primarily I want to share one id/account. we don't need separate private messaging here. when people try to do that, it should be a matrix conversation. etc.
Bluesky enthusiasts are stating that Bluesky has ”plans” to make ATProto universal and transfer it to W3C or the like. Well, there is no evidence that Bluesky wants to give up control or the protocol is going to be widely adopted after 5 years of development so forgive me being sceptical. The story is a bit different with ActivityPub.
@rolle agree. If they were serious about this, they would commit to participate in social web working group and to moving toward full federation with the rest of the #Fediverse, instead of scoffing at anyone who raises these points.
@TVPaulD In some form you will, because Threads is implementing ActivityPub and Bluesky can be bridged via BridgyFed. In the future it would be possible to just use one to access them all.
The whole idea of BlueSky supporting nomadic identities but the rest of the ActivityPub (plus other stuff) Fediverse being unable to do so is such an oversold idea.
A new service using ActivityPub behind the scenes (and not the AT Protocol) can absolutely support nomadic identities, even if the service doesn't treat a whole website as the actor.
It will still use did:plc, same as AT Protocol (BlueSky), but once done so, an application that understands how to work with did:plc can dereference an actor based on the DID.
That said, an existing service will simply not be compatible with this idea, without changing how it operates.
@Plastic Paragraph @Sal Rahman Nomadic identity, as invented by @Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ in 2011 and first implemented in the Zot protocol from 2011 and the Friendica fork Red in 2012 and used by Hubzilla and the streams repository today, goes even further.
Its basic functionality is to keep at least one clone of your identity on another server.
On most Fediverse projects, e.g. Mastodon, your identity is in your account and thus bound to one specific server.
Hubzilla and (streams) put "identity containers" into your account, so-called channels. Your identity is not directly put into your account, but into one of these channels. The channel separates your identity, your connections, your posts, your settings, your files etc. etc. from your login credentials.
This makes two things possible. One, you can have multiple, completely separate identities (channels) on one and the same account, accessible through one and the same login.
Two, and here does nomadic identity come into play: A channel can be cloned to another server.
Such a clone is not a dumb copy like when you move from one Mastodon server to another Mastodon server. It's a real-time, bidirectional, live, hot backup. And it's fully identical to the main instance of your channel, down to the identity, at least as perceived by server applications that know nomadic identity. Anything that happens on the main instance is mirrored to all clones, and anything that happens on a clone is mirrored to the main instance and the other clones.
For example: The main instance of my channel is on hub.netzgemeinde.eu. Thus, my identity is jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu.
I've got one clone on hub.hubzilla.de. Hubzilla and (streams) understand nomadic identity. They know that this clone is the same jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu. Even if I should send something from my clone which I've actually done once when Netzgemeinde was acting up, Hubzilla and (streams) connections still perceive it as coming from jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu.
The big advantage of this is resilience against server shutdowns. This is actually the very reason why Mike invented nomadic identity in the first place: He saw Mistpark/Friendica nodes disappearing into thin air upon short notice or spontaneously. He saw users lose everything from one day or hour or minute to the next and always have to start over from zero. And he knew that the only solution for this problem would be if a user's identity resided on multiple servers simultaneously.
Nomadic identity makes channels even resilient against the shutdown of the server that contains the main instance. You can always declare any clone the main instance. If you still have a main instance, it's demoted to clone. All of your connections on Hubzilla and (streams) are automatically changed accordingly. The only difference in practice between the main instance and a clone is that the main instance is the one that defines the identity.
A byproduct of nomadic identity is that it provides the best way to move an identity from one server to another. It first creates a clone. Then it declares the clone the new main instance, turning the old instance into a clone. Then it deletes the old instance. If the account on the old server doesn't hold any more channels, the whole account is deleted.
So not only can you move with actually absolutely everything, a Mastodon user's wet dream that will probably never come true, but you can do so with relative ease and quite safely, and most of all, you don't leave a dead identity/account behind.
Okay woah, this is on a whole new level. Been trying Friendica and Hubzilla, but seems a bit over the pay grade in terms of complexity. And oddly enough, not too many intro/how to videos of them on youtube either...
Will have to do some further reading, as these two don't seem to be as user friendly as the normal Fediverse apps. And those were already a mind-shift when coming from traditional social media.
But if #BridgyFed becomes more user-friendly, that will be a big step towards interoperability. And we can finally put this silly competition between #ActivityPub and #ATProtocol to rest.
“Blacksky is providing a platform to amplify, protect, and moderate Black content so users can safely build community online.
“The mission and purpose of the project is to de-center whiteness as the default and to provide a space for Black folk to discuss the Black everyday in a way that feels affirming.”
I just realized that #GhostCMS being compatible with #ActivityPub (and possibly #ATProtocol / #Bluesky at a later date) means that it will probably be possible to tag somebody directly in a newsletter post, via their #Mastodon or #Threads profile for instance.
@fromjason " joins ActivityPub working group" is so predictable because companies are still doing embrace, extend and extinguish. And companies like mastodon will probably let them
Question for my web nerds— #BlueSky uses a global index "fire hose" and pull method for its #ATProtocol federation. It appears any server can create its own global index but of course, technically and effectively possible are two different things.
Does this approach disqualify BlueSky as "decentralized" social media or "federated"?
I'm trying to define the two terms but I'm finding it surprisingly difficult as I'd have to ignore lots of contradictions.
@fromjason We will probably be debating this for years… there's no clear answer since it's not a 0-1 matter, but rather shades of gray.
Right now things are pretty centralized on the relay and AppView level, since there are no alternatives. So if they wanted to e.g. censor someone unfairly (i.e. not an obvious spammer etc.), they could. Would they? I believe not, but that's my opinion.
@fromjason But things could be very different a year from now. I think some people are playing with relays and/or AppViews. I'm thinking about building one myself. Running those shouldn't be super hard, only scaling them to large traffic is.
But if people still mostly use Bluesky's ones, how much that changes things? Hard to say. It will just be "more % decentralized" than it is now.
(You could argue Mastodon is also some % centralized because of m.s, for some small but non-zero %.)
Successfully moved from mastodon.online to mastodon.social.
All that waffle in @theverge interview with Jay Graber about things such as Bluesky being better for portability, and AT Protocol being more centred around the user, and that somehow servers are bad, and... ah, I think @reckless1280 just didn't challenge her enough. I'd think what I'd much prefer is a proper panel debate, not a one-sideded AT evangelism/sales-pitch like that.
@hallenbeck@theverge@reckless1280 I recently migrated from firefish.city to atomicpoet.org. The process wasn’t smooth. 2,300 followers did not make the migration.
Account migration is better than no migration at all but true nomadic identity would be much better for the Fediverse.
Thankfully, a few people are working on ensuring ActivityPub has nomadic identity. It is nevertheless a work in progress.
@hallenbeck@theverge@reckless1280 It's not at all weird that a venture-funded startup that was created to enclose the commons would give misleading information about the open standards they are competing against.
A rant about social protocols Introduction
Recently, I read an article that talked about that someone, tried to do a new platform called “Content Nation”. This is a German platform that allows people to write content (to be honest, I don’t really know what it does.) and publish it. And recently, the creators tried to implement the ActivityPub protocol. They did so by using the official documentation provided by @w3c.
The problem was that the last time the official documentation was updated, was in 23 January 2018. So, this means that a lot of new standards that other platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, etc... use are not written in there. But this isn’t the fault of the service developers, this is the fault of the W3C that hasn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards in the industry such as Webfinger, SharedInbox, Privacy Scopes, and Opt-Out for Search…
The thing, is that this led to a lot of people thinking that this site was some kind of scraper and started making the crawler crash or, even worse, someone tried to load CP inside the platform. BlueSky
Recently, BlueSky opened its AT protocol for everyone to use and federate, due to this, there has been a bit of a discussion inside these platforms. This made me think, why did BlueSky feel the necessity to make another protocol? If there is one already, why do we need another one that competes, wasn’t the objective of protocols to allow interoperability?
So, I did a bit of digging and I found two things. The first one is that they wanted so solve a few things that AP does not support officially (here are the main points, not all of them):
Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.
Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we're going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.
A lot of these problems are already present on ActivityPub for a long time. The account portability of ActivityPub let’s say it’s not intuitive. You have to do a lot of things and even then, there are some things like the posts that you make or the favourites that don’t transfer (in the case of favourites you need to transfer them manually, the same for blocks and mutes).
Also, right now 99% if not all software that uses ActivityPub, does not have an algorithm that orders content for you to see, but shows you everything in chronological order (I don’t know if its intentional or if it’s a limit of AP) and the only thing you have to discover topics is trough hashtags that maybe someone forgot to tag.
Furthermore, not to mention that on ActivityPub, you are at the mercy of the server moderators, so this means that if you know someone that is on an instance that is blocked by yours, you won’t be able to talk to them unless you change the instance, which in a way it’s not very decentralized. The other protocols
By doing research, I realized that there are a lot of other protocols (for example Nostr) that have its own implementation of things maybe there are some that are bridged and other not.
Such protocols have different features, for example Nostr allows you to suggest content edit to other people’s posts, move your content easily, etc. How can we solve this?
First, we have to know why all these other companies make their own. I must say, that most of them probably do because AP does not allow customization of posts or the adding of new features for everyone and the fact that it’s not been updated for 6 whole years makes matters worse.
What the developers want, is a protocol that lets them create wherever they want and add everything the want, for example the edit thing that I said the Nostr supports, the only way to add it to AP, would be or only on your software or find another software that is willing to implement that feature, the rest of the market is left behind as well as the users that depending on what it is, they don’t understand.
My solution to this problem would be to add some kind of per user plugin system directly to the AP that allows for devs to implement add-ons that do with the JSON strings that add buttons or scripts at least to send and receive data. As well as to add some kind of CSS support for the posts and profiles. Of course, the point of these is that if you make a platform, and you are the only one using these characteristics, well… but in case that everybody wants to use it and everybody makes their own plugins it would be chaos.
For this, the solution I proposed would be like something you add while the W3C updates the protocol to support a very popular feature. #socialprotocols#nostr#activitypub#W3C#ATprotocol#rant#blogpost#ContentNation
> this is the fault of the W3C that hasn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards.
There is no "THE" #W3C that maintains or is responsible for evolving the #ActivityPub related specs. There's the #SocialCG, a community group, with representatives (read: volunteers) from the same grassroots movement that is engaged with the #Fediverse, i.e. fedizens.
I, like most, advocate for a 'technology substrate' with highest chance to a) unleash full potential of fedi/social web, and b) remains open and accessible to anyone. Whatever process that takes.
I feel the process should bottom-up, facilitating a decentralized ecosystem. Should address the tendency in grassroots movements that everything fragments, and fiefdoms form. So it should stimulate collab.
Great interview with Jay Graber (CEO, #Bluesky) on Decoder with Nilay Patel (@reckless1280), where they dig into some of the major difference between Bluesky (#ATProtocol) and #Mastodon (#ActivityPub).
My read on #bluesky is that they are effectively sucking the air out of the decentralization balloon, whether they intend to or not. On the tech side, the #ATprotocol will prevent much decentralization from ever happening and divert the focus that was on #ActivityPub development. On the culture side, they deter a critical mass from developing here, which we need to overwhelm the influence of our most annoying users and lure in the people most people want to follow and interact with. #fediverse
Manton from Micro.blog intends to enable the service as an ATProtocol PDS:
The long-term plan for Micro.blog is to fully support AT’s PDS — Personal Data Servers. Any blog hosted on Micro.blog would plug into Bluesky seamlessly, with data portable to other AT Protocol hosting providers.