My decision about whether to try Bluesky depends on what everyone else does. I just want to be where everyone else is, and not be around too many Nazis. My needs are simple.
@mattblaze Yes, I'm exhausted trying to reproduce my contact circles elsewhere. Activation energy is high for social media. LinkedIn is much more useful to me nowadays, too, so that's a whole nother lift.
@mattblaze Maybe it is not really that simple. Maybe you cannot be “where everyone else is” and not have too many Nazis. Also, I am a little surprised that you had nothing to say about data mining and manipulation to drive conflict.
@mattblaze Fair enough. Federation — like Free Software — has to stand or fall on its merits, and Free Software, for example, has had mixed success. Religion is one thing, but maybe philosophy is another. I see no reason to believe that services organized along the same business model will behave differently, and I think too much concentration of power and capital is usually ultimately a bad thing. So far, Mastodon is OK by me, but my wife dislikes it. Each to his/her/their own.
I have no idea whether I’ll stick around there. I don’t want a zillion different accounts to check all the time, so whatever ends up feeling like home is probably where I’ll stay.
There’s a lot I like about this place and the fediverse concept, but frankly, I still feel like a slightly unwelcome guest here six months in. Who knows.
@mattblaze BS' "moderation" model and issues relating to control of nodes by administrators (or not) suggest that it will face a variety of content-related regulatory and other challenges that could quickly become chaotic as its userbase grows. Too soon to be sure, of course.
@lauren I suspect there’s no sustainable model for social media platforms. But it may be possible to have something usable and worthwhile for a while before it inevitably implodes. That might be ok.
@oclsc@mattblaze And die, for all practical purposes, it did. But it led the way to much worse. More to the point, the regulatory environment is utterly different now -- for all routine purposes it didn't exist for Usenet back then.
@lauren@mattblaze
"...as we know it...". I agree. There's obviously a need for a centralized communication app, but it will need to be rethought and may even need new technology not yet discovered.
@lauren We got, what, 8-10 years out of Twitter before it started to turn into a disinformation weapon, and another few years after that before it completely imploded, so that's not a bad run. If Mastodon, or Bluesky, or whatever last half that long, that's still something. Anything still usable after 5 years might be like a spacecraft that keeps sending signals back after its batteries were supposed to be dead already. An unexpected bonus.
@mattblaze @lauren
I've had accounts on various Fediverse servers (mostly Mastodon, but also others) since 2017.
And I wasn't in the first wave, or any of the first few waves.
I think we've succesfully passed that 5 year limit you talk of.
@mattblaze@lauren At this point, I'm looking forward to a return to smaller, more focused communities. Though there is a major problem to be solved in discovery of those communities.
@mattblaze for me it gets better and better as I follow more interesting people & #hashtags. The first couple of months it felt like a desert … my trick to unlock the value was looking at people I followed initially and seeing who they followed. Now my graph feels fairly rich - too many posts actually and I am starting to think if client-side filtering is the answer to produce a snackable timeline where I can keep up.
If you settle somewhere else, please give us all some heads up. I think the trolls will follow anywhere, and if you face them directly, it's their game on. I just block and blithely go about my business. There's no troll like a blocked troll.
@mattblaze Hope you stay. I too get tired of looking at replies and thinking: "You don't even know what you're talking about; no chance you'll get my point."
@mattblaze To each their own! I've been here six months, it feels like a good fit for me. Hope you find a place where you feel welcome! :pikachu_dancing:
@mattblaze@baba_lilith not to be rude, and forgive me for being blunt but: why do you think you owe anyone anything? They don't pay you, they aren't blood, so why do they matter to you?
Hope this helps sort out why they live rent free in your head.
@kentindell “Followers” is such a weirdly loaded term, too. It sounds like we’re all leaders of our own personal cults. I’ve used the term “readers”, but that seems to rub people the wrong way for reasons I don’t understand.
@mattblaze Welcome here, Matt, where you're given the extraordinary opportunity to be your own algorithm, instead of being the controlled victim of an antisocial medium!
The different account "verification" semantics on Mastodon vs Bluesky vs. (old) Twitter are interesting. Here, you prove you control one or more web pages listed in your profile. On Bluesky, you prove you control the DNS of a domain, which becomes your username. So verified names there are more likely to be tied to a PERSONAL domain, but on Mastodon you can more easily tie it to, e.g., your web page at a well-known employer.
The DNS-based verification is probably more "secure", insofar as taking over someone's DNS is usually a more heavyweight attack than simply slipping something in on a web page. But it's probably more meaningful to confirm that I'm the Matt Blaze who has a web page at Georgetown than that I'm whoever owns mattblaze.org.
Another difference is that with the DNS-becomes-your-name scheme, you're limited to binding your identity to a single domain. On Mastodon, you can list and verify as many web pages as you want in your profile.
Either way, much richer than Twitter, where it was "someone thinks this person is worth verifying" or (now) simply "has $8/month to burn".
One thing that remains to be seen is how important or useful identity verification for social media is in the first place. It's not clear that people actually check whether accounts are verified (or who they point to) before they react, or what they think verification means. And name collisions (there are other Matt Blazes out there) will always muddy the whole concept.
@mattblaze A thought about website verification here at Mastodon: What if an account is a bad guy, the guy has a green check mark for a web site, and I go and check the web site and that site has bad code. Is that a neglible risk?
@hehemrin If you trust your instance (which is where the checkmark is inserted into the profile, I believe) to have properly checked, you don't need to do so yourself, so that mitigates the risk a bit.
@mattblaze "And name collisions..." this and every other Jim Davis are in agreement. (I haven't gotten the do-you-draw-Garfield in a while, but still.)
@mattblaze I research everyone I follow on Mastodon to make sure they’re the real person and they actually post here and aren’t just forwarding posts from Twitter without visiting here.
Seeing the verification to a website is a big plus for me. Not that I’m worried about being scammed, I’m just really picky about who I get info from.
Both approaches remind me (in different ways) of the "web-of-trust" model for (email) keys, which, for all the attention it got, was basically a failure at scale.
Large-scale identity verification remains largely an unsolved problem with conflicting requirements.
@mattblaze Maybe the only meaningful verification on social media that scales is "cross checking".
I.e., you're the person who controls mattblaze.com, the relevant web page at Georgetown, the linkedin profile you have, your personal and work e-mail addresses, etc.
[We don't have a protocol for cross-checking, but I can at least imagine a reasonable one.]
@mattblaze hey so, tangential crazy counter-factual, but: if social media hadn't taken off, especially when it did, I wonder if people might've gotten around to being more comfortable with PKI, at least with email.
@mattblaze 🥥 Now envisioning a scene like the one in the #KirkDouglas movie, "Spartacus," in which -- one after another -- a large group of bare-chested men declare, "I am #MattBlaze"!
Bonus for #Boomers: Cue #GarryMoore saying, "Will the real Matt Blaze please stand up"! 🥥
"If you verify via DNS, your entire username is the domain name you verified"
OK, but this is my question: does "the domain name you verified" mean I have official, administrative control over the DNS record for the domain?
As I do for the three domain names I've had registered since 1998
This seems to be very limiting -- unless people want to start making up domain names and registering them into the DNS with no intention of ever using them for any sort of hosting
@FinchHaven@nunesgh Right. In particular, you have to have the ability to create a particular TXT record for _atproto.FQDN (where FQDN can be a subdomain if you want). So to make my username "@mattblaze.org", I had to create a specific TXT record for "_atproto.mattblaze.org".
@FinchHaven@nunesgh Is this better than verifying via text on a web page? I dunno. Either way limits verification to people who have either a web page they control or a domain, neither of which is anywhere near "everybody"
I (obviously) have html-edit authority over my own domain name/web site which is how I got "Verified" on here
Interestingly (I guess) I can edit html on Smugmug dot com, and did, but apparently Smugmug strips out the <rel="me" > portion of the tag I added when it renders the page, so it had no effect
You can see the text I added, and it ends up back here if clicked-on, but it doesn't "Verify" anything with Mastodon
@FinchHaven@mattblaze@nunesgh Another track with its own mind-blowing can of worms would be DNS cybersquatters who buy “similar to” DNS names of popular businesses, pols, and celebs in the hopes of extorting a ridiculously high price for selling those names back to them. How many Taylor Swift account variations, for example, would get “verified” status on BlueSky, that she actually has nothing to do with?
@mjf_pro@FinchHaven@nunesgh Indeed, though that same risk exists with the URL-based scheme used here. E.g., anyone can register TotallyOfficialTaylorSwift.com or whatever and create a mastodon-verified URL at the root.
@mjf_pro@FinchHaven@nunesgh I don't think any of these domain or URL-based schemes meaningfully work very well at scale, frankly. It might work for a narrow cross section of the highly nerd- literate, but that's a small subset of social media users.
@mattblaze@mjf_pro@FinchHaven@nunesgh If you only look at this piece of the puzzle, you're missing the bigger picture. If someone was impersonating another and trying to abuse the Verified system, others could report that bad actor and server admins would quickly block that bad actor. The verification check mark is only one piece of the whole moderation machine. 🙂
@mattblaze Well, unless you just let it laps, and that's definitely a risk for the economically disadvantaged.
It sounds really technologically quirky on the level of PGP in that honestly thinking "normal people" would just go and register domains for validation seems, an idea that only certain sorts of privileged people would come up with, and think would work for everyone else.
@mattblaze You can link multiple DNS domains to your Bluesky account, by adding the same TXT record to each of them. The default bsky.app UI doesn't provide any way (currently) to switch between them, but it's something that's been discussed, and that is technically possible (because it's the DID that matters for identity).
@mattblaze Potentially, yes. You can already change your visible handle in the UI, it just doesn't support multiple simultaneously at present (for e.g. searching for users, or visibly posting from different handles without going through that change process).
Main question there will be one of UX: would people understand that these are the same account? How would follows work (get everything? get just posts "sent" from the followed handle?)
@mattblaze One use case that currently no social media platform has solved is verifying authoritative sources of information. That's something that Twitter used to do well.
E.g. you used to be pretty sure that if you followed @zelensky_ua that it actually was the president of Ukraine. That worked right down to e.g. local fire brigades.
It was incredibly useful for getting out the word about incidents, accidents, emergencies, severe weather etc. 1/2
@mjausson Yeah, although I wonder how well that was able to scale. My sense is that the Twitter verification process was straining under its own weight, starting to verify sketchy sources and refusing to verify legitimate ones. I think there were about 400K verified accounts at peak, with a small department handing out the checkmarks.
@mattblaze Yes that is definitely something that would need to be decentralized geographically to work at scale. You can't expect someone in San Francisco to be able to verify the fire department in a regional city in say Paraguay. Basing it on DNS makes sense from that perspective.
I would really like to see a social media platform be proactive about it. That would make the platform very attractive to journalists too.
@avuko Sure, but standing up and maintaining a server is a much heavier weight commitment than simply entering a DNS record or editing a web page. Definitely not for everyone (or every org),
@mattblaze@avuko why does everyone wants “verified” accounts?? Verified insta, Twitter , whatever…
I don’t wanna verify myself anywhere nor do I think it is necessary or should become the norm. It should be the norm to use the internet as anonymous as possible … everywhere
@mattblaze Here, I have the chance of reading your posts (which I find interesting). For what concerns Bluesky I'm on the wait list since maybe two weeks, and I can't even read your posts there without being inside. It seems to be a closed club. Just ignore the toot police...
@mattblaze same, I basically want an invite to bluesky to reserve my username in case it's the next big thing. Not really interested in using it for now
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