this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of (socialhub.activitypub.rocks)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a

We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital

In other words, the enshittification is coming. Because Bluesky is backed by crypto-bro venture capital.

A lot of hay is being made about Bluesky but despite literal oligarchs taking over the country, I guess rich people dictating how our systems work is what people want because apparently Mastodon is too much to ask of individuals.

We can talk about Bluesky and how great their tech is all we want, but unless we address the elephant in the room, venture capital that wants a return on their investment, we're just spiraling the same stupid fucking drain we've been down with every social media preceding it.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Maybe Mastodon should take a moment to learn something. Everybody on Reddit is praising all the moderation capabilities of Bluesky, the ability to create block lists and starter packs. The way you can verify your user by using your own domain as a handle.

Instead of complaining about users, which is pointless, make Mastodon better. Users won’t come to Mastodon by shaming them for being stupid.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

Everybody on Reddit is praising all the moderation capabilities of Bluesky

Bluesky is an unmoderated space. People don't seem to know what "moderation" is anymore. It's not the ability for end users to block other end users.

block lists and starter packs

This is a bigger issue than it seems, because the people building and using the fediverse care very strongly about things like trust and consent, and so discussions around stuff like this get stifled.

It's not a technological issue with Mastodon. It's a social one, with the fediverse at large. The place is swarming with people who will openly attack you for making the place more comfortable to less technically adept users, because they themselves were bullied off of Twitter.

Like, this is the real issue the fediverse can't get traction. People will overcome other hurdles, and develop work arounds for other limitations. But being treated as unwelcome tourists by the people who are already here? No, they won't do that.

The way you can verify your user by using your own domain as a handle.

This is a core feature of the fediverse. Run your own server, use your own domain. And mastodon offers secondary validation by adding an ID string to your website that it can check and verify.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Users to VCs in a year or two: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal"

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

Capitalists need to be regulated (forced) to play nice, without that it's gonna be the same song, same dance for the rest of time. And it's not gonna happen anytime soon by the looks of things

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

15 million Series A financing

Maybe shitty corporate search engines are failing me, but has there been a stated valuation for Bluesky? Googling 'Bluesky valuation" or any combination thereof is a problem since that's a business term so lol, lmao, search engine worthless.

$8m seed + $15m A series may be a shockingly small amount of equity, or it could be the whole damn company but I'm just not seeing it actually posted anywhere.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago (3 children)

theres almost nothing decentralized about bluesky

.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

Swapping Twitter for New Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

Hey now, they're happy to decentralize the feed management so they don't have to worry about processing user's custom feeds themselves!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I wonder which billionaire is going to snap up bluesky once they've fattened their crop of highly engaged users

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

They already owe their livelihoods to Blockchain Capital, and venture capital firm of crypto-bros.

The bait is out and the switch is coming.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I don't really get all the pessimism. Even if folks are right in saying there'll be a bait and switch, this is people moving to a new platform en masse. If Bluesky goes to shit there's more reason to believe users would just move again.

In the meantime, as members of the fediverse, we should be using Bluesky being "decentralized" as a way to ease people into actually decentralized platforms.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Is Bluesky decentralized in any meaningful way? If the company dies, could the service live on?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Define decentralisation

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

If the company dies, could the service continue?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

I can tell you right now nobody's on Bluesky because it's "decentralized" because the evidence is clear, it's not in practice decentralized lol.

This is all a bloody waste of time. I really wish I could just fast-forward two years into the enshittification when everyone realizes they got duped by Big VC. Again.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Ok. I want to host my own Bluesky and interact with the bsky.app instance. How?

The article is all about excuses.

[–] Blisterexe 6 points 2 days ago

all you have to do is

  1. host your own PDS, where your account lives, this is easy, I do it myself already.

  2. host you own appview: the only actually good appview is bsky's, luckily it's open source, unfortunately I do not believe they made it easy to self-host.

  3. Host a relay, this isn't all that hard, it just needs a real big server (AFAIK it needs a shitton of io throughput), so unless you're very rich it's not too realistic to host this.

So yeah, a PDS is easy to host but the other two parts are a pain, and since the protocol has only been open for a few months, people haven't really done too much.

Frontpage exists, but they haven't made it be able to interact with bsky.Social, although the accounts are shared. I have been told by people involved with that that that's an issue with frontpage's implementation, and not the AT protocol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Install it and use it?

Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

It's very centralized, but it's not that different from what you'd have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

Though really you shouldn't do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate "microblog" shit because it's designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

My guess is Bluesky never intended to be « open » and « federated » and « decentralized « as we understand it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Just a hunch, but I think no decentralised network is going to run ATProto unless someone other than Bluesky forks it and makes the protocol changes that would allow that to be practical. I guess it's possible, in theory?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've not read much about their protocol yet, is there a proposal somewhere on what changes are needed?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I'm not sure what approach would work. As I understand it, it's designed around the idea that all messages get routed through a monolithic "relay" which needs to see every single event from every user in order for any of them to get routed between the PDS nodes where user data gets stored.

Probably best to just add ActivityPub on top of it, if they really wanted to federate with anyone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Decentralisation doesn't necessarily come with decentralized technical infrastructure, but its the basis for it. I'm still betting on ActivityPub. Sure social insentives are important, but the most openess will win. Also, Wordpress, Flipboard, Threads already joined ActivityPub, so the ecosystem already is kind of attractive in that direction.