Since some people have asked me, here's a quick thread on initial experience comparison between Bluesky and the fediverse. It's important to note that this comparison is somewhat absurd by default because Bluesky is still tiny & unproven, but there's interest so I'm happy to share what I've observed. Also, I don't get into protocol differences because honestly who cares. So:
The fediverse (including Mastodon) is better at: having been proven to scale, having multiple places running different services, offering more choice of apps, giving a choice of legal jurisdictions and business/non-profit models, and is still growing far faster, especially globally.
Bluesky is better at: Onboarding & signup experience, having fewer choices to make, quality of the default app, familiarity for people used to Twitter's design, discovery of other users within the existing service.
Here are things we don't know: What Bluesky's trust, safety & abuse policies will look like at scale, compared to fediverse services. Mastodon and other fediverse services have been uneven at times, but have matured over years; Bluesky is still tiny and hasn't been tested at all. We don't know if Bluesky can scale, either technically or socially.
There are also platform features that people might legitimately have different goals for. Bluesky makes content & people searchable by default, which Mastodon only does for hashtagged content. This aids discovery, but can also enable kinds of abuse. Fediverse partisans argue this constraint helps build healthy community, but many newer users find it a frustrating omission. Both platforms let you use your own domain, but it's much harder to do so on the fediverse right now.
@console My rule of thumb these days is: if I can’t get my desired username, I’m not joining. 😂 The longer it takes me to get an invite, the less likely it is that I’ll be able to get my username. (It may already be taken.)
Gone are the days when I was able to be an early adopter and get an account to things before the masses.
@ramsey@console Bluesky (and ATProto as a whole) are built completely around domain names as identity. you don't need a *.bsky.social username; you can bring your own domain and use that
@ramsey@console Nobody said that? I wouldn't try to self-host right now because the underlying protocol doesn't seem completely stable (e.g. moderation is still being finalized at Bluesky) but it's an open and federated protocol just like ActivityPub is. you'd be free to implement ATProto on your own server if you wish
@davidcelis@console So, you can self-host? That’s what I’m trying to find info on. A DNS TXT record using your domain isn’t the same as self hosting. Are there instructions for that?
@davidcelis@console That would require building my own server, which I’m not interested in, but I’d like to play around with self-hosting BlueSky, if that’s possible, like you can do with Mastodon. I’ve never written an ActivityPub server, but I can run Mastodon.
@ramsey@console Ah, then no; their Bluesky server isn't open source or public. Someone in the community could reasonably build an open source ATProto-compliant server but nobody has done it yet
@ramsey@console I honestly don't know; the best answers you're gonna get will probably be from joining Bluesky and talking to the people working on it and ATProto. they're very responsive and engage a lot with the community
@anildash I’m signed up, now. It’s a little sad, though. All the tech folks I followed on Twitter and had hoped would join the Fediverse are there. It feels like we just can’t get the momentum to bring back the Open Web. This will end up relegating the Fediverse to the backwaters of the web, since so many of the “thought leaders” went to Bluesky instead. 😢
@anildash I’m dubious about the protocol taking off and gaining traction. I’d love to see some collaboration between the ActivityPub and AT protocol communities (maybe there is?). It still has that start-up “feel” to it. How does Bluesky plan to monetize?
I guess it’ll start making more sense to me when we start seeing federation and individuals able to run the own servers.
@amyhoy@anildash I’m finding it difficult to articulate what I feel, but what I’d like to see is more community ownership of spaces on the web and less corporate ownership. With the fediverse, I see a way forward for that. With AT protocol, I do not.
That said, the community ownership might be what’s contributing to your horrible experience, and that’s a much deeper problem than ActivityPub vs. AT. I wish I knew how to solve it, but I’m trying to create a good space here.
People's perception of the overall fediverse is (probably unfairly) shaped by Mastodon, though many other services make different choices around key features that others might find meaningful. Understanding federation is a huge barrier for people who just want to (re)connect with friends or institutions. People's perception of Bluesky is shaped by Jack Dorsey's role in its initial conception; we don't yet know whether that's fair, though he doesn't seem very involved at all.
@anildash its absolutely bonkers to me that this late in the game a brand new social media network wouldnt staunchly and proudly say "zero tolerance for nazis, racists, etc etc". they havent learned anything.
@Viss I think they're approaching it from a technocratic standpoint ("we'll make a framework for blocking that stuff!") but I'm curious to see what the framing is once they get their abuse/blocking stuff in place.
@anildash i read a headline today or yesterday about how they're "just going to label hate groups, but not prevent them from joining the platform", and today, in 2023, thats a death sentence.
@Viss@anildash That's mastodon too, though. We rely on our server admins to defederate where the Nazis join, but they can't be prevented for signing up for the fediverse. That's going to be inherent to any decentralized system. I agree with you that it shouldn't have to be that way, but it does seem like an unfortunate reality imo
@sgrif@Viss@anildash Not the same. Any Mastodon Covenant website will ban Nazis on sight. They’re banished to the defederated fringes. Actually blocked. Jack’s allowing them to stay, right alongside you, but saying if you don’t avert your eyes and ignore them then it’s your fault for opting in to viewing “hate speech” or choosing the wrong labelling provider from the vapourware “moderation marketplace”.
@MetalSamurai@sgrif@Viss But ActivityPub is available to Nazis too, and they do use it. So Bluesky has to build similar tools around the AT protocol as mastodon has around the ActivityPub protocol. If they don’t, then we hold them accountable. But by your logic we should blame mastodon’s maintainers for the fact that Nazis also use the protocol.
@anildash@sgrif@Viss Nazis are removed from instances when they show themselves and instances that don’t are defederated and ostracised.
I don’t see anything like that even being discussed as a future possibility. It’s literally just “pretend the bad stuff isn’t there”.
@MetalSamurai@anildash@Viss I suspect the reason you don't see it being discussed is because it's just less fundamentally important when the protocol decouples the client that shows you a feed from the server hosting your content to the extent that AT does. Ultimately it's a federated protocol and there's no reason you can't defederate an instance. The practical differences between defederating and refusing to show the content is ultimately pretty minor
@MetalSamurai@anildash@Viss Personally I find the notion of not having to couple the decision of where to host my account with what moderation actions happen to be quite compelling. And the idea of having more control over what ends up in my feed beyond just who I follow also seems compelling. It's entirely possible that none of it works out in practice, but imo the ideas are sound and worth exploring
@MetalSamurai@anildash@Viss Mastodon's alternative widely depends on the efforts and goodwill of volunteers who are largely both unpaid and unaccountable. That strikes me as problematic for a whole host of other reasons. Ultimately both approaches leave much to be desired, but decentralized media makes this hard by design
The idea of a sort of plug and play composable system sounds great. If I can take my own user handle, pick an instance to host my posts, choose a moderation style I like, pick a timeline weighting and display system from somewhere else, pick a mobile client that suits me and have it all just work together sounds great.
@sgrif@anildash@Viss Mastodon’s moderation is far from perfect, but works just fine for reasonably small self policing instances, especially if they’re based on a common group and language. Moderating the large instances with multiple languages and all different kinds of social groups all jammed together is harder.
@sgrif@anildash@Viss It’s not great and certainly could be better and often the threat of defederation can come across as blackmail or overkill and we end up with things like Raspberry Pi, dot lol, pre-emptive defederation with instances that don’t publicly display their moderation policies, the apparently growing movement to defederate mastodon.social and so on. It’s an anarchy and that’s how things work.
@sgrif@anildash@Viss For the system as a whole it’s probably pretty healthy; for individual users it can be really harmful. Proper nomadic, portable accounts would be a massive help in allowing users to jump ship when inter-instance problems arise.
@sgrif@anildash@Viss There’s a huge difference, philosophically and practically between Mastodon style moderation and Blue Sky’s “moderation”. I won’t call Blue Sky’s scheme moderation as it’s simply muting. They’re not talking about removing bad actors or unwanted content from the platform, merely sweeping it under the carpet.
@sgrif@anildash@Viss This is where Mastodon is very different - if you’re spewing transphobic hate, or Ivermectin tips, antisemitic conspiracy theories, you’ll get kicked off the instance that you’re on. If you’re an instance that chooses to host that sort of content, you’ll get defederated. This stuff gets stopped at source and doesn’t get spread to the wider fediverse.
@sgrif@anildash@Viss In the same way, I run many mail servers. They all have blacklists, spam filters, support SPF and DKIM, greylisting and other strategies. You stop it at the border. You don’t let it wash all over your network and then tell end users to just keep training their own personal spam filters.
@sgrif@anildash@Viss Jack’s vision looks like a sea of spam, disinformation, trolling and hatred but he’s providing special tunnel vision systems so woke snowflakes won’t see what they’re stepping in, while stout hearted alt-reich channers can turn off the filters and spread racist memes with impunity. It’s arse backwards, wrong headed and, I hope, doomed.
@sgrif@anildash@Viss It is not credible that the guy that ran Twitter for years and been forced to set up trust and safety teams to deal with this has not considered this, doesn’t understand how much work is involved and made no attempt to even start working on something to deal with this before launching. It’s a choice. And it’s going to end up a crypto spammer’s paradise.
@MetalSamurai@sgrif@Viss Okay, you want to rant about it. Just take me off the thread if it’s just rehashing how Jack fucked up; I’ve spent more time and done more work on that than 99.99% of people. But you seem hell-bent on ignoring the actual discussion about protocols and architecture.
@MetalSamurai@sgrif@Viss No, there are, in fact, instances specially for Nazis to connect with one another. But they do have tools for filtering content above the protocol level, just as Bluesky says they’re doing.
@anildash@sgrif@Viss I think that’s what I was saying. The “free speech” instances are a separate island. As new instances come on line they quickly learn about Oliphant’s blocklists to cut off that part of the Fediverse. They can howl at each other on their side of the fire break, the rest of us don’t need to deal with it.
@anildash@sgrif@Viss I had a look through the list of other projects that support AT to see if anyone had tools to deal with actual moderation, and couldn’t see any. If there really is work being done on it, great. But the fact they’re wrongly calling muting “moderation” makes me think their claims are not made in good faith.
@anildash@sgrif@Viss If you’ve gone to the effort of designing a whole new protocol, despite knowing that AP, Zot etc already exist, you surely must have built in something to support real moderation and removal of unwanted content, right?
@MetalSamurai@sgrif@Viss They did, it happens with apps on top of the protocol, not at the protocol level. Just like ActivityPub. But with more user control over those apps.
The couple of times a transphobe or Nazi has been invited in, CEO Jay Graber has kicked them from the platform; and she can kick or restrict the whole invitation tree, like who invited them and who they invited. So they’re not “pretending the bad stuff isn’t there”.
@MetalSamurai@sgrif@anildash@Viss - Obviously it can’t scale by having the CEO personally kick people. The dev team there is pretty openly talking about it, and have opened a Discord to take in community suggestions.
@FlyingTrilobite@sgrif@anildash@Viss This was written when they announced their “moderation” system which was nothing of the sort. It was a labelling and muting system that they misleadingly named. I think they really thought that would be good enough. Unsurprisingly it was not good enough and they rapidly had to implement some user removal code they didn’t think they needed, but absolutely should have had in place before launch.
@FlyingTrilobite@sgrif@anildash@Viss They were nowhere near ready for even a semi public launch, and every mistake they’ve made has been an unforced error of an entirely predictable nature (the TOS, the absence of moderation, the absence of federation, the inability to keep up and being overwhelmed, the guessable invite codes, and so on). Incidentally the “banned” users can return if and when another node is added and federation happens …
@FlyingTrilobite@sgrif@anildash@Viss (assuming it ever does - I have my doubts), as they will have a complete archive of all their content and it will return to the network as soon as they can reconnect. That’s the way it’s designed.
@FlyingTrilobite@sgrif@anildash@Viss I’m not going to give a project that started up several years ago with mountains of VC money and guidance from people who’d been involved with the legal and other issues of running a major social media site for years anything like the same kind of pass I’d give a garage based plucky startup.
@FlyingTrilobite@sgrif@anildash@Viss They should not be in the position of having to canvas opinions from end users over Discord for how to fix problems of their own making.
@FlyingTrilobite@sgrif@anildash@Viss “How to deal with bad actors” should have come up at the very first design meeting. Flailing about now, asking end users for help deciding what to do and apparently building things that were not on their roadmap is farcical.
One difference: individual server admins CAN ban and remove Nazi's, I'm digging thru documents at Bluesky and I'm still unclear if Bluesky admins can remove accounts, nuke content, or "Fediblock" content from other BlueSky servers to their own.
@tchambers Protocols don't dictate what servers can do internally. I'd be shocked if the official implementation didn't provide those tools, since it'd just be begging for an alternative impl to come up and provide it.
@tchambers We'll have to see once their server impl is available for us to play around with. They've been pretty clear that they're expecting multiple impls either way
@anildash as a 59yo user of mastodon - and had an account on twitter from 2007 on until October of last year I agree on the difficulty of onboarding and the lack of search BUT I also have found that my conversations here are much more engaging and I appreciate the reasoning behind the decisions made. I am not giving up my data to a social media company run by one person ever again. The activity pub protocol makes the potential for the fediverse much more palatable in my mind.
@torb@barbarakb you may be correct. but the way they’re handing out invites, that I can decipher, is based on how active you are on platform and/or random begging. no rhyme or reason that I can see. that usually doesn’t end well.
@barbarakb@anildash What I don’t like about it is how the developers are playing favorites with the invites; or how some people begging for them are getting them. Feels like there's an "in crowd" already and it's kind of icky. That's already part of the platform culture and that's not going to go away.
@Theblueone@anildash yes, I’ve noticed that as well. there has been some recent activity and time element clarification about invites. but there’s still some randomness.
@barbarakb@anildash Like I really do not like the vibes this stuff at Bluesky gives off. As much as people say Mastodon has learning curve etc etc at least it doesn’t exude the cool kids peaking in high school energy. This is People Producing Content As Product Pavlovian vibes.
@randulo@anildash@barbarakb I agree that it may be a reasonable way to limit growth of a new service. It is also a way to generate perceived scarcity and I believe Bluesky is using it for the latter. The reason is that perceived scarcity generates media coverage (as it has been) with articles like “Why is everyone clamoring to get on…”
Personally I strongly suspect that the scarcity is merely being faked and the corporate media is drinking the kool aid.
@timbray@kevin@anildash@randulo@barbarakb quite true. VC money can make stuff go fast. sometimes. we’ll see. it reminds me of twtr in 2007. difference? no one cared or wanted “in” thru an invite process thus the consistent “fail whale” 🐳 😆
@timbray@anildash@randulo@barbarakb Is that true? The project was started by Twitter in 2019 according to the reports I read. And the lead has been researching distributed networks for years.
Was nothing happening for the three years between 2019 and 2022?
@anildash Thanks for this. I feel like the kremlinology on how Bluesky plays out is a little out of control on here. Nice to see more people talking about both the protocol and the experience in relatively chill ways.
@kissane@anildash I think the discussion can get heated because people feel strongly about Twitter's enhanced toxicity in exchange for gain. Virulent engagement being better for business.
I feel that such discussions help being critical, which implies an effort to see a thing clearly and truly in order to judge it fairly. Clinical discussions aren't necessarily better.
After the experience with Twitter, I think we have all it takes to be less superficial with the tech we use to communicate.
My feeling, which I expect will encounter some resistance for a while, is that if Bluesky succeeds (for whatever definition of "success"), it's just part of the fediverse. Email has thrived for a long time with multiple protocols making it run behind the scenes; there's no reason that the new wave of social networks built on the open web can't share that trait.
@bhaugen@anildash In this context federation by default would mean its own protocol, but the two are reasonably interoperable in their goals so it should be possible to build a bridge. (Not to put words in Anil’s mouth but I take his thought to mean that you can have multiple protocols the same way we have IMAP and POP for email, which act differently but deliver similar enough experiences that 99% of users don’t ever think about what protocol they’re using.)
@mergesort
Difference being I can carry on conversations and follow threads of email messages addresses to me regardless of which email protocol they are using. That is also true of anybody on any other fediverse site using ActivityPub.
Don't know if that will be possible or even desirable with Bluesky, and also don't know if I will care one way or another. Somebody suggested Bluesky will be light on moderation, so maybe another Musky experience....
@bhaugen@anildash I think it would be plenty desirable for both sides! If the point is to connect people then I don't want to think about where they are, I just want my community.
Also Bluesky doesn't have a “goal” of being light on moderation, their goal is to have “composable moderation”. Highly recommend reading the article in this post, with personal context that I spent 4 years working on Societal Health at Twitter building features to minimize Twitter's harm. https://macaw.social/@mergesort/110251885702358771
@mergesort@bhaugen@anildash From the little that's out there so far, composable means, partially composed of Nazis (which you can block) and I'm currently in the camp of not being comfortable w/this.
As others correctly note: profit and moderation have conflicting goals.
@mergesort@bhaugen@anildash I don't see how composable moderation addresses issues of societal harm like, picking an example out of the air here, "this guy is trying to use the platform to organise a coup".
It's all focused on me choosing what I don't want to see (via labelling) and not on disinformation, incitement of violence, etc.
The screenshot of the "political hate groups" toggle shows the problem. Hate groups inciting violence against me remains my problem even if I choose "hide".
@tomw@bhaugen@anildash I wouldn’t judge based on a screenshot of an unfinished product, and don’t look at composable moderation as the solution, look at it as another tool. If we’re being honest there’s little stopping any of what you mentioned from happening on any platform, hoping Facebook or Mastodon staffs people exposing themselves to the worst content on the internet to keep a platform safe isn’t a solution either, we need that and primitives to help people protect themselves online.
@mergesort@bhaugen@anildash It's not about the screenshot but about the whole principle of the system, which is:
Label things
I can choose not to see them
My question is: how does this possibly address issues like incitement, where hiding it from myself is not a solution?
Mastodon admins looking at incitement can remove it easily – it's not even harmful to look at in and of itself. It is only harmful if it is able to spread.
@tomw@bhaugen@anildash That’s exactly why I said it’s another tool. Having labeling built into the protocol is another valuable tool, and it’s worth considering the @ protocol separately from the incomplete social network. Bluesky will also be federated and can layer the same exact moderation you’re describing, people can run their own servers with stricter rules, and you can ban anything you want. What you’re describing is very possible, which is why I suggested not judging by a screenshot.
@tomw@bhaugen@anildash That’s because I wrote about the concept of composable moderation as they plan to apply it to Bluesky, not what’s happening today. They don’t have federation or blocks yet, but they’re being open, transparent, responsive, and building it. Only time will tell if it works, I trust open people by default and try to imagine what could reasonably happen, and if it doesn’t I’ll gladly say the model didn’t work or they were nefarious or malicious or call out all the issues.
@mergesort@bhaugen@anildash I do not think launching without a block function (for example) is "hey let's wait and see" territory. It's deeply irresponsible.
@tomw@bhaugen@anildash I don't think it's responsible either, I’d never do that but that's not the whole story. Blocks depend on the federation model work being complete (for example how to propagate and ensure that blocks are respected across servers), and the federation model is about a week away from being completed, with blocks soon after that. I would describe the product as “accidentally launched”, it wasn't intended to go viral, and to their credit they own the issues. Time will tell.
@mergesort@bhaugen@anildash Call me cynical but I’m assuming the goal is to be the central hub and control what the 90% of users who accept the defaults see. Maybe for good reasons. Maybe for profit, power, or just to read celebs’ DMs. Jack might feel bad he made a hellsite in his youth and now wants to get right with Krishna. Who knows?
@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash Look, I’m gonna be honest and say I can’t reply to everything you wrote point by point but it’s a very specific view of running a social platform. At Twitter I fought for pretty much all of the ideals you note, and I appreciate many of the goals here, but I don’t think it’s enough or scalable. There’s nothing stopping Bluesky from doing anything or everything you mentioned but the default assumption is they won’t and can’t, I’m letting time answer that question.
@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash I would love to see it, but my experience so far (as a true believer in federated networks, ActivityPub, and a person with 2,000+ posts and 2,000+ followers so I’m giving it a real shot as my home) has been that everything works great when your behavior matches a certain style or archetype. I‘ve found Mastodon to be very civil as long as you follow very specific rules, ones that have little to do with mediating real harms, and it means many don’t feel welcome here.
@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash I think it is 100% ok to say that the goal is to have a safe and happy space for some people (I genuinely think it is that!), but if the goal of the fediverse is to create space for everyone with good intentions and extend that sense of safety strategically then I don’t think that’s working yet. I say this with love, not hate, I want the fediverse to thrive and be inclusive of all people who come with no malice or ill will (so no nazis and the like obviously).
Everyone takes themselves and the preservation of Mastodon and the fediverse very seriously here. A very noble ideal, but often means that there are no boundaries that can be pushed. Pushing boundaries gently is important, it’s what helps culture expand. There’s a lot of “this is how it should be” without empirical evidence as to why, taking the wrong lessons from Twitter’s mistakes and failures.
@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash 2. To speak broadly knowing it’s one perspective but many black people, women, and inherently silly people are missing and have been pushed away by the current culture.
The fediverse has done a great job onboarding many people, and I happen to fit into a lot of what’s considered openly acceptable. (White, male, pretty left, LGBTQIA+ friendly, etc.) But I find myself missing a lot of people who provide any other form of diversity or provide alternative viewpoints.
@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash I think this issue of mismatched expectations. I follow people from quite a few instances, the model of what people expect is everyone I can find on the internet, not “who’s on my server”. I only follow a handful of people on Macaw.social (it actually has 1,000+ members, another hitch with federation like not seeing replies or follower counts from other servers), and these are things people come by, see, and leave being told “you have to understand it’s because…”
@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash I completely understand and am reasonably well versed in Mastodon's history, why is why I've tried to keep my commentary about Mastodon in the present, rather than the future. I'm also not picking a horse in this race as some folks interpreted my original post to say, it's not Bluesky or Mastodon or whatever else, I want thriving , open, and safe federated communities interoprerating across the internet so I don't lose my people ever again wherever they may be.
@supernovae@mergesort@bhaugen@anildashBeats Drum This can all be done in the client. The key is the client. Sure you can try and push change through to a thousand different admins and Gorgon or you could build clients that do search, discovery, encrypted DMs, Algorithmically curated feeds, etc, etc, etc.. The data is all out there flying around in the activity pub universe, go grab it and present it in the client. Hint: there's already people implementing QTs in the client.
@mike@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash You sure can, and yet it all feels like a disjointed mess right now because there are dozens of implementations. Not saying it’s not a valid approach but when I write a quote post I want to know that others will see it, or if there’s search on one server I use but not the other and it really of stinks. I’m technical and understand why this is the way it is, but it’s a bad user experience and that’s what matters at the end of the day.
@mergesort@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash Agreed, and I think these are all technical issues that can be overcome. My point is that in the fediverse we have almost complete access to the data and can build almost any client we want, that IS the competitive advantage. If stakeholders realize this, there'll be a gold rush to build clients and then a few will establish themselves as the defacto standard because they deliver a better user experience. But first we need to realize its about the client
@supernovae@bhaugen@anildash I want to express incredibly directly, my critiques come from a place of love because I exude hope out my ears for an open community-based future. Most of my issues are about Mastodon culture, not the technology, and I have a lot of hope for ActivityPub.
It can be harder to build here because many would consider what you’re doing controversial, but at the end of the day someone joining Mastodon just expects that stuff to work, infinite choices be damned.
@anildash My strong suspicion is that Bluesky (or any similar corporate product that preaches federation) will use federation for their initial growth spurt, and then find a way to pull up the drawbridge once private equity or the Saudis decide that lock-in sounds more profitable.
I don't know why I would be so cynical, except for my lying eyes and the entire history of Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, RSS, XMPP, OpenID, and even Open Graph meta tags.
@jwz@anildash I fully share your concern, but the story does tend to play out differently with fully open source protocols/products as opposed to closed companies (with maligned growth imperatives) “adopting” open tech.
RSS is our global standard for podcasts, and still in wide (albeit no longer mainstream) use for blogs.
XMPP has been succeeded by Matrix and soon IETF’s MLS
OIDC is the web’s standard login.
Open Graph.. not quite sure, but I think it’s widely used for embeds.
@erlend Missing my point entirely. [Service X] used to support [protocol Y] and then stopped when they wanted more lock-in. That [protocol Y] still technically exists is irrelevant.
@jwz microblog shortform writing makes every point seemingly missed 😄
I get what you’re saying. What I’m pointing out is that when Service X is an open source product & company like WordPress which supports Protocol Y like RSS or Open Graph, there is far more cultural and economical peer-pressure on them to not do a rug-pull.
The dynamics are different with primarily open actors; you can’t apply the same EEE logic to a value offering that is inherently forkable.
@Jonathanglick people with an emotional attachment to particular platforms or protocols, who have a sense of identity or belonging tied to the perceived values they attach to these choices.
@anildash@Jonathanglick or rather people from marginalized groups who are facing genocide and want to have a modicum of personal safety against organized harassment
@anantagd@Jonathanglick all of these protocols have fascists using them, and all of them are relying on different app providers to build protections against those hate movements. That isn't different by platform or protocol.
How is this different from, say, Cloudflare continuing to host kiwifarms? Isn't providing a platform where hate groups can organize generally considered amoral if not sociopathic?
@Jonathanglick@kims@anantagd there's a difference between what a protocol allows and what an app built on top of that protocol does. (That line is blurred right now because Bluesky is currently both.) But ActivityPub, for example doesn't have any way for the protocol to stop nazis from using it; there are in fact Mastodon instances for hate groups. Instead, apps that use the protocol build systems for stopping or blocking that content. Bluesky is following a similar pattern.
@Jonathanglick it varies. There are people who (understandably) have skepticisms about anything with Jack associated, but let it color their judgment enough that they can't assess the protocol objectively at all.
@anildash until BlueSky has proven itself actually federable, especially with respect to onboarding and search, none of those features can actually be claimed to be functional though
@anildash This is ludicrous. Jack ran Twitter for years and knows exactly what the trust and safety issues are, but he’s chosen to ignore them and pretend that selective blindness is an adequate replacement. It’s had years of work, millionaire VC funding and people are trying to excuse failings as if they are a brand new garage startup.
@anildash Bsky isn’t a naive 2 person startup, Jack has years of inside knowledge of exactly what running a social media platform is like, but somehow they’ve launched and are slowly letting the public on, but aren’t ready? He’s a high profile figure, knew all eyes would be watching, but their pitch on moderation isn’t “we won’t carry it”, but instead is “we’ll help you pretend it’s not there”. The only story they’ve got is muting, which they’re disingenuously describing as moderation.
@anildash Simple onboarding is easy when there’s only one server and one app. Surely there should be multiple servers already even just for testing or proof of concept.
@anildash I'm having trouble seeing how this will continue to be the case if it is meant to be a federated service. Either the onboarding and discovery will remain simple but they'll in effect only have a single instance, or it will inevitably get more complex because they'll have more instances. I just don't see how it can remain both simple and become federated.
@anildash That could happen (to an extent, similar moves have already happened in the Fediverse - the Mastodon app versus the Mammoth app and the forks of Mastodon like Plemora and Calckey/Misskey etc).
However, it would be an increase in complexity and a reduction in discoverability. "I have to choose an app?" would be the new "I have to choose an instance?"
@anildash My understanding is that Bluesky can only do public posts. And "delete" is technically not possible, only marking an object as "dead" while keeping the content around.
@anildash Thanks very much for the comparison. Most enlightening. I've got to admit that for me the paper-cuts the fediverse imposes are barely noticeable but for others they're HUGE so I'll refrain from bemoaning the fact that people are piling into yet another corporate silo :)
Whatever makes folks happy I guess, and certainly the Fediverse is more than healthy enough to handle competition.
Well, okay then. It's a "so", I guess. "Nothing to see then folks" kinda thing is what I'm coming away with then.
Even a sentence or two would have helped instead of s single word.
Not a big optimist here with respect to ATP after hacking on its previous ADX but personally, I would have given it at least a twenty word review lolz.
Yet another mastodon hellthread. Those things always come in out of chronological order for me since mastodon orders then by arrival time and not timestamp anyway.
Thanks again for the (chronologically in order) screenie 👍
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