Well, yes. But why hasn’t it happened yet? Feels a little like the tumblr promise ATM where it’s just not in their interests.
Beyond that, if forced to choose between a Threads dominated fediverse and a BlueSky federation, I think I’d lean toward to BlueSky and others might too.
Depends on how things shake out and how much can be built on ATProto, but I’d say bsky are sending better signals about their project than Threads right now.
@maegul Hard to say how it's going to end up with Threads and AP, I honestly wouldn't bet either way… there are some incentives in connecting and in not connecting. And it also depends on how their user activity / count is going to develop in coming months, and how well Twitter and Bluesky are going to do too.
I guess for me the big point is it doesn’t bode well if AP/masto’s best hope in a fight with bsky is Threads. It implies masto isn’t “winning” on its own merits.
@maegul It does seem like it… I mean, it's been a year now since a big migration started, but mostly just geeks ended up here, and big media, politics, institutions etc. haven't followed
Yep, for better or worse, masto may have failed as a Twitter substitute. Which was mastodon’s aim, so a bit sad to see. Too much reliance on decentralisation without enough UX to support the architecture. Hard lesson for tech people to learn perhaps!
A number I’m keen to watch is the MAU of mastodon as bsky opens up. If people get poached from here, that’d be a worrying sign. Masto might not realise, but being the only alternative might have been a big factor in its user numbers.
@maegul Right now Bluesky's active user numbers have been falling lately in the last few weeks, after rising consistently since spring… but a lot is going to change in the next few months.
@maegul I count the number of unique user DIDs in posts from a given day on my server, where I'm running the firehose for the feeds. It's not publicly exposed yet, I just post charts sometimes, but I want to put it on some public page at some point.
@maegul Hard to say what the user dynamic is exactly, I think a lot of people sign up, use the site for some time and then get bored/discouraged and leave. Hopefully opening up for public read access soon will bring some more major accounts from Twitter/Threads.
Yes. Their first attempt to make sustainable income is to provide domains for users or corporations or journalists etc who want their handle to be their own domain. Not sure how much income that will bring in for them, but it’s mildly interesting.
Presumably they’ll just go with ads eventually.
To be fair, it’s not like money isn’t a problem here.
@maegul so I haven’t looked myself, but I have heard other people say that when they poked around at the documentation they were horrified by it.
I guess you found it actually okay? What did you like about it?
And to lay my cards on the table, when I poked at the ActivityPub standard that horrified me. It looked completely unable to scale, and I felt like instance operators confirmed that when they started talking about the resource consumption.
@volkris@maegul I do like it much more myself (I've been hacking on it since April). It fixes some issues that AP has like the ease of account migration, your identity isn't bound to the instance but instead uses a "distributed ID", the architecture seems like it should scale better, no missing replies in threads etc. It takes different tradeoffs so other people may see some aspects as downsides (no way to control who can access your content, less power given to instance admins etc.).
How much do you think can be built on the protocol by 3rd parties without involving bsky? Also, do you think multiple platform types could work? Like, an independent but federated Reddit substitute but with good interop with bsky itself?!
I’m also unclear on how baked in the BSG thing is to the protocol. Could parts of the network develop without connecting to the centralised services?
@maegul A lot of it is still "you gotta trust us" at the moment, but I've been watching these guys pretty closely for half a year, and I do trust them.
BGS/relay and AppView are the more centralized parts, but the plan is that once federation opens (should be early next year), anyone will be able to set up one too - although they're both pretty resource heavy, so hard to say how many there will be in practice. The code's open source, has been for a while - it's just walled off in configuration.
@maegul They've said that they imagine the number of relays to be "like web search engines now", so multiple independent, but not many.
As for other "apps" - yes, that's the plan, you define a new set of "lexicons" (record types/endponts). Right now the PDSes reject any non-bsky records, but they will accept them in future. Someone was actually already playing with designing a lexicon set for a Reddit-like platform on AT.
So an interesting question to me is how does the experience of running a BGS compare to running a big instance on AP.
Can communities be built around BGSs, which would require that certain policies are implemented at the BGS level?
And how does the onus compare? Like mastodon.social’s resources (pretty hefty) or mid mas.to or mastodon.world or hachyderm.io. Point being that people are out there willing to run their own stuff. That’s a success story of mastodon really.
@maegul I think a lot of such things are a bit up in the air still - it will work out in practice later once these things are actually possible...
It's hard to say which parts will really be "community-forming" here. There definitely isn't something as clear as a Fedi instance. It may well be that BGSes, AppViews and PDSes will just be services you can pick if you care about it, but all forming one shared space in which you can form communities the way it happened on Twitter.
@maegul BGS will definitely have very different usage patterns than a large AP instance - you basically need a big stream in and a bunch of big streams out, but not that many, and a lot of disk. But it could be just simpler because there will be less kinds of things happening.
Also, it may not be that hard to make alternative implementations that may end up more performant. (People are already playing with their own independent implementations of PDS!)
@mackuba
Oh, the code for their BSG is open! Didn’t know!
So things like BSGs are pretty baked in to the protocol then? As much as I like the idea of centralised services for scale, I thought it’d be nice if the protocol had affordances for going decentralised if you wanted to.
@maegul Yeah, that part is definitely not going away. It should be possible to make independent AppViews and BGSes that scan some part of the network only. AppView decides which BGS(es) it streams data from, and PDS decides which AppView it connects to.
@mackuba see, this is the kind of thing I really focus on, the scaling of the core, not so much the scaling of userbase and use cases and such.
Without scaleable core infrastructure everyone above it is hamstrung.
You say BGS and AppView are pretty resource heavy, which is reminiscent of some of the growing pains ActivityPub has seen.
All distributed platforms face similar problems of how to transfer and synchronize content between endpoints when every single sender wants to get every single message to every single receiver, a growing list times a growing list times a growing list.
I wasn’t impressed by AP’s solution to this problem, and I wonder if AT has a solution that’s more efficient and effective.
Above you said that there were no missing replies to threads, as a sign that it should scale better, but it worries me that that level of certainty indicates that it will scale worse under the hood with senders struggling to ensure that all content gets to all receivers.
@volkris@maegul Well that's the thing, with the AT architecture there will be much less receivers to send to. In AP, if you have a big account on a small-medium instance, that means your every new post puts jobs in the queue to distribute that post to possibly hundreds or thousands of other servers. For an instance which is not mastodon.social, that could be quite a big burden.
@volkris@maegul In ATProto, PDSes only send each post or like to the small number of BGSes that are listening to everyone. So BGSes and AppViews need a lot of resources, but PDSes need very little. Any new information will be duplicated much fewer times than in AP, where everyone needs to have a local copy of everything.
@volkris@maegul "No missing replies" is because in AP, everyone is browsing the Fedi only from the perspective of their instance, so that instance needs to have a copy of everything - if it doesn't, you're missing replies in threads. In ATProto, your app connects to your PDS which loads most data from the AppView, which has a ~complete view of the network. It's probably a little bit longer roundtrip, but you see what everyone else can see.
Oh, I see, so a little more like the nostr design than AP.
Yeah, I thought the multiple-big-relay design sounded like a good part of the solution to the problem, and I faulted AP for missing aggregation like that.
@maegul why does something have to "win"? We're allow to have more than one website we use. We're allowed to have more than one protocol. Sometimes people just continue to use something because they like it, and that's okay. Given only one side of this fight has a profit motive, I would argue they aren't playing the same game and it's pointless to worry about "winning".
@jimbob
I’m not worried about winning and am personally happy to remain in niche places.
But many do care about reshaping what the social web looks like. Many came to the Fedi excited by that possibility (myself incl). This involves what the majority of the internet is doing, and in that sense, “winning” is certainly a dynamic that can occur.
What’s potentially of interest is whether fediverse people are happy for a group playing a different “game” to come out on top.
As someone else put it here … there’s a kinda Cold War over what the mainstream becomes here on the Fedi. We like to think it doesn’t exist, but all of the tone policing and arguments over values and norms are about trying to control the core of the fediverse, and in turn the federated social web.
A successful BlueSky adds a new dimension to that fight. And anyone who cares about the fight in someway can be easily affected by BlueSky whether they see or feel it or not.
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