[HN Gopher] We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky
___________________________________________________________________
We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky
Author : srameshc
Score : 165 points
Date : 2025-01-19 00:53 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for
| an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber
| effect we've seen on other platforms. Now, not only can you
| subscribe to those with like opinions, but the collective can
| reject dissenting opinions en masse. What could go wrong?
| NewJazz wrote:
| You call it "social media echo chamber" I call it "not exposing
| myself, family, or friends to gore or lewd content".
| numpad0 wrote:
| Doubt it, Twitter had that feature years ago and there wasn't a
| major problem that linked to it.
|
| Crazy people can't follow protocols, and most realizes they're
| in the wrong before blocking million accounts. References to
| useful contents from blocked accounts will occasionally leak
| through channels, and that should validate/invalidate choices.
|
| It's probably a pain for spammers and an extra processing cost
| for serving platform, though.
|
| edit: if you consider it must to block massive amount of real
| users(i.e. not script bots and/or third world hired guns trying
| to destroy a platform) to use a platform normally, that's just
| not sane.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Educated people will remain educated. Ignorant people will
| remain ignorant. Angry people will remain angry. Block lists
| aren't going to make a material difference in winning hearts
| and minds. The average reading level in the United States is
| between 7th and 8th grade, for example. Users will pick what
| they want to read, and they should be able to.
| adolph wrote:
| I wonder what's the max lexile score for 144 characters
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Seems to be the wrong measure for the angry dopamine
| machine. I should've mentioned critical thinking and
| emotional intelligence as well in my first comment.
| Citations below.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z
|
| https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/430608-trending-
| science-...
|
| https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/mit-sloan-study-finds-
| thinkin...
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07779
| pixl97 wrote:
| The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers,
| the clinically insane, outright enemies.
|
| Why should I listen to the endless amount of slop flat earthers
| shat upon the internet at large?
|
| The early internet was a pretty decent place to talk, debate,
| and see opinions you didn't agree with. But those days are long
| gone. He'll, these days the other side of the conversation
| could just be a bot that will never change its mind, and waste
| your time you could be talking to an actual human.
| nbittich wrote:
| The internet of the 2000s was good because it didn't have
| these "discover" and "for you" algorithms. If you were
| interested in a subject, you actually had to search and
| filter results to find what you wanted; no AI choosing for
| you. If you're not interested in politics, you shouldn't see
| political content, unless you specifically search for it.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Usenet had kill files. It was invented before the Internet
| was widespread. There was even a term, plonk, for adding
| someone usually as parting message.
|
| Kill files were required for reading Usenet. There were less
| bad posters, but since saw everything in newsgroup, it helped
| to filter the problems.
| computerthings wrote:
| > The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers,
| spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
|
| And also with people who just add people they consider
| enemies for whatever reason to all sorts of lists, and others
| who just subscribe to those lists blindly, without ever
| checking any. Why would they want to, it's supposedly
| unsavory.
|
| Blocking things _as_ they actually become a problem for you
| has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it. Just
| because it says "list of X" doesn't mean it's a list of X,
| it just means anyone can title things however they like.
| EasyMark wrote:
| depends on the trustworthiness of the source. at some point
| we have to trust something; could be our own selection
| process, but it can very well be the opinion of someone who
| you follow that seem genuine over X amount of time. The
| false positives are probably a necessary evil, humans will
| make mistakes, miss sarcasm, etc.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you
| has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it.
|
| On small sites, yes. You can actually do this in human
| bound time limits.
|
| On a big site that attracts millions of small time spammers
| along with commercial and nation state level scammers,
| you've already lost. The rate new scam channels are created
| are faster than you can even click the UI button to remove
| them.
|
| If you value your time you'll make a whitelist of a few
| trusted channels and avoid the rest. If those channels have
| recommendations that fill your interest, add those channels
| to your whitelist. This will stop the constant doom
| scrolling and brain rot traps we humans love to fall into.
|
| Simply put, there is too much information in the world for
| you to ever be able to see and filter it all. Propaganda
| techniques like the 'firehose of falsehood' will exploit
| this to wear you out and make you ineffective. Select your
| media choices wisely.
| kiba wrote:
| Hacker News is heavily curated. Do you think there's an echo
| chamber effect? I frequently encountered opinions that differ
| from mine, sometime completely on the opposite end.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| As much as I like and enjoy HN most of the time, it's very
| much an echo chamber. Even if we ignore politics and
| politics-adjacent threads and focus on tech stuff, there are
| some popular perceptions/opinions that have not earned their
| popularity, and god help you should you suggest you're not on
| that bandwagon. The blanket ban on outright politics here may
| blunt the echo chamber effect a bit, but it exists because
| echo chamber susceptibility is part of the human condition.
| We cannot get away from it.
| bruce511 wrote:
| While there's a ban on overt politics, a lot of social
| discourse is ultimately political.
|
| It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for
| example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while
| (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care
| (despite its many imperfections. )
|
| And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the
| military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote
| based on opinion rather than discussion.
|
| So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally
| plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
|
| This is ultimately how human societies work.
| thrwwawayyay wrote:
| Yes try making a comment in favor of bulk data collection
| by the intelligence agencies, or stating that Snowden's
| actions caused significant harm and really only helped
| adversaries - to give two examples.
|
| Even if you write a well argued and decently sourced
| comment, it's very likely to get flagged by people with
| ideological disagreements to this. And there are a lot of
| them on HN, so your comment will likely disappear pretty
| quickly.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > try making a comment in favor of bulk data collection
| by the intelligence agencies, or stating that Snowden's
| actions caused significant harm and really only helped
| adversaries - to give two examples.
|
| Those are both the same example, and sometimes comments
| get downvoted because they're just making a bad or
| vacuous argument for an indefensible position.
|
| It's obvious why intelligence agencies want to do bulk
| data collection, and the reason is related to why it's a
| problem -- the public needs to be protected against bulk
| data collection by _foreign_ intelligence agencies, and
| by domestic ones with insufficient oversight.
| "Oversight" in a democracy means the public knows about
| it, otherwise how can there even be a debate about
| whether it's worth it? But intelligence agencies aren't
| in favor of oversight of intelligence agencies, so
| they'll always be in favor of surveillance even if it
| isn't worth it, which is why they can't be allowed to do
| it in secret and anyone bringing it into the light is
| acting in the public interest.
|
| Moreover, bulk surveillance _isn 't_ worth it, because if
| you don't build technology that can resist bulk
| surveillance then foreign governments will do it to your
| population and the cost of that exceeds any benefit from
| you being able to do it to others, even before you
| account for the domestic cost of having a surveillance
| apparatus already in place in the event that an
| oppressive administration comes to power.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| HN is heavily echo chamber. Just because some people
| agree/disagree on technical topics doesn't mean you're
| getting a true diversity of opinions. Like, say, from the
| 99.99...% of the population that don't know what an int is.
| kiba wrote:
| Believe it or not, I find most of my disagreement on social
| issues rather than technical topics on HN and I am a fairly
| conventional social democrat.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| HN is rife with downvote (and in some cases, flagging) abuse.
| So the echo chamber is more self-imposed by the brahmins
| rather than curated.
|
| Slashdot had a superior moderation system whereby the ability
| to downvote (mod points) was given out selectively and in
| limited quantity. In all honestly it was years ahead of its
| time.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Yeah, I don't want to see spam and inane posts, it isn't some
| moral imperative that everyone gets exposed to every thought
| someone shits out.
| burgerrito wrote:
| I noticed that those blocklist on Bluesky tends to have false
| positives too!
|
| I've seen an instance where an innocent user added to a
| blocklist that blocks Nazi ideology or something like that.
|
| Honestly if that happened to me, I'd quit Bluesky instantly
| verdverm wrote:
| The comments on that post (I saw the same or similar on
| Reddit) point out that there are very aggressive lists and
| more discerning lists. Some lists filter out based on links
| in a profile or certain emojis or if you follow certain
| accounts.
|
| These are 3rd party lists and a user has to opt into them to
| leverage their blocking choices. If a list blocks 1M accounts
| but only has 100 followers, it's not such a big deal.
|
| When you subscribe to a well built list, you are given
| options for how like mute vs block, your choice, or label |
| warn | hide, per label, a subchoice within an opt in
| labeller.
|
| What ATProto gives us as users is choice and competition. Bad
| lists will not gain subscribers and will be marginalized by
| the market effect. High quality lists will be shared and gain
| network effect.
|
| We shouldn't expect or want a one-size fits all solution to
| moderation. Our social graphs in real life and online are not
| a giant blob where everyone has to listen to everyone. We
| naturally break down into subgraphs or communities. Online
| communities or groups should be able to exclude people for
| any reason they wish. They should be seen similar to a
| private group in real life. You shouldn't expect to be
| allowed into or to participate in a group if your going
| against the group's rules or customs in real life. Online
| should be no different.
| Kosovid wrote:
| There are lots of lists like that. Like I stumbled across
| this one the other day titled "Pedophiles of Bluesky" at http
| s://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:zufzme6bw4kqvd7uwff3qfpc/li...
|
| Now I had a good look and I'm pretty sure the people added to
| this list haven't posted anything to warrant this accusation.
| Yet if you go to their profiles on Clearsky or whatever it
| will show them in this pedophile list, like
| https://clearsky.app/messyjhesse.bsky.social/lists
|
| That's not right, and the worst thing is you can't see on the
| app if you've been wrongly labeled that way, you have to use
| a third-party website to find out.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| This is solved by blocking everyone by default and invites via
| some temporary UUID that you can use to add someone.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| I'm sure that blocking everyone by default will really help
| them attract users...
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| From my admittedly subjective perspective, it's the lesser of
| two evils. The alternative of having centralized control of
| "truth" is a far more awful option.
| baobun wrote:
| Sounds better than everyone outsourcing the same to Musk, Zuck,
| spez, or similar.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| > Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula
| for an even more extreme version of the social media echo
| chamber effect we've seen on other platforms.
|
| I like my echo chamber. I like talking to my friends online. I
| don't want things I don't want to see.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I get this, and I use bsky. What I don't understand is why
| some of my more liberal friends have a meltdown when I tell
| them I successfully use Twitter for what I want to get out
| of: instant news and commentary, some memes, some Instagram
| like feeds, and a couple of other things. I don't use the
| firehouse feed, I just pay attention to those I follow and
| have almost zero issues.
| nastoy wrote:
| Agreed. Bluesky is useless for this reason and the way that
| blocking works individually as well.
|
| Imagine if HN had a "block" option you could select against a
| user, that when you click it, it wipes out every comment that
| this user ever made on a post that you both commented in, past
| and future - but not just for you, for every other HN user as
| well. And there's no "showdead" option to see them either, for
| anyone.
|
| Like if I or anyone who replied to you blocked you now, with
| this hypothetical Bluesky-like feature on HN, no-one at all
| would be able to see your comment. Except maybe dang if he went
| poking around in the database.
|
| That's basically how Bluesky blocks work. It's absurd.
| verdverm wrote:
| Musk Social provides some options for you to control who can
| reply to your posts (like followers only), at least it did
| before I nuked all my accounts.
|
| Bluesky provides a richer set of options. I should be able to
| choose who interacts with my posts. If that's not your style,
| fine, there are other options out there. Bluesky users like
| this feature. It reduces the toxicity and makes it a more
| enjoyable platform.
|
| The culture around "don't engage, just block" the trolls
| helps keep the discourse more civil. With a fresh start, we
| can stay ahead of the trolls and bots. It's a group effort
| nastoy wrote:
| You have misunderstood. The way Bluesky blocking works is
| not just about controlling who else can interact with your
| posts, it affects the posts of others too, and applies to
| every other user whether they like it or not.
|
| See https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-
| app/issues/7021 for more detail.
|
| A relevant comment from that issue:
|
| > _As it stands, if 20 people are involved in a discussion,
| and ONE single person decides to block someone, then all of
| a sudden, the 19 other people in the discussion (+ any
| other viewers) are now inconvenienced simply because one
| person had an issue with someone else._
|
| > _Bluesky does have a bit of a block culture, and as such,
| this issue is only going to get worse and worse, and
| threads are going to get harder and harder to read and
| follow as more and more people get blocked._
|
| > _Just the other day I got a notification, and I clicked
| on it, and once again, the post they were replying to was
| "blocked", not because of me, but because the person who
| made the post blocked the person they were responding to. I
| was trying to make sense of their post, but now I couldn't
| as I had no idea what the hell they were replying to...
| then I_ think _I found the post they replied to; it showed
| "1 reply", but when I clicked on it, no replies were
| shown._
|
| > _Now, this functionality was probably done with good
| intentions - but you know what they say, "The road to hell
| is paved with good intentions"._
|
| Another comment explaining the problem:
|
| > _This is working as intended but I agree it should be
| reassessed. For example:_
|
| > _1. In a popular thread, User A posts some nonsense_
|
| > _2. User B replies to that reply explaining why it 's
| nonsense_
|
| > _3. User A blocks User B_
|
| > _4. Now User A has successfully hidden the rebuttal to
| his comment from everyone. The only defense against this is
| if the thread OP happens to block User A._
|
| > _This is a pretty serious downside of the "nuclear block"
| system imo. It creates an escalation ladder of blocking
| where the first user to hit "block" is advantaged. On the
| other hand it causes me personally to avoid blocking where
| I otherwise would, because I want the conversation to still
| be visible for others._
|
| > _There should at least be a "show reply" button on posts
| that are hidden for this reason IMO. Otherwise you've given
| every user the unilateral power to hide a reply, for
| everyone, permanently. If I hide a reply the normal way,
| it's not deleted for everyone! There is a "show hidden
| reply" button! The effect of hiding someone else's reply
| should be consistent across these two ways to do it._
| verdverm wrote:
| The beauty of ATProto is that you can build an
| alternative App View that handles blocks differently. The
| Bluesky app is open source so you don't have to start
| from scratch either.
|
| Choice and competition will make this network a better
| long-term social fabric than the centralized systems we
| are used to.
| nastoy wrote:
| What is the incentive to do that, given the costly
| barrier to entry in both developer time and computing
| resources?
| verdverm wrote:
| What's this "costly barrier to entry"? It is certainly
| not a given from where I am looking
|
| By any account, it is far less than building an
| independent social network application. The components
| are also decoupled so you don't have to rebuild
| everything. If you want to build an App View, it's just a
| webapp or react native. You don't have to rebuild
| everything
|
| re: incentives, there are many, people have different
| perspectives and motivations to do so
| nastoy wrote:
| The omission of blocked posts is done server-side by the
| app.bsky.feed.getPostThread endpoint, so you'd need to
| reimplement that to return the content of blocked posts
| instead, both upthread (parent) and downthread (replies).
| It would require acquiring and maintaining your own
| replica of the data, which is hundreds of gigabytes in
| size.
|
| This is significantly more complex than making a few
| small changes to the frontend app.
| verdverm wrote:
| This is absolutely and provably wrong.
|
| I have written my own webapp (https://blebbit.com) and I
| can see content and accounts I have blocked on Bluesky. I
| just validated this to be the true. This because I have
| not implemented block respecting in my own code yet. It's
| more work to actually respect the blocking.
|
| The full backup of ATProto is more than 5T now.
|
| You seem really misinformed about all of this.
|
| Or maybe you created an account to intentionally spread
| falsehoods about Bluesky? There has been a flurry of this
| on HN lately
| nastoy wrote:
| No, this is not wrong. I will demonstrate. Here is a
| sample conversation between three users A, B, and C:
|
| https://i.ibb.co/CJkZWBG/image.png
|
| No-one has blocked anyone at this point, so the
| conversation is visible to all parties and any onlookers.
|
| Your own app shows the same:
|
| https://i.ibb.co/3kxp5Q9/image.png
|
| Now for whatever reason, user B decides to block user A.
| The entire subthread starting with user B's response to
| user A is removed, which includes making the discussion
| between user A and user C no longer viewable in that
| thread, to anyone:
|
| https://i.ibb.co/j6f9z92/image.png
|
| This appears exactly the same in your app:
|
| https://i.ibb.co/2Px9bw5/image.png
|
| The root cause is that the app.bsky.feed.getPostThread
| endpoint omits the entire tree of replies for that
| subthread in its response:
|
| https://i.ibb.co/F45n6QV/image.png
|
| Please feel free to verify this in your own browser and
| explain why you believe this to be incorrect.
| verdverm wrote:
| yet... https://ibb.co/h8JWzHH
| nastoy wrote:
| Having to visit the Replies page of user C and try to
| piece together snippets of conversation - some of which
| are still unviewable - is not a reasonable solution. In
| particular, posts 7 and 8 are not there and the link
| between posts 1 and 2 is severed.
| verdverm wrote:
| > not a reasonable solution
|
| That's your opinion. The vast majority of ATProto users
| like the enhanced controls over their conversations. If
| you don't like it, use a different social media platform
| nastoy wrote:
| That it's unreasonable to expect users to mitigate this
| by hunting around others' profiles for snippets of
| conversation is my opinion, yes.
|
| That one user blocking another user makes chunks of the
| conversation disappear for everyone else viewing the
| thread is verifiable fact. As it is a verifiable fact
| that this is done server-side via the getPostThread
| endpoint, by which posts in the parent and replies fields
| of the response are omitted.
|
| This is not "absolutely and provably wrong", as you put
| it. Maybe do some research yourself before accusing
| others of intentionally spreading falsehoods?
| verdverm wrote:
| You said posts were blocked when what you are actually
| describing is replies being disconnected from a post on
| that post. They are still visible within the network
|
| It's working as expected
|
| You have made multiple other inaccurate statements about
| Bluesky / ATProto throughout your comments with your new
| account
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| This whole thread nastoy has been making the argument
| that blocked posts are omitted from the thread for all
| viewers, and circumventing this behavior requires
| modifying the relay (and hence ingesting the firehose)
| not just the client
|
| You have been arguing that blocked posts still appear in
| your custom client, which is a different claim than
| nastoy. As detailed by the GitHub issue that started this
| disagreement, bluesky relays have introduced thread
| breaking behavior that one can not get around simply by
| forking the appview.
| verdverm wrote:
| > As detailed by the GitHub issue that started this
| disagreement, bluesky relays have introduced thread
| breaking behavior
|
| "relay" does not appear in that issue, not sure where
| this idea that relays have _introduced_ thread breaking
| behavior is coming from
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I haven't hacked away at the bluesky api but isn't the
| aforementioned "app.bsky.feed.getPostThread" called
| against an instance of a bluesky relay hosted at
| api.bsky.app, as opposed to a PDS or an appview?
|
| That being the case, when you want to get posts of a
| thread, the information of which posts belong to which
| thread are the responsibility of a relay, which is doing
| the firehose-level-aggregation of which posts belong to
| which threads, am I misunderstanding?
| giaour wrote:
| The filtering of blocked _replies_ is done server-side.
| You can view whatever top-level posts you want in the
| protocol; making those visible /invisible is up to the
| client software.
|
| If I post something that gets traction, and someone
| replies with an ad for ED pills, I should be able to
| remove that spam from the discussion on my thread and not
| just from my view of it. If others have already "engaged"
| with a plug for boner pills, their replies are not lost
| but are just no longer part of the thread stemming from
| _my_ post.
|
| If you as the OP don't want this behavior, there are
| other tools at your disposal (mute the replier instead,
| "hide for everyone", etc).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well if Mastodon is any indication, there are a ton of
| third-party FOSS apps for it.
| frontalier wrote:
| this is false
|
| if alice blocks bob: it hides all posts bob made in response
| to alice posts; blocks bob from replying to future posts of
| alice; but more importantly it erases bob from alice's feed
| wich is often the only healthy thing to do because bob is a
| deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he
| seeks
| nastoy wrote:
| It is not false.
|
| > _it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts_
|
| Exactly, it hides these from anyone else who might read the
| thread, including others participating in the thread.
|
| This offers Alice not just the means to control her own
| Bluesky experience, but also to unilaterally control which
| parts of the conversation that all others on Bluesky can
| see.
|
| It is in effect a feature to selectively delete the posts
| of others for any reason.
|
| > _because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe
| bob the attention he seeks_
|
| That is generally not the reason why users on Bluesky hit
| the block button. There's a strong tendency there of
| blocking because someone disagrees with you, or they
| explained why you're wrong about something, or they pointed
| out that you're spreading misinformation.
|
| On Bluesky, blocking is a way to quickly and conveniently
| hide any dissent.
| frontalier wrote:
| yes, alice has autonomy over who participates on
| conversations she started. bob is still free to have the
| same conversation, just not on alice's conversations or
| as replies to her.
|
| i dont't think we're going to agree on why people
| generaly block others. you seem to see yourself as some
| sort of dissenter, or a truth-teller of some kind, but
| when you get blocked for interjecting into someone else's
| coversations it's just because no one asked you to be
| part of that conversation and now you lost your access
| privileges. this rejection probably fucks with your self-
| esteem more than it should but i'm no therapist so maybe
| go find one instead of annoying folks on the internet.
| tensor wrote:
| It seems that a lot of people today have a really
| difficult time understanding that free speech does not
| mean you get to follow someone around yelling at them,
| you don't get to come into their home, follow them to the
| bar they go to with their friends. That's not free
| speech, that's harassment.
|
| I'd go so far as to say that social media without a block
| button is unethical, and promotes propaganda and
| harassment. The block button means the user heard you,
| use used your free speech! Congrats! Now they want to
| walk away from you. Ooops. No, you are not entitled to
| get any response, nor to continue talking at them if they
| choose to leave the area.
| EasyMark wrote:
| It actually has worked well for me, and I've had some
| interesting discussions on there and some arguments, but over
| facts and not emotions. I think people have a right to
| express their opinions, but they don't have a right to make
| me hear what they're saying if they're known belligerents,
| spreaders of disinformation, or similar things.
| nastoy wrote:
| Should people who disagree with your opinions be able to
| stop others from reading your opinions? As that's what the
| Bluesky block feature does.
|
| You might be responding to a spreader of disinformation
| with facts, but if they then block you, no-one else will be
| able to read your response.
| pjc50 wrote:
| No, this is good. It's an anti-flamewar measure.
| yfw wrote:
| Echo chamber or filtering out noise?
| frontalier wrote:
| the "collective" has been able to block out toxic shit for a
| while
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250107144929/https://blocktoge...
| https://web.archive.org/web/20241230160146/https://gardenfen...
|
| folks just get riled up when their diatribes don't get traction
| rsynnott wrote:
| Shared blocklists are older than social media; in particular
| see USENET killfiles, which were often shared. More recently,
| you had user-made shared blocklists on Twitter until Musk broke
| the API. There's nothing particularly new about them, though
| having them as a convenient first-class feature is somewhat
| new.
|
| They help make Bluesky usable; for instance I subscribe to one
| which nukes transphobes, because, really, I do not have the
| patience to listen to their One Joke anymore, thanks. And
| another which warns on people with AI-generated profile pics
| (these are virtually always some form of scammer, or, worse, AI
| evangelists).
|
| The blocklists are not mandatory.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| Interesting how the concept of blacklisting was so horrifying
| to people that they immediately changed their vocabulary,
| code, and even broke APIs (despite the origins predating
| unrelated current events by hundreds of years) only to
| immediately turn around and justify the newly christened
| "blocklist" as a great thing we should all embrace.
| rsynnott wrote:
| No, you're thinking of allowlist/denylist. 'Blocklist' is a
| fairly old term; per Google trends it was more commonly
| used in 2004 than today, say (whereas allowlist and
| denylist show little use before the current decade). This
| more or less makes sense, as both webforums and running
| your own email server (and thus having to care about spam
| prevention software, which used the term) were more of a
| big thing back then. A blocklist is a list of things to
| block, which is a more precise term than
| blacklist/denylist.
|
| Like, if you're going to get performatively outraged about
| something, consider checking whether it is a real thing,
| first.
| continue-100 wrote:
| https://sites.google.com/view/sources-why-we-hate-each-other...
| SS The Myth of the Filter Bubble
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Everyone in life has a blocklist, and they are shared.
|
| You have a list of public people that piss you off and avoid,
| when you are asked about them you say "ugh I don't like x
| because". Now, you might get someone say "dont be mean about x,
| they had y, which is why they did z" and you might accept or
| reject the point they made.
|
| However that person is unlikely to blast you with content or
| facts to do with said public figure, unless they want to drive
| you away.
|
| It is part of human nature, infact its the basis of society.
| The only way we can function is by having effective way to have
| some shared core "principles" (formally around religion, feudal
| chiefs, now around semi cult leaders) This means rejecting
| other ideas as heretical. (see civil rights marches, universal
| suffrage, silver/gold standard the fracturing of protestantism)
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| Twitter had shared block lists for a long time before they were
| removed.
|
| Twitter was better then.
|
| We don't have to guess how that works, it existed.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Better for you? Better for discourse? Better for protecting
| your echo chamber from things that might challenge you?
| rsynnott wrote:
| See, the thing is, I do not wish to hear from idiots. Life
| is too bloody short.
|
| This is how normal in-person social interaction works too,
| by the way. If you're in a pub and someone comes up and
| starts ranting at you about how the pizza restaurant
| basements are turning the frogs gay, you're probably not
| going to engage them. And if they keep at it, they'll
| probably get kicked out.
|
| The internet is full of people who (a) insane, and (b)
| insane in a very boring, same-y way. Filtering these people
| out is _fine_. There is no moral obligation to listen to
| every ranting idiot who comes along.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah this is the thing. I see the same here in Holland
| since the extreme-right won the elections.
|
| People are constantly dragging up topics like
| transsexuality in completely unrelated discussions. I
| completely disagree with their opinion and I like
| challenging them on it (for example, what is it to them
| what other people do with their bodies?). They've never
| been able to give me a good answer to that so far. But
| they're constantly derailing topics about completely
| different things. They seem so obsessed with this topic.
| It's also getting so tediously repetitive. Always the
| same slurs without any kind of actual discussion.
|
| The thing is, here in the Netherlands we used to have
| 'echo chambering' as the foundation for the country. We
| used to call it 'verzuiling' (literally translated
| "pillarification"). After the war the country was made up
| of several groups that didn't get along so well so each
| had their own newspapers, social circles, TV and radio
| broadcasters etc. There were the Catholics, the super-
| strict Calvinists, the Labour/progressive atheist crowd
| etc. They basically lived alongside without really
| interacting. And really, lately I'm starting to think
| this was not such a bad idea at all.
| crznp wrote:
| I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not
| mention Mastodon/ActivityPub.
|
| On one hand, it is another alternative if Bluesky falls, but on
| the other hand I feel like the algorithm makes it a different
| sort of community.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not
| mention Mastodon /ActivityPub._
|
| Is that an omission, or is that because Mastodon is already in
| the process of "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and
| transferring ownership and stewardship"1, and because
| ActivityPub was published as a W3C Recommendation back in 2018?
|
| 1 https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-
| own-...
| verdverm wrote:
| Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical
| user. There is also the issue that your account is tied to a
| specific server and migration means you lose your followers.
| Discovery and server DDoS on a viral post are also challenges
| for the way ActivityPub was architected.
|
| ATProto is still young, even compared to ActivityPub. It will
| continue to evolve and improve. It certainly has the momentum
| compared to ActivityPub
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical
| user.
|
| The only headache is picking the server. If I pick one for
| them it's pretty smooth sailing from there.
|
| If someone can't handle the basic interface, there's a really
| really high chance he doesn't have much of value to say.
|
| The problem isn't that it's "complicated". It's that they
| have no _incentive_ to sign up.
|
| As much as the HN crowd hates it, ads and marketing work.
| People went to Bluesky not because it's easier but because
| several famous people talked about it loudly and everyone
| knows the people behind the original Twitter are behind it.
|
| Marketing.
| verdverm wrote:
| The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick a
| server, then later the moderation policies of the admins
| changes. You can either deal with it or start over again on
| another server. Losing all your followers is why people put
| up with bad social media overlords.
|
| ATProto removes the switching cost. This is a significant
| difference from ActivityPub
| clot27 wrote:
| I mean, isnt the default server on ATP also managed by a
| corpo? So what if they change the rule? they dont even
| have option to migrate account
| verdverm wrote:
| Bluesky has an initial PDS anyone can run, available on
| their github. Last I checked they said not to host more
| than 10 accounts during the beta testing. You can
| absolutely migrate your account and still use the Bluesky
| app. The custom server is an option at login
|
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
| numpad0 wrote:
| Level of de-centralization Bluesky has is somewhere
| between the old Twitter and Ethereum, neither of which
| have strong resistance against central decision making.
|
| The problem discussed here is that Mastodon is not simply
| de-centralized, but its superstructure upholds a
| segregation policy and loves to ostracize admins based
| on, _ahem, preferences._ This in turn encourage admins to
| join a virtue signaling zeitgeist, and towards assuming
| more divisive and dismissive stances, out of fear. As a
| second order effect, regular non-admin users and their
| ability to communicate would be not only at whim of the
| server owner but also that of the inner group cast
| towards the admin.
|
| Bluesky doesn't have this type of problem, precisely
| because it's not too decentralized. Either you
| individually get banned or not, based on levels of value
| alignment between you and the corpo outsourced
| moderators. There are also blocklist feature as well as
| third party voluntarily applicable moderation framework
| in Bluesky, but personally I can't imagine majority of
| users using it, or dividing the network into fragmented
| subgroups, and are non-factors in the grand scheme of
| things.
|
| (By the way, I sometimes wonder how moderator value
| alignment is going to inevitably drift over time; as I
| understand it, social media content moderation is
| partially automated and exploitatively outsourced to
| workers from low income regions, such as sub-Saharan
| Africa. This phenomenon is almost exclusively discussed
| in context of human rights and fair worker treatment, but
| I think this also means a lot of people with minimal
| prior exposure to media, let alone the anaerobic layer of
| the Internet, are being trained to develop preferences on
| such content and especially the more flaggable yet less
| hateful and flaggable-but-less-flag-deserving content.
| i.e. stimulative but not blood and gore. If anyone is
| reading down to this line, you know what I mean.)
| verdverm wrote:
| Subscribing to a labeller is as easy as following any
| other account. I use several 3rd party moderation
| services. The bar to adoption is much lower than I think
| you anticipate
| metabagel wrote:
| Can you recommend any of them?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick
| a server, then later the moderation policies of the
| admins changes.
|
| Moderation policies change even with the big ones
| (Twitter, etc).
|
| I suspect you're referring to the confusion due to
| different servers having different moderation policies,
| and that could effectively make you invisible to others
| or vice versa merely by being on a given server.
|
| First, my guess is that this is a problem with a tiny
| percentage of servers. I've not had to deal with this
| even once.
|
| Second, when you say you "heard others bring it up", my
| guess is these others are highly technical folks. Not a
| single "average" person stayed away from Mastodon due to
| this. I suspect perhaps 99% of active Mastodon users are
| not even aware of this.
|
| These are valid criticisms of Mastodon. But they're not
| the reason people didn't sign up for it. Name recognition
| is.
|
| > You can either deal with it or start over again on
| another server. Losing all your followers is why people
| put up with bad social media overlords.
|
| FYI, for quite a while now you can switch servers, and
| have the followers automatically follow your new account.
| metabagel wrote:
| In my (strongly held) opinion, the experience is better on
| BlueSky. Discovery on Mastodon was tedious work for me.
| clot27 wrote:
| You can migrate your account on masto without loosing
| followers https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-
| account-to-anot...
| verdverm wrote:
| You _can_ , but as that document makes clear, it is very
| complicated to move an account and to do it right.
| treyd wrote:
| It's really not complicated, that article is just being
| excessively verbose for clarity. The UI itself explains
| it very well, it takes just a couple of minutes to log
| into both servers and set up the transfer.
| aiono wrote:
| After you pick a server is there anything else that makes it
| hard?
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| Interesting how the online left _now_ is beginning to care about
| decentralizing social media again after years of deriding the
| topic and espousing (obviously politicized) "content moderation"
| efforts.
|
| Unfortunately, this is also strike in favor of the blockchain
| people (like Farcaster) -- the best of which have been working to
| find ways to keep systems permanently decentralized (and not just
| temporarily decentralized, like
| Bluesky/Nostr/Mastodon/SMTP/etc.).
| adolph wrote:
| _wants to create a nonprofit foundation to govern and protect the
| AT Protocol, outside of Bluesky the company_
|
| _Bluesky and Graber recognize the importance of this effort and
| have signaled their approval. But the point is, it can't rely on
| them._
|
| What's the point of this article? The repo is dual MIT/Apache
| [0]. Nothing seems to prevent the author from forking and hacking
| away. Just do it.
|
| 0. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
| neilv wrote:
| I can't tell _why_ the writers feel that Bluesky 's AT protocol
| is somehow the technologically best, or most politically
| strategic foundation, for a viable open mechanism for this kind
| of communication.
|
| This article does seem to have the effect of being an endorsement
| of Bluesky, though.
|
| (What I mean by endorsement: _" Why would this progressive
| political operator be saying that we need to focus on freedom
| safeguards for this Bluesky platform, if it wasn't obviously the
| place for progressives to be. And no mention of anything else,
| like W3C standard ActivityPub, so that's right out. Clearly we
| must once again get behind a platform that someone owns. And then
| work from a position of weakness, like activists. Since that went
| so well for the co-author's former MoveOn.org, as evidenced by
| the incoming administration. And we can keep telling people they
| are under attack, and keep raising donations from them, to
| continue the fight."_)
| DeepPhilosopher wrote:
| Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally
| around Bluesky and its AT Protocol, which is promising
| federation but has yet to deliver. Not to mention it is backed
| by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to
| enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.
|
| Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one
| service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed,
| PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and
| promising platform.
|
| And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as
| an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely
| seen more than two people from the same server comment on a
| given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already
| everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
|
| To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to
| shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with
| Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a
| server is to hard or stressful?
| davidcbc wrote:
| It's because people don't care about federated services, they
| care about services that are easy to use and have people on
| them and that's bluesky right now
| DeepPhilosopher wrote:
| Sure, average people don't care about federation, but what
| about the techies at sites like Technology Review and The
| Verge who write these kinds of articles? They love to point
| out Bluesky's (yet to be seen in action) federation thanks
| to the AT Protocol, so you know they see the value in
| federation that the average person doesn't, but these
| reporters choose Bluesky, a platform with all the same
| warning signs as Twitter that barely has federation,
| something they purport to value despite the fact that
| ActivityPub and Mastodon exist and are much more developed
| and open?
| dartos wrote:
| > techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge
| who write these kinds of articles
|
| It's called "marketing" and "paid-for articles"
| pfraze wrote:
| We didn't pay for this, coordinate with this, or have any
| idea it was coming out.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Perhaps they recognize that a perfect decentralized
| platform without users doesn't matter as much as pushing
| the platforms being used to improve
| bruce511 wrote:
| Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money
| driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in
| the same direction.
|
| Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no
| one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll
| spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly
| compelling (because most of the current mouths are, um, the
| same people ranting about the incumbents. )
|
| I don't disagree that the same process leads to the same
| outcome. I personally don't think bluesky will ultimately be
| any different to the rest.
|
| But the no-money approach of mastodon means its a very very
| slow burn, which will take a decade or more to succeed, and
| even then may not be what we expect when a billion people
| show up.
| EGreg wrote:
| TruthSocial is a forked Mastodon
| treyd wrote:
| They've disabled federation and replaced the frontend
| with an alternative. They just needed something that
| worked out of the box.
| mariusor wrote:
| > Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money
| driving the experience forward and getting everyone going
| in the same direction.
|
| Which is a good thing from the spec point of view but maybe
| bad from a user adoption point of view. Even for the later
| you'd be wrong, as Threads is supposed to be an ActivityPub
| application.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no
| one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure
| it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not
| terribly compelling
|
| While I think Mastodon's irrelevance is deserved, let's
| also be fair to the "incumbents": Facebook, Mysterious
| Twitter X, Reddit, et al. gained and maintain their
| critical mass from word of mouth.
|
| Many other would-be upstarts in history also usurped
| thrones by word of mouth, foremost example being Firefox
| against Internet Explorer.
|
| Mastodon's problem with becoming relevant (and also
| BlueSky's problem with upending Mysterious Twitter X) is
| far more fundamental than lack of awareness.
| timeon wrote:
| I do not think that for service to be dependent on some
| particular company is successful way to do it. It is
| successful to deliver _some_ kind of service but, as we
| have many examples from and post- web2.0, that service does
| not have desired outcome.
|
| Anyway I have checked several social medias today (HN
| included) and everywhere except one place there was too
| much noise about TikTok - only place that my feed was
| without it was Mastodon - it is quite slow there but i
| consder it to be good thing. However I think that there is
| no good social media - Mastodon included and my days would
| be improved without any of them. RSS feeds feels like more
| then enough. Discussion seems to be mostly point-less.
| Maybe even this one, but those enhanced with algorithmic
| engagement and endless scroll are net-negative.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't really care whether it's got a ton of people
| though. I do care if it's truly free and federated.
|
| It's for the same reason I don't recommend Signal to anyone
| in my circle. I don't want to trade one walled garden for
| another (Signal still refuses third-party clients for
| example). I use Matrix which is truly open.
| dmje wrote:
| IMO what kills Mastodon is what us nerds say is the single
| important point about Mastodon: federation.
|
| Stay with me...
|
| So: federation is very cool in principle, and it's
| extremely cool in that it in theory means we don't have
| Just One Batshit Master of all our content... but in the
| way it's being done with Masto, it IMHO makes for a weak
| proposition.
|
| Why?
|
| Mainly because people (normal people, not us lot) don't
| understand or care what "federation" is. They expect
| (because it's been the norm for every other service), a
| SINGLE place where they can go to find their mates and
| celebs and politicians.
|
| What they instead get is a thing where:
|
| 1) They can't search a global place and find all those
| people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't have
| this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)
|
| 2) They find someone on one "instance" (not understanding
| what an "instance" is) and then can't (easily) follow them
| from their own instance without having to think about
| namespaces and all that
|
| 3) They naturally gravitate towards the biggest one -
| probably mastodon.social - and then we're right back at the
| beginning, with everyone on a single instance, beholden to
| the possibly loony who might shut it down / monetise it /
| etc
|
| Moving between instances is much harder than it is claimed
| to be (you lose all sorts of stuff like your history, or at
| least you did when I tried it).
|
| Federation also brings all manner of hard things to those
| trying to run an instance - I tried, as "medium level nerd"
| and ended up walking away from the complexity of just not
| understanding why some content didn't seem to be getting
| from my instance to others, etc etc.
|
| If I was the Mastodon team, I'd be focusing all my
| attention on global search, and on never using the word
| "federated" in any of their marketing ever again. It might
| well be the coolest thing, but it's a non-marketable thing.
|
| Of course all this is predicated on "a good outcome" being
| "everyone on Mastodon" and I do appreciate those who don't
| want that. It's definitely the case that less people tends
| to make for better online social spaces, and maybe small
| niche groups leads to better things all round.
| metabagel wrote:
| > They can't search a global place and find all those
| people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't
| have this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)
|
| Amen and hallelujah! This is why I gave up on Mastodon. I
| read that not allowing full text search across instances
| was actually a design decision in order to discourage
| brigading. But, more crucially it undermines discovery.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think Mastodon lost the herd trust when it pivoted away
| from global federation and made confession of allegiance a
| firm requirement. They killed the canary and people left.
| EGreg wrote:
| What confession? Link? I haven't heard of this
| numpad0 wrote:
| I'm referring to mass defederation, defederation list
| sharing and mutual surveillance that followed it.
| Gud wrote:
| Link please?
| kemotep wrote:
| Why is everyone required to federate with everyone on
| ActivityPub? What if I want to only see Wordpress,
| Peertube, and Pixelfed content but nothing from Mastodon
| or Lemmy? How is that problematic as an ActivityPub
| client? Or I only want Spanish language content?
| dingnuts wrote:
| in practice that's not the kind of content that is
| defederated. what is defederated is usually for
| ideological reasons, but sometimes it's because of
| illegal content (there's a lot of Japanese Misskey
| instances that will happily federate images to you that
| are questionably legal to possess in the US whether you
| want them on your drive or not) or out of spam control /
| distrust (small instances often have trouble federating)
|
| ironically when I used Mastodon, while dealing with these
| issues, I was unable to filter out other languages. So in
| addition to extremely questionable content, a lot of it
| was simply in another language.
|
| ActivityPub is a really half baked protocol and the
| sooner we realize that and move on from it the better.
| Personally, I didn't feel that defederation was an
| adequate defense against those MissKey instances and I
| decided running an instance is a very big liability.
| kemotep wrote:
| I guess I just have a unicorn of an instance because I
| never see these issues. Yes there is a large list of
| servers defederated but many of them are at best 4chan
| tier content which I can easily find on 4chan no need for
| my mastodon feed to have everything under the sun on it.
|
| Like I get that moving instances or between applications
| isn't really possible on AP and there is concerns with
| moderation and so on but it's been the best internet
| experience I've had. It's a bubble but I easily just come
| here or to 4chan or reddit to see outside that bubble.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The second largest Mastodon instance is Chinese, third
| and fourth Japanese, fifth NSFW exclusive. Third and
| fourth combined is 32% larger than the first, fourth also
| has about 4x more post per user(~49 vs ~195). The list
| I'm referring does not include Misskey-based systems(also
| APub based).
|
| Defederation is not a huge issue if you assume and
| embrace a segregationist view and cut off likely major
| fractions of the organically formed Fediverse out of
| itself. After all it's porn and scripts you don't even
| recognize, what's the point in having them? My insistence
| is, that's a fresh dead canary in cage.
|
| 1: https://instances.social/list/advanced#min-
| users=100000
| kemotep wrote:
| If I want a feed of 100 people who post statuses/tweets,
| blogs, videos, and pictures who I am interested in and by
| using ActivityPub can use a single client to view all
| this activity, is that by your definition segregationist
| and a dead canary?
|
| I don't understand how if I host my own AP client on my
| own hardware and choose only to federate and subscribe
| with a small subset of sites and people who post using AP
| that this is a bad thing. I can use other websites like
| Hacker News to see other opinions and views.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Because otherwise social graphs and organic exchanges
| don't work. I'm not joining a Mastodon server to
| passively consume curated collection of serfs owned by
| benevolent server admins offer. Yet, that's the model of
| users and communities in Mastodon as it is.
| kemotep wrote:
| Is there any kind of social media that doesn't become a
| serfdom in your opinion? I mean Hacker News falls under
| that definition as well yet here you are consuming a
| curated feed.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Are there thousands of HN?
| kemotep wrote:
| I don't understand the question. You are currently using
| one of the most heavily moderated sites on the internet
| complaining that another platform which allows
| individuals to create their own clients which to view
| content published on the protocol has servers that you
| are not required to use that are too moderated?
| beowulfey wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow you. It sounds like you expect to
| _receive_ from every instance, and in turn expect all to
| receive from yours?
|
| I don't see the appeal; it sounds like it would devolve
| into white noise
| numpad0 wrote:
| I'm expecting random person to reply to my comments here,
| and expect my reply to yours shown to you. I don't
| expect* others to be on a blocked sub-cluster of HN
| server that my comments would not show or someone else's
| response to be removed from my sight.
|
| *: for the sake of argument
| dartos wrote:
| That's literally the moderation model of federated
| networks at work.
|
| Each instance chooses to adopt defederating lists.
|
| If you don't like that make your own instance.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's doing this at the instance level rather than the
| user level which is the problem. The long-term result of
| that is a few large instances that default-block smaller
| instances, so then people switch from the smaller
| instances to the larger ones that aren't blocked,
| creating new instances becomes unviable and the market
| concentrates into an oligopoly susceptible to capture by
| ideologues.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again
| to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with
| Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a
| server is to hard or stressful?
|
| Mastodon has many MANY MANY issues.
|
| The first is that instance operators regularly abuse their
| users as hostages in personal petty fights. I don't care too
| much about drama, but there has been a lot of it regarding
| Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia and instances defederating
| from each other as a result of said drama.
|
| The second one is instances can go down for whatever reason -
| the admins just being unable/unwilling to cope with
| moderation, running out of money, getting into trouble with
| the legal system, ... - and users can't move their post, DM
| and media history to another instance.
|
| And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates.
| Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to
| implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower
| than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.
| shafyy wrote:
| > _And the third one is it takes them forever to ship
| updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to
| implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower
| than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself._
|
| Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How
| can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky
| or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond
| me.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Bluesky also has but a handful of engineers
| zimpenfish wrote:
| But was initially started internally by Twitter with
| millions of dollars of funding and since being split out
| has taken several million dollars in outside funding from
| VCs. Which does help grease the wheels somewhat, no?
| api wrote:
| The tying of identity to one's home instance is IMHO a
| fatal flaw. Absolutely fundamental error in a decentralized
| system, making it effectively not decentralized.
|
| It's understandable in ancient protocols like email where
| storage was at such a premium that universal replication
| was out and cryptography was primitive. It's not forgivable
| today.
|
| I am ignorant of AT -- does it have this problem? I know
| that Nostr doesn't and it's always struck me as technically
| superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but
| Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Nostr sadly doesn't scale. IMO it's a better system for
| decentralized account identity lookup but not great for
| content delivery. It needs something else for the content
| part.
|
| ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account
| lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra.
| Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a
| sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s
| Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP
| with intentionally minimal authentication".
| api wrote:
| Hmmm... if Bluesky owns identity then it's just another
| centralized SaaS play which I guess is to be expected.
|
| There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of
| anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or
| both).
|
| I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I
| think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a
| client-server system with a network of servers. Making
| all traffic go through it that way is going to cause
| scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that
| will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally
| passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but
| it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth.
|
| IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably
| get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You
| still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of
| the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas
| where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without
| port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower
| experience because you have to relay.
| rapnie wrote:
| All kinds of innovations of the network stack would be
| easier when IPv6 has that penetration. I saw a very cool
| vid by Brett Sheffield of Librecast [0] titled "Privacy
| and Decentralization with Multicast" [1] (btw, it is
| hosted on a decentralized PeerTube instance) and it was
| an eye-opener for me, as the average tech person not
| deeply into this stack and taking the one we have for
| granted (mostly).
|
| [0] https://librecast.net
|
| [1] https://spectra.video/w/9cBGzMceGAjVfw4eFV78D2
| api wrote:
| I've wondered if this might not be a reason for some of
| the slow rolling. It might reduce the all-important role
| of cloud and centralized services in facilitating
| connectivity, which is almost mandatory in IPv4 world due
| to the existence of symmetric NAT.
| pfraze wrote:
| Your referring to the ID registry (PLC) which is intended
| to be moved to a separate org.
| lifty wrote:
| Why doesn't nostr scale?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It kind of doesn't matter _why_ people are rallying around
| BlueSky but simply that they _are_.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| I'll take this all seriously when people admit what the
| real drivers are. Admit why people are _actually_ looking
| for an X alternative.
|
| It's a mix of ideologues, performative outrage, foot
| stomping, and wanting the 2020 status quo.
| archagon wrote:
| It sounds like you're saying that Bluesky users are
| actually just throwing a giant fit.
|
| That has not been my experience at all.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| I cancelled my Twitter account in 2021 or so.
|
| I tried X again at some later point, I think even twice.
|
| A fresh account bombards you with far-right propaganda
| and outright lies. At the time at least this included
| hateful and incoherent rambling by Musk himself, which
| you couldn't unfollow (or ignore, it simply didn't work).
|
| Call it ideological, but I'm not going to spend my free
| time with this "content", especially when the platform
| clearly disregards repeated signals that I don't want to
| read hateful ideological propaganda comment no 73646445
| by some alt right shill.
|
| I'm all for open discourse and dealing with other peoples
| differing opinions.
|
| But at this point, the "ideology" accusation by the far
| right against any other opinion is nothing but laughable.
| Well, it would be, if people didn't still pay it
| credibility.
|
| And no, I'm not a "leftist", "transgender activist", or
| whatever group gets to be public enemy of the day for
| these people.
|
| I did notice that Bluesky seems to have more politically
| left people.
|
| This kind of content is not very interesting to me, we
| already have Reddit.
|
| But for Bluesky, the platform bubble phenomenon didn't
| seem that strong to me.
|
| Appreciate the new features to build my own (interest)
| bubble.
|
| For political content, I think actual journalism and
| real-life discourse are most valuable.
| toofy wrote:
| personally i think there are two significantly larger
| reasons:
|
| 1) terrible experience: a lot of people just don't have
| fun on twitter, it's just an awful experience. why spend
| your free funtime in a place that you just don't enjoy?
| we don't go to restaurants that we hate, why on earth
| would we go to a website that we don't enjoy?
|
| 2) too crowded. take a music concert for example, a lot
| of people absolutely prefer a music venue with 2,000
| people over a concert where there are 100,000 people.
| logifail wrote:
| > The diversity is astounding
|
| Over the years I've come to the conclusion that there are
| people who say they are in favour of diversity but underneath
| only want their kind of diversity, not genuine diversity.
|
| Diversity of opinion would definitely be a feature, not a
| bug.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| 99% of normies don't want to decide what dictatorial fiefdom
| (server) they wish to belong to.
| archagon wrote:
| 99% of normies can just pretend that mastodon.social _is_
| "Mastodon."
| jghn wrote:
| I never understood why people even cared to choose a
| server. If you're only looking at posts from people you
| follow, it doesn't matter. Who cares what other people
| you don't know on your server are saying
| numpad0 wrote:
| Because 2 out of top 3 servers and half of top 10 were in
| Japan and filled with content that they couldn't
| politically handle.
|
| Cutting that off and "just walk into the brightest place"
| couldn't happen at the same time, so the core devs and
| ops switched to the "Mastodon's strength is in small
| servers, pick any of the right one" narrative.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Can you tell more about the Japan thing? It's the first
| I've heard of it. What kind of content? I can't think of
| anything political about Japan that's super hard to
| handle.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I believe there's a fair amount of content on Japanese
| Mastodon servers that would land me, as an admin in the
| UK, in extremely hot water[0] if I was letting it be
| stored on my servers (whether I looked at it or not.)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_
| in_the_...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ah I see the age of consent in UK is 18 and in Japan it
| appears to be 16 (the same page links to the Japanese
| one). Weird.
|
| I thought they were super strict there (after all they
| even require that blocky censor thing on the functional
| parts in normal adult pornos making it basically
| useless).
| numpad0 wrote:
| And that was okay until they started the whole "choose
| the politically right one out of thousands and good
| people should have nothing to fear" thing.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| 99% of normies use platforms that offer only one
| dictatorial fiefdom. Picking the biggest server is better
| than that option. Picking a server at random is better than
| that option.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Because no one's actually going to Mastodon. It's really that
| simple.
|
| If you wanna delve into the details of _why_ people so often
| avoid the platforms that FOSS enthusiasts tend to recommend,
| that 's an interesting question, but we gotta be clear here,
| we already knows who's successful and who's not.
| bflesch wrote:
| People one go where the technologically literate tell them
| go. If it wasn't for me, my family and friends wouldn't
| have gone on iOS, WhatsApp, Signal, you name it. If we give
| the thumbs up they know it's not bad if they migrate. Of
| course they can still decide against something if they
| don't see the value, but we can have significant impact on
| what platforms they use or not.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > People one go where the technologically literate tell
| them go.
|
| No they don't. If this was true, my wife's family would
| be on Telegram or Discord, haha. We actually did go into
| Telegram briefly, but they all dropped out. What got them
| to switch from SMS to WhatsApp was her parents
| temporarily moving to Austria.
| bflesch wrote:
| Maybe you don't have a lot of credibility with them ;) If
| someone would recommend me to Telegram I'd also doubt
| their credibility.
| metabagel wrote:
| I tried so hard to like Mastodon, but discovery was actual
| work for me. On BlueSky, discovery is natural and easy.
|
| I think part of the issue is that you can't do full text
| search across instances. You can only search on hashtags, and
| people don't always use hashtags.
| pornel wrote:
| They're right that they need to actually shift the power away
| from Bluesky and have users use other servers.
|
| The AT protocol may promise decentralisation and an insurance
| policy, but that is meaningless if Bluesky the company can stop
| using the AT protocol and survive it.
|
| As long as the majority of users use the official app and log in
| to the primary server with their username/password, not the
| protocol's private key, Bluesky isn't forced to continue using
| the AT protocol. They still have power to push the enshittify
| button, block federation, and keep users captive on the official
| app/website like Musk's X does.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| No mention of their benefit corporation status
| idlewords wrote:
| Bluesky is two completely separate things:
|
| 1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the
| current Twitter ownership.
|
| 2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a
| strong ideological commitment to federated design.
|
| There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of
| the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up
| sowing a lot of confusion about it.
|
| I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being
| decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block,
| private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it
| definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a
| production social app running on it.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I got the impression from Christine Webber that the Blue sky
| protocol could not practically be federated, there's a
| bottleneck (relays iirc) that can only be properly implemented
| with huge resources, and which scales quadratically
|
| https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Bluesky is designed for the appearance of federation.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Also the appearance of no political baggage, but that's not
| actually true either.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed a bit here:
|
| _How decentralized is Bluesky really?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410 - Nov 2024 (16
| comments)
| ziml77 wrote:
| Would be silly for anyone to take the other side of that bet.
| It's clear most people don't care. Early on I tried to explain
| to people why their feature requests didn't make sense in the
| federated design, but eventually I gave up. And to some extent
| Bluesky gave up as well. People were demanding DMing be a
| feature of the site so eventually they just added DMs that are
| centrally stored on their servers.
| liquidpele wrote:
| And rightfully so, because it's a stupid feature to not have
| and most people want an app not an ideology.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Email is DM and that's decentralised (despite best efforts of
| Microsoft and Google).
|
| So is Matrix.
| JFingleton wrote:
| > Twitter clone without the political baggage
|
| I tried out Bluesky last week in hope of finding a social
| network which ticked this box, but my feed was full of anti
| Elon Musk / Trump messages. So it was very political from my
| initial experience.
|
| This was after the setup wizard process where I selected
| tech/science/entertainment preferences.
|
| Perhaps I did something wrong or didn't give it enough chance?
|
| Either way I deleted my account.
| yeahwhatever10 wrote:
| What they meant to say was the "right" kind of political.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Nonetheless this is an issue that's still not fixed in
| bsky.
|
| I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America
| politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts
| that surrounds Trump.
|
| There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It
| does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I
| don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| That's always going to be hard work using a US-based
| platform. Whatever its downsides, Mastodon is noticeably
| less US-centric and it shows in the content.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| True, avoiding all posts with "Trump" or "Elon" would be
| amazing. I don't live in the US either and it's just too
| much drama for me.
|
| It was the same with Brexit. Those 2 years I got so fed
| up with that constantly repeating discussion about
| separating goods & services which they knew was
| impossible from the start.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well I can understand where they're coming from. The
| discussions have become so polarised and so nasty.
|
| What is happening a lot here in Holland now that the hard-
| right crowd are constantly spamming topics about _totally
| unrelated issues_ with stuff like "There are only 2
| genders". I don't mind them having an opinion (even though
| I strongly disagree), I just don't want it shoved in my
| face constantly and inappropriately. It's like they are so
| preoccupied with what's happening in other people's pants
| that they can't talk about anything else.
|
| So yeah that is something I don't want to see in social
| media anymore and I avoid platforms that allow it. Like
| Xitter.
| seydor wrote:
| interesting how the political tables have turned - Open
| source apps like lemmy were supported by the pro-trump camp
| back then.
| captainepoch wrote:
| > 1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of
| the current Twitter ownership.
|
| Not the current, but the previous one when Dorsey owned
| Twitter. And I don't know what's worse, honestly.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a
| strong ideological commitment to federated design.
|
| I got the impression from the Dorsey interview that this was
| _his_ commitment, and that he left because they weren 't
| interested in that. They're just trying to be a twitter clone
| that picks up angry twitter users who hate Musk.
|
| -----
|
| > That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is
| literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This
| is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It's another app.
| It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's
| footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
|
| > Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we
| wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a
| company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's
| not what I intended to help create.
|
| https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...
|
| -----
|
| The problem for Bluesky is that those people aren't actually
| leaving twitter, they're still using twitter more than they use
| Bluesky.
|
| https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
| EGreg wrote:
| I have been saying the same things for over a decade, and writing
| about it. But more importantly - I built the alternative, we've
| tested it with lots of local communities and will be going to
| market Nov 5th this year
|
| https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://archive.ph/VDPuq
| tasuki wrote:
| > In terms of content moderation, posts related to child sexual
| abuse or terrorism are best handled by professionals trained to
| help keep millions or billions safe.
|
| Does that mean bluesky will somehow centrally moderate posts
| "related to terrorism"?
| chad1n wrote:
| Who's this "we"? Is there anything that runs on the Bluesky
| protocol outside of the Bluesky itself which has its own
| extensions which can't be federated. Also, when I opened this
| site, all the posts were from a certain political ideology. The
| algorithm is probably more or less the same as Twitter in pushing
| contents loved by their creators.
| threeseed wrote:
| > The algorithm is probably more or less the same as Twitter in
| pushing contents loved by their creators
|
| Do you some evidence that BlueSky owners are manipulating the
| feed like we know Elon has been doing with X.
|
| Because I would argue it's more just that the communities have
| fragmented.
| derelicta wrote:
| I can already tell that whilst reactionary propaganda will now be
| allowed on the platform, any anti-genocide activism will be
| quietly censored. It's like I can already taste it.
| azangru wrote:
| > The internet doesn't need to be like this. As luck would have
| it, a new way is emerging just in time. If you've heard of
| Bluesky...
|
| Why do they write as if activitypub and mastodon do not exist?
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| don't forget SOLID from W3C!
|
| https://solidproject.org
|
| https://github.com/solid
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Perhaps because, in terms of numbers, they don't?
| archagon wrote:
| Deceptive. Half the tech people I used to follow on Twitter
| now post exclusively on Mastodon.
| jghn wrote:
| Deceptive. While half the tech people I used to follow on
| Twitter moved to Mastodon, three quarters of them have
| either shifted to bsky or post to both via mirroring.
| azakai wrote:
| Aside from tech, though: practically none of the non-tech
| people I followed on Twitter moved to Mastodon. Almost
| all of them went to Bluesky. I follow a mix of people, so
| I ended up mostly on Bluesky.
|
| I would have been happy on Mastodon too, and I don't know
| why it didn't catch on with non-tech people, but it just
| hasn't. So Bluesky is our main opportunity for an open
| social web, at this time.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It sounds stupid but I think the bit where you pick your
| host was too much for normies or led to pushing off the
| decision and just not joining. Even when you have an
| account you know have to pick a client.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| I've never used twitter or any of the alternatives but
| I'm glad not many people are going to mastodon
|
| The number of dead links I've had where the shard is down
| or overloaded is way too high
|
| The design simply doesn't work imo
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Hey, question. Is mirroring officially supported by
| either platform. So for example, can I configure my blue
| sky account to just monitor my mastodon feed and re-post
| things for me?
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| I see some BlueSky users mirroring their content from
| Mastodon
| m-p-3 wrote:
| There's a bidirectional bridge available
|
| https://fed.brid.gy/
| WJW wrote:
| Have the non-tech people you used to follow on Twitter also
| migrated to Mastodon? What about the other half of the tech
| people, where did they go?
|
| Labeling another post as deceptive and then trying to use
| just one demographic (and not a very large one at that) as
| proof for whether mastodon is "large" in percentage terms
| is not very reassuring as to the level of discussion on
| Mastodon tbh.
| archagon wrote:
| I am just relaying my experience. Bluesky and Mastodon
| together cover 90% of the intelligent discussion I used
| to get on Twitter, weighed more heavily towards Mastodon.
| To pretend it's a dead platform is ridiculous.
| input_sh wrote:
| Their metrics are comparable in every single way, both with
| around a million MAU.
|
| Plenty of stats websites for both, you should check them.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe because user identities aren't bound to server instances
| with Bluesky?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Sure they are, it's just that it's centralised and you don't
| see it. If bluesky shut down it's business guess where you
| data goes? Into the void, correct.
|
| Data isn't tied to an instance in mastodon, it resides in an
| instance and can be easily migrated. If you either host
| yourself or subscribe to a reputable service that offers
| mastodon, like omg.lol then it's a safe bet your data will
| live long after the other proprietary services get shut down.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| User identities are not user data. Your identity is only
| lost if you used an identity provider that shut down. Your
| data is separately stored. You can, in effect, own your
| bluesky identity forever, even if every BS server shuts
| down, so long as DNS still exists and functions.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Didn't know that, thanks for the info!
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Strictly speaking:
|
| 1. This is true for did:web but less true for did:plc
| identities.
|
| 2. For did:plc identities to survive a full "bluesky PBC"
| death, you'd need to to transfer master authority for
| your PLC identity to a set of keys you control. If you
| don't then ultimately bluesky PBC would still have final
| authority over your identity. But if you transfer control
| to your own keys ahead of time then you can use those
| keys to make changes long after bluesky PBC's death.
| BodyCulture wrote:
| Wound be great if you posted the URL to the relevant
| documentation for this... I guess there must be some docs
| about these delicate details? Thank you very much!
| jacoblambda wrote:
| That's not actually true. If you host your data yourself
| with a PDS then everything continues to work. And your data
| is all stored in a big merkle tree so you can actually just
| back it up from the network and if bluesky shits itself you
| can upload it to your own PDS and continue as if nothing
| happened.
|
| Same goes for identity (albeit in a different way)
| metabagel wrote:
| My experience with Mastodon is that discovery is terrible. It's
| great that it's open, but it was far too much work to find
| people and topics to follow outside of my instance
| (indieweb.social). BlueSky makes discovery natural and easy.
| blitzar wrote:
| My experience with Mastodon is that discovery is wonderful.
| It is natural and easy - no algorithm, no manipulation,
| nothing at all. Just type in details of person you want to
| follow and follow them.
| lokar wrote:
| That's not what people mean by discovery.
| pxoe wrote:
| Their discovery is so bad that they were touting new
| discovery algorithms for account recommendations in some
| recent release. So much for "no algorithm".
| serial_dev wrote:
| Discovery is great, as long as you know exactly who you
| want to follow. Got it!
| alkonaut wrote:
| Both are written with the idea of decentralization and
| federation in mind. Bluesky at least superficially looks
| centralized like Twitter, which is simply put, what I want. I
| believe that's the case for most ex Twitter users too.
| nout wrote:
| And Nostr. Nostr is smaller than either Bluesky or ActivityPub,
| but it has some benefits over those two. It has a large number
| of cool clients (twitter-like, medium-like, music related,
| instagram-like) and the fact that instance admin can't de-
| platform you like they can on Mastodon, which literally
| happened to me. Nostr also shows signs of being able to support
| the developers via very easy "tipping" feature. For example
| when new Amethyst (nostr client on android) is released, it
| makes it super easy to send the developers couple cents. And
| those cents add up. I don't think it's self sustainable
| currently, but it's not that far either.
| sitkack wrote:
| I don't know why your comment is being downvoted, first I
| heard of the protocol.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostr
|
| https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/
|
| Is that because of it being crypto adjacent?
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| What do you mean by "instance owners can't deplatform?" Is
| this about being able to port your data (and username/handle)
| out to a different instance?
| tensor wrote:
| There are a number of things I don't like about mastodon.
|
| 1. The platform is outright hostile to discovery. You generally
| can't even index posts in a search engine. This is not what I
| want, at all.
|
| 2. Moderation is awful. Letting individual servers control
| moderation at their whim is not what I want. In contrast,
| Bluesky's idea of labelling services and opt-in moderation
| sounds amazing.
|
| 3. After point 1, it probably goes without saying that Mastodon
| is outright hostile to algorithms. While I agree that
| algorithms can be very problematic, Bluesky's approach to opt-
| in algorithms is an interesting approach.
|
| 4. I think the ship has long sailed on Mastodon. It's failed
| time and again to gain enough critical mass for non-tech people
| to adopt. Clearly the combination of above issues, or even
| maybe the confusion of onboarding, is too much.
|
| Overall I'm glad Mastodon exists, and perhaps Bluesky wouldn't
| be what it is without first seeing what worked and didn't work
| with Mastodon.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| I'm glad that Mastodon didn't gain enough critical mass for
| non-tech people to adopt. I see that as a feature.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| With it seeming like even fewer powerful people will control how
| social media is moderated, as they say depending on the "policy
| environment" there's never been a more important time to work
| towards distributed social media.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I lost interest in Bluesky when I got an "account required"
| blocker after I clicked on a Bluesky post link.
|
| UPDATE: OK, didn't realize it was a configurable setting. I guess
| I ran into it a few times and assumed it was a default block.
| Thanks for the clarification.
| excerionsforte wrote:
| Interesting given I can access this[1] without an account.
|
| [1]
| https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3lfdz...
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| This is a per-account flag that's only honoured by the official
| web app and some third party ones
| dymk wrote:
| I don't know if "only" is the right adverb to use when it's
| how the first-party apps and website works. I don't know what
| usage looks like for third-party sites, but I would imagine
| it's incredibly small compared to bsky.app, and it's nearly
| everyone's first impression of Bluesky.
| TZubiri wrote:
| What's wrong with requiring an account to view some content?
|
| Does everything need to be 100% public?
|
| What if I want to post somewhat private thoughts or images and
| restrict the content in some manner?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| AT proto is a cleartext protocol, hiding content is a matter
| of clients respecting a flag, a false sense of privacy. If
| you want to restrict the audience of a post, you should post
| it encrypted and send keys to intended recipients
| IshKebab wrote:
| Publicly accessible content should be accessible without an
| account. The only reason they ask for an account is to push
| you to sign up, which is just annoying.
|
| Imagine if Wikipedia asked you to log in before you could
| read anything.
|
| It makes some sense for something like Facebook which is more
| or less private by default (you couldn't see much without an
| account anyway), but not for X or Bluesky where it's all
| public.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Framing bluesky as a "competitor" to mastodon makes about as much
| sense as framing a quarterback making the winning run as
| "beating" the kid drawing clouds in the bleachers.
|
| They're in the same general space, but only one is playing the
| game.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Why would we want to protect a protocol that isn't federated in
| any meaningful way?
| mindcrash wrote:
| The protocol _is_ protected.
|
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/
|
| "Dual MIT/Apache-2.0 License
|
| Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Bluesky PBC, and Contributors
|
| Except as otherwise noted in individual files, this software is
| licensed under the MIT license
| (<http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>), or the Apache License,
| Version 2.0 (<http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>).
|
| Downstream projects and end users may chose either license
| individually, or both together, at their discretion. The
| motivation for this dual-licensing is the additional software
| patent assurance provided by Apache 2.0."
|
| Even when Bluesky decides to fuck around with the licenses,
| everybody is free to fork the current version crediting Bluesky
| PBC due to the MIT and Apache 2.0 license allowing this.
|
| And besides that, the community could also decide _not_ to
| support AT at all but put their full weight behind Nostr
| (https://nostr.com/)
|
| UPDATE:
|
| And the protocol spec is licensed under Creative Commons:
|
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-website/
|
| "Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)
|
| Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Bluesky PBC, and Contributors
|
| Documentation text and blog posts in this repository are licensed
| under a permissive CC-BY license.
|
| For anybody interested in derivative works of documents and
| specifications, remember that:
|
| - you must give attribution (credit) to the original work - you
| must indicate any changes made - trademark rights are _not_
| granted (for example, to "Bluesky", "AT Protocol", or "atproto",
| or any logos or icons)
|
| Inline code examples, example data, and regular expressions are
| under Creative Commons Zero (CC-0, aka Public Domain) and
| copy/pasted without attribution."
| seydor wrote:
| At this point in history it's wrong to suggest that any mass
| communication medium can be non-politicized
| poszlem wrote:
| And using BlueSky as an example of a "non-politicized" platform
| is even more inaccurate.
| threeseed wrote:
| You can. Threads achieved this for a while before Zuckerberg
| capitulated.
|
| All you need to do is down-rank political content in general
| and prevent it from appearing in For You type feeds.
|
| Then it just becomes a case of people needing to specifically
| follow political content which heavily limits its reach.
| captainepoch wrote:
| Pure Bluesky endorsement from a MIT blog.
|
| ActivityPub, Pleroma and Mastodon existed before this, and they
| just work.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| I'll bet that most who casually encounter hate speech/far right
| content on X, Meta or other platforms are not far-right and don't
| actually want to see or be influenced by it. It likely creates a
| negative user experience for them.
|
| However powerful the X/Meta AI feed algorithms are at surfacing
| content people are interested in, it all counts for nothing if
| people see content that they find repulsive. Its not just far
| right content, disturbing content in general gets more engagement
| and is surfaced in feeds.
|
| BlueSky and its AT Protocol, by putting moderation back into the
| hands of the user, allows people to see the content they want and
| not what they don't want, making for a much better and more
| positive user experience.
|
| I predict that this means that at some point, it will take over
| as the dominant social media platform. There are already multiple
| startups with VC funding building things on the AT Protocol.
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