this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
84 points (98.8% liked)
Fediverse
28480 readers
855 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Almost nothing decentralized yet…
You can host your own PDS (making it distributed but not decentralized), there is an ability to host a relay but hosting a relay requires mirroring the entire network instead of just subscribed nodes like AP, making it cost prohibitive for communities to organize their own relays on ATProto.
If bluesky is serious about decentralization then they need to make mirroring the entire network optional, allow relays’ firehoses to only to stream the activity from subscribed accounts from their users and federate with relays that don’t mirror the entire network.
Mirroring the entire network is what makes it a friendly experience for newcomers, IMO. In my own Mastodon instance I have to subscribe to a big relay (infosec.social) so that a reasonable proportion of replies from other instances I don’t happen to be happening populates into the feed.
I suppose you could say AP makes this optional, but that seems like a reasonable design choice to diverge on rather than a critical flaw in my opinion.
Mirroring the entire network is what makes it act like Twitter.
I'm not convinced that that's A) something we should want, and B) a fight we can win. Trying to recreate what already exists, using technology that's not really suited for it, feels like an uncanny skeuomorphism to me.
Really good points. I put some thoughts in this comment that I think reflect your concerns too. TL;DR the architectural differences lend suitability to the social differences as well between a Twitter-alike and a more clustered, less homogeneous social feed.
https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/15918153
That definitely makes it accessible to newcomers. But costs are going to gatekeep smaller communities from hosting relays as the network scales. There are plenty of obscure conversations happening on the far corners of the network that don’t concern the majority, requiring a full network mirror of this activity just increases cost for minimal perceived benefit.
There does need to be some level of seeding, I think the big push for getting starter packs and the like into Mastodon is an example of that need. At the same time, it’s hard to justify spending the money on extra storage and computer just so I can see posts on furry bluesky or some other niche but highly active community.
That’s a good set of points and I agree. I am starting to think this technical difference reflects underlying social / experiential differences:
ActivityPub “clumpy” federation (like a region of city-states) where your view of the network is based on who you and others in your instance interact with - interoperability, but not homogeneity of content or interaction
Atproto “swarm” federation (like a pool of taxis sharing livery, with possibly-but-not-necessarily independent operators), endpoints are exchanging data to compose a single virtual platform out of replaceable interoperating parts - federated but not decentralized, having a primary network (the relay service) holding everyone’s experience together
To me the former feels like it encourages a spirit like original Internet communities (MUDs, BBSs, message boards) while the latter produces that of branded app platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat).