Incidentally the size of sockets and screws (including the Allen wrench) is very much a technology. William Sellers pushed standards in the mid 1800s specifically to benefit American industry through interoperability. Standards we still use today.
It's amazing how much things that seem so ho-hum today are yesterday's incredible invention
JimDabell · 1h ago
I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. Then Threads added federation. What am I supposed to do with each account? They have different posting histories, they can’t be merged, but if I post the same thing to both of them, I’ll be repeating myself. Am I supposed to discontinue using one of them? If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. It’s a mess.
al_borland · 1h ago
This is why centralized social media took off. It is easy to understand and use.
Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.
I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?
Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.
echelon · 21m ago
Just give me P2P social media and put me in the swarm. BitTorrent for Reddit and Twitter.
It shouldn't matter what servers are anywhere. It should all be eventually consistent for some agglomerated cluster sampling of the world. Make the content immutable and ephemeral. People that care to archive it will.
Federation is silly and is part of the problem. Plus it creates more little fiefdoms.
I'll subscribe to my own filters if I care, and my agent will handle the rest.
JimDabell · 1h ago
> I know people like to compare it with email
There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.
I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
MithrilTuxedo · 1h ago
Think of them like different social groups.
righthand · 1h ago
Really though is this a real world issue? Tombstone one and use the other. No reason to quit just because you don’t have perfect agency. Post both if you want, people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
JimDabell · 1h ago
> Tombstone one and use the other.
Like I said:
> If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post.
> people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
em-bee · 1h ago
well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.
JimDabell · 1h ago
> the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated.
It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting.
> you need to treat your thread account as not federated too.
But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.
righthand · 38m ago
Right so your quibble is that part of your audience is not portable, not that federation makes posting harder. You either maintain a centralized service account or you don’t. That hasn’t changed with Meta services. It is Threads that doesn’t allow for portability.
Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio.
How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.
aorloff · 1h ago
One of these gives you ultimate control (mastodon / AT) if you want it (you can host and own the domain) or the ability to ride along with your choice of admin.
The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for)
Those are the trade offs
JimDabell · 1h ago
None of that addressed any of the issues I have.
Havoc · 4h ago
Haven't invested time into bluesky yet but I'm always shocked at how fast the pages load. The contrast to twitter is stunning.
Lemmy is a bit more hit/miss on loads but the content posted seems so much more wholesome than other socials
the_gipsy · 2h ago
I'm shocked that it's as slow as Twitter.
There was a time when tweets were just good ol' regular HTML pages. Today it's unbearable if you remember that you're just trying to read one small paragraph.
mkoubaa · 2h ago
Anyone remember how fast geocities pages loaded?
cesarb · 2h ago
> Anyone remember how fast geocities pages loaded?
Yeah, they were slow. Mostly due to the low speed of dial-up modems.
al_borland · 1h ago
And the heavy gif usage.
dingnuts · 4h ago
Unlike Bluesky, which is a website and community, "Lemmy" is software. There are many Lemmy instances; the content varies wildly, just like it does between Mastodon instances, or web sites.
What instance is more wholesome? As written, your comment is like saying IRC is more wholesome. It is? On what server?
Havoc · 3h ago
I'm thinking of programming.dev in particular but suspect my wholesome comment is pretty universally true. The type of crowd that sets up their own servers like these are in my experience slightly biased towards wholesome side. Setting up software, build initial user base etc...there is a level of intent there that you don't get with the free for all that is reddit or whatever.
Maybe that's just my impression but suspect there is a kernel of truth there
rzazueta · 1h ago
Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded".
In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.
When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.
I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.
The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.
This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.
I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.
Kye · 3h ago
AP instances tend to reflect the same clusters that emerge in social media where most people are on the same app.
It's just a different way of organizing communities.
sunaookami · 4h ago
Huh? Bluesky loads very slow, a lot of loading circles and placeholder skeletons.
Zaylan · 34m ago
A lot of decentralized projects focus on the philosophy, but most people just want something that works smoothly. Platforms like Blacksky probably grew not because of cutting-edge tech, but because they made it feel easy to use without overthinking.
echelon · 19m ago
And yet Threads pushed past that number in half the time.
Bluesky and Mastodon are still the fringe of human community.
bilbo0s · 11m ago
That's because Blacksky and Threads address wildly different markets.
Blacksky's market is literally orders of magnitude smaller. That's quite a growth curve when adjusted for market size.
skybrian · 17m ago
I wonder how they came up with two million Blacksky users. Who counts as a user? Do they host that many users' accounts? Is it any Bluesky user who subscribed to their feeds? Something else?
bit1993 · 4h ago
Allot of people have a social media account rather than a website and allot of people use gmail rather than host their own mail. Decentralized means do it yourself, but most people just want something with batteries included that works well and don't really care about centralization.
blooalien · 3h ago
> "Decentralized means do it yourself" ...
Not necessarily. Just one famous example; BitTorrent is decentralized but for most people it's just "run this app, download files". "Decentralized" just means "doesn't rely on a centralized service to accomplish a goal". As long as the application isn't too complex to install and use, most folks won't care one way or the other whether it's decentralized or not, as long as it accomplishes the goal they're looking to accomplish.
cramsession · 2h ago
There has to be a payoff though. BitTorrent is actually pretty hard to get working correctly, track down the torrent files... people do it because it's the only way to get some content and a way to get content you'd otherwise have to pay for. With social media, there's not much reward and most people's friends already post for free on other networks. Not saying it's not worthwhile, but it's hard to extract this lesson from BitTorrent.
l72 · 1h ago
But it can also be specialized forums like https://startrek.website/ which is hosted using Lemmy but you can use your federated login. It can help bring back indie forums and websites that aren’t controlled by Reddit or meta.
blooalien · 2h ago
Yeah, for sure. Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use (or simpler) than existing social networks, and / or offer some genuinely unique and desirable feature(s) in order to attract any serious critical mass of users.
bit1993 · 1h ago
"Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use..."
In practice this issue arise something like this: A decentralized service is launched it is so decentralized the user has to store their own private keys. Later a centralized solution is launched where the user does not have to go through the trouble of storing the private keys, everything is managed for them... everyone joins the centralized service.
cramsession · 2h ago
Interestingly the original Napster was a pretty good social network! I really liked being able to browse through all of a user's shared files. We should bring something like that back.
bawolff · 2h ago
Perhaps, but i feel like under this definition, bluesky and friends, dsspite all their talk, really does fit in the centralized camp.
blooalien · 2h ago
> ... "under this definition, bluesky and friends, dsspite all their talk, really does fit in the centralized camp."
In my mind, I put them somewhere in-between, leaning a tad more toward "centralized" because they still rely on an individual to host the service no matter how "federated" they are. Until they're truly peer-to-peer, there's still that aspect of centralization involved. We need something kinda like BitTorrent but for messaging / social connections.
rectang · 2h ago
Maybe Bluesky is analogous to Github, if the AT protocol truly does allow for migration away to an alternative?
Although Git repositories are portable, PRs, issues, actions and such aren't — so even if the migration away from Bluesky is lossy the comparison seems apt.
rzazueta · 1h ago
Naw, decentralized means not having everyone on one platform. ActivityPub-enabled sites (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) can be run by just about anyone, and can serve multiple users.
So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.
We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
didibus · 3h ago
I really like their listed user experience goals:
1. Cross-platform engagement
Create content via one platform and engage with users on other platforms.
2. Moderation choice
Voluntarily opt into moderation policies that reflect the experience you want.
3. Data portability
Data portability and credible exit are built in (you can take your data and followers with you).
4. Advertising disincentive
Portability prevents lock-in or captive audiences, which disincentivizes advertising.
5. Algorithmic choice
Users can choose the feeds and algorithms that work for them.
It's not do it yourself, it's more having more control if you want too.
bit1993 · 3h ago
The issue is only developers know the benefits of those features. Most people just want to view content or post and get their likes. That is why they use social media rather than post on their own website.
I don't think this is a technology problem, its more of a socioeconomic problem. People tend to choose the centralized option and projects that start out decentralized tend to end up centralized WWW-Social media, Email-Gmail, Git-Github, Bitcoin-Coinbase etc
l72 · 1h ago
This is where tech family and friends need to play a role. Host these services for them!
My family just thinks Jellyfin and Navidrome is another Netflix or Spotify they have access to. And most of them prefer Jellyfin as content doesn’t disappear and is much more curated.
alexisread · 4h ago
Decentralised here means keeping companies honest by avoiding lock-in. It's fine to have the centralisation if it's easy to switch. BlackSky users don't need to care about the details, but if they don't like the community they can move their data elsewhere. Try doing that with Instagram.
dingnuts · 4h ago
They can also liberate their identity, which is the real innovation of the AT protocol
jazzyjackson · 1h ago
Didn’t they just adopt DNS? I mean I guess you have a DID people can follow ( tho afaik there’s no other identity server for resolving DIDs besides bsky app), but the way to tell that someone is who you think they are is their handle being connected to their domain
bawolff · 2h ago
I mean, facebook is pretty easy to switch from, just stop going to their website.
Personally i'm a little doubtful that bluesky is decentralized in a way that matters.
l72 · 1h ago
Until you kids school uses it for organizing information for parents or that’s the only place a niche group you like is.
Getting banned from Facebook means loosing access to all of that. Kinda like getting banned from YouTube could mean loss of access to email, groups, drive and a bunch of other services. Hell I’ve heard of company contractors getting banned from Google Play’s Developer and everyone in the company then getting banned from all Google services!
If I get banned from a Lemmy community that doesn’t ban me from other communities or other servers and I can always run my own if I need to.
bee_rider · 1h ago
I think Facebook is pretty useless and just not using the site is a great way to transfer away from it. But I feel like to engage with the idea of switching away constructively, I’d have to find some value in the content I had on the site.
binary132 · 2h ago
DNS is decentralized
Kye · 3h ago
The distinction blurs with AT protocol. My data lives on Bluesky's PDS for now, but I can log in to that PDS from anything that supports AT. Like leaflet.pub
This post is stored in Leaflet's own lexicon in its own collection right next to all my Bluesky data. I could move this to a different PDS if I wanted. I could come up with a script to turn the collection into static pages or convert them to another platform's import format.
Nobody cares about decentralization until they do[0] and AT seems to have the best answer for that eventuality.
Social media's next evolution: state-owned, built by politically connected firms, and working poorly but there's no alternative....
mhh__ · 1h ago
I might just be projecting from a certain phase of my life but if I had to bet on what social media will look like:
TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience
Twitter+offline meetups for everything else.
Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.
al_borland · 1h ago
Why Twitter? Every time I go on there it seems like people who are seeking an argument as a way to connect. Those aren’t happy people.
mhh__ · 57m ago
Everyone I've met in person from twitter has been very well adjusted, smart, and surprisingly good looking.
t1E9mE7JTRjf · 1h ago
"our users’ accounts and data are on our server"
I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.
anon7000 · 11m ago
ATProto is decentralized in that it allows you to choose a 3rd party like Blacksky to do all kinds of things for you. You can use the social media feed this 3rd party curates, use their moderation services like block lists, and even have your data hosted on a 3rd party’s servers.
All while using the same client app everyone else is using, or even a custom 3rd party client.
The nature of the protocol is that everything is connected, but services of the protocol can be decentralized when a user chooses to use a 3rd party to do certain things for them.
MithrilTuxedo · 1h ago
The unit of decentralization is the group, not the individual. The client-server relationship is still centralized.
Joining a community is a highly centralizing act. ;-p
There is a depressing irony about a story on an effort to decentralize social media being published on a centralized social media platform. It feels like decentralized blogging will never come back, even though we have Ghost (not to mention Wordpress) right there.
With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 1h ago
I wouldn't say it's too depressing. It's just that's the platform the interviewer uses. Often bluesky adjacent blogs are posted via Leaflet (atproto based blog) nowaday. It's not always but tbh I see them more than I see substack in my circles now.
swayvil · 22m ago
Decentralized must necessitate abandonment of moderators.
To filter the bad stuff, to inform that algorithm, we will use a shared rating system. Rating the stuff and rating the raters too.
anon7000 · 16m ago
This is basically proof that you’re wrong: a separate entity hosts separate moderation, and anyone using a client of AT Proto (even the official app) can use this 3rd party as the moderation service for the content that they see. That’s decentralized moderation, where the user has choice over what moderation they use and what feeds they see.
swayvil · 13m ago
Please don't pretend to misunderstand me. It's annoying.
utilize1808 · 3h ago
Is it just me but I feel "social" would imply centralization. After all, if I want to socialize I will want to go where other people go, using a tool/client/channel that works for most people --- this inevitably leads to centralization.
DrewADesign · 1h ago
I don’t agree — I can socialize with my neighbor and I can also socialize in a centralized hub, like a club.
What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users.
I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
l72 · 1h ago
This is why I miss RSS so much. It is such a great way to keep up with people over a wide variety of platforms with your own powerful user agent.
I still use a self hosted FreshRSS heavily and fortunately many sites still accidentally support it, but it could be so much easier for non tech people.
daft_pink · 2h ago
I know right. Seems like they’re just reinventing the wordpress blog.
dyauspitr · 1h ago
I definitely don’t think this is the next evolution. Decentralized just means you have to do work to find places to post to and no one is doing that. The only decentralized social media is going to be stuff that is too gruesome, illegal and hateful to post in regular spaces.
NickNaraghi · 1h ago
you sound like a Fed lol
Pocomon · 2h ago
‘Black folks have always been huge culture drivers on social media platforms and other tech products. Systemically excluded from access to capital and distribution, Black folks leverage creativity to make social media platforms their “own” without ever having true ownership.’
I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.
mrtesthah · 2h ago
Have you looked at response-Tweets on X lately?
Pocomon · 2h ago
I've opted out of social media so you will have to clue me in. (Mainly because of the trolling and the excessive moderation)
basisword · 2h ago
Twitter is a racist cesspit. I deleted my account a while ago but recently decided to give it another go to follow some sports reporters. The amount of racism, xenophobia and hateful content that gets pushed in front of you is absurd. I imagine huge amounts of racism is a turn off for people that aren't white.
l72 · 1h ago
Allowing every drive by commentator is a huge mistake in building an actual community. Communities are built by people invested in the platform.
In the early to mid aughts I was part of couch surfing. It had a lot of purpose built in friction and it created an amazing tight knit group of people that I still consider my best friends. Once the pressure from Airbnb and investment money caused them to remove that, it became terrible.
Sometime never growing a community over a small group of invested people is the right choice.
The same thing happened with NextDoor. When it was small and just involved a few hundred people in your immediate neighborhood there was a real community on there. Then the kept expanding the size and now you have people that live no where in your community ruining the experience for everyone.
bluefirebrand · 2h ago
I really want to make a decentralizable streaming video platform
Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams"
Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such
Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers
wasabi991011 · 1h ago
Haven't checked it out, but supposedly stream.place [1] is "the Twitch of Bluesky" (according to the HN comment I heard about it from), doing livestreaming using the AT Protocol.
PeerTube is a project that already exists and fits some of those qualifications. Not certain if it quite meets all of your specifications, as I don't believe it has direct integration for payment processing. Most streamers, however, take third-party payment anyway, like Streamlabs, that give a much larger percentage to the creator compared to Twitch or YouTube. I am also not certain how easy it is to set up PeerTube.
It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.
I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.
All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
krapp · 2h ago
The more decentralized social media platforms there are, the better, but I wonder if there's a reason they didn't go with Mastodon?
adinhitlore · 3h ago
I like bluesky like...a lot but too busy recently to post there and of course, lack of engagement from my part = lack of people to actually give a f@@@ about me.
I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
ChrisArchitect · 3h ago
Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear. Seems like a ton of work to manage the separate server. (a similar refrain from fediverse/mastodon things) But if they're happy sure.
A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.
Kye · 3h ago
The whole impetus for the original project inside Twitter was the recognition that centralized moderation at scale is impossible without ignoring what makes different communities unique. Context collapses fast and well-intentioned moderation decisions spark huge, unending imbroglios.
kosolam · 4h ago
I didn’t understand what are these Black users that blacksky is made for? Is it about skin color wtf?
The real question is where are they. Bluesky doesn't have any black users, this is another case of liberal whites pretending to represent black people in some way in order to manipulate other white people.
"Black users" isn't about skin color, it's about a group of people who came from US slavery who the entire world is aware of and patterned their music, dancing, speaking, and any number of things after. It's as cohesive and identifiable a group of people as Poles or the Chinese, but for some reason some people get triggered by their mere existence as a distinct group with distinct concerns. If we're not distinct, why are you so good at screaming about us?
Everybody remembers when the first black stuff came to their country. The first returned immigrant who changed your popular culture by imitating things that black people were doing in the US, whether it was rock and roll, or just how to dance. You don't have to be grateful (cultural transmission is natural), but it's goofy to play blind.
That being said, bluesky 1) doesn't offer anything useful to black people, 2) it took VC (not a charity), and 3) is not decentralized.
quesera · 2h ago
> "Black users" isn't about skin color, it's about a group of people who came from US slavery
(I am having trouble phrasing this question to be unambiguously sincere and without intention of provocation, so please bear with me...)
I read your statement above as saying that "Black" means "descended from US chattel slavery".
Is that your intention? Is this a big-B vs small-b distinction? What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery?
Please assume ignorance and not malice. I really do not know what I don't know here.
codeforafrica · 1h ago
What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery?
Africans? (in Africa at least)
I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black"
krapp · 2h ago
I mean, Rudy Fraser, the founder of BlackSky, appears to be a black man and not a white liberal.
And of course there are black users on Bluesky. They're there, I don't know why you would claim otherwise.
ChrisArchitect · 3h ago
tl;dr
Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky, so running on the AT Protocol that has its own infrastructure, mod team etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sellers
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3102001
Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.
I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?
Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.
It shouldn't matter what servers are anywhere. It should all be eventually consistent for some agglomerated cluster sampling of the world. Make the content immutable and ephemeral. People that care to archive it will.
Federation is silly and is part of the problem. Plus it creates more little fiefdoms.
I'll subscribe to my own filters if I care, and my agent will handle the rest.
There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.
I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
Like I said:
> If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post.
> people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting.
> you need to treat your thread account as not federated too.
But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.
Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio.
How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.
The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for)
Those are the trade offs
Lemmy is a bit more hit/miss on loads but the content posted seems so much more wholesome than other socials
There was a time when tweets were just good ol' regular HTML pages. Today it's unbearable if you remember that you're just trying to read one small paragraph.
Yeah, they were slow. Mostly due to the low speed of dial-up modems.
What instance is more wholesome? As written, your comment is like saying IRC is more wholesome. It is? On what server?
Maybe that's just my impression but suspect there is a kernel of truth there
In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.
When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.
I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.
The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.
This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.
I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.
https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3ltda4vl5322z
It's just a different way of organizing communities.
Bluesky and Mastodon are still the fringe of human community.
Blacksky's market is literally orders of magnitude smaller. That's quite a growth curve when adjusted for market size.
Not necessarily. Just one famous example; BitTorrent is decentralized but for most people it's just "run this app, download files". "Decentralized" just means "doesn't rely on a centralized service to accomplish a goal". As long as the application isn't too complex to install and use, most folks won't care one way or the other whether it's decentralized or not, as long as it accomplishes the goal they're looking to accomplish.
In practice this issue arise something like this: A decentralized service is launched it is so decentralized the user has to store their own private keys. Later a centralized solution is launched where the user does not have to go through the trouble of storing the private keys, everything is managed for them... everyone joins the centralized service.
In my mind, I put them somewhere in-between, leaning a tad more toward "centralized" because they still rely on an individual to host the service no matter how "federated" they are. Until they're truly peer-to-peer, there's still that aspect of centralization involved. We need something kinda like BitTorrent but for messaging / social connections.
Although Git repositories are portable, PRs, issues, actions and such aren't — so even if the migration away from Bluesky is lossy the comparison seems apt.
So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.
We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
1. Cross-platform engagement
Create content via one platform and engage with users on other platforms.
2. Moderation choice
Voluntarily opt into moderation policies that reflect the experience you want.
3. Data portability
Data portability and credible exit are built in (you can take your data and followers with you).
4. Advertising disincentive
Portability prevents lock-in or captive audiences, which disincentivizes advertising.
5. Algorithmic choice
Users can choose the feeds and algorithms that work for them.
It's not do it yourself, it's more having more control if you want too.
I don't think this is a technology problem, its more of a socioeconomic problem. People tend to choose the centralized option and projects that start out decentralized tend to end up centralized WWW-Social media, Email-Gmail, Git-Github, Bitcoin-Coinbase etc
My family just thinks Jellyfin and Navidrome is another Netflix or Spotify they have access to. And most of them prefer Jellyfin as content doesn’t disappear and is much more curated.
Personally i'm a little doubtful that bluesky is decentralized in a way that matters.
Getting banned from Facebook means loosing access to all of that. Kinda like getting banned from YouTube could mean loss of access to email, groups, drive and a bunch of other services. Hell I’ve heard of company contractors getting banned from Google Play’s Developer and everyone in the company then getting banned from all Google services!
If I get banned from a Lemmy community that doesn’t ban me from other communities or other servers and I can always run my own if I need to.
Here's a post on one of my Leaflet publications under my own domain: https://foxes.kyefox.com/3lx46ftzhhc27
This post is stored in Leaflet's own lexicon in its own collection right next to all my Bluesky data. I could move this to a different PDS if I wanted. I could come up with a script to turn the collection into static pages or convert them to another platform's import format.
Nobody cares about decentralization until they do[0] and AT seems to have the best answer for that eventuality.
[0] https://kyefox.com/nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until...
[0] https://youtu.be/8GQrVgHh6EU
TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience
Twitter+offline meetups for everything else.
Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.
I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.
All while using the same client app everyone else is using, or even a custom 3rd party client.
The nature of the protocol is that everything is connected, but services of the protocol can be decentralized when a user chooses to use a 3rd party to do certain things for them.
Joining a community is a highly centralizing act. ;-p
With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.
To filter the bad stuff, to inform that algorithm, we will use a shared rating system. Rating the stuff and rating the raters too.
What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users.
I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
I still use a self hosted FreshRSS heavily and fortunately many sites still accidentally support it, but it could be so much easier for non tech people.
I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.
In the early to mid aughts I was part of couch surfing. It had a lot of purpose built in friction and it created an amazing tight knit group of people that I still consider my best friends. Once the pressure from Airbnb and investment money caused them to remove that, it became terrible.
Sometime never growing a community over a small group of invested people is the right choice.
The same thing happened with NextDoor. When it was small and just involved a few hundred people in your immediate neighborhood there was a real community on there. Then the kept expanding the size and now you have people that live no where in your community ruining the experience for everyone.
Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams"
Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such
Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/stream.place
It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.
I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.
All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.
"Black users" isn't about skin color, it's about a group of people who came from US slavery who the entire world is aware of and patterned their music, dancing, speaking, and any number of things after. It's as cohesive and identifiable a group of people as Poles or the Chinese, but for some reason some people get triggered by their mere existence as a distinct group with distinct concerns. If we're not distinct, why are you so good at screaming about us?
Everybody remembers when the first black stuff came to their country. The first returned immigrant who changed your popular culture by imitating things that black people were doing in the US, whether it was rock and roll, or just how to dance. You don't have to be grateful (cultural transmission is natural), but it's goofy to play blind.
That being said, bluesky 1) doesn't offer anything useful to black people, 2) it took VC (not a charity), and 3) is not decentralized.
(I am having trouble phrasing this question to be unambiguously sincere and without intention of provocation, so please bear with me...)
I read your statement above as saying that "Black" means "descended from US chattel slavery".
Is that your intention? Is this a big-B vs small-b distinction? What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery?
Please assume ignorance and not malice. I really do not know what I don't know here.
Africans? (in Africa at least)
I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black"
And of course there are black users on Bluesky. They're there, I don't know why you would claim otherwise.
Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky, so running on the AT Protocol that has its own infrastructure, mod team etc.