to trade one walled garden for another (Signal still refuses third-party clients for example). I use Matrix which is truly open.
>Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling
While I think Mastodon's irrelevance is deserved, let's also be fair to the "incumbents": Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, et al. gained and maintain their critical mass from word of mouth.
Many other would-be upstarts in history also usurped thrones by word of mouth, foremost example being Firefox against Internet Explorer.
Mastodon's problem with becoming relevant (and also BlueSky's problem with upending Mysterious Twitter X) is far more fundamental than lack of awareness.
I do not think that for service to be dependent on some particular company is successful way to do it. It is successful to deliver some kind of service but, as we have many examples from and post- web2.0, that service does not have desired outcome.
Anyway I have checked several social medias today (HN included) and everywhere except one place there was too much noise about TikTok - only place that my feed was without it was Mastodon - it is quite slow there but i consder it to be good thing. However I think that there is no good social media - Mastodon included and my days would be improved without any of them. RSS feeds feels like more then enough. Discussion seems to be mostly point-less. Maybe even this one, but those enhanced with algorithmic engagement and endless scroll are net-negative.
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that there are people who say they are in favour of diversity but underneath only want their kind of diversity, not genuine diversity.
Diversity of opinion would definitely be a feature, not a bug.
It's because people don't care about federated services, they care about services that are easy to use and have people on them and that's bluesky right now
Sure, average people don't care about federation, but what about the techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge who write these kinds of articles? They love to point out Bluesky's (yet to be seen in action) federation thanks to the AT Protocol, so you know they see the value in federation that the average person doesn't, but these reporters choose Bluesky, a platform with all the same warning signs as Twitter that barely has federation, something they purport to value despite the fact that ActivityPub and Mastodon exist and are much more developed and open?
> To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Mastodon has many MANY MANY issues.
The first is that instance operators regularly abuse their users as hostages in personal petty fights. I don't care too much about drama, but there has been a lot of it regarding Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia and instances defederating from each other as a result of said drama.
The second one is instances can go down for whatever reason - the admins just being unable/unwilling to cope with moderation, running out of money, getting into trouble with the legal system, ... - and users can't move their post, DM and media history to another instance.
And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.
The tying of identity to one’s home instance is IMHO a fatal flaw. Absolutely fundamental error in a decentralized system, making it effectively not decentralized.
It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today.
I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.
AT protocol currently supports two different schemes for base identifiers based on w3c's DID system. The DID:PLC scheme is centralized, but not inherently tied to any one host. It is currently hosted and run by the Bluesky PBC, but they want to spin it off to help protect against themselves turning evil. This system lets users change their handle and move to a new personal data server seamlessly.
There is also DID:Web. This one has the downside that you need to continue to control the domain name in question indefinitely, and it can be argued that the domain name system is still a form of centralization. Like PLC users can theoretically change handles to another domain name with this scheme (but must contrinue to control the original domain name). Users can freely move to another personal data server.
AT Protocol can add new DID schemes in the future to avoid these downsides, with the caveat that users cannot change from DID type to a different one seamlessly, and adding new DID types may potentially require updates by multiple other parts of the ecosystem.
Nostr sadly doesn't scale. IMO it's a better system for decentralized account identity lookup but not great for content delivery. It needs something else for the content part.
ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".
Hmmm... if Bluesky owns identity then it's just another centralized SaaS play which I guess is to be expected.
There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or both).
I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a client-server system with a network of servers. Making all traffic go through it that way is going to cause scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth.
IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower experience because you have to relay.
All kinds of innovations of the network stack would be easier when IPv6 has that penetration. I saw a very cool vid by Brett Sheffield of Librecast [0] titled "Privacy and Decentralization with Multicast" [1] (btw, it is hosted on a decentralized PeerTube instance) and it was an eye-opener for me, as the average tech person not deeply into this stack and taking the one we have for granted (mostly).
I've wondered if this might not be a reason for some of the slow rolling. It might reduce the all-important role of cloud and centralized services in facilitating connectivity, which is almost mandatory in IPv4 world due to the existence of symmetric NAT.
Yes, I had the same feeling. There's still a massive amount of money sloshing around in cloud vendor market to ensure people remain glued to their services. And then there are a range of new technologies that are all like dark clouds threatening this digital cloud playground. Local-first, P2P networking, generic sync protocols, Wasm-everywhere, etc. where a paradigm shift in computing away from both cloud and web browser hegemony is possible, and these become optional choices instead of 'where it all happens'.
There's much more interesting innovation waiting for adoption on that lower part of the internet stack I suppose. As someone for whom that's a too specialist area I would love to have more overview of what are the promising technologies and upcoming standards to place early bets on.
The other day by accident I found out about Named Data Networking networking [0] via a paper [1] "Exploring the Design of Collaborative Applications via the Lens of NDN Workspace", and saw that NDN still sees active development after many years, so I wondered about the extent the technology still is considered promising for mass adoption today.
> And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.
Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.
> Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me
Put another way, they were structured in a way that doesn't allow them to compete.
But was initially started internally by Twitter with millions of dollars of funding and since being split out has taken several million dollars in outside funding from VCs. Which does help grease the wheels somewhat, no?
Because no one's actually going to Mastodon. It's really that simple.
If you wanna delve into the details of why people so often avoid the platforms that FOSS enthusiasts tend to recommend, that's an interesting question, but we gotta be clear here, we already knows who's successful and who's not.
People one go where the technologically literate tell them go. If it wasn't for me, my family and friends wouldn't have gone on iOS, WhatsApp, Signal, you name it. If we give the thumbs up they know it's not bad if they migrate. Of course they can still decide against something if they don't see the value, but we can have significant impact on what platforms they use or not.
> People one go where the technologically literate tell them go.
No they don't. If this was true, my wife's family would be on Telegram or Discord, haha. We actually did go into Telegram briefly, but they all dropped out. What got them to switch from SMS to WhatsApp was her parents temporarily moving to Austria.
What videocall service other than Discord lets a normal user individually adjust other call participants' relative volume or even mute them? Because for me, that's the killer feature.
I tried so hard to like Mastodon, but discovery was actual work for me. On BlueSky, discovery is natural and easy.
I think part of the issue is that you can’t do full text search across instances. You can only search on hashtags, and people don’t always use hashtags.
I think Mastodon lost the herd trust when it pivoted away from global federation and made confession of allegiance a firm requirement. They killed the canary and people left.
It's doing this at the instance level rather than the user level which is the problem. The long-term result of that is a few large instances that default-block smaller instances, so then people switch from the smaller instances to the larger ones that aren't blocked, creating new instances becomes unviable and the market concentrates into an oligopoly susceptible to capture by ideologues.
There’s a similar issue with server priority and federating too. At least last I saw, maybe a year ago.
Eg if I run a small server I have a difficult time getting my updates federated quickly because other servers have a lot of fire hoses to manage. You end up low on the priority list and less likely to be seen. In my experience from last I tried, at least.
> It’s always at the instance level. They own the machine.
The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint. If you want to block someone, you block them, or delegate it to someone in a way that you can later change at no switching cost to yourself.
> The difference between federated networks and decentralized networks is that the main control is with node operators vs cryptographic key holders.
Fully decentralized networks have to solve a difficult technical problem: If your device is offline, who is hosting your stuff? How do you make it fast and reliable?
Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way. Instead of your stuff being hosted nowhere, each person gets to pick, which can and should be independent of any moderation or other considerations. The benefit, and goal, of federation here should be to make the hosting node a fungible commodity.
You can also federate moderation by, for example, choosing a moderator who publishes a block list that you can subscribe to.
But these two things should not be linked together. Doing so is a mistake. As many things of this nature should be made separate as possible and with the lowest achievable switching costs, to inhibit forces that tend toward market concentration.
Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another, not when there are four that are significantly isolated from one another and you need state-level resources to spin up a fifth.
> The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint. If you want to block someone, you block them, or delegate it to someone in a way that you can later change at no switching cost to yourself.
Why would you force the provider to support objectionable (for them) content? It makes sense for the instance to be aligned with its users on moderation rules.
> The benefit, and goal, of federation here should be to make the hosting node a fungible commodity.
Communities aren't fungible! And your insistence on having federation completely seamless will result in "what's the point anyway, let's centralize it, more efficient"
>Communities aren't fungible! And your insistence on having federation completely seamless will result in "what's the point anyway, let's centralize it, more efficient"
This is the correct answer though, as much as we don't like it "users" as a whole do not care about privacy or centralization
> The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint
You’re, again, looking for a decentralized system.
> Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way
Yes, the ability to change home servers is missing from mastodon.
But even if they had such a feature, the content you see and likely your ability to change servers would be controlled by your instance owner because they literally own the machine your data lives on and which serves you content.
This is the defining quality of a federated network vs a decentralized one.
> Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another
I don’t think this is a useful definition as it also fits decentralized systems.
Federated networks are networks where independent instances of compatible software are able to exchange information without being owned by a single entity (think email, mastodon, lemmy, etc)
Most instance block types in Mastodon affect the "public feeds"/"shared community" on an instance, but allow individual users to follow users on "blocked" instances in their own feeds.
User decision making is still very much an entrenched thing.
Most decision making on blocks in small-to-medium instances is democratic, in my experience, with users voting on them together. Also, as pointed out there's the obvious "vote with your feet" of switching to a different instance if you don't agree with its policies and/or how other instances don't agree with its policies.
There's definitely a risk of large instances trying to strong arm smaller instances with blocks and/or threats of blocks. But so far it's more a philosophical risk than a real risk from what I've seen. At least in my parts of the Fediverse small instances are "the norm" and it's is more likely the blocks are against the larger instances because with size they are more likely to allow spam registrations, they are more likely to have users that don't respect cultural norms like CWs or Alt text/Image Descriptions and don't feel a need to respect them because their mods won't enforce them, or yes they set up an ideologue as a mod/admin and shift to a gross direction. As a "telegraph network between a lot of small villages that mostly ignore the big cities", ActivityPub can be rather nice.
Why is everyone required to federate with everyone on ActivityPub? What if I want to only see Wordpress, Peertube, and Pixelfed content but nothing from Mastodon or Lemmy? How is that problematic as an ActivityPub client? Or I only want Spanish language content?
Because otherwise social graphs and organic exchanges don't work. I'm not joining a Mastodon server to passively consume curated collection of serfs owned by benevolent server admins offer. Yet, that's the model of users and communities in Mastodon as it is.
Is there any kind of social media that doesn’t become a serfdom in your opinion? I mean Hacker News falls under that definition as well yet here you are consuming a curated feed.
I don’t understand the question. You are currently using one of the most heavily moderated sites on the internet complaining that another platform which allows individuals to create their own clients which to view content published on the protocol has servers that you are not required to use that are too moderated?
I'm expecting random person to reply to my comments here, and expect my reply to yours shown to you. I don't expect* others to be on a blocked sub-cluster of HN server that my comments would not show or someone else's response to be removed from my sight.
in practice that's not the kind of content that is defederated. what is defederated is usually for ideological reasons, but sometimes it's because of illegal content (there's a lot of Japanese Misskey instances that will happily federate images to you that are questionably legal to possess in the US whether you want them on your drive or not) or out of spam control / distrust (small instances often have trouble federating)
ironically when I used Mastodon, while dealing with these issues, I was unable to filter out other languages. So in addition to extremely questionable content, a lot of it was simply in another language.
ActivityPub is a really half baked protocol and the sooner we realize that and move on from it the better. Personally, I didn't feel that defederation was an adequate defense against those MissKey instances and I decided running an instance is a very big liability.
I guess I just have a unicorn of an instance because I never see these issues. Yes there is a large list of servers defederated but many of them are at best 4chan tier content which I can easily find on 4chan no need for my mastodon feed to have everything under the sun on it.
Like I get that moving instances or between applications isn’t really possible on AP and there is concerns with moderation and so on but it’s been the best internet experience I’ve had. It’s a bubble but I easily just come here or to 4chan or reddit to see outside that bubble.
The second largest Mastodon instance is Chinese, third and fourth Japanese, fifth NSFW exclusive. Third and fourth combined is 32% larger than the first, fourth also has about 4x more post per user(~49 vs ~195). The list I'm referring does not include Misskey-based systems(also APub based).
Defederation is not a huge issue if you assume and embrace a segregationist view and cut off likely major fractions of the organically formed Fediverse out of itself. After all it's porn and scripts you don't even recognize, what's the point in having them? My insistence is, that's a fresh dead canary in cage.
If I want a feed of 100 people who post statuses/tweets, blogs, videos, and pictures who I am interested in and by using ActivityPub can use a single client to view all this activity, is that by your definition segregationist and a dead canary?
I don’t understand how if I host my own AP client on my own hardware and choose only to federate and subscribe with a small subset of sites and people who post using AP that this is a bad thing. I can use other websites like Hacker News to see other opinions and views.
99% of normies use platforms that offer only one dictatorial fiefdom. Picking the biggest server is better than that option. Picking a server at random is better than that option.
I never understood why people even cared to choose a server. If you're only looking at posts from people you follow, it doesn't matter. Who cares what other people you don't know on your server are saying
Because 2 out of top 3 servers and half of top 10 were in Japan and filled with content that they couldn't politically handle.
Cutting that off and "just walk into the brightest place" couldn't happen at the same time, so the core devs and ops switched to the "Mastodon's strength is in small servers, pick any of the right one" narrative.
Can you tell more about the Japan thing? It's the first I've heard of it. What kind of content? I can't think of anything political about Japan that's super hard to handle.
I believe there's a fair amount of content on Japanese Mastodon servers that would land me, as an admin in the UK, in extremely hot water[0] if I was letting it be stored on my servers (whether I looked at it or not.)
Ah I see the age of consent in UK is 18 and in Japan it appears to be 16 (the same page links to the Japanese one). Weird.
I thought they were super strict there (after all they even require that blocky censor thing on the functional parts in normal adult pornos making it basically useless).
Strict cuts many ways. Doesn't involve kids, not a CP in Japanese laws. Doesn't depict details, not a porn. Two high schoolers having an affair, uhh not in penal code, so violations. Adults buying kids, that's prostitution and/or assault per code. Age from looks and/or workplace fitness factor, it's subjective so doesn't matter.
IMO, human aging vary too much to solve this "looks kids to me" problem. Age by appearance is clearly regional; there are plenty reports of East Asians abroad barred entries at morning and beer at evening. So any substantial East Asian content feed is destined to include tons of "kids/age unreliable" content, unfortunate opposite being "middle aged/unknown". Other factors as cultural norms and effect of modes of consumption compounds on it.
Long term, the solution to this has to be algorithmic: the mix of content must be artificially manipulated so to suit the need of consumers. The fraction of first(primary) language English speaker is below 9%[2], less than third of Mandarin Chinese at 21% or about same as Spanish at 11%. So a viewer application for a truly global feed of all contents will have to mark and remove ~90% of content for it to be palatable to an English speaker. "Endless Japanese CP" problem is just but an early sampler.
Algorithmic? I think simply checking like the US law "ID 18 U.S.C. 2257" already does is a much better solution than having algorithms guess the age based on a photo or video.
Though I have to say I sometimes wonder how sites like Onlyfans do this with male actors. Often the only thing you see is their dick and I can't remember having to submit a dickpic for my passport :D So how do they know a submitted passport matches the dick in question?
But really I think it's better to know for sure than to guess.
Laws just don't matter. People physically can't look adults/kids if they're from "wrong" cultures whether they were 60 or 16 and put GP into hot water by appearance.
Sites like Onlyfans, or any website for that matter, just delete contents based on appearances and user metrics. Otherwise escalations won't stop; users would leave, protest will occur, new laws will be created, state committees will be formed and blacklists are made, and credit card processing suspiciously starts failing. Recordkeeping is for honest people to be honest if they want to be. Some numbers on a driver's license do not stop the horde from banging the walls.
So a truly global feed has to hide inconvenient contents from users until users are ready for it. Ideally user editable. Which is what everyone is fat-finger doing at server side anyway.
> Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.
The same can be said about the atproto as different apps are being developed for specific users like picture video only feeds and 3p clients for bsky.
> And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
I'm not sure I get your point. I run my own bsky PDS, and federation is working fine for me and my users. I see plenty of posts from others.
> Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Are you asking if perception of difficulty is really impactful to people's choices?
W/ bsky the hardest choice was the domain name purchase. And I didn't have to host my own server to do that either.
I tried X again at some later point, I think even twice.
A fresh account bombards you with far-right propaganda and outright lies. At the time at least this included hateful and incoherent rambling by Musk himself, which you couldn't unfollow (or ignore, it simply didn't work).
Call it ideological, but I'm not going to spend my free time with this "content", especially when the platform clearly disregards repeated signals that I don't want to read hateful ideological propaganda comment no 73646445 by some alt right shill.
I'm all for open discourse and dealing with other peoples differing opinions.
But at this point, the "ideology" accusation by the far right against any other opinion is nothing but laughable. Well, it would be, if people didn't still pay it credibility.
And no, I'm not a "leftist", "transgender activist", or whatever group gets to be public enemy of the day for these people.
I did notice that Bluesky seems to have more politically left people.
This kind of content is not very interesting to me, we already have Reddit.
But for Bluesky, the platform bubble phenomenon didn't seem that strong to me.
Appreciate the new features to build my own (interest) bubble.
For political content, I think actual journalism and real-life discourse are most valuable.
personally i think there are two significantly larger reasons:
1) terrible experience: a lot of people just don’t have fun on twitter, it’s just an awful experience. why spend your free funtime in a place that you just don’t enjoy? we don’t go to restaurants that we hate, why on earth would we go to a website that we don’t enjoy?
2) too crowded. take a music concert for example, a lot of people absolutely prefer a music venue with 2,000 people over a concert where there are 100,000 people.
Yes. And so complex to explain that it still isn't obvious what federation does or is after an afternoon of research by a tech enthusiast. Where does the data live? How does it spread? Who has control over it?
You could tell me that, but don't. The answers are very much besides the point if you can't explain it and the advantages of the arrangement in five minutes to somebody on the opposite end of the normal distribution of technical understanding to your average HN account. Network effects dominate most social network pros and cons, so if you can only educate five percent of the general population there isn't much point.
> Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally around Bluesky and its AT Protocol
I think one of the major parts that resonates with people is the focus on data portability. AFAIK, ActivityPub doesn't help with wanting to move your data somewhere, without having to manually perform a async migration.
> which is promising federation but has yet to deliver
They seem to surely but slowly make headway on the federation stuff, there are more and more successful experiments of people hooking into the network.
> it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.
That is true, hopefully the network will be resilient enough by that point, because I'm wary of that too. I guess time will tell how that goes.
On a more optimistic note, there seems to be more and more efforts of trying to fund other non-Bluesky projects, including for core infrastructure. Example, not an endorsement: https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com
1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.
2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.
I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.
I got the impression from Christine Webber that the Blue sky protocol could not practically be federated, there's a bottleneck (relays iirc) that can only be properly implemented with huge resources, and which scales quadratically
Would be silly for anyone to take the other side of that bet. It's clear most people don't care. Early on I tried to explain to people why their feature requests didn't make sense in the federated design, but eventually I gave up. And to some extent Bluesky gave up as well. People were demanding DMing be a feature of the site so eventually they just added DMs that are centrally stored on their servers.
I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a production social app running on it.
> 2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
I got the impression from the Dorsey interview that this was his commitment, and that he left because they weren't interested in that. They're just trying to be a twitter clone that picks up angry twitter users who hate Musk.
-----
> That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
> Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.
I tried out Bluesky last week in hope of finding a social network which ticked this box, but my feed was full of anti Elon Musk / Trump messages. So it was very political from my initial experience.
This was after the setup wizard process where I selected tech/science/entertainment preferences.
Perhaps I did something wrong or didn't give it enough chance?
It's still political but the armies of anonymous blue checks that dominate every reply section on Twitter with regurgitated memes and low-effort insults are missing.
are they really missing, or is the shoe just on the other foot? i've been trying Bluesky for a month or so and it indeed seems to just be regurgitated memes and low-effort insults. the only difference is it's from a liberal/Democrat POV. the place comes off as an echo chamber sorely lacking in diversity of opinion tbh. if you go against the grain you'll be added to blocklists, which people seem giddy to use as to curate their echo chamber. hell, for daring to criticize the Democratic party from the left i've found myself on numerous MAGA and far-right blocklists. maybe this will change in due time? that'd be swell.
Well I can understand where they're coming from. The discussions have become so polarised and so nasty.
What is happening a lot here in Holland now that the hard-right crowd are constantly spamming topics about totally unrelated issues with stuff like "There are only 2 genders". I don't mind them having an opinion (even though I strongly disagree), I just don't want it shoved in my face constantly and inappropriately. It's like they are so preoccupied with what's happening in other people's pants that they can't talk about anything else.
So yeah that is something I don't want to see in social media anymore and I avoid platforms that allow it. Like Xitter.
Nonetheless this is an issue that's still not fixed in bsky.
I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts that surrounds Trump.
There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.
It works though?! I've got all that US political nonsense added as mute/block words and follow a couple of notorious block lists and I rarely if ever see any of that content in my feed.
That's always going to be hard work using a US-based platform. Whatever its downsides, Mastodon is noticeably less US-centric and it shows in the content.
True, avoiding all posts with "Trump" or "Elon" would be amazing. I don't live in the US either and it's just too much drama for me.
It was the same with Brexit. Those 2 years I got so fed up with that constantly repeating discussion about separating goods & services which they knew was impossible from the start.
There are a number of things I don't like about mastodon.
1. The platform is outright hostile to discovery. You generally can't even index posts in a search engine. This is not what I want, at all.
2. Moderation is awful. Letting individual servers control moderation at their whim is not what I want. In contrast, Bluesky's idea of labelling services and opt-in moderation sounds amazing.
3. After point 1, it probably goes without saying that Mastodon is outright hostile to algorithms. While I agree that algorithms can be very problematic, Bluesky's approach to opt-in algorithms is an interesting approach.
4. I think the ship has long sailed on Mastodon. It's failed time and again to gain enough critical mass for non-tech people to adopt. Clearly the combination of above issues, or even maybe the confusion of onboarding, is too much.
Overall I'm glad Mastodon exists, and perhaps Bluesky wouldn't be what it is without first seeing what worked and didn't work with Mastodon.
That's my impression too. There was a flock of academics and relatively non-tech folks joining a few years ago. Most didn't stay, and a few of those who did are now flocking to Bluesky.
But the others seem to be very much at home. They are not millions. They are probably prioritizing the small communities that have formed over maximum reach.
> You generally can't even index posts in a search engine.
That's a per-instance setting in an easy to find place in the Administration section. It's not doing anything more complex than swapping ROBOTS.txt files.
If on per-instance, there are also per-user settings to opt-in. (Again, it mostly just tweaks ROBOTS.txt.)
The off-by-default nature makes it seem "hostile" if your intent is to roll your own Fediverse index, because you actually have to read ROBOTS.txt files and abide by them. On the other hand, it is nice because it sets an ecosystem norm that indexes and bots should respect ROBOTS.txt and are considered bad actors to destroy if they can't be bothered to do the simple thing of respecting a ROBOTS.txt file.
The off-by-default nature makes it a little bit harder to find an instance if you do want your posts indexed in a search engine, but that's a part of why good federation means a diversity of instances.
Also, if they are your posts you want searchable nothing is stopping you from using an API to repost them to any other website you control with search engine indexing. I've seen several bloggers include their microblog posts from ActivityPub on their blog. That's my "eventual" plan for my own ActivityPub posts; I don't want the "live feed" search indexed, but I may want to eventually curate "best of" stuff, add context, do some revisions/editing, and upgrade them to blog posts.
And Nostr. Nostr is smaller than either Bluesky or ActivityPub, but it has some benefits over those two. It has a large number of cool clients (twitter-like, medium-like, music related, instagram-like) and the fact that instance admin can't de-platform you like they can on Mastodon, which literally happened to me.
Nostr also shows signs of being able to support the developers via very easy "tipping" feature. For example when new Amethyst (nostr client on android) is released, it makes it super easy to send the developers couple cents. And those cents add up. I don't think it's self sustainable currently, but it's not that far either.
No, there are no instances, there are just caching servers called "relays" that are run by many different people.
You create the content on your device and then send it to many of these relays (usually 10-20) and other users pull the content from also 10-20 relays. So if one relay decides to block you, then people still get your content from other relays. If all relays decide to block you, then you can (quite easily) run your own relay and tell your friends to pull the data from it. You own your data and you can resend it to wherever you want (it's signed by your private key, so it's verifiably from you).
Because there are no instances. There are relays that you post to, and that people use to fetch notes from. But there are no “user accounts” on the relays. If the note is signed by your private key, it comes from you, regardless of how it came to me. It can be through a bunch of relays.
Relays can and do filter notes by pub key. To fight spam, and problematic content. But you as a user can always change the relay set that you post to. And, of course, host your own relay, which is pretty straightforward.
Yeah, probably. Nostr is quite hated by the Hacker News community from what I have observed. This is most likely because it's used by folks that are into freedom technologies that explicitly don't allow excluding any users from participating. And so it attracts people that are into bitcoin, Tor, cryptography, etc. "Crypto" is actually quite hated at Nostr and you get called out for bringing any stupid crypto coins. You are free to talk about anything though and the system can't block or exclude you, but people may mute you in their clients.
My experience with Mastodon is that discovery is terrible. It’s great that it’s open, but it was far too much work to find people and topics to follow outside of my instance (indieweb.social). BlueSky makes discovery natural and easy.
My experience with Mastodon is that discovery is wonderful. It is natural and easy - no algorithm, no manipulation, nothing at all. Just type in details of person you want to follow and follow them.
Their discovery is so bad that they were touting new discovery algorithms for account recommendations in some recent release. So much for "no algorithm".
Both are written with the idea of decentralization and federation in mind. Bluesky at least superficially looks centralized like Twitter, which is simply put, what I want. I believe that's the case for most ex Twitter users too.
Deceptive. While half the tech people I used to follow on Twitter moved to Mastodon, three quarters of them have either shifted to bsky or post to both via mirroring.
Aside from tech, though: practically none of the non-tech people I followed on Twitter moved to Mastodon. Almost all of them went to Bluesky. I follow a mix of people, so I ended up mostly on Bluesky.
I would have been happy on Mastodon too, and I don't know why it didn't catch on with non-tech people, but it just hasn't. So Bluesky is our main opportunity for an open social web, at this time.
It sounds stupid but I think the bit where you pick your host was too much for normies or led to pushing off the decision and just not joining. Even when you have an account you know have to pick a client.
Hey, question. Is mirroring officially supported by either platform. So for example, can I configure my blue sky account to just monitor my mastodon feed and re-post things for me?
Have the non-tech people you used to follow on Twitter also migrated to Mastodon? What about the other half of the tech people, where did they go?
Labeling another post as deceptive and then trying to use just one demographic (and not a very large one at that) as proof for whether mastodon is "large" in percentage terms is not very reassuring as to the level of discussion on Mastodon tbh.
I am just relaying my experience. Bluesky and Mastodon together cover 90% of the intelligent discussion I used to get on Twitter, weighed more heavily towards Mastodon. To pretend it’s a dead platform is ridiculous.
Sure they are, it's just that it's centralised and you don't see it. If bluesky shut down it's business guess where you data goes? Into the void, correct.
Data isn't tied to an instance in mastodon, it resides in an instance and can be easily migrated. If you either host yourself or subscribe to a reputable service that offers mastodon, like omg.lol then it's a safe bet your data will live long after the other proprietary services get shut down.
User identities are not user data. Your identity is only lost if you used an identity provider that shut down. Your data is separately stored. You can, in effect, own your bluesky identity forever, even if every BS server shuts down, so long as DNS still exists and functions.
1. This is true for did:web but less true for did:plc identities.
2. For did:plc identities to survive a full "bluesky PBC" death, you'd need to to transfer master authority for your PLC identity to a set of keys you control. If you don't then ultimately bluesky PBC would still have final authority over your identity. But if you transfer control to your own keys ahead of time then you can use those keys to make changes long after bluesky PBC's death.
Wound be great if you posted the URL to the relevant documentation for this… I guess there must be some docs about these delicate details? Thank you very much!
It's generally pretty sparse docs because everything is fairly "beta" still and because it is cryptography if you fuck it up you permanently lose control over your account forever. This is one of the reasons they don't advertise non-custodial recovery keys super aggressively.
And the protocol that is used for maintaining a ledger of key changes isn't exactly ideal or to my knowledge final but rather is in a "it's good enough until we douse the other fires" state.
That's not actually true. If you host your data yourself with a PDS then everything continues to work. And your data is all stored in a big merkle tree so you can actually just back it up from the network and if bluesky shits itself you can upload it to your own PDS and continue as if nothing happened.
Same goes for identity (albeit in a different way)
Downstream projects and end users may chose either license individually, or both together, at their discretion. The motivation for this dual-licensing is the additional software patent assurance provided by Apache 2.0."
Even when Bluesky decides to fuck around with the licenses, everybody is free to fork the current version crediting Bluesky PBC due to the MIT and Apache 2.0 license allowing this.
And besides that, the community could also decide not to support AT at all but put their full weight behind Nostr (https://nostr.com/)
UPDATE:
And the protocol spec is licensed under Creative Commons:
Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Bluesky PBC, and Contributors
Documentation text and blog posts in this repository are licensed under a permissive CC-BY license.
For anybody interested in derivative works of documents and specifications, remember that:
- you must give attribution (credit) to the original work
- you must indicate any changes made
- trademark rights are not granted (for example, to "Bluesky", "AT Protocol", or "atproto", or any logos or icons)
Inline code examples, example data, and regular expressions are under Creative Commons Zero (CC-0, aka Public Domain) and copy/pasted without attribution."
Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber effect we've seen on other platforms. Now, not only can you subscribe to those with like opinions, but the collective can reject dissenting opinions en masse. What could go wrong?
The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
Why should I listen to the endless amount of slop flat earthers shat upon the internet at large?
The early internet was a pretty decent place to talk, debate, and see opinions you didn't agree with. But those days are long gone. He'll, these days the other side of the conversation could just be a bot that will never change its mind, and waste your time you could be talking to an actual human.
Usenet had kill files. It was invented before the Internet was widespread. There was even a term, plonk, for adding someone usually as parting message.
Kill files were required for reading Usenet. There were less bad posters, but since saw everything in newsgroup, it helped to filter the problems.
> The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
And also with people who just add people they consider enemies for whatever reason to all sorts of lists, and others who just subscribe to those lists blindly, without ever checking any. Why would they want to, it's supposedly unsavory.
Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it. Just because it says "list of X" doesn't mean it's a list of X, it just means anyone can title things however they like.
>Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it.
On small sites, yes. You can actually do this in human bound time limits.
On a big site that attracts millions of small time spammers along with commercial and nation state level scammers, you've already lost. The rate new scam channels are created are faster than you can even click the UI button to remove them.
If you value your time you'll make a whitelist of a few trusted channels and avoid the rest. If those channels have recommendations that fill your interest, add those channels to your whitelist. This will stop the constant doom scrolling and brain rot traps we humans love to fall into.
Simply put, there is too much information in the world for you to ever be able to see and filter it all. Propaganda techniques like the 'firehose of falsehood' will exploit this to wear you out and make you ineffective. Select your media choices wisely.
> On a big site that attracts millions of small time spammers along with commercial and nation state level scammers, you've already lost.
Bluesky is not that site though? There used to be a lot of fake follows a few weeks ago, and many people posting about it, but I didn't have one in over a week. It may get to that, of course, as the site grows.
What I've actually seen a lot is people posting about lists they've been added to, and it's just silly. I've been added to one or two "MAGA" lists myself, heh.. I'm not even American, have no love for Trump, but I disagreed with "the people who are against MAGA" on something (I don't even know what it was), so now I'm "MAGA" according to that list, DNI haha.
Anyone interested, you can check what lists accounts are on here: https://clearsky.app/
It simmered down now, but people seemed positively obsessed with blocking and letting their enemies "whither in silence" etc. That's the main reason I care, because it fascinates me, because I find it kind of sad. But in practical terms, the people who use social media like that are no loss to me, and I'm no loss to them, so it's actually totally fair, I don't mind being put on block lists for petty reasons. But I know not everybody is that jaded. Some people probably do mind.
And it also seems kind of insidious how it makes people disappear from each other who never interacted, so they will never find out it was for a BS reason. It's not exactly Black Mirror, it's just Bluesky, no harm no foul, but still. How people (seemingly, maybe my perception is wrong) go "oh nice, this is useful thanks" and subscribe, without much discussion or concern, does rub me the wrong way a little.
depends on the trustworthiness of the source. at some point we have to trust something; could be our own selection process, but it can very well be the opinion of someone who you follow that seem genuine over X amount of time. The false positives are probably a necessary evil, humans will make mistakes, miss sarcasm, etc.
The internet of the 2000s was good because it didn't have these "discover" and "for you" algorithms. If you were interested in a subject, you actually had to search and filter results to find what you wanted; no AI choosing for you. If you're not interested in politics, you shouldn't see political content, unless you specifically search for it.
if it was aimed just at flat earthers or Qanon types that would be one thing, but that has not been my experience on Bluesky. folks cast quite a wide net and the slightest bit of opinion outside of the hive mind will get you on the shit list.
> Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber effect we've seen on other platforms.
I like my echo chamber. I like talking to my friends online. I don't want things I don't want to see.
I get this, and I use bsky. What I don't understand is why some of my more liberal friends have a meltdown when I tell them I successfully use Twitter for what I want to get out of: instant news and commentary, some memes, some Instagram like feeds, and a couple of other things. I don't use the firehouse feed, I just pay attention to those I follow and have almost zero issues.
Doubt it, Twitter had that feature years ago and there wasn't a major problem that linked to it.
Crazy people can't follow protocols, and most realizes they're in the wrong before blocking million accounts. References to useful contents from blocked accounts will occasionally leak through channels, and that should validate/invalidate choices.
It's probably a pain for spammers and an extra processing cost for serving platform, though.
edit: if you consider it must to block massive amount of real users(i.e. not script bots and/or third world hired guns trying to destroy a platform) to use a platform normally, that's just not sane.
Hacker News is heavily curated. Do you think there's an echo chamber effect? I frequently encountered opinions that differ from mine, sometime completely on the opposite end.
As much as I like and enjoy HN most of the time, it's very much an echo chamber. Even if we ignore politics and politics-adjacent threads and focus on tech stuff, there are some popular perceptions/opinions that have not earned their popularity, and god help you should you suggest you're not on that bandwagon. The blanket ban on outright politics here may blunt the echo chamber effect a bit, but it exists because echo chamber susceptibility is part of the human condition. We cannot get away from it.
While there's a ban on overt politics, a lot of social discourse is ultimately political.
It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care (despite its many imperfections. )
And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote based on opinion rather than discussion.
So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
Yes try making a comment in favor of bulk data collection by the intelligence agencies, or stating that Snowden's actions caused significant harm and really only helped adversaries - to give two examples.
Even if you write a well argued and decently sourced comment, it's very likely to get flagged by people with ideological disagreements to this. And there are a lot of them on HN, so your comment will likely disappear pretty quickly.
> try making a comment in favor of bulk data collection by the intelligence agencies, or stating that Snowden's actions caused significant harm and really only helped adversaries - to give two examples.
Those are both the same example, and sometimes comments get downvoted because they're just making a bad or vacuous argument for an indefensible position.
It's obvious why intelligence agencies want to do bulk data collection, and the reason is related to why it's a problem -- the public needs to be protected against bulk data collection by foreign intelligence agencies, and by domestic ones with insufficient oversight. "Oversight" in a democracy means the public knows about it, otherwise how can there even be a debate about whether it's worth it? But intelligence agencies aren't in favor of oversight of intelligence agencies, so they'll always be in favor of surveillance even if it isn't worth it, which is why they can't be allowed to do it in secret and anyone bringing it into the light is acting in the public interest.
Moreover, bulk surveillance isn't worth it, because if you don't build technology that can resist bulk surveillance then foreign governments will do it to your population and the cost of that exceeds any benefit from you being able to do it to others, even before you account for the domestic cost of having a surveillance apparatus already in place in the event that an oppressive administration comes to power.
About 18 months ago, there was an article (here on HN) suggesting that The Cheesecake Factory (an American casual dining restaurant, big chain) made their food from scratch. This is trivially debunked. Go to their website, which has the menu for all locations in North America, and you can see for yourself that there is practically nothing that would or could be made from scratch. Everything, literally every menu item at the time, was something that could be brought frozen and reheated there (on a grill more likely than in microwaves, but I don't know which). Furthermore, I pointed out how I drive past one every day to go to work, and twice a week in the morning I will see the Sysco truck unloading in the back of the restaurant.
Even the fucking salad, such as they are, are in plastic bags and dumped into a bowl. Pointing this out though, was worthy of more than one downvote. Why? Does HN have some deep bench of experts on American casual dining chains? Is it a technology topic? No, the echo chamber had already decided, and going against this insults the echo chamber even if there is no emotional investment.
When I said there was an echo chamber, I pointed out that I was excluding politics because you kind of just expect that. But it's literally about everything no matter how trivial it should be. I have had many examples over the years, and if there were a point to it I could give you an exhaustive list. This is the human condition. Forever arguing over stupid shit for the rest of eternity, or at least until doomsday, which I suspect is less than a century off.
> This is trivially debunked. Go to their website, which has the menu for all locations in North America, and you can see for yourself that there is practically nothing that would or could be made from scratch. Everything, literally every menu item at the time, was something that could be brought frozen and reheated there (on a grill more likely than in microwaves, but I don't know which).
It has leafy greens that would get soggy if frozen or combined with the other ingredients for shipping. There is a slice of lime on the side. I doubt they ship them pre-sliced or heat the lime with the rest of the food.
It's presumably "from scratch" in the same way that Blue Apron is and not in the sense that there is a local chef shopping at the local wholesale market to decide what to put on the local menu. But it's possible to distinguish the former from the thing where your meal comes out of a freezer and goes into a microwave as a single unit, with the latter implying that it contains no ingredients that haven't been frozen or stuffed so full of preservatives that they'll biodegrade some decades after the wrapper does.
And even if some items have ingredients that could be frozen, that doesn't tell you whether or not they actually were. Or, for that matter, that a meal made "from scratch" couldn't have any frozen ingredients.
> It has leafy greens that would get soggy if frozen or combined with the other ingredients for shipping.
You know those plastic bags of chopped lettuce, often with carrots and cabbage in them too, you can buy at the grocery store? Sysco has those in their catalog, bigger ones.
Everything's in a package, dumped in a bowl or on a plate, reheated (if needed) and sent out to your table. But all of HN was absolutely certain that they were some gourmet operation, and that some very large majority of their menu was made there, in the restaurant. And everyone still thinks so. Who thought this originally (if anyone) I do not know, but then you all sort of agreed. Enough of you agreed that disagreement wasn't welcome, and that was that. We live in giant echo chambers, and it's not just the polarized politics doing it.
> And even if some items have ingredients that could be frozen, that doesn't tell you whether or not they actually were.
I'm telling you that. I'm giving you an educated opinion, having worked in restaurants and knowing what non-previously prepared food looks like, having eaten in the restaurant in question multiple times, having studied the menu the day the story hit HN.
No sauce, no pasta, no soup, no meal, no dessert, absolutely nothing there is "made from scratch". No primary ingredients are even available in the kitchen of that restaurant save tapwater and the few spices they would sprinkle on their overpriced sirloin steak on the grill are back there. And it's bizarrely naive to think so.
It's also weird how insulted this forum is from people who don't sit in an office chair to earn their living. I guess there's only one Cheesecake Factory in all of San Francisco though, and the workers there live in the homeless tent camps so none of you talk to them.
HN is heavily echo chamber. Just because some people agree/disagree on technical topics doesn't mean you're getting a true diversity of opinions. Like, say, from the 99.99...% of the population that don't know what an int is.
HN is rife with downvote (and in some cases, flagging) abuse. So the echo chamber is more self-imposed by the brahmins rather than curated.
Slashdot had a superior moderation system whereby the ability to downvote (mod points) was given out selectively and in limited quantity. In all honestly it was years ahead of its time.
Just like an adored local restaurant, it went to shit "under new management" when the original owners cashed out and the users moved on. So everything started to suck around the moderation.
I vaguely remember such was their commitment to free speech, if you browsed at -1 they allowed posts to remain up that broke the HTML and page rendering, and refused to take them down on principle, until they could update their filters. Those early days of the web were a wild west.
See, the thing is, I do not wish to hear from idiots. Life is too bloody short.
This is how normal in-person social interaction works too, by the way. If you’re in a pub and someone comes up and starts ranting at you about how the pizza restaurant basements are turning the frogs gay, you’re probably not going to engage them. And if they keep at it, they’ll probably get kicked out.
The internet is full of people who (a) insane, and (b) insane in a very boring, same-y way. Filtering these people out is _fine_. There is no moral obligation to listen to every ranting idiot who comes along.
Yeah this is the thing. I see the same here in Holland since the extreme-right won the elections.
People are constantly dragging up topics like transsexuality in completely unrelated discussions. I completely disagree with their opinion and I like challenging them on it (for example, what is it to them what other people do with their bodies?). They've never been able to give me a good answer to that so far. But they're constantly derailing topics about completely different things. They seem so obsessed with this topic. It's also getting so tediously repetitive. Always the same slurs without any kind of actual discussion.
The thing is, here in the Netherlands we used to have 'echo chambering' as the foundation for the country. We used to call it 'verzuiling' (literally translated "pillarification"). After the war the country was made up of several groups that didn't get along so well so each had their own newspapers, social circles, TV and radio broadcasters etc. There were the Catholics, the super-strict Calvinists, the Labour/progressive atheist crowd etc. They basically lived alongside without really interacting. And really, lately I'm starting to think this was not such a bad idea at all.
I appreciate that post-Twitter there has been a push on Bluesky (and maybe Mastodon) to block, block, block. Don't feed the trolls, as they used to say but we seem to have forgotten. Just block them and move on. It is definitely a mental health benefit.
Of course, I get it. You are so smart and everyone else is an idiot.
The thing is… if you had grown up in someone else’s life, you would be the one censored. Your intelligence has nothing to do with it. It’s a historical perspective.
But of course, you’re a genius and can’t nobody else tell you nothin. I believe John Stewart Mill wrote at least a volume on that topic!
> The thing is… if you had grown up in someone else’s life, you would be the one censored.
Choosing to ignore people is not censorship.
Also I would note that the lunatic-fringe far-right stuff I was referencing with the pizza restaurants turning the frogs gay did not _exist_ when I was growing up; it's quite new, really emerging in the past 15 years (of course, it does take a lot from older far-right concepts, but it is to some extent a thing onto itself). This isn't something that was forced upon people as kids because their great-grandparents were into dank Pepe memes, it is something that they have embraced themselves.
Except you aren’t choosing. You are having other people chose for you.
Defend it all you like. I think it is a move of people with weak character who aren’t actually so sure in their ideas that it makes them uncomfortable to be challenged.
Educated people will remain educated. Ignorant people will remain ignorant. Angry people will remain angry. Block lists aren’t going to make a material difference in winning hearts and minds. The average reading level in the United States is between 7th and 8th grade, for example. Users will pick what they want to read, and they should be able to.
Seems to be the wrong measure for the angry dopamine machine. I should’ve mentioned critical thinking and emotional intelligence as well in my first comment. Citations below.
Shared blocklists are older than social media; in particular see USENET killfiles, which were often shared. More recently, you had user-made shared blocklists on Twitter until Musk broke the API. There’s nothing particularly new about them, though having them as a convenient first-class feature is somewhat new.
They help make Bluesky usable; for instance I subscribe to one which nukes transphobes, because, really, I do not have the patience to listen to their One Joke anymore, thanks. And another which warns on people with AI-generated profile pics (these are virtually always some form of scammer, or, worse, AI evangelists).
Interesting how the concept of blacklisting was so horrifying to people that they immediately changed their vocabulary, code, and even broke APIs (despite the origins predating unrelated current events by hundreds of years) only to immediately turn around and justify the newly christened "blocklist" as a great thing we should all embrace.
Now I had a good look and I'm pretty sure the people added to this list haven't posted anything to warrant this accusation. Yet if you go to their profiles on Clearsky or whatever it will show them in this pedophile list, like https://clearsky.app/messyjhesse.bsky.social/lists
That's not right, and the worst thing is you can't see on the app if you've been wrongly labeled that way, you have to use a third-party website to find out.
The comments on that post (I saw the same or similar on Reddit) point out that there are very aggressive lists and more discerning lists. Some lists filter out based on links in a profile or certain emojis or if you follow certain accounts.
These are 3rd party lists and a user has to opt into them to leverage their blocking choices. If a list blocks 1M accounts but only has 100 followers, it's not such a big deal.
When you subscribe to a well built list, you are given options for how like mute vs block, your choice, or label | warn | hide, per label, a subchoice within an opt in labeller.
What ATProto gives us as users is choice and competition. Bad lists will not gain subscribers and will be marginalized by the market effect. High quality lists will be shared and gain network effect.
We shouldn't expect or want a one-size fits all solution to moderation. Our social graphs in real life and online are not a giant blob where everyone has to listen to everyone. We naturally break down into subgraphs or communities. Online communities or groups should be able to exclude people for any reason they wish. They should be seen similar to a private group in real life. You shouldn't expect to be allowed into or to participate in a group if your going against the group's rules or customs in real life. Online should be no different.
From my admittedly subjective perspective, it's the lesser of two evils. The alternative of having centralized control of "truth" is a far more awful option.
Agreed. Bluesky is useless for this reason and the way that blocking works individually as well.
Imagine if HN had a "block" option you could select against a user, that when you click it, it wipes out every comment that this user ever made on a post that you both commented in, past and future - but not just for you, for every other HN user as well. And there's no "showdead" option to see them either, for anyone.
Like if I or anyone who replied to you blocked you now, with this hypothetical Bluesky-like feature on HN, no-one at all would be able to see your comment. Except maybe dang if he went poking around in the database.
That's basically how Bluesky blocks work. It's absurd.
It makes a lot of sense. If you came to my house and started talking nonsense, I would ask you to leave the house, not stand with my eyes closed and ears plugged in my own house while you continued to rant to my guests.
It actually has worked well for me, and I've had some interesting discussions on there and some arguments, but over facts and not emotions. I think people have a right to express their opinions, but they don't have a right to make me hear what they're saying if they're known belligerents, spreaders of disinformation, or similar things.
if alice blocks bob:
it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts; blocks bob from replying to future posts of alice; but more importantly it erases bob from alice's feed wich is often the only healthy thing to do because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
> it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts
Exactly, it hides these from anyone else who might read the thread, including others participating in the thread.
This offers Alice not just the means to control her own Bluesky experience, but also to unilaterally control which parts of the conversation that all others on Bluesky can see.
It is in effect a feature to selectively delete the posts of others for any reason.
> because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
That is generally not the reason why users on Bluesky hit the block button. There's a strong tendency there of blocking because someone disagrees with you, or they explained why you're wrong about something, or they pointed out that you're spreading misinformation.
On Bluesky, blocking is a way to quickly and conveniently hide any dissent.
yes, alice has autonomy over who participates on conversations she started. bob is still free to have the same conversation, just not on alice's conversations or as replies to her.
i dont't think we're going to agree on why people generaly block others. you seem to see yourself as some sort of dissenter, or a truth-teller of some kind, but when you get blocked for interjecting into someone else's coversations it's just because no one asked you to be part of that conversation and now you lost your access privileges. this rejection probably fucks with your self-esteem more than it should but i'm no therapist so maybe go find one instead of annoying folks on the internet.
It seems that a lot of people today have a really difficult time understanding that free speech does not mean you get to follow someone around yelling at them, you don't get to come into their home, follow them to the bar they go to with their friends. That's not free speech, that's harassment.
I'd go so far as to say that social media without a block button is unethical, and promotes propaganda and harassment. The block button means the user heard you, use used your free speech! Congrats! Now they want to walk away from you. Ooops. No, you are not entitled to get any response, nor to continue talking at them if they choose to leave the area.
no one is missing the point, it has been state multiple times: when you get blocked you no longer get to reply to that person, and all previews replies are hidden, to them and everyone else.
the one other point that seems to be ignore though is: you are still capable of continuing that conversation on your own terms on you own feed. your posts will not be visible to the people blocking you but everyone else can still see them.
it's probably the single feature that will drive me away from Bluesky given how abused it is. not fun erroneously getting lumped in with MAGA and finding yourself in a void.
Musk Social provides some options for you to control who can reply to your posts (like followers only), at least it did before I nuked all my accounts.
Bluesky provides a richer set of options. I should be able to choose who interacts with my posts. If that's not your style, fine, there are other options out there. Bluesky users like this feature. It reduces the toxicity and makes it a more enjoyable platform.
The culture around "don't engage, just block" the trolls helps keep the discourse more civil. With a fresh start, we can stay ahead of the trolls and bots. It's a group effort
You have misunderstood. The way Bluesky blocking works is not just about controlling who else can interact with your posts, it affects the posts of others too, and applies to every other user whether they like it or not.
> As it stands, if 20 people are involved in a discussion, and ONE single person decides to block someone, then all of a sudden, the 19 other people in the discussion (+ any other viewers) are now inconvenienced simply because one person had an issue with someone else.
> Bluesky does have a bit of a block culture, and as such, this issue is only going to get worse and worse, and threads are going to get harder and harder to read and follow as more and more people get blocked.
> Just the other day I got a notification, and I clicked on it, and once again, the post they were replying to was "blocked", not because of me, but because the person who made the post blocked the person they were responding to. I was trying to make sense of their post, but now I couldn't as I had no idea what the hell they were replying to... then I think I found the post they replied to; it showed "1 reply", but when I clicked on it, no replies were shown.
> Now, this functionality was probably done with good intentions - but you know what they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Another comment explaining the problem:
> This is working as intended but I agree it should be reassessed. For example:
> 1. In a popular thread, User A posts some nonsense
> 2. User B replies to that reply explaining why it's nonsense
> 3. User A blocks User B
> 4. Now User A has successfully hidden the rebuttal to his comment from everyone. The only defense against this is if the thread OP happens to block User A.
> This is a pretty serious downside of the "nuclear block" system imo. It creates an escalation ladder of blocking where the first user to hit "block" is advantaged. On the other hand it causes me personally to avoid blocking where I otherwise would, because I want the conversation to still be visible for others.
> There should at least be a "show reply" button on posts that are hidden for this reason IMO. Otherwise you've given every user the unilateral power to hide a reply, for everyone, permanently. If I hide a reply the normal way, it's not deleted for everyone! There is a "show hidden reply" button! The effect of hiding someone else's reply should be consistent across these two ways to do it.
The beauty of ATProto is that you can build an alternative App View that handles blocks differently. The Bluesky app is open source so you don't have to start from scratch either.
Choice and competition will make this network a better long-term social fabric than the centralized systems we are used to.
What's this "costly barrier to entry"? It is certainly not a given from where I am looking
By any account, it is far less than building an independent social network application. The components are also decoupled so you don't have to rebuild everything. If you want to build an App View, it's just a webapp or react native. You don't have to rebuild everything
re: incentives, there are many, people have different perspectives and motivations to do so
The omission of blocked posts is done server-side by the app.bsky.feed.getPostThread endpoint, so you'd need to reimplement that to return the content of blocked posts instead, both upthread (parent) and downthread (replies). It would require acquiring and maintaining your own replica of the data, which is hundreds of gigabytes in size.
This is significantly more complex than making a few small changes to the frontend app.
The filtering of blocked replies is done server-side. You can view whatever top-level posts you want in the protocol; making those visible/invisible is up to the client software.
If I post something that gets traction, and someone replies with an ad for ED pills, I should be able to remove that spam from the discussion on my thread and not just from my view of it. If others have already "engaged" with a plug for boner pills, their replies are not lost but are just no longer part of the thread stemming from my post.
If you as the OP don't want this behavior, there are other tools at your disposal (mute the replier instead, "hide for everyone", etc).
I have written my own webapp (https://blebbit.com) and I can see content and accounts I have blocked on Bluesky. I just validated this to be the true. This because I have not implemented block respecting in my own code yet. It's more work to actually respect the blocking.
The full backup of ATProto is more than 5T now.
You seem really misinformed about all of this.
Or maybe you created an account to intentionally spread falsehoods about Bluesky? There has been a flurry of this on HN lately
Now for whatever reason, user B decides to block user A. The entire subthread starting with user B's response to user A is removed, which includes making the discussion between user A and user C no longer viewable in that thread, to anyone:
Having to visit the Replies page of user C and try to piece together snippets of conversation - some of which are still unviewable - is not a reasonable solution. In particular, posts 7 and 8 are not there and the link between posts 1 and 2 is severed.
That's your opinion. The vast majority of ATProto users like the enhanced controls over their conversations. If you don't like it, use a different social media platform
That it's unreasonable to expect users to mitigate this by hunting around others' profiles for snippets of conversation is my opinion, yes.
That one user blocking another user makes chunks of the conversation disappear for everyone else viewing the thread is verifiable fact. As it is a verifiable fact that this is done server-side via the getPostThread endpoint, by which posts in the parent and replies fields of the response are omitted.
This is not "absolutely and provably wrong", as you put it. Maybe do some research yourself before accusing others of intentionally spreading falsehoods?
You said posts were blocked when what you are actually describing is replies being disconnected from a post on that post. They are still visible within the network
It's working as expected
You have made multiple other inaccurate statements about Bluesky / ATProto throughout your comments with your new account
This whole thread nastoy has been making the argument that blocked posts are omitted from the thread for all viewers, and circumventing this behavior requires modifying the relay (and hence ingesting the firehose) not just the client
You have been arguing that blocked posts still appear in your custom client, which is a different claim than nastoy. As detailed by the GitHub issue that started this disagreement, bluesky relays have introduced thread breaking behavior that one can not get around simply by forking the appview.
I haven't hacked away at the bluesky api but isn't the aforementioned "app.bsky.feed.getPostThread" called against an instance of a bluesky relay hosted at api.bsky.app, as opposed to a PDS or an appview?
That being the case, when you want to get posts of a thread, the information of which posts belong to which thread are the responsibility of a relay, which is doing the firehose-level-aggregation of which posts belong to which threads, am I misunderstanding?
Everyone in life has a blocklist, and they are shared.
You have a list of public people that piss you off and avoid, when you are asked about them you say "ugh I don't like x because". Now, you might get someone say "dont be mean about x, they had y, which is why they did z" and you might accept or reject the point they made.
However that person is unlikely to blast you with content or facts to do with said public figure, unless they want to drive you away.
It is part of human nature, infact its the basis of society. The only way we can function is by having effective way to have some shared core "principles" (formally around religion, feudal chiefs, now around semi cult leaders) This means rejecting other ideas as heretical. (see civil rights marches, universal suffrage, silver/gold standard the fracturing of protestantism)
Who's this "we"? Is there anything that runs on the Bluesky protocol outside of the Bluesky itself which has its own extensions which can't be federated. Also, when I opened this site, all the posts were from a certain political ideology. The algorithm is probably more or less the same as Twitter in pushing contents loved by their creators.
Considering everyone NOT in a specific ideological umbrella has been fleeing X en masse, yeah it's obviously sensible that alternative ideologies would be more present by default.
I lost interest in Bluesky when I got an “account required” blocker after I clicked on a Bluesky post link.
UPDATE: OK, didn't realize it was a configurable setting. I guess I ran into it a few times and assumed it was a default block. Thanks for the clarification.
I don't know if "only" is the right adverb to use when it's how the first-party apps and website works. I don't know what usage looks like for third-party sites, but I would imagine it's incredibly small compared to bsky.app, and it's nearly everyone's first impression of Bluesky.
AT proto is a cleartext protocol, hiding content is a matter of clients respecting a flag, a false sense of privacy. If you want to restrict the audience of a post, you should post it encrypted and send keys to intended recipients
Publicly accessible content should be accessible without an account. The only reason they ask for an account is to push you to sign up, which is just annoying.
Imagine if Wikipedia asked you to log in before you could read anything.
It makes some sense for something like Facebook which is more or less private by default (you couldn't see much without an account anyway), but not for X or Bluesky where it's all public.
I'll bet that most who casually encounter hate speech/far right content on X, Meta or other platforms are not far-right and don't actually want to see or be influenced by it. It likely creates a negative user experience for them.
However powerful the X/Meta AI feed algorithms are at surfacing content people are interested in, it all counts for nothing if people see content that they find repulsive. Its not just far right content, disturbing content in general gets more engagement and is surfaced in feeds.
BlueSky and its AT Protocol, by putting moderation back into the hands of the user, allows people to see the content they want and not what they don't want, making for a much better and more positive user experience.
I predict that this means that at some point, it will take over as the dominant social media platform. There are already multiple startups with VC funding building things on the AT Protocol.
As for the moment, whenever someone complains to me about toxicity in social media on X/Facebook or whatever platform they are using, I recommend BlueSky and advise others to do the same. Word of mouth spread is powerful.
> I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not mention Mastodon/ActivityPub.
Is that an omission, or is that because Mastodon is already in the process of "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship"¹, and because ActivityPub was published as a W3C Recommendation back in 2018?
Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical user. There is also the issue that your account is tied to a specific server and migration means you lose your followers. Discovery and server DDoS on a viral post are also challenges for the way ActivityPub was architected.
ATProto is still young, even compared to ActivityPub. It will continue to evolve and improve. It certainly has the momentum compared to ActivityPub
It's really not complicated, that article is just being excessively verbose for clarity. The UI itself explains it very well, it takes just a couple of minutes to log into both servers and set up the transfer.
> Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical user.
The only headache is picking the server. If I pick one for them it's pretty smooth sailing from there.
If someone can't handle the basic interface, there's a really really high chance he doesn't have much of value to say.
The problem isn't that it's "complicated". It's that they have no incentive to sign up.
As much as the HN crowd hates it, ads and marketing work. People went to Bluesky not because it's easier but because several famous people talked about it loudly and everyone knows the people behind the original Twitter are behind it.
The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick a server, then later the moderation policies of the admins changes. You can either deal with it or start over again on another server. Losing all your followers is why people put up with bad social media overlords.
ATProto removes the switching cost. This is a significant difference from ActivityPub
> The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick a server, then later the moderation policies of the admins changes.
Moderation policies change even with the big ones (Twitter, etc).
I suspect you're referring to the confusion due to different servers having different moderation policies, and that could effectively make you invisible to others or vice versa merely by being on a given server.
First, my guess is that this is a problem with a tiny percentage of servers. I've not had to deal with this even once.
Second, when you say you "heard others bring it up", my guess is these others are highly technical folks. Not a single "average" person stayed away from Mastodon due to this. I suspect perhaps 99% of active Mastodon users are not even aware of this.
These are valid criticisms of Mastodon. But they're not the reason people didn't sign up for it. Name recognition is.
> You can either deal with it or start over again on another server. Losing all your followers is why people put up with bad social media overlords.
FYI, for quite a while now you can switch servers, and have the followers automatically follow your new account.
Level of de-centralization Bluesky has is somewhere between the old Twitter and Ethereum, neither of which have strong resistance against central decision making.
The problem discussed here is that Mastodon is not simply de-centralized, but its superstructure upholds a segregation policy and loves to ostracize admins based on, ahem, preferences. This in turn encourage admins to join a virtue signaling zeitgeist, and towards assuming more divisive and dismissive stances, out of fear. As a second order effect, regular non-admin users and their ability to communicate would be not only at whim of the server owner but also that of the inner group cast towards the admin.
Bluesky doesn't have this type of problem, precisely because it's not too decentralized. Either you individually get banned or not, based on levels of value alignment between you and the corpo outsourced moderators. There are also blocklist feature as well as third party voluntarily applicable moderation framework in Bluesky, but personally I can't imagine majority of users using it, or dividing the network into fragmented subgroups, and are non-factors in the grand scheme of things.
(By the way, I sometimes wonder how moderator value alignment is going to inevitably drift over time; as I understand it, social media content moderation is partially automated and exploitatively outsourced to workers from low income regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa. This phenomenon is almost exclusively discussed in context of human rights and fair worker treatment, but I think this also means a lot of people with minimal prior exposure to media, let alone the anaerobic layer of the Internet, are being trained to develop preferences on such content and especially the more flaggable yet less hateful and flaggable-but-less-flag-deserving content. i.e. stimulative but not blood and gore. If anyone is reading down to this line, you know what I mean.)
Subscribing to a labeller is as easy as following any other account. I use several 3rd party moderation services. The bar to adoption is much lower than I think you anticipate
Bluesky has an initial PDS anyone can run, available on their github. Last I checked they said not to host more than 10 accounts during the beta testing. You can absolutely migrate your account and still use the Bluesky app. The custom server is an option at login
Framing bluesky as a "competitor" to mastodon makes about as much sense as framing a quarterback making the winning run as "beating" the kid drawing clouds in the bleachers.
They're in the same general space, but only one is playing the game.
It's politicized by default when it stands in opposition to the most blatantly ideologically slanted social media site in existence this side of Gab and Truth Social.
Down-ranking "political content" requires a definition of "politics" which is, inherently, an ideological posture, QED all content that remains is "political content."
> In terms of content moderation, posts related to child sexual abuse or terrorism are best handled by professionals trained to help keep millions or billions safe.
Does that mean bluesky will somehow centrally moderate posts "related to terrorism"?
I have been saying the same things for over a decade, and writing about it. But more importantly - I built the alternative, we’ve tested it with lots of local communities and will be going to market Nov 5th this year
They're right that they need to actually shift the power away from Bluesky and have users use other servers.
The AT protocol may promise decentralisation and an insurance policy, but that is meaningless if Bluesky the company can stop using the AT protocol and survive it.
As long as the majority of users use the official app and log in to the primary server with their username/password, not the protocol's private key, Bluesky isn't forced to continue using the AT protocol. They still have power to push the enshittify button, block federation, and keep users captive on the official app/website like Musk's X does.
With it seeming like even fewer powerful people will control how social media is moderated, as they say depending on the “policy environment” there’s never been a more important time to work towards distributed social media.
I guess this is a "oh Twitter got bought and TikTok got shutdown for a day, so we need a free Twitter/TikTok that wouldn't have any of these problems" response?
It's a pretty inane article that provides no solutions. Twitter got bought and TikTok got made because attention is valuable. There's ads/enshittification because a service like this is expensive to run, also you want to raise money for new features, also greed is a thing.
TFA wrestles with none of this? At least like, consider nationalization or some kind of nationalized e2e platform. Aren't we wishcasting after all?
Interesting how the online left now is beginning to care about decentralizing social media again after years of deriding the topic and espousing (obviously politicized) "content moderation" efforts.
Unfortunately, this is also strike in favor of the blockchain people (like Farcaster) — the best of which have been working to find ways to keep systems permanently decentralized (and not just temporarily decentralized, like Bluesky/Nostr/Mastodon/SMTP/etc.).
This article does seem to have the effect of being an endorsement of Bluesky, though.
(What I mean by endorsement: "Why would this progressive political operator be saying that we need to focus on freedom safeguards for this Bluesky platform, if it wasn't obviously the place for progressives to be. And no mention of anything else, like W3C standard ActivityPub, so that's right out. Clearly we must once again get behind a platform that someone owns. And then work from a position of weakness, like activists. Since that went so well for the co-author's former MoveOn.org, as evidenced by the incoming administration. And we can keep telling people they are under attack, and keep raising donations from them, to continue the fight.")
Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.
And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling (because most of the current mouths are, um, the same people ranting about the incumbents. )
I don't disagree that the same process leads to the same outcome. I personally don't think bluesky will ultimately be any different to the rest.
But the no-money approach of mastodon means its a very very slow burn, which will take a decade or more to succeed, and even then may not be what we expect when a billion people show up.
Stay with me...
So: federation is very cool in principle, and it's extremely cool in that it in theory means we don't have Just One Batshit Master of all our content... but in the way it's being done with Masto, it IMHO makes for a weak proposition.
Why?
Mainly because people (normal people, not us lot) don't understand or care what "federation" is. They expect (because it's been the norm for every other service), a SINGLE place where they can go to find their mates and celebs and politicians.
What they instead get is a thing where:
1) They can't search a global place and find all those people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't have this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)
2) They find someone on one "instance" (not understanding what an "instance" is) and then can't (easily) follow them from their own instance without having to think about namespaces and all that
3) They naturally gravitate towards the biggest one - probably mastodon.social - and then we're right back at the beginning, with everyone on a single instance, beholden to the possibly loony who might shut it down / monetise it / etc
Moving between instances is much harder than it is claimed to be (you lose all sorts of stuff like your history, or at least you did when I tried it).
Federation also brings all manner of hard things to those trying to run an instance - I tried, as "medium level nerd" and ended up walking away from the complexity of just not understanding why some content didn't seem to be getting from my instance to others, etc etc.
If I was the Mastodon team, I'd be focusing all my attention on global search, and on never using the word "federated" in any of their marketing ever again. It might well be the coolest thing, but it's a non-marketable thing.
Of course all this is predicated on "a good outcome" being "everyone on Mastodon" and I do appreciate those who don't want that. It's definitely the case that less people tends to make for better online social spaces, and maybe small niche groups leads to better things all round.
Amen and hallelujah! This is why I gave up on Mastodon. I read that not allowing full text search across instances was actually a design decision in order to discourage brigading. But, more crucially it undermines discovery.
If someone want full-text search across the entire fediverse, who is going to pay for it? Bluesky has a business model that makes that attractive to them as a value add to pay for. ActivityPub has instances running on RPis in a shoebox. (This is a great thing, it's part of where ActivityPub federation works well.)
Of course, that's also before you get into the sociopolitics that many instances don't want full text search and are concerned about brigading and pulling old microblog posts out of context for nefarious reasons; some of which is why some instances left services like Twitter and have no interest in services like Bluesky.
The people you describe wouldn’t use Mastodon in a web browser and this is a solved problem on the apps.
The only person I know who regularly uses Twitter says she has never visited the site in a browser and is quite sure that everyone in her circle uses the app. But that's just anecdote
Which is a good thing from the spec point of view but maybe bad from a user adoption point of view. Even for the later you'd be wrong, as Threads is supposed to be an ActivityPub application.
It's for the same reason I don't recommend Signal to anyone in my circle. I don't want to trade one walled garden for another (Signal still refuses third-party clients for example). I use Matrix which is truly open.
You mean, it lacks centralization?
While I think Mastodon's irrelevance is deserved, let's also be fair to the "incumbents": Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, et al. gained and maintain their critical mass from word of mouth.
Many other would-be upstarts in history also usurped thrones by word of mouth, foremost example being Firefox against Internet Explorer.
Mastodon's problem with becoming relevant (and also BlueSky's problem with upending Mysterious Twitter X) is far more fundamental than lack of awareness.
Anyway I have checked several social medias today (HN included) and everywhere except one place there was too much noise about TikTok - only place that my feed was without it was Mastodon - it is quite slow there but i consder it to be good thing. However I think that there is no good social media - Mastodon included and my days would be improved without any of them. RSS feeds feels like more then enough. Discussion seems to be mostly point-less. Maybe even this one, but those enhanced with algorithmic engagement and endless scroll are net-negative.
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that there are people who say they are in favour of diversity but underneath only want their kind of diversity, not genuine diversity.
Diversity of opinion would definitely be a feature, not a bug.
It’s called “marketing” and “paid-for articles”
Mastodon has many MANY MANY issues.
The first is that instance operators regularly abuse their users as hostages in personal petty fights. I don't care too much about drama, but there has been a lot of it regarding Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia and instances defederating from each other as a result of said drama.
The second one is instances can go down for whatever reason - the admins just being unable/unwilling to cope with moderation, running out of money, getting into trouble with the legal system, ... - and users can't move their post, DM and media history to another instance.
And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.
It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today.
I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.
There is also DID:Web. This one has the downside that you need to continue to control the domain name in question indefinitely, and it can be argued that the domain name system is still a form of centralization. Like PLC users can theoretically change handles to another domain name with this scheme (but must contrinue to control the original domain name). Users can freely move to another personal data server.
AT Protocol can add new DID schemes in the future to avoid these downsides, with the caveat that users cannot change from DID type to a different one seamlessly, and adding new DID types may potentially require updates by multiple other parts of the ecosystem.
ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".
There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or both).
I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a client-server system with a network of servers. Making all traffic go through it that way is going to cause scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth.
IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower experience because you have to relay.
[0] https://librecast.net
[1] https://spectra.video/w/9cBGzMceGAjVfw4eFV78D2
There's much more interesting innovation waiting for adoption on that lower part of the internet stack I suppose. As someone for whom that's a too specialist area I would love to have more overview of what are the promising technologies and upcoming standards to place early bets on.
The other day by accident I found out about Named Data Networking networking [0] via a paper [1] "Exploring the Design of Collaborative Applications via the Lens of NDN Workspace", and saw that NDN still sees active development after many years, so I wondered about the extent the technology still is considered promising for mass adoption today.
[0] https://named-data.net/
[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2407.15234v1
Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.
Put another way, they were structured in a way that doesn't allow them to compete.
If you wanna delve into the details of why people so often avoid the platforms that FOSS enthusiasts tend to recommend, that's an interesting question, but we gotta be clear here, we already knows who's successful and who's not.
No they don't. If this was true, my wife's family would be on Telegram or Discord, haha. We actually did go into Telegram briefly, but they all dropped out. What got them to switch from SMS to WhatsApp was her parents temporarily moving to Austria.
No True Scotsman is Exhibit A for why technology-first platforms tend to fail.
I think part of the issue is that you can’t do full text search across instances. You can only search on hashtags, and people don’t always use hashtags.
Each instance chooses to adopt defederating lists.
If you don’t like that make your own instance.
Eg if I run a small server I have a difficult time getting my updates federated quickly because other servers have a lot of fire hoses to manage. You end up low on the priority list and less likely to be seen. In my experience from last I tried, at least.
It’s always at the instance level. They own the machine.
The difference between federated networks and decentralized networks is that the main control is with node operators vs cryptographic key holders.
You’re looking for a decentralized solution, not a federated one.
The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint. If you want to block someone, you block them, or delegate it to someone in a way that you can later change at no switching cost to yourself.
> The difference between federated networks and decentralized networks is that the main control is with node operators vs cryptographic key holders.
Fully decentralized networks have to solve a difficult technical problem: If your device is offline, who is hosting your stuff? How do you make it fast and reliable?
Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way. Instead of your stuff being hosted nowhere, each person gets to pick, which can and should be independent of any moderation or other considerations. The benefit, and goal, of federation here should be to make the hosting node a fungible commodity.
You can also federate moderation by, for example, choosing a moderator who publishes a block list that you can subscribe to.
But these two things should not be linked together. Doing so is a mistake. As many things of this nature should be made separate as possible and with the lowest achievable switching costs, to inhibit forces that tend toward market concentration.
Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another, not when there are four that are significantly isolated from one another and you need state-level resources to spin up a fifth.
Why would you force the provider to support objectionable (for them) content? It makes sense for the instance to be aligned with its users on moderation rules.
> The benefit, and goal, of federation here should be to make the hosting node a fungible commodity.
Communities aren't fungible! And your insistence on having federation completely seamless will result in "what's the point anyway, let's centralize it, more efficient"
This is the correct answer though, as much as we don't like it "users" as a whole do not care about privacy or centralization
You’re, again, looking for a decentralized system.
> Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way
Yes, the ability to change home servers is missing from mastodon.
But even if they had such a feature, the content you see and likely your ability to change servers would be controlled by your instance owner because they literally own the machine your data lives on and which serves you content.
This is the defining quality of a federated network vs a decentralized one.
> Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another
I don’t think this is a useful definition as it also fits decentralized systems.
Federated networks are networks where independent instances of compatible software are able to exchange information without being owned by a single entity (think email, mastodon, lemmy, etc)
User decision making is still very much an entrenched thing.
Most decision making on blocks in small-to-medium instances is democratic, in my experience, with users voting on them together. Also, as pointed out there's the obvious "vote with your feet" of switching to a different instance if you don't agree with its policies and/or how other instances don't agree with its policies.
There's definitely a risk of large instances trying to strong arm smaller instances with blocks and/or threats of blocks. But so far it's more a philosophical risk than a real risk from what I've seen. At least in my parts of the Fediverse small instances are "the norm" and it's is more likely the blocks are against the larger instances because with size they are more likely to allow spam registrations, they are more likely to have users that don't respect cultural norms like CWs or Alt text/Image Descriptions and don't feel a need to respect them because their mods won't enforce them, or yes they set up an ideologue as a mod/admin and shift to a gross direction. As a "telegraph network between a lot of small villages that mostly ignore the big cities", ActivityPub can be rather nice.
I don't see the appeal; it sounds like it would devolve into white noise
*: for the sake of argument
ironically when I used Mastodon, while dealing with these issues, I was unable to filter out other languages. So in addition to extremely questionable content, a lot of it was simply in another language.
ActivityPub is a really half baked protocol and the sooner we realize that and move on from it the better. Personally, I didn't feel that defederation was an adequate defense against those MissKey instances and I decided running an instance is a very big liability.
Like I get that moving instances or between applications isn’t really possible on AP and there is concerns with moderation and so on but it’s been the best internet experience I’ve had. It’s a bubble but I easily just come here or to 4chan or reddit to see outside that bubble.
Defederation is not a huge issue if you assume and embrace a segregationist view and cut off likely major fractions of the organically formed Fediverse out of itself. After all it's porn and scripts you don't even recognize, what's the point in having them? My insistence is, that's a fresh dead canary in cage.
1: https://instances.social/list/advanced#min-users=100000
I don’t understand how if I host my own AP client on my own hardware and choose only to federate and subscribe with a small subset of sites and people who post using AP that this is a bad thing. I can use other websites like Hacker News to see other opinions and views.
Cutting that off and "just walk into the brightest place" couldn't happen at the same time, so the core devs and ops switched to the "Mastodon's strength is in small servers, pick any of the right one" narrative.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_...
I thought they were super strict there (after all they even require that blocky censor thing on the functional parts in normal adult pornos making it basically useless).
IMO, human aging vary too much to solve this "looks kids to me" problem. Age by appearance is clearly regional; there are plenty reports of East Asians abroad barred entries at morning and beer at evening. So any substantial East Asian content feed is destined to include tons of "kids/age unreliable" content, unfortunate opposite being "middle aged/unknown". Other factors as cultural norms and effect of modes of consumption compounds on it.
Long term, the solution to this has to be algorithmic: the mix of content must be artificially manipulated so to suit the need of consumers. The fraction of first(primary) language English speaker is below 9%[2], less than third of Mandarin Chinese at 21% or about same as Spanish at 11%. So a viewer application for a truly global feed of all contents will have to mark and remove ~90% of content for it to be palatable to an English speaker. "Endless Japanese CP" problem is just but an early sampler.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
Though I have to say I sometimes wonder how sites like Onlyfans do this with male actors. Often the only thing you see is their dick and I can't remember having to submit a dickpic for my passport :D So how do they know a submitted passport matches the dick in question?
But really I think it's better to know for sure than to guess.
Sites like Onlyfans, or any website for that matter, just delete contents based on appearances and user metrics. Otherwise escalations won't stop; users would leave, protest will occur, new laws will be created, state committees will be formed and blacklists are made, and credit card processing suspiciously starts failing. Recordkeeping is for honest people to be honest if they want to be. Some numbers on a driver's license do not stop the horde from banging the walls.
So a truly global feed has to hide inconvenient contents from users until users are ready for it. Ideally user editable. Which is what everyone is fat-finger doing at server side anyway.
The same can be said about the atproto as different apps are being developed for specific users like picture video only feeds and 3p clients for bsky.
> And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
I'm not sure I get your point. I run my own bsky PDS, and federation is working fine for me and my users. I see plenty of posts from others.
> Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Are you asking if perception of difficulty is really impactful to people's choices?
W/ bsky the hardest choice was the domain name purchase. And I didn't have to host my own server to do that either.
I’ll take this all seriously when people admit what the real drivers are. Admit why people are actually looking for an X alternative.
It’s a mix of ideologues, performative outrage, foot stomping, and wanting the 2020 status quo.
I tried X again at some later point, I think even twice.
A fresh account bombards you with far-right propaganda and outright lies. At the time at least this included hateful and incoherent rambling by Musk himself, which you couldn't unfollow (or ignore, it simply didn't work).
Call it ideological, but I'm not going to spend my free time with this "content", especially when the platform clearly disregards repeated signals that I don't want to read hateful ideological propaganda comment no 73646445 by some alt right shill.
I'm all for open discourse and dealing with other peoples differing opinions.
But at this point, the "ideology" accusation by the far right against any other opinion is nothing but laughable. Well, it would be, if people didn't still pay it credibility.
And no, I'm not a "leftist", "transgender activist", or whatever group gets to be public enemy of the day for these people.
I did notice that Bluesky seems to have more politically left people.
This kind of content is not very interesting to me, we already have Reddit.
But for Bluesky, the platform bubble phenomenon didn't seem that strong to me.
Appreciate the new features to build my own (interest) bubble.
For political content, I think actual journalism and real-life discourse are most valuable.
1) terrible experience: a lot of people just don’t have fun on twitter, it’s just an awful experience. why spend your free funtime in a place that you just don’t enjoy? we don’t go to restaurants that we hate, why on earth would we go to a website that we don’t enjoy?
2) too crowded. take a music concert for example, a lot of people absolutely prefer a music venue with 2,000 people over a concert where there are 100,000 people.
That has not been my experience at all.
You could tell me that, but don't. The answers are very much besides the point if you can't explain it and the advantages of the arrangement in five minutes to somebody on the opposite end of the normal distribution of technical understanding to your average HN account. Network effects dominate most social network pros and cons, so if you can only educate five percent of the general population there isn't much point.
I think one of the major parts that resonates with people is the focus on data portability. AFAIK, ActivityPub doesn't help with wanting to move your data somewhere, without having to manually perform a async migration.
> which is promising federation but has yet to deliver
They seem to surely but slowly make headway on the federation stuff, there are more and more successful experiments of people hooking into the network.
> it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.
That is true, hopefully the network will be resilient enough by that point, because I'm wary of that too. I guess time will tell how that goes.
On a more optimistic note, there seems to be more and more efforts of trying to fund other non-Bluesky projects, including for core infrastructure. Example, not an endorsement: https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com
1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.
2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.
I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
How decentralized is Bluesky really? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410 - Nov 2024 (16 comments)
So is Matrix.
The scuttlebutt is that many people have heard that the index, the directory, and the signing keys are centralized.
The good news is the signing keys are not in the hands of the users so we could in theory rewrite all of the messages on the protocol.
If you had those keys would you choose to do this?
I got the impression from the Dorsey interview that this was his commitment, and that he left because they weren't interested in that. They're just trying to be a twitter clone that picks up angry twitter users who hate Musk.
-----
> That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
> Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...
-----
The problem for Bluesky is that those people aren't actually leaving twitter, they're still using twitter more than they use Bluesky.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
Not the current, but the previous one when Dorsey owned Twitter. And I don't know what's worse, honestly.
I tried out Bluesky last week in hope of finding a social network which ticked this box, but my feed was full of anti Elon Musk / Trump messages. So it was very political from my initial experience.
This was after the setup wizard process where I selected tech/science/entertainment preferences.
Perhaps I did something wrong or didn't give it enough chance?
Either way I deleted my account.
It was a discussion about congestion pricing.
What is happening a lot here in Holland now that the hard-right crowd are constantly spamming topics about totally unrelated issues with stuff like "There are only 2 genders". I don't mind them having an opinion (even though I strongly disagree), I just don't want it shoved in my face constantly and inappropriately. It's like they are so preoccupied with what's happening in other people's pants that they can't talk about anything else.
So yeah that is something I don't want to see in social media anymore and I avoid platforms that allow it. Like Xitter.
I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts that surrounds Trump.
There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.
It was the same with Brexit. Those 2 years I got so fed up with that constantly repeating discussion about separating goods & services which they knew was impossible from the start.
Why do they write as if activitypub and mastodon do not exist?
1. The platform is outright hostile to discovery. You generally can't even index posts in a search engine. This is not what I want, at all.
2. Moderation is awful. Letting individual servers control moderation at their whim is not what I want. In contrast, Bluesky's idea of labelling services and opt-in moderation sounds amazing.
3. After point 1, it probably goes without saying that Mastodon is outright hostile to algorithms. While I agree that algorithms can be very problematic, Bluesky's approach to opt-in algorithms is an interesting approach.
4. I think the ship has long sailed on Mastodon. It's failed time and again to gain enough critical mass for non-tech people to adopt. Clearly the combination of above issues, or even maybe the confusion of onboarding, is too much.
Overall I'm glad Mastodon exists, and perhaps Bluesky wouldn't be what it is without first seeing what worked and didn't work with Mastodon.
But the others seem to be very much at home. They are not millions. They are probably prioritizing the small communities that have formed over maximum reach.
That's a per-instance setting in an easy to find place in the Administration section. It's not doing anything more complex than swapping ROBOTS.txt files.
If on per-instance, there are also per-user settings to opt-in. (Again, it mostly just tweaks ROBOTS.txt.)
The off-by-default nature makes it seem "hostile" if your intent is to roll your own Fediverse index, because you actually have to read ROBOTS.txt files and abide by them. On the other hand, it is nice because it sets an ecosystem norm that indexes and bots should respect ROBOTS.txt and are considered bad actors to destroy if they can't be bothered to do the simple thing of respecting a ROBOTS.txt file.
The off-by-default nature makes it a little bit harder to find an instance if you do want your posts indexed in a search engine, but that's a part of why good federation means a diversity of instances.
Also, if they are your posts you want searchable nothing is stopping you from using an API to repost them to any other website you control with search engine indexing. I've seen several bloggers include their microblog posts from ActivityPub on their blog. That's my "eventual" plan for my own ActivityPub posts; I don't want the "live feed" search indexed, but I may want to eventually curate "best of" stuff, add context, do some revisions/editing, and upgrade them to blog posts.
You create the content on your device and then send it to many of these relays (usually 10-20) and other users pull the content from also 10-20 relays. So if one relay decides to block you, then people still get your content from other relays. If all relays decide to block you, then you can (quite easily) run your own relay and tell your friends to pull the data from it. You own your data and you can resend it to wherever you want (it's signed by your private key, so it's verifiably from you).
Relays can and do filter notes by pub key. To fight spam, and problematic content. But you as a user can always change the relay set that you post to. And, of course, host your own relay, which is pretty straightforward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostr
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/
Is that because of it being crypto adjacent?
https://solidproject.org
https://github.com/solid
Plenty of stats websites for both, you should check them.
I would have been happy on Mastodon too, and I don't know why it didn't catch on with non-tech people, but it just hasn't. So Bluesky is our main opportunity for an open social web, at this time.
The number of dead links I've had where the shard is down or overloaded is way too high
The design simply doesn't work imo
https://fed.brid.gy/
Labeling another post as deceptive and then trying to use just one demographic (and not a very large one at that) as proof for whether mastodon is "large" in percentage terms is not very reassuring as to the level of discussion on Mastodon tbh.
Data isn't tied to an instance in mastodon, it resides in an instance and can be easily migrated. If you either host yourself or subscribe to a reputable service that offers mastodon, like omg.lol then it's a safe bet your data will live long after the other proprietary services get shut down.
1. This is true for did:web but less true for did:plc identities.
2. For did:plc identities to survive a full "bluesky PBC" death, you'd need to to transfer master authority for your PLC identity to a set of keys you control. If you don't then ultimately bluesky PBC would still have final authority over your identity. But if you transfer control to your own keys ahead of time then you can use those keys to make changes long after bluesky PBC's death.
This is a tool that allows you to create new recovery keys: https://github.com/renahlee/manual
Post about said tool: https://bsky.app/profile/renahlee.com/post/3lcbnab6rl22h
An article on how to do this manually: https://whtwnd.com/fei.chicory.blue/entries/How%20to%20get%2...
It's generally pretty sparse docs because everything is fairly "beta" still and because it is cryptography if you fuck it up you permanently lose control over your account forever. This is one of the reasons they don't advertise non-custodial recovery keys super aggressively.
And the protocol that is used for maintaining a ledger of key changes isn't exactly ideal or to my knowledge final but rather is in a "it's good enough until we douse the other fires" state.
Same goes for identity (albeit in a different way)
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/
"Dual MIT/Apache-2.0 License
Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Bluesky PBC, and Contributors
Except as otherwise noted in individual files, this software is licensed under the MIT license (<http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>), or the Apache License, Version 2.0 (<http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>).
Downstream projects and end users may chose either license individually, or both together, at their discretion. The motivation for this dual-licensing is the additional software patent assurance provided by Apache 2.0."
Even when Bluesky decides to fuck around with the licenses, everybody is free to fork the current version crediting Bluesky PBC due to the MIT and Apache 2.0 license allowing this.
And besides that, the community could also decide not to support AT at all but put their full weight behind Nostr (https://nostr.com/)
UPDATE:
And the protocol spec is licensed under Creative Commons:
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-website/
"Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)
Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Bluesky PBC, and Contributors
Documentation text and blog posts in this repository are licensed under a permissive CC-BY license.
For anybody interested in derivative works of documents and specifications, remember that:
- you must give attribution (credit) to the original work - you must indicate any changes made - trademark rights are not granted (for example, to "Bluesky", "AT Protocol", or "atproto", or any logos or icons)
Inline code examples, example data, and regular expressions are under Creative Commons Zero (CC-0, aka Public Domain) and copy/pasted without attribution."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing https://web.archive.org/web/20250107144929/https://blocktoge... https://web.archive.org/web/20241230160146/https://gardenfen...
folks just get riled up when their diatribes don't get traction
Why should I listen to the endless amount of slop flat earthers shat upon the internet at large?
The early internet was a pretty decent place to talk, debate, and see opinions you didn't agree with. But those days are long gone. He'll, these days the other side of the conversation could just be a bot that will never change its mind, and waste your time you could be talking to an actual human.
Kill files were required for reading Usenet. There were less bad posters, but since saw everything in newsgroup, it helped to filter the problems.
And also with people who just add people they consider enemies for whatever reason to all sorts of lists, and others who just subscribe to those lists blindly, without ever checking any. Why would they want to, it's supposedly unsavory.
Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it. Just because it says "list of X" doesn't mean it's a list of X, it just means anyone can title things however they like.
On small sites, yes. You can actually do this in human bound time limits.
On a big site that attracts millions of small time spammers along with commercial and nation state level scammers, you've already lost. The rate new scam channels are created are faster than you can even click the UI button to remove them.
If you value your time you'll make a whitelist of a few trusted channels and avoid the rest. If those channels have recommendations that fill your interest, add those channels to your whitelist. This will stop the constant doom scrolling and brain rot traps we humans love to fall into.
Simply put, there is too much information in the world for you to ever be able to see and filter it all. Propaganda techniques like the 'firehose of falsehood' will exploit this to wear you out and make you ineffective. Select your media choices wisely.
Bluesky is not that site though? There used to be a lot of fake follows a few weeks ago, and many people posting about it, but I didn't have one in over a week. It may get to that, of course, as the site grows.
What I've actually seen a lot is people posting about lists they've been added to, and it's just silly. I've been added to one or two "MAGA" lists myself, heh.. I'm not even American, have no love for Trump, but I disagreed with "the people who are against MAGA" on something (I don't even know what it was), so now I'm "MAGA" according to that list, DNI haha.
Anyone interested, you can check what lists accounts are on here: https://clearsky.app/
It simmered down now, but people seemed positively obsessed with blocking and letting their enemies "whither in silence" etc. That's the main reason I care, because it fascinates me, because I find it kind of sad. But in practical terms, the people who use social media like that are no loss to me, and I'm no loss to them, so it's actually totally fair, I don't mind being put on block lists for petty reasons. But I know not everybody is that jaded. Some people probably do mind.
And it also seems kind of insidious how it makes people disappear from each other who never interacted, so they will never find out it was for a BS reason. It's not exactly Black Mirror, it's just Bluesky, no harm no foul, but still. How people (seemingly, maybe my perception is wrong) go "oh nice, this is useful thanks" and subscribe, without much discussion or concern, does rub me the wrong way a little.
I like my echo chamber. I like talking to my friends online. I don't want things I don't want to see.
Crazy people can't follow protocols, and most realizes they're in the wrong before blocking million accounts. References to useful contents from blocked accounts will occasionally leak through channels, and that should validate/invalidate choices.
It's probably a pain for spammers and an extra processing cost for serving platform, though.
edit: if you consider it must to block massive amount of real users(i.e. not script bots and/or third world hired guns trying to destroy a platform) to use a platform normally, that's just not sane.
It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care (despite its many imperfections. )
And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote based on opinion rather than discussion.
So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
This is ultimately how human societies work.
Even if you write a well argued and decently sourced comment, it's very likely to get flagged by people with ideological disagreements to this. And there are a lot of them on HN, so your comment will likely disappear pretty quickly.
Those are both the same example, and sometimes comments get downvoted because they're just making a bad or vacuous argument for an indefensible position.
It's obvious why intelligence agencies want to do bulk data collection, and the reason is related to why it's a problem -- the public needs to be protected against bulk data collection by foreign intelligence agencies, and by domestic ones with insufficient oversight. "Oversight" in a democracy means the public knows about it, otherwise how can there even be a debate about whether it's worth it? But intelligence agencies aren't in favor of oversight of intelligence agencies, so they'll always be in favor of surveillance even if it isn't worth it, which is why they can't be allowed to do it in secret and anyone bringing it into the light is acting in the public interest.
Moreover, bulk surveillance isn't worth it, because if you don't build technology that can resist bulk surveillance then foreign governments will do it to your population and the cost of that exceeds any benefit from you being able to do it to others, even before you account for the domestic cost of having a surveillance apparatus already in place in the event that an oppressive administration comes to power.
Even the fucking salad, such as they are, are in plastic bags and dumped into a bowl. Pointing this out though, was worthy of more than one downvote. Why? Does HN have some deep bench of experts on American casual dining chains? Is it a technology topic? No, the echo chamber had already decided, and going against this insults the echo chamber even if there is no emotional investment.
When I said there was an echo chamber, I pointed out that I was excluding politics because you kind of just expect that. But it's literally about everything no matter how trivial it should be. I have had many examples over the years, and if there were a point to it I could give you an exhaustive list. This is the human condition. Forever arguing over stupid shit for the rest of eternity, or at least until doomsday, which I suspect is less than a century off.
I mean, what?
So for example, Thai Chicken Salad:
https://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/salads/thai-chicke...
It has leafy greens that would get soggy if frozen or combined with the other ingredients for shipping. There is a slice of lime on the side. I doubt they ship them pre-sliced or heat the lime with the rest of the food.
It's presumably "from scratch" in the same way that Blue Apron is and not in the sense that there is a local chef shopping at the local wholesale market to decide what to put on the local menu. But it's possible to distinguish the former from the thing where your meal comes out of a freezer and goes into a microwave as a single unit, with the latter implying that it contains no ingredients that haven't been frozen or stuffed so full of preservatives that they'll biodegrade some decades after the wrapper does.
And even if some items have ingredients that could be frozen, that doesn't tell you whether or not they actually were. Or, for that matter, that a meal made "from scratch" couldn't have any frozen ingredients.
> It has leafy greens that would get soggy if frozen or combined with the other ingredients for shipping.
You know those plastic bags of chopped lettuce, often with carrots and cabbage in them too, you can buy at the grocery store? Sysco has those in their catalog, bigger ones.
Everything's in a package, dumped in a bowl or on a plate, reheated (if needed) and sent out to your table. But all of HN was absolutely certain that they were some gourmet operation, and that some very large majority of their menu was made there, in the restaurant. And everyone still thinks so. Who thought this originally (if anyone) I do not know, but then you all sort of agreed. Enough of you agreed that disagreement wasn't welcome, and that was that. We live in giant echo chambers, and it's not just the polarized politics doing it.
> And even if some items have ingredients that could be frozen, that doesn't tell you whether or not they actually were.
I'm telling you that. I'm giving you an educated opinion, having worked in restaurants and knowing what non-previously prepared food looks like, having eaten in the restaurant in question multiple times, having studied the menu the day the story hit HN.
No sauce, no pasta, no soup, no meal, no dessert, absolutely nothing there is "made from scratch". No primary ingredients are even available in the kitchen of that restaurant save tapwater and the few spices they would sprinkle on their overpriced sirloin steak on the grill are back there. And it's bizarrely naive to think so.
It's also weird how insulted this forum is from people who don't sit in an office chair to earn their living. I guess there's only one Cheesecake Factory in all of San Francisco though, and the workers there live in the homeless tent camps so none of you talk to them.
Slashdot had a superior moderation system whereby the ability to downvote (mod points) was given out selectively and in limited quantity. In all honestly it was years ahead of its time.
Was it the hot grits ?
I say this as someone who still has an account over there with a lowish UID.
I vaguely remember such was their commitment to free speech, if you browsed at -1 they allowed posts to remain up that broke the HTML and page rendering, and refused to take them down on principle, until they could update their filters. Those early days of the web were a wild west.
Twitter was better then.
We don't have to guess how that works, it existed.
This is how normal in-person social interaction works too, by the way. If you’re in a pub and someone comes up and starts ranting at you about how the pizza restaurant basements are turning the frogs gay, you’re probably not going to engage them. And if they keep at it, they’ll probably get kicked out.
The internet is full of people who (a) insane, and (b) insane in a very boring, same-y way. Filtering these people out is _fine_. There is no moral obligation to listen to every ranting idiot who comes along.
People are constantly dragging up topics like transsexuality in completely unrelated discussions. I completely disagree with their opinion and I like challenging them on it (for example, what is it to them what other people do with their bodies?). They've never been able to give me a good answer to that so far. But they're constantly derailing topics about completely different things. They seem so obsessed with this topic. It's also getting so tediously repetitive. Always the same slurs without any kind of actual discussion.
The thing is, here in the Netherlands we used to have 'echo chambering' as the foundation for the country. We used to call it 'verzuiling' (literally translated "pillarification"). After the war the country was made up of several groups that didn't get along so well so each had their own newspapers, social circles, TV and radio broadcasters etc. There were the Catholics, the super-strict Calvinists, the Labour/progressive atheist crowd etc. They basically lived alongside without really interacting. And really, lately I'm starting to think this was not such a bad idea at all.
The thing is… if you had grown up in someone else’s life, you would be the one censored. Your intelligence has nothing to do with it. It’s a historical perspective.
But of course, you’re a genius and can’t nobody else tell you nothin. I believe John Stewart Mill wrote at least a volume on that topic!
Choosing to ignore people is not censorship.
Also I would note that the lunatic-fringe far-right stuff I was referencing with the pizza restaurants turning the frogs gay did not _exist_ when I was growing up; it's quite new, really emerging in the past 15 years (of course, it does take a lot from older far-right concepts, but it is to some extent a thing onto itself). This isn't something that was forced upon people as kids because their great-grandparents were into dank Pepe memes, it is something that they have embraced themselves.
Defend it all you like. I think it is a move of people with weak character who aren’t actually so sure in their ideas that it makes them uncomfortable to be challenged.
Yes, absolutely.
"Better for discourse?"
Incredibly. You actually have conversations. You talk about topics. You replace all the meaningless arguing and yelling with actual conversation.
"Better for protecting your echo chamber from things that might challenge you?"
... The whole world is challenging right now.
It has been my entire life.
The only way to protect my echo chamber is to make the world better.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/430608-trending-science-...
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/mit-sloan-study-finds-thinkin...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07779
They help make Bluesky usable; for instance I subscribe to one which nukes transphobes, because, really, I do not have the patience to listen to their One Joke anymore, thanks. And another which warns on people with AI-generated profile pics (these are virtually always some form of scammer, or, worse, AI evangelists).
The blocklists are not mandatory.
I've seen an instance where an innocent user added to a blocklist that blocks Nazi ideology or something like that.
Honestly if that happened to me, I'd quit Bluesky instantly
Now I had a good look and I'm pretty sure the people added to this list haven't posted anything to warrant this accusation. Yet if you go to their profiles on Clearsky or whatever it will show them in this pedophile list, like https://clearsky.app/messyjhesse.bsky.social/lists
That's not right, and the worst thing is you can't see on the app if you've been wrongly labeled that way, you have to use a third-party website to find out.
These are 3rd party lists and a user has to opt into them to leverage their blocking choices. If a list blocks 1M accounts but only has 100 followers, it's not such a big deal.
When you subscribe to a well built list, you are given options for how like mute vs block, your choice, or label | warn | hide, per label, a subchoice within an opt in labeller.
What ATProto gives us as users is choice and competition. Bad lists will not gain subscribers and will be marginalized by the market effect. High quality lists will be shared and gain network effect.
We shouldn't expect or want a one-size fits all solution to moderation. Our social graphs in real life and online are not a giant blob where everyone has to listen to everyone. We naturally break down into subgraphs or communities. Online communities or groups should be able to exclude people for any reason they wish. They should be seen similar to a private group in real life. You shouldn't expect to be allowed into or to participate in a group if your going against the group's rules or customs in real life. Online should be no different.
Imagine if HN had a "block" option you could select against a user, that when you click it, it wipes out every comment that this user ever made on a post that you both commented in, past and future - but not just for you, for every other HN user as well. And there's no "showdead" option to see them either, for anyone.
Like if I or anyone who replied to you blocked you now, with this hypothetical Bluesky-like feature on HN, no-one at all would be able to see your comment. Except maybe dang if he went poking around in the database.
That's basically how Bluesky blocks work. It's absurd.
You might be responding to a spreader of disinformation with facts, but if they then block you, no-one else will be able to read your response.
if alice blocks bob: it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts; blocks bob from replying to future posts of alice; but more importantly it erases bob from alice's feed wich is often the only healthy thing to do because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
> it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts
Exactly, it hides these from anyone else who might read the thread, including others participating in the thread.
This offers Alice not just the means to control her own Bluesky experience, but also to unilaterally control which parts of the conversation that all others on Bluesky can see.
It is in effect a feature to selectively delete the posts of others for any reason.
> because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
That is generally not the reason why users on Bluesky hit the block button. There's a strong tendency there of blocking because someone disagrees with you, or they explained why you're wrong about something, or they pointed out that you're spreading misinformation.
On Bluesky, blocking is a way to quickly and conveniently hide any dissent.
i dont't think we're going to agree on why people generaly block others. you seem to see yourself as some sort of dissenter, or a truth-teller of some kind, but when you get blocked for interjecting into someone else's coversations it's just because no one asked you to be part of that conversation and now you lost your access privileges. this rejection probably fucks with your self-esteem more than it should but i'm no therapist so maybe go find one instead of annoying folks on the internet.
I'd go so far as to say that social media without a block button is unethical, and promotes propaganda and harassment. The block button means the user heard you, use used your free speech! Congrats! Now they want to walk away from you. Ooops. No, you are not entitled to get any response, nor to continue talking at them if they choose to leave the area.
the one other point that seems to be ignore though is: you are still capable of continuing that conversation on your own terms on you own feed. your posts will not be visible to the people blocking you but everyone else can still see them.
Right, that's the problem.
> your posts will not be visible to the people blocking you but everyone else can still see them.
They can see them if they go digging for them, but they can't see them in any reasonable place.
it's the purpose of the block, it's intentional, and works wonderfully.
what's your point?
Bluesky provides a richer set of options. I should be able to choose who interacts with my posts. If that's not your style, fine, there are other options out there. Bluesky users like this feature. It reduces the toxicity and makes it a more enjoyable platform.
The culture around "don't engage, just block" the trolls helps keep the discourse more civil. With a fresh start, we can stay ahead of the trolls and bots. It's a group effort
See https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/7021 for more detail.
A relevant comment from that issue:
> As it stands, if 20 people are involved in a discussion, and ONE single person decides to block someone, then all of a sudden, the 19 other people in the discussion (+ any other viewers) are now inconvenienced simply because one person had an issue with someone else.
> Bluesky does have a bit of a block culture, and as such, this issue is only going to get worse and worse, and threads are going to get harder and harder to read and follow as more and more people get blocked.
> Just the other day I got a notification, and I clicked on it, and once again, the post they were replying to was "blocked", not because of me, but because the person who made the post blocked the person they were responding to. I was trying to make sense of their post, but now I couldn't as I had no idea what the hell they were replying to... then I think I found the post they replied to; it showed "1 reply", but when I clicked on it, no replies were shown.
> Now, this functionality was probably done with good intentions - but you know what they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Another comment explaining the problem:
> This is working as intended but I agree it should be reassessed. For example:
> 1. In a popular thread, User A posts some nonsense
> 2. User B replies to that reply explaining why it's nonsense
> 3. User A blocks User B
> 4. Now User A has successfully hidden the rebuttal to his comment from everyone. The only defense against this is if the thread OP happens to block User A.
> This is a pretty serious downside of the "nuclear block" system imo. It creates an escalation ladder of blocking where the first user to hit "block" is advantaged. On the other hand it causes me personally to avoid blocking where I otherwise would, because I want the conversation to still be visible for others.
> There should at least be a "show reply" button on posts that are hidden for this reason IMO. Otherwise you've given every user the unilateral power to hide a reply, for everyone, permanently. If I hide a reply the normal way, it's not deleted for everyone! There is a "show hidden reply" button! The effect of hiding someone else's reply should be consistent across these two ways to do it.
Choice and competition will make this network a better long-term social fabric than the centralized systems we are used to.
By any account, it is far less than building an independent social network application. The components are also decoupled so you don't have to rebuild everything. If you want to build an App View, it's just a webapp or react native. You don't have to rebuild everything
re: incentives, there are many, people have different perspectives and motivations to do so
This is significantly more complex than making a few small changes to the frontend app.
If I post something that gets traction, and someone replies with an ad for ED pills, I should be able to remove that spam from the discussion on my thread and not just from my view of it. If others have already "engaged" with a plug for boner pills, their replies are not lost but are just no longer part of the thread stemming from my post.
If you as the OP don't want this behavior, there are other tools at your disposal (mute the replier instead, "hide for everyone", etc).
I have written my own webapp (https://blebbit.com) and I can see content and accounts I have blocked on Bluesky. I just validated this to be the true. This because I have not implemented block respecting in my own code yet. It's more work to actually respect the blocking.
The full backup of ATProto is more than 5T now.
You seem really misinformed about all of this.
Or maybe you created an account to intentionally spread falsehoods about Bluesky? There has been a flurry of this on HN lately
https://i.ibb.co/CJkZWBG/image.png
No-one has blocked anyone at this point, so the conversation is visible to all parties and any onlookers.
Your own app shows the same:
https://i.ibb.co/3kxp5Q9/image.png
Now for whatever reason, user B decides to block user A. The entire subthread starting with user B's response to user A is removed, which includes making the discussion between user A and user C no longer viewable in that thread, to anyone:
https://i.ibb.co/j6f9z92/image.png
This appears exactly the same in your app:
https://i.ibb.co/2Px9bw5/image.png
The root cause is that the app.bsky.feed.getPostThread endpoint omits the entire tree of replies for that subthread in its response:
https://i.ibb.co/F45n6QV/image.png
Please feel free to verify this in your own browser and explain why you believe this to be incorrect.
That's your opinion. The vast majority of ATProto users like the enhanced controls over their conversations. If you don't like it, use a different social media platform
That one user blocking another user makes chunks of the conversation disappear for everyone else viewing the thread is verifiable fact. As it is a verifiable fact that this is done server-side via the getPostThread endpoint, by which posts in the parent and replies fields of the response are omitted.
This is not "absolutely and provably wrong", as you put it. Maybe do some research yourself before accusing others of intentionally spreading falsehoods?
It's working as expected
You have made multiple other inaccurate statements about Bluesky / ATProto throughout your comments with your new account
You have been arguing that blocked posts still appear in your custom client, which is a different claim than nastoy. As detailed by the GitHub issue that started this disagreement, bluesky relays have introduced thread breaking behavior that one can not get around simply by forking the appview.
"relay" does not appear in that issue, not sure where this idea that relays have introduced thread breaking behavior is coming from
That being the case, when you want to get posts of a thread, the information of which posts belong to which thread are the responsibility of a relay, which is doing the firehose-level-aggregation of which posts belong to which threads, am I misunderstanding?
You have a list of public people that piss you off and avoid, when you are asked about them you say "ugh I don't like x because". Now, you might get someone say "dont be mean about x, they had y, which is why they did z" and you might accept or reject the point they made.
However that person is unlikely to blast you with content or facts to do with said public figure, unless they want to drive you away.
It is part of human nature, infact its the basis of society. The only way we can function is by having effective way to have some shared core "principles" (formally around religion, feudal chiefs, now around semi cult leaders) This means rejecting other ideas as heretical. (see civil rights marches, universal suffrage, silver/gold standard the fracturing of protestantism)
Do you some evidence that BlueSky owners are manipulating the feed like we know Elon has been doing with X.
Because I would argue it's more just that the communities have fragmented.
UPDATE: OK, didn't realize it was a configurable setting. I guess I ran into it a few times and assumed it was a default block. Thanks for the clarification.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3lfdz...
Does everything need to be 100% public?
What if I want to post somewhat private thoughts or images and restrict the content in some manner?
Or only if you re-encrypt the content for every key you hand out?
Imagine if Wikipedia asked you to log in before you could read anything.
It makes some sense for something like Facebook which is more or less private by default (you couldn't see much without an account anyway), but not for X or Bluesky where it's all public.
However powerful the X/Meta AI feed algorithms are at surfacing content people are interested in, it all counts for nothing if people see content that they find repulsive. Its not just far right content, disturbing content in general gets more engagement and is surfaced in feeds.
BlueSky and its AT Protocol, by putting moderation back into the hands of the user, allows people to see the content they want and not what they don't want, making for a much better and more positive user experience.
I predict that this means that at some point, it will take over as the dominant social media platform. There are already multiple startups with VC funding building things on the AT Protocol.
As for the moment, whenever someone complains to me about toxicity in social media on X/Facebook or whatever platform they are using, I recommend BlueSky and advise others to do the same. Word of mouth spread is powerful.
On one hand, it is another alternative if Bluesky falls, but on the other hand I feel like the algorithm makes it a different sort of community.
Is that an omission, or is that because Mastodon is already in the process of "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship"¹, and because ActivityPub was published as a W3C Recommendation back in 2018?
¹ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-...
ATProto is still young, even compared to ActivityPub. It will continue to evolve and improve. It certainly has the momentum compared to ActivityPub
The only headache is picking the server. If I pick one for them it's pretty smooth sailing from there.
If someone can't handle the basic interface, there's a really really high chance he doesn't have much of value to say.
The problem isn't that it's "complicated". It's that they have no incentive to sign up.
As much as the HN crowd hates it, ads and marketing work. People went to Bluesky not because it's easier but because several famous people talked about it loudly and everyone knows the people behind the original Twitter are behind it.
Marketing.
ATProto removes the switching cost. This is a significant difference from ActivityPub
Moderation policies change even with the big ones (Twitter, etc).
I suspect you're referring to the confusion due to different servers having different moderation policies, and that could effectively make you invisible to others or vice versa merely by being on a given server.
First, my guess is that this is a problem with a tiny percentage of servers. I've not had to deal with this even once.
Second, when you say you "heard others bring it up", my guess is these others are highly technical folks. Not a single "average" person stayed away from Mastodon due to this. I suspect perhaps 99% of active Mastodon users are not even aware of this.
These are valid criticisms of Mastodon. But they're not the reason people didn't sign up for it. Name recognition is.
> You can either deal with it or start over again on another server. Losing all your followers is why people put up with bad social media overlords.
FYI, for quite a while now you can switch servers, and have the followers automatically follow your new account.
The problem discussed here is that Mastodon is not simply de-centralized, but its superstructure upholds a segregation policy and loves to ostracize admins based on, ahem, preferences. This in turn encourage admins to join a virtue signaling zeitgeist, and towards assuming more divisive and dismissive stances, out of fear. As a second order effect, regular non-admin users and their ability to communicate would be not only at whim of the server owner but also that of the inner group cast towards the admin.
Bluesky doesn't have this type of problem, precisely because it's not too decentralized. Either you individually get banned or not, based on levels of value alignment between you and the corpo outsourced moderators. There are also blocklist feature as well as third party voluntarily applicable moderation framework in Bluesky, but personally I can't imagine majority of users using it, or dividing the network into fragmented subgroups, and are non-factors in the grand scheme of things.
(By the way, I sometimes wonder how moderator value alignment is going to inevitably drift over time; as I understand it, social media content moderation is partially automated and exploitatively outsourced to workers from low income regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa. This phenomenon is almost exclusively discussed in context of human rights and fair worker treatment, but I think this also means a lot of people with minimal prior exposure to media, let alone the anaerobic layer of the Internet, are being trained to develop preferences on such content and especially the more flaggable yet less hateful and flaggable-but-less-flag-deserving content. i.e. stimulative but not blood and gore. If anyone is reading down to this line, you know what I mean.)
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
ActivityPub, Pleroma and Mastodon existed before this, and they just work.
They're in the same general space, but only one is playing the game.
All you need to do is down-rank political content in general and prevent it from appearing in For You type feeds.
Then it just becomes a case of people needing to specifically follow political content which heavily limits its reach.
It's an oxymoron.
So much so all the journalists left for BlueSky and they have had to reverse it.
Does that mean bluesky will somehow centrally moderate posts "related to terrorism"?
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
The AT protocol may promise decentralisation and an insurance policy, but that is meaningless if Bluesky the company can stop using the AT protocol and survive it.
As long as the majority of users use the official app and log in to the primary server with their username/password, not the protocol's private key, Bluesky isn't forced to continue using the AT protocol. They still have power to push the enshittify button, block federation, and keep users captive on the official app/website like Musk's X does.
Bluesky and Graber recognize the importance of this effort and have signaled their approval. But the point is, it can’t rely on them.
What’s the point of this article? The repo is dual MIT/Apache [0]. Nothing seems to prevent the author from forking and hacking away. Just do it.
0. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
It's a pretty inane article that provides no solutions. Twitter got bought and TikTok got made because attention is valuable. There's ads/enshittification because a service like this is expensive to run, also you want to raise money for new features, also greed is a thing.
TFA wrestles with none of this? At least like, consider nationalization or some kind of nationalized e2e platform. Aren't we wishcasting after all?
Unfortunately, this is also strike in favor of the blockchain people (like Farcaster) — the best of which have been working to find ways to keep systems permanently decentralized (and not just temporarily decentralized, like Bluesky/Nostr/Mastodon/SMTP/etc.).