this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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It should be Mastodon. This is the same shit with a different name
I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.
Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can't enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that's under central control. But you also can't do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.
Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn't. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).
Very accurate
ActivityPub is the protocol though. Mastodon is an implementation of the protocol.
That's an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I'm from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren't tech savy... this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.
I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We've already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
I'm reasonably tech savvy and even I'd struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.
There's a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can't. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that's hosted on .sh.itjust.works.
There's also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.
People complain that the mainstream sites are relatively closed ecosystems, but they also complain when those sites try to be more open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People don't like the monolith when it's over there and they don't like it when it comes over here, either
read about embrace/extend/extinguish to see why
Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don't see how the venture capital firm could stop them... For as long as one organization doesn't control 60%+ of all user's instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen... but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.
They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn't under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don't control 60%+ of all user's instances we are good.
It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that's what I hope.
Why? Why wouldn't they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
You don't need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That's what the users are coming for.
As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren't posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn't an audience there. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn't immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.
Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don't know..., .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world's content.
I wouldn't say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn't kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.
There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.
Yeah, that's what I heard from my microblogging colleagues too. They tried Mastodon during the first wave of Twitter exodus, found it too frustrating/difficult, tried Bluesky and stuck with it ever since.
Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can't run your own server yet. We'll see if they keep their promise.
Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you're not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.
They've followed through on their promises so far, and you can actually self-host pretty much the whole stack today:
https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
I'd perfer for mastodon to take off personally, but really at this point both are good options and worlds better than twitter.
They took crypto bros VC money.
Do we really think they’ll allow mass federation without getting returns on their investment?
It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.
Like seriously... that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.
I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.
Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money...to get more money.
What's the difference, really? Aren't they both decentralized microblogging social networks?
One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.
Bluesky is mit licensed, if it goes bad what's to stop a fork? Once there's interop between the protocols will it matter at all?
There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A...
Can you give a specific example of how bluesky could be?
yes, see this thread
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474
"#BlueSky isn't decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that's all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find "networking through Relays instead of server-to-server" as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else."
You can run your own relay, though:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running%20a%20Full-Network%20atproto%20Relay%20(July%202024)
I do prefer Activitypub overall, and it's certainly more mature, but any efforts towards decentralization should be encouraged/celebrated.
You can run your own relay, in that sense the "body" of bluesky is when considered in the abstract potentially decentralized... but when you consider the "brain" of bluesky nodes and the layer of moderation and post/commenting is still locked into a centralized system it is a bit like arguing borg drones have free will because they are physically individual beings.
Or it is like arguing an ant isn't existentially dependent upon the structure of the ant colony to survive since each ant posesses an individual body with its own six legs.
Not 100% sure but I don't think anything would stop either a fork or a new app that uses the same protocol.
I really don't see how it could matter tbh
I think lemmy should get atproto support too.
BlueSky isn't decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can't set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn't happened yet.