[HN Gopher] ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared
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ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared
Author : nameequalsmain
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-04-07 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nate.mecca1.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (nate.mecca1.net)
| echelon wrote:
| ActivityPub is ahead, but it feels like a dead end. It has the
| same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord
| over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and
| your freedom.
|
| Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love
| the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard
| to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and
| accessibility, but they're the only ones developing and
| implementing AT protocol.
|
| Social media should be more P2P and learn from the 2000's era
| before the platform giants stole away the dream. Bittorrent, RSS,
| Atom, semantic web (FOAF, microformats) were the way to complete
| digital freedom.
| systemz wrote:
| The larger instances, the larger moderation issues.
|
| People are only people so fierce moderation will happen. With
| smaller instances "blast radius" is smaller and it shouldn't be
| problematic like in centralized social media.
| mariusor wrote:
| > moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the
| algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.
|
| I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think
| it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of
| view.
|
| If you're not welcome in a community, join one that would hear
| you. Why would that be against your "freedom"?
| sharperguy wrote:
| I think it's more of an arcitectural issue. If you were a
| node operator, would you peer with a dedicated racial hatred
| AP node? What if a small minority of your users complained
| that you blocked it.
|
| With something like nostr, you are free as a relay operator
| to block whatever makes you feel uncomfortable, while users
| can just get that content from some other relay without
| having to create a new account and move their entire social
| graph over.
| vidarh wrote:
| This, to me, is an argument against Nostr.
|
| To elaborate, I prefer that the barrier is greater.
| saurik wrote:
| Because... you are terrified that you might manage to
| figure out how to access such content, and need to make
| it extremely difficult for you to do so, even on purpose?
| (I clearly don't understand.)
| vidarh wrote:
| No, because I want to be able to choose to interact with
| people who are fine with there being barriers to similar
| types of content.
|
| If some feel they have a compelling reason to straddle
| both, they still can, so it denies them nothing, but
| sometimes even small extra barriers helps set a tone for
| communities.
| echelon wrote:
| Why should minds be put in jails? Why should we segregate
| into like-minded and undesirables?
|
| We're better than this.
|
| I grew up with [x views, y political party], but because
| the early internet was open and accepting and not at all
| like this, I was able to see the broader world and wholly
| new perspectives. Now the bias is to shit on, shame, and
| block everyone. That's not going to build a better
| society.
|
| The internet pioneers would be aghast at all of the
| "happy little" censorship happening today.
|
| I've been banned from several subreddits for leaving
| comments in subreddits the moderators dislike. Removed
| completely by automation. They don't even realize my
| comments weren't in support of their favorite issue to
| hate on.
|
| Censorship is wrong. Put blinders on your own feed all
| day long if you so choose, but stop trying to put cages
| on other people's minds and voices.
| vidarh wrote:
| No minds are "put in jails".
|
| But they do not have a right to unfettered access _to
| me_.
|
| I'm free to choose to set standards, and the standard of
| requiring them to have a second account if they both want
| access to me and to content I find deplorable is a
| _really low_ barrier.
|
| And others are free to choose to commune with me in the
| spaces I want to spend time in, and communities are free
| to set their standards.
|
| I've not argued for censorship. I've argued for _my
| right_ to shield myself _very mildly_ from people I want
| nothing to do with, and for others to choose to do so
| with me.
|
| You're free to say what you want on your instance or
| those of people who believe as you do or are fine with
| your speech.
|
| Nobody is stopping your speech, just your ability to
| impose it on those of us who does not want it near us.
| echelon wrote:
| > No minds are "put in jails".
|
| I got banned from my city's subreddit because I said
| something once about crime the mods disagreed with. Now I
| can't enjoy a platform about the city I live in. I can't
| ask about restaurants, talk about concerts. It's frankly
| troubling.
|
| I posted something to /r/conservative once that asked
| them to be more inclusive of trans people. They banned me
| on sight, which figures. From that moment, I've been
| auto-banned from several trans and liberal spaces for
| posting in /r/conservative. I'm LGBT and my partner is
| trans.
|
| This authoritarian censorship is toxic and pervasive.
| It's just not right. Stopping the flow of ideas is how
| the pressure valves stop working. It's how polarization
| deepens and is how our democracy ends and authoritarians
| arise.
|
| > But they do not have a right to unfettered access to
| me.
|
| You can block me all you want. You can subscribe to a
| list of HN contrarians to filter forever. But you have no
| right to filter me from other people that don't willfully
| subscribe to your banlist.
|
| Lock yourself in your house all you want. You can't keep
| me from enjoying the outside public [1], from meeting
| people in the public, or from me seeing and meeting other
| people you've locked out of your house. Or even going as
| far as to say you can't lock people inside your house
| without their consent or knowledge.
|
| You do what you want in your house. But don't desire to
| make your house rules the default for all humanity.
|
| [1] "the public" is an allusion to a P2P, non-federated,
| user-first social media protocol. Something like email.
| vidarh wrote:
| They willfully sign up to my ban list if they join my
| instance, same as users on Reddit willfully sign up to
| the the rules and the moderators when they join a
| subreddit.
|
| Nobody has argued for the power to keep you from enjoying
| the public. But my instances are not public space,
| neither are subreddits.
|
| If you want to run an uncensored space for your city, you
| can. If you want an uncensored place for conservatives,
| you can have that too. And so on. The reality is that no
| such places stay functioning if they are uncensored, and
| so the question tends to be if they are open enough that
| _you_ don 't notice.
|
| I'll note we're having this discussion on one of the more
| heavily moderated forums available.
| bouncing wrote:
| I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques. The cliques
| form around moderation, politics, whether they federate with
| Threads.net, what content warnings are used, and even whether
| alt text is "required" for images.
|
| Then some instances defederate otherwise innocent instances
| that don't have sufficient agreement on all those points,
| regardless of actual content.
|
| It is kind of tiring and honestly hard to recommend.
| vidarh wrote:
| So is Twitter, and every other social network. They just
| don't give you the tools to clearly delineate boundaries.
| bouncing wrote:
| There are debates and groups on other networks.
|
| But there aren't schisms over alt text or content
| warnings for food on Threads.
| vidarh wrote:
| Is it a feature to you that whole sections of society are
| absent from it? Because otherwise those views would be
| there.
| yborg wrote:
| They mean the freedom to impose their views on others,
| because if the ignorant can just be made to hear the 'truth'
| they will believe it too. Having the ability to remove such
| toxicity from the much larger community of people who
| genuinely want share ideas is a strength of the platform, not
| a weakness.
| echelon wrote:
| > I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people
| think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted
| points of view.
|
| You're using words like toxic to describe me and you don't
| even know me. This goes to show the incredibly rotten and
| highly polarized the status quo has become. Systems that
| behave the way you're describing are the current norm, and
| they're broken.
|
| You can choose for yourself to ignore me. You can advertise
| to the world that you ignore me and people can opt into that
| if they choose. _But you shouldn 't ever have the right to
| unilaterally make that call for everyone._ Nobody should have
| that power.
|
| Imagine if [opposite viewpoint] could technologically shut
| you down for everyone else? The systems we design today could
| enable that tomorrow. Just because you're in a comfortable
| spot today doesn't mean that eroding rights and freedoms
| won't ensnare you tomorrow or that the zeitgeist won't
| change.
|
| > If you're not welcome in a community
|
| This is also frankly a disturbing trend. Creating little
| fiefdoms of unacceptance. Who makes you the judge of that?
| You don't even know what my views and values are, and you're
| seeking to shun me already.
|
| We're all the same. We just sample the world differently. We
| all need to be more accepting and loving and stop playing
| petty team sports.
|
| In the meantime, you're free to keep on tooting. Nobody is
| taking Mastodon away from you. It's just not a system I want
| to spend time or energy advocating for.
| mariusor wrote:
| > But you shouldn't ever have the right to unilaterally
| make that call for everyone.
|
| In this hypothetical I'm only making the call for the
| people of my instance, not for everyone. Like I said, you'd
| be free to join other instances where people are willing to
| entertain your point of view.
|
| The audacity of assuming that the server that I pay and
| care for should be a vehicle for content that I don't agree
| with is baffling to me. It's my house, my rules, simple as.
| echelon wrote:
| Sure, that's absolutely your right.
|
| I just want spaces for me and others where this isn't the
| default imposed upon everyone. I don't want to subscribe
| to [x filtering] unless I choose.
|
| House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the
| default for the public commons.
|
| The legislators are going to make rules that enforce
| these technological straddles, and the defaults will
| slowly change in directions you neither anticipate nor
| enjoy.
|
| We shouldn't accept ActivityPub as the end state solution
| to these problems. If anything, large instances (and thus
| their owners) will win out, and this just entrenches the
| status quo of tiny cabals in power censoring things that
| displease them.
| mariusor wrote:
| > House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the
| default for the public commons.
|
| I can't understand how you can think that fediverse
| instances are "public commons". Each of them is run under
| the rules of the people that keep them running and not
| everyone can be moot to be able to suffer everything on
| their servers.
|
| The public commons part of the fediverse is formed of the
| many software that you can just pick up and run yourself.
| echelon wrote:
| Mastodon is thought of as "distributed social media",
| when in reality it's not much different than Reddit
| without central corporate control and profit.
|
| Instance owners can block anyone based on manual or
| automated rules. It's just an extension of the status
| quo. This is fantastic for building insular communities,
| but it doesn't get us into a better place with respect to
| individual user freedom. There are still power dynamics
| and the end users are not powerful.
|
| My concern is that we stop here and this becomes
| "distributed social networking". What we need more than
| anything -- more than Mastodon and ActivityPub -- are
| protocols that enable peer to peer communication where no
| node can impose its will upon others and the barrier to
| participation in the broad community doesn't demand
| fielty to powerful moderators.
| krapp wrote:
| The status quo is that most people don't want pure
| anarchy, they want communities, and communities have
| boundaries. Uncensored free-for-all discussion only
| results in the most aggressively toxic elements and
| effective spammers driving away the rest. Even the guy
| who runs Gab recently found that out.
|
| If that's what you want, I'm sure you can already find it
| somewhere. But I think you're in the minority, and it
| certainly isn't what's needed "more than anything."
| echelon wrote:
| Why would you think I want anarchy? I want a public park.
| A protocol as free as the old web and BitTorrent.
|
| Gab attracted its group because it was the anti-Reddit.
| People banned from Reddit went there. Of course it was
| filled with anarchy and racism.
|
| I don't want all of our protocols and platforms to have a
| higher class of user with God mode. That's inequitable,
| and that's what Masto is today. And Reddit. And HN. And
| every other centralized platform.
|
| I'm a moderate centrist and I get censored by everybody.
| The right, the left. People want to shut you up unless
| you agree with them. And often times it's not about
| silencing harm, but rather power tripping. People get off
| on that.
|
| More than anything, I'm deeply afraid of censorship. It's
| a real and very slippery slope. You might think you're
| the one getting to pick and choose the topics today, but
| very quickly that will escape you.
| vidarh wrote:
| My Mastodon instance is not a public commons. If I choose
| to let you join it, it is on my terms. If you don't like
| that, there are others, or you can run your own. The
| "public commons" is the system of federation, not the
| instances.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms:
| moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the
| algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.
|
| That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your preferences, there's
| an ActivityPub instance with moderation you'll like. Want to be
| in a liberal thought bubble? It's there. Want nothing but all
| Trump, all the time? They have that. Only the good things about
| astrology? Yep. Aggressive blocking of anti-science woo? Sure.
|
| Moderation decisions are made at the instance level, not the
| network level. There are instances that take a laissez-faire
| approach. Others are quite heavy handed. Most are somewhere in
| the middle. Users can pick which sounds best to them and find
| servers that align with their wishes.
| grumbel wrote:
| What if I want something that isn't an echo-chamber?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Join one of the instances with looser moderation.
| xigoi wrote:
| Suhh instances tend to be put on shared blocklists,
| effectively making them echo-chambers too.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I think that says more about the content of those
| instances being blocked. If you're transmitting content
| bad enough to get blocked by a large portion of the
| fediverse, the problem has more to do with what you're
| saying than their decision not to hear it.
| saurik wrote:
| What you are describing -- a system where I have to maintain
| accounts on a number of separate networks that don't
| interoperate due to content control disagreements -- is an
| ecosystem of competing centralized systems, not a
| decentralized one, and that people who run their own servers
| are reportedly presumed evil and defederated either by
| default or at the drop of a hat is a visceral demonstration
| that this setup undermines most of the benefit you think you
| are getting by calling it "decentralized". The reality is
| that many of the people using Mastadon would be not just
| "happy enough" but "actively happier" (per all the clearly
| ridiculous controversy surrounding people doing the
| supposedly-evil work of building search engines or, heaven
| forbid, being able to quote-tweet _without permission_ ,
| lol... if you are going out of your way to prevent
| hyperlinks, something seriously wrong has happened) using a
| centralized competitor to Twitter that was merely run by
| someone they liked.
| vidarh wrote:
| The number of people who have to maintain more than one
| account is minuscule, and most of the time they ought to
| reflect over why they are part of communities with such
| mutual animosity that they can't find one home that accepts
| both/all.
|
| I run my own, and have seen no trace of this being
| "presumed evil" you speak of.
| irusensei wrote:
| Issue is that the admin is the one who decides what you can
| see. I remember a few months ago some meme/map or the network
| divided in "normie" and "weird" sides of the network. The
| impression I got is that the normie side instance admins
| apparently cooperate on blocking instances.
|
| What if I want to be on both? Well you need two accounts.
| krapp wrote:
| Two accounts are trivial to manage, especially with a third
| party client. I managed more than that through a bookmarks
| folder. Many people have multiple accounts on various
| platforms anyway.
|
| Also you could always host your own instance and be your
| own admin. I started doing that a couple of weeks ago. It's
| easy to find a host plan, if you don't want to do all of
| the work yourself. But you could still do that if you
| wanted to.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Then get 2. They're generally free.
|
| That schism is inevitable. To pick an extreme case, imagine
| a server for LGBTQ people and another for self-declared
| neo-Nazis. The people on the 1st might have very strong
| feelings that they want no contact whatsoever with people
| on the 2nd. There's no world where it's reasonable to say
| they have to keep their servers connected.
|
| Now suppose you want to follow people on the 2nd server for
| journalism purposes. It's unreasonable to have an account
| on the 1st server and then complain that they're not
| talking to the 2nd. Even if you have legitimate purposes
| that aren't creepy, they're not going to go along with it.
| So instead, you get another account to follow the 2nd
| server and everyone's happy.
|
| The Mastodon server I own turned 7 years old today. We've
| blocked probably a couple dozen servers over the years. In
| every case I can tell you exactly why we blocked that
| instance. Most of them involve, literally, their users
| sending mine swastika imagery, death threats, or other
| utterly indefensible content, and the moderators of those
| instances being OK with it. My users stick around because
| they trust my explanations for the moderation actions I
| take. They don't want to manually filter actual Nazi
| content from their timelines. Those that do can pick any
| number of servers that wouldn't block that content.
| mg wrote:
| The next hurdle to create distributed social media seems to be
| distributed likes and follows. Those are the social currencies of
| today's generation.
|
| In a centralized system, you trust the central authority to show
| the correct number of likes a post got and the correct info who
| liked a post. Same for number of followers and who follows whom.
|
| Do any of these 3 protocols have an approach to do the same in a
| decentralized world?
| saurik wrote:
| It is not obvious to me at all that this problem needs to be
| solved or that it is even a good thing for social networks to
| provide such stats; but, if it actually somehow is important,
| it is also a problem that is trivially reduced to the same
| problem as spam: likes and follows are simply signed messages,
| not pre-aggregated counts, and if you balk at sending someone a
| list of a hundred thousand signatures they are trivially
| compressed using zero-knowledge proofs. Now... how to prevent
| people from making up a million real-looking bot accounts? That
| is harder (though I absolutely believe is tractable), but you
| have to solve that anyway lest rather than inflating likes and
| follows people just flood the system with replies (and it is
| also a problem the centralized system will also have to contend
| with, though it might have more strategies available to it).
| mg wrote:
| Regarding whether it is "a good thing for social networks to
| provide such stats":
|
| It's a central part of social media, even here on HN.
|
| Look at the front page. Each post shows 6 pieces of
| information: Title, Domain, Points, Author,
| Time, Comments
|
| 2 of them = 33% are numeric indicators we trust because we
| trust HN.
|
| Likes and follows are probably two of the main reasons that
| centralized social media sites have displaced websites, rss,
| forums, mailing lists, newsgroups etc.
| saurik wrote:
| And yet, Hacker News long ago removed the ability to see
| vote point counts on comments, and there is no mechanism
| for people to follow other users at all.
|
| And, hell, while "author" is the most trivial feature of
| all to get right as it simply can't be forged in a
| signature-based system, it is incredible to me how many
| people on Hacker News actively try to ignore who wrote a
| comment (not me! the first thing I look at is your name as
| I think it is actively asocial to dehumanize the people you
| are communicating with).
|
| I honestly think you will be surprised at how usable the
| Hacker News feed would still be if you remove everything
| except the URL itself, and had your client generate a URL
| preview, and encourage you to try hiding some of these
| fields for a while using a local browser extension / script
| / stylesheet.
|
| The real magic of Hacker News -- both of the feed and of
| the comment thread -- is the algorithmic sorting that makes
| sense of the cacophony of submissions, not the silly
| indicators (which are likely serving more as distractions
| than as beacons) it is bothering to surface to you: those
| are merely serving the purpose of making its decisions seem
| credible (and if you go hunting you will realize there are
| many posts you likely didn't see for many reasons despite
| having gotten many likes _or even comments_ ).
|
| The question then is really: "how can I algorithmically
| rank content on a decentralized network", and I think that
| phrasing of the issue unlocks tons of doors that myopically
| insisting on a scant handful of specific statistics that
| are merely one of many many inputs to the current system
| that actually rules your usage of the website uses
| precludes.
|
| Sometimes, information the user might actively be using to
| argue with the recommendations is even best hidden from the
| user: TikTok notably will happily recommend a post from
| years ago _and hides the timestamp from you_ as people
| doing manual mental filtering incorrectly deweight the
| value of old content and /or find it awkward to interact
| with.
|
| Now, is sorting and filtering in a decentralized system for
| sure solvable? I don't know... I think it is, and have tons
| of ideas for how to do it! Yet, I would not be shocked to
| try really hard and fail, or even to discover some
| "trivial" (in retrospect) proof that it is impossible. But,
| either way, one thing I am very confident of is that likes
| and comments isn't it, as real world systems -- including
| Facebook and TikTok -- manage to surface tons of
| interesting content to me that have low numbers of likes:
| the world simply isn't best sorted by thumbs up.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >The question then is really: "how can I algorithmically
| rank content on a decentralized network"
|
| An interesting thing would be if you could write your own
| ranking algorithm and then apply it to your followers'
| content or if you could at least tweak the algorithm e.g.
| "I want 70% of content to be from let's say cybersecurity
| and 30% from gaming) or (I want 70% of content to be from
| my friends and family and 30% of content from "Internet
| people" that I follow).
|
| Edit: Custom ranking algorithm would be hard to design
| and implement but not unfeasible.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I wholeheartedly believe that those are anti-features.
| They're metrics that drive antisocial behavior and make the
| world a little worse.
| mg wrote:
| You say so on a website that displays the number of likes
| (here: "points") for every post right on the front page.
| Klonoar wrote:
| This take is so tired. They're stuck posting where
| engagement is because there's nowhere near the level of
| discussion elsewhere.
|
| Participating in something and trying to discuss how it
| could be improved when you disagree with it is normal
| human behavior.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Why do you think the engagement is here, and on other
| sites that _do_ keep track of imaginary internet points
| -- and not so much on sites that don 't?
|
| Begin with "this take is so tired" if you want, but then
| I want to hear actual reasons.
| krapp wrote:
| Karma and voting are ruining Hacker News as well, just
| not as quickly because the algorithms here are not as
| aggressively tuned to maximize engagement.
| systemz wrote:
| ActivityPub isn't perfect but still seems better vs putting
| everything in one basket controlled by big corp (Meta's FB, IG
| etc).
| grumbel wrote:
| With ActivityPub you are still putting everything in one
| basket. All the federation is completely optional and
| identities are not transferable. But unlike big corps, that
| generally care very little about what you do, a whole lot of
| ActivityPub instances are heavily politically motivated and
| love to block or defederate.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| That's not entirely correct. Mastodon already implements a
| feature to migrate to a new instance. Also there is a draft
| for identities that are not bound to an instance.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| This post was written in late January. Bluesky opened up early
| access to federation about a month later, which does change some
| of the perspective. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-
| federation
| edent wrote:
| > it sends a copy per follower, meaning if 10 users on one server
| follow the same user on a remote server that remote server sends
| 10 copies of the message
|
| That's not right. Most AP servers operate a shared inbox. So you
| only need to send one message - no matter how many followers you
| have on that server.
| pogue wrote:
| This is from January 30th. Since then Bluesky has opened up to
| everyone (no invitation required), allows you to host your own
| PDS and even added new community based moderation tools known as
| Ozone internally, but acts a a "labeling service". It allows
| those who subscribe to them to get more specific tailored content
| they don't (or in some cases do!) want to see and it is labeled
| with a tag on accounts or posts, then the end user can choose
| whether they want those posts to have a warning on them, be
| completely hidden or nothing at all. It allows much more
| customized options & Bluesky doesn't need to actively close or
| ban accounts that might just include content other people don't
| want to see.
|
| From the stats of people who ran their own PDS for their own
| accounts, it used an less than 1mb of data transfer a day and
| insignificant amounts of CPU/RAM (less than a 20% spike). But, it
| will depend on how big your account is, how many followers you
| have, number of posts you make, etc etc.
|
| In native Bluesky with a default account, they have decentralized
| the servers so there are maybe around 20-30 servers all on the
| East Coast of the US. There's currently not much incentive to run
| your own. The PDS software is fairly new and unless you just
| wanted to have a non-US host for privacy reasons, you could do so
| and get away with running it on a RPi or standard VPS no problem.
| No one has yet started any major instances to rival the primary
| ones yet, however.
| linuxdude314 wrote:
| The description of AT protocol is just super lacking.
|
| I highly recommend reading the actual protocol docs if you're
| interested in learning about it and it's scalability.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| These all feel quite over-engineered. I feel like a combination
| of a webpage with your bio and a feed of posts with an associated
| RSS feed could cover the "follow a user/microblogging" side of
| social media, and email could cover direct messaging and threaded
| conversations. What am I missing that these protocols bring to
| the table?
| 3np wrote:
| Semantics. Notions of tags, replies, metadata, what kind of
| entity a link is refering to. Stable identifiers (how do you
| canonically refer to content rehosted elsewhere?). Authenticity
| for rehosted content. There was/is an idea and attempt at
| "semantic web" aka "web 3.0" but it never caught on.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
|
| Also, a common requirement is authenticated reads and fine-
| grained access control of pull-based content. E.g. I want to
| sharre my vacation photos with a different subset of
| friends/followers vs my tech blogging, only some of which
| should be public.
| robert_foss wrote:
| What about Matrix? I think the protocol would compete well
| against the others in this list.
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