b) the article is about why I won't set up on +new+, unfederated services, not why I'm ragequitting
c) Everything I write - 5-7 essays/week - are open access (CC BY you can republish them, including commercially) at pluralistic.net, and mirrored to Medium. I write one Medium column every week, which is Medium-only, and pays my mortgage.
It's OK if you want to skip that column, but I think it's hard to characterize my publishing program as ungenerous.
@pluralistic@rysiek@kas Oh that's pretty cool. How do I federate with medium to get their content. Do they have one that is a bot that posts what their authors write?
@pluralistic@rysiek I’ve seen it claimed by a number of lapsed Mastodon users now active on BlueSky that the latter’s killer feature is that the culture isn’t the Mastodon one (insert any of “HOA Karens”, “alt text/CW scolds”, “Linuxbeard mansplainers” or similar). Their view of the desirability of federating with the AP fediverse may be very different to ours.
This may also apply to people active on Threads, assuming that those exist.
@pluralistic After spending several months on Bluesky and working with the protocol (on building a PHP library for it), I realized it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Even if/when they do federate, the intent appears to be for large companies to run major portions of the protocol.
And Bluesky just converted to a C corp to take on venture capital.
I deactivated my account last week because I won’t get fooled again.
(I now have that song by The Who stuck in my head.)
@Edelruth@pluralistic I’m not an expert on companies and stock, but I don’t think Jack had a choice in the matter. It was a good deal for the shareholders, and the board has a fiduciary responsibility to them, so they had to accept the deal or the shareholders would have sued.
@ramsey@pluralistic It looks like BS converted their corporate form from a "Public Benefits LLC" to a "Public Benefits C Corporation". However I'm not sure either of those things actually exists. It seems like they are trying to cosplay as a B corporation, which does exist.
@jef@pluralistic I read up on it a bit, and I’m by no means an expert, but yes, it’s a corporate structure that appears to cosplay as a “certified B” corp. As far as I can tell, the only requirement is that they define in their Articles the “public benefit” they provide, and they publish a yearly report on that benefit. The public itself has no stake in the company. The benefit Bluesky provides is the AT Protocol.
@ramsey@jef@pluralistic The only thing I've been able to discern is that Public Benefit corporations can explicitly have a mission and be profit-driven at the same time.
Probably the way this shakes out is that shareholders can't successfully sue for lack of value maximization when the company decides to do something good at the expense of optimal future profits.
I don't think there's anything that requires the corporation to follow that mission, just that it's allowed to. :-/
@timmc@ramsey@jef@pluralistic Exactly right. I researched B corps just last month, and there is no duty, fiduciary or otherwise, to anyone besides shareholders. They can be as rapacious as any C corp.
@ramsey@pluralistic Thank you. I have been mulling trying BlueSky, but there's no point. Dumping Xcrement, passing on Threads and Bluesky entirely. Sick of these greedy bastards and their unrelenting need to control everything and everyone.
@ramsey@pluralistic the Musk “Blocks, might remove from users rights.” Huge surge to Bluesky. I woke up to an invite code from the app. Made an account to add some that I follow on Voldemort’s territory. Within hours, Dorsey posts agreement to “no block”. Felt like two billionaires had pwned both platforms.
@clairwil@pluralistic Well, to be “fair,” neither of them pwned the platforms. They both literally own them, in the very literal and not-at-all figurative sense.
@ramsey@clairwil@pluralistic I felt that they used those on both platforms as toys. Reminded me of cruel children herding ants around with a water hose, just to watch them run.
One might say, "Nothing to see here folks, run along home now.", or perhaps, that statement is only true because it has been blatantly obvious and in the face of all of us directly involved since the very beginning.
@DaniES Admittedly, I’m doing some reading-between-the-lines, but IMO, it’s implied:
“The federation architecture allows anyone to host a BGS, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers. Small bespoke BGSs could also service tightly or well-defined slices of the network, like a specific new application or a small community.”
@DaniES The BGSs are called “Big Graph Services.” In name alone, this implies they’re too big for individuals to run. The protocol docs go into more detail about how BGSs work: https://atproto.com/guides/overview
In that doc, they have this interesting sentence: “As with Web search engines, users are free to select their aggregators.”
@ramsey
bit late to the discussion, but I'm running multiple custom BGS instances which index the entire network. Right now it's still possible to just host them yourself, with similar resource requirements as other self-hosted services, just more storage usage (full network history is about 50 GB atm). Also the marketplace of algorithms thing is already available, did you try some of the custom feeds? @DaniES
@ramsey@pluralistic Poeple who think Bluesky would ever federate like Mastodon are naive. If they do, people could just make a super-mastodon that federates both with Bluesky and any ActivityPub service, allowing people to just skip the ads. Investors won't like that.
@karpour@pluralistic There are folks currently working on an ActivityPub bridge to AT Protocol. Bluesky has federation active in their sandbox environment, and supposedly, you can request access to develop against it. I’m not sure how far along the bridge is, though. But yes, you’re right; Bluesky might not allow bridging if they’re able to figure out how to advertise over a federated protocol.
@ramsey if nothing else at least Bluesky and Threads (both truly spectacularly terribly names) keep big corporate interests at arm’s length from the fedi. At least for now.
@alper
That strongly depends on the subgroup you want to see
in the recent weeks, Furries have 98% abandoned Fediverse, the only thing i read everywhere is
"has anyone a Blusky invite" or "i am now on Bluesky" "Fediverse is dead"
@ramsey@pluralistic I'd have to log into my account to see but 3 of em were liking nazis posting memes mocking people pissed about yet another anti-Black scandal
@santiago@villares@pluralistic To be fair to that “crypto developer,” the “crypto” they’re using is not blockchain tech but is standard cryptography. Jay, the “crypto dev” in question, did have some blockchain background, but what she brings to the table is more around project management and arch design. Much of the crypto they use is around uniquely identifying data and signing it for verification by nodes.
@ramsey@villares@pluralistic I know cryptography doesn’t mean cryptocurrency and even though they never said anything publicly about integrating shitcoins into BlueSky we do know Musk & Dorsey were totally into this– supposedly because of privacy. It just happens that in 2021 it looked promising and in 2022+ it looked like jail :-)
@ramsey@villares@pluralistic I remember Tesla bought 1.5 Billion in Bitcoin in 2021, the same year Jay Graber who previously worked on Zcash was appointed. Of course in 2022 & 2023 it didn’t sound good to mention coins anymore. As there is currently zero actual federation I suspected they’d wait to just modify the protocol before federating. Yes, pure speculation but I am not suspecting innocent random people.
@ramsey I'm intrigued by the AT protocol. Can anyone run a node and interact with folks on BS? if not, what's the main barrier? lack of available software, need of approval to be a node?
@andresmh The answer is “not yet,” and it’s unclear if they’ll ever fully federate. They’re still learning and proving the protocol (and making major changes to it, as they learn). It’s a moving target. They do supposedly have a sandbox environment where federation is enabled for testing apps, but it can’t communicate with the main community on Bluesky.
I decided not to bother developing for it anymore. It has a few good ideas, & these ideas could be adapted to ActivityPub.
@ramsey good to know. One thing I liked about AT is that people can use their domain as part of their handle, without having to set up a node/instance.
@andresmh Yep. That, and the idea that you could fully move your account and all its content, etc. from one node to another. In practice, that’s never been tested, though.
@lukasb@pluralistic I definitely think they have some good ideas in terms of the protocol and tech, but they have lots of people/culture problems they think can be solved by the tech, which IMO, won’t work out for them.
@ramsey@lukasb@pluralistic To paraphrase The Police's "There's no political solution for a troubled evolution", I'm going to say there's no technological solution for our troubled evolution.
@jwcph@ramsey@pluralistic maybe. But there's a lot of potential in new timeline algorithms, I think - I'm excited about the idea of just letting devs try out new ideas here.
Basically I'm wondering if we can surface good stuff without the "optimizing for car crashes" aspect of current social media algorithms.
@lukasb@ramsey@pluralistic I don't agree. There will be now possible way for us, the users, to have any kind of transparency into how any given algo works. Even in the best case scenario - say, one where you can fine-tune the algo to your preferences somehow - you still have no idea in hell how it achieves the feed you're looking at.
For all you can possibly know, any algo you choose may be laden with all sorts of icky or dangerous biases & there's no way for you to know.
@jwcph@ramsey@pluralistic I don't understand. Why couldn't developers open-source their algorithms? (Yes, it's more complicated if there's machine learning involved, but it's also possible there.)
@lukasb@ramsey@pluralistic Open-sourcing algos won't help in the slightest. Even experts won't be able to agree how an algo actually works in the wild just by reading the code - and everyone else will be utterly without a single chance of getting any kind of clarity or understanding from anywhere.
@jwcph@lukasb@pluralistic Algorithms are code routines. You can tell what an algorithm does by reading the code. You’re giving the machines too much credit; none of them make decisions independently of the code and data given to them.
Here's a simple formula. You could trivially write code in a few lines that implements it.
Now predict if a given complex value 'c' will result in a bounded orbit for z when this is iterated.
It's a code routine (if you write the code ... if you want me to supply the code I can do that for you as well). You can read the code. Nothing, when this code is executed makes independent decisions. So you should be able to tell what it does just by reading it.
@qqmrichter@jwcph@lukasb@pluralistic If you’re attempting a “gotcha,” please just get to the point. I’m interested in understanding how the definition of a Mandelbrot set shows that we can’t tell what an algorithm does by looking at its code.
@ramsey@jwcph@lukasb@pluralistic No amount of looking at the Mandelbrot Set implementation code will tell you if a given point on the complex plane will lie within the set or not. The output cannot be inferred by inspection of the code. If you'd never encountered the Mandelbrot Set before you'd have no idea what to even expect in the behaviour. This despite the code implementing in deterministic fashion a trivial algorithm whose operation can be understood at a glance.
@ramsey@lukasb@pluralistic - and you might be giving me too little credit; I obviously know that. I also know, however, that code is a messy business, and that anything involving many parts all interacting with each other can be difficult - or impossible - to untangle & map out clearly (here meaning: In a way a non-expert can understand, which also accurately predicts the system's behavior).
Good work, Ben, thank you. I was wondering about Bluesky, even started the process of opening account, then few months ago my cat whiskers felt something untoward, and I got off the idea. Nothing concrete, just a hunch. Your post confirms it.
@ramsey@pluralistic I've ruminated on this a bit, and (hopefully obviously) while I share Cori's misgivings about promises-vs-actual-shipping on federation, I don't think "large companies run major portions of the protocol" is necessarily a failure state. I want that to be one model for how things scale, just not the only one. So that's not the disqualifier for me, though I agree we should hold off on commitments to any non-open platform.
@ramsey@pluralistic Wait. People thought BS was going to be serious about being federated and all that jazz? It's an investment vehicle launched by a billionaire. Why would they do that if it reduces the value of the company and monetization opportunities?
@CStamp@pluralistic They originally incorporated as an LLC. In the US, this stands for “limited liability company,” which has members as owners and doesn’t issue stock. Each employee (from my understanding) was a member of the LLC.
In transitioning to a C corp, it means they now have ownership based on stock, so the members (employees) now get their shares diluted by whatever venture capitalists want to put in money to own a part of the company.
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