I believe the client is the _most_ important thing to focus on, but is often secondary to the needs of the server.

True RESTful (HATEOAS) APIs are really powerful, but they are a major pain for any client to implement. GraphQL APIs are worse than HATEOAS, but the client tooling is amazing. GraphQL won.

I think the same thing will happen here. The distributed nature of the Fediverse is really powerful, but creating clients are a huge pain. The API is so complex.

In contrast to the Federvise API, the BlueSky API is easy to use which will allow more people to "play" with different clients and use cases.

And then in a few years they will close the gate after the walled garden is complete.

Same stuff, different platform.

Same people even, isn't Dorsey involved? And it is a public benefit company that sort of laughably hasn't disclosed its charter, like how OpenAI backed out of revealing the details of its corporate structure.

Dorsey is on the board but does not hold any ownership in the company. He also deleted his account. Seems like he only cares about nostr.

he's on the board says everything. many including myself don't believe he'll give up his stake in neither Bluesky or Nostr.

Nostr is full of crypto and "free speech" people. there will be too much controversies if he's seen active on both.

Again, he doesn't have a stake.

I agree Nostr is full of that, which is why I don't use it.

What's a "free speech person"? Is it one that support effective access to the actual exercise of fundamental human rights?

> In contrast to the Federvise API, the BlueSky API is easy to use

I coded with both, I don't feel they are that different.

Except for the fact that it requires a centralized directory server that you can be banned from at any time, with no recourse. And for users, being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly—a big step backwards from Mastodon where a group of users can come together and live on a server run by an admin they trust without needing their own DNS names. It replaces social trust that's more accessible for a lot of non-technical users with a more complicated kind of technical trust that requires a high level of technical sophistication (Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of twitter users all signing up for a registrar and buying their own domain names?)

Well, or a group of users can come together and attach their identity to a DNS server run by an admin they trust. If I register pinksky.com, it is fairly cheap for me to hand out subdomains to Bluesky users -- certainly easier than running a Mastodon instance.

I think the questions about indexers and firehose servers are more relevant to the question of centralizations. Identity is much easier to solve.

The other issue is that I fundamentally don't think the problems of moderation and hosting are "separable" as the paper claims—the moderation of your content is intrinsic to the question of "who wants to be responsible for hosting and paying for this content?". And people are going to want to use moderation systems that make moderation decisions they agree with and support—they're not going to want to be paying for a hosting provider that hosts content they disagree with. That's why I see the fediverse "plurality of networks" federated model winning out in the end, because it can be funded and operated by small groups of people interoperating with each other rather then requiring large centralized directory resources that nobody wants to pay for.

I thought it was cheaper not to look at the content, than to look at it. That just leaves legal responsibility as an issue.

That requires each and every user to do the moderation for themselves. Which few if any want. Most users actually want moderation, as long as they can decide whose ban list applies to the content they see.

Moderation is only an issue at "commercial" scale. Any small community can easily solve moderation. One critique I have about most modern business plans is that they are looking for large scale and little responsibility.

Nightpool has been an admin of AcitvityPub servers of all sizes for years now and is versed in the moderation challenges therein, I'm not sure they'd agree :) I'm not sure I agree that it's a solvable issue at community scale.

Yeah, I don't think moderation is "solved" at all on the community scale, but my point is that ActivityPub servers are just way more likely to be at that "community" scale, and Bluesky—as a more flat protocol with a lot of discovery and indexing features—is not. So I think they have a lot better chance of having communities that can reach a local moderation equilibrium.

I guess I'm looking at it from the Lens of the community. If a community can't solve its moderation issue through social standards the community degrades.

Once the community degrades to having no social standards there is no point in moderation.

I helped run a moderate a small forum community in the early aughts. We only had maybe 800-1000 active users at our peak. Moderation was fucking terrible, and not 'solved'. We had several users we elevated into moderator positions and still.. I think we were running about 1.5 moderators per 100 active users on average.

800 to a thousand sounds like a lot to me. The early aughts were also different times.

I think this comment is kind of correct, the moderation problem can be overlooked until the system scales(IMO not until individual participating instances scale but until the whole system becomes relevant), and thereafter we'd come back to the problem of bad actors and external pressures.

> And for users, being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly

This is not really true. DNS allows you to set your name to a domain, but ultimately all of your posts are tied to your DID. If you wanted to move from steveklabnik.bsky.app to steveklabnik.whatever.app, you could do that still, no DNS required. You won't lose anything. The DNS stuff is effectively vanity.

My understanding is that this only works if you're using their centralized PLC DID, which I think only works if you sign up through their website? Maybe I'm mistaken about that or they removed that restriction, I don't see any mentions of that in the docs today. Users using the `web:` DID need to use the .well-known resolution system predicated on owning a domain name and their identity is tied to that domain name.

In general, I guess I'm just pessimistic of the ability for any DID system to exist that isn't either centralized or majorly user-unfriendly. I think that reasoning on a "local scope" like ActivityPub does and worrying less about global identity is just a better long-term solution for users and works better with how people are practically using social media today (think about the proliferation of a million discord servers each with effectively their own user identity....)

Yeah, as you can see from the sub-thread, I maybe over-stepped a small amount here. I am thinking about what is required by the protocol, and that is just 'any DID.' You are right to point out that web: and plc: both have certain practical drawbacks today. I am confident that because this problem is considered carefully by the team, that this will be 100% true in the future, but you're also right that there are real restrictions today. I will be sure to be more careful in the future.

> In general, I guess I'm just pessimistic of the ability for any DID system to exist that isn't either centralized or majorly user-unfriendly.

That's fair. Time will tell :)

At present all the DIDs issued through bluesky use plc for resolution, which is a centralised directory managed by bluesky

Yes, I agree this is a weak point. It's also one that the team is aware of and seemingly has the right amount of discomfort with. I see temporary compromises like this as an example of the pragmatic decision making needed to ship, and trust that they will do the right things here, but I also understand some skepticism.

It's not a 'weak point' it's a fatal flaw.

Given that it is a non-essential part of how the protocol works, I disagree, but I understand that reasonable people may differ.

PLC uses signed logs similar to certificate transparency. We have a lot of options for where to take it. There may be a distributed/decentralized hosting system if we can settle on a consensus model we're comfortable with. Otherwise it will be some kind of org management model.

The other direction we've got is did:web, which is already used in some cases, and has some tradeoffs but is a strong option.

For now. As I understand it (from talking to them in person a few years ago), they don't want it to stay like that forever. They want to eventually invite more organisations to run name resolution servers, and they have some clever ideas about how to keep all those servers & organisations honest.

You've identified a real problem but blamed the wrong target. We don't need to avoid using domain names, we need to make them an order of magnitude easier for laypeople to buy and use.

99% of people who could benefit from owning a domain should never have to know what a DNS record or TLS cert is. This should all be managed by apps through a simple delegation system built on OAuth2.

You log on to bsky.app, they say, "want to connect a domain?". You say yes and get redirected to your domain registrar, where you grant access to for bsky.app to have control over bsky.example.com until you revoke access.

DomainConnect[0] should solve this but in practice it's turned out to be very gatekeepy in my opinion.

[0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/

This is an interesting take! I don't necessarily disagree with it—we could definitely make the DNS system more accessible than it is today—but I don't think it's the panacea either, there are still a lot of costs and paperwork involved with owning a domain name that aren't related to the actual technical knowledge required. How is my 12 year old cousin whose parents don't understand technology supposed to buy a domain name just to be able to comment on a youtube video?

Certainly I think there are regulatory and social issues as well. The current system was built in a time where it made far less sense for that 12 yo to have their own domain name. But they also didn't have their own phone numbers back then, but the phone system evolved so they could. DNS needs to evolve too.

You're only addressing half the issue here. By delegating control of your domain to bsky.app, you're still beholden to a centralized ban list and retain no control over your own instance.

If they ban you then you take everything, including your profile domain, and move somewhere else. This mobility would do a lot to ensure they don't ban users without a good reason. It's incentive alignment and insurance.

Are you saying that if you get banned you have the ability to take your bluesky name and all data to another server somewhere?

I have not ready anything about the protocol yet, is there something in it that keeps all your data accessible to you after a ban?

Is list of contacts, other people's posts and such part of that move or what exactly is left to someone after they are banned?

Edit: oh wait I'm completely wrong, that's not a key, that's an ID in a directory, lol. The public key thing is just a plan.

There's a thing called DID that identifies you. There's a few options, but one is called "DID PLC" with a sample implementation here:

https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc

With the disclaimer that I haven't dug into it seriously enough, I understand it's a public key (that I can also rotate) that I can use to prove that an account somewhere else is really mine. Note that I have no idea what the private key is, or how to dig it out - I'm sure that's documented somewhere, but I wasn't interested enough for now.

TL;DR: there definitely is a theoretical mechanism for users to "take their toys with them." How it works out in practice is a different matter. I suspect most users wouldn't know they're supposed to keep a bundle of data stored somewhere for a dark hour. I also wonder how the protocol protects itself from people accidentally putting that data in public.

There are no safe haven registrar that are immune from harassment against lawful contents. There's no guarantee that you can port-out domains against registrar's will, even if it's technically your property.

The whole "we can just use DNS names as ID and it'll be unbannable" idea is just relying on the fact that domain names aren't normally used as social media IDs and that more neutrality is expected from registrars, and neither of these presumptions are guaranteed.

Once enough users start using domain names and gets >100k daily likes with anime illustrations, same people as who were problems ARE going to get mad and set up their systems to just hammer Namecheap, GoDaddy, Gandi, Porkbun, until their support gives in just like it always happened. If they didn't, they inject faults in credit card payments, make their authoritative servers unresolvable in UK, Apple devices, on 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8, so on and forth, until they do.

What are you optimizing for and what's your threat model? Personally I'm optimizing for UX and data ownership. One reason centralized services are bad is they tend to turn into monopolies. Once there's no competition there's no incentive for UX to be good. More ads, less useful features, more useless features, etc.

Using a decentralized protocol and providing custom domains is sufficient for me.

If you're optimizing for censorship resistance and your threat model is that registrars want to take you down because there are enough people mad about what you're posting, you're going to have to make UX tradeoffs that most people don't and shouldn't need to.

From GP:

> If they ban you then you take everything, including your profile domain, ...

This reads like censorship resistance against moderation/management going insane on its own, to me. And in reality, that rarely happens. It's ongoing on Twitter, kind of, but that's less than once in a decade occurrence, and the crazy element wasn't internal.

What happens more often is some fundamentalist group or something starts harassing companies, often leveraging advertisers, credit card companies, perhaps some backend APIs too, sometimes even foreign laws way outside jurisdictions, to get them swallow their agendas. That leads to bans and insane policies getting introduced.

And, if you look at what happened to Twitter in last few years, I think you can see the latter of above two descriptions is closer to what happened to it; whether it was foreign conspiracy, or purely to that guy's insanity, or politics, it was external force that lead to the situation that necessitated escape. It was sane-ish up to the acquisition.

It doesn't work with subdomains?

Users. Don't. Care.

actually you can use any kind of identity system that uses a did. it’s not dependent on dns alone.

(we run the largest instance of atproto outside of bluesky)

My understanding is that bluesky will only support interoperating with their own centralized PLC system (which other developers currently can't access) or the did:web: protocol. Is that not true?

> being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly—a big step backwards from Mastodon where a group of users can come together and live on a server run by an admin they trust

In the DNS, that’s called a subdomain. I.e. a group of users can come together and buy a domain name and all use different subdomains, completely without any additional cost per user.

> and for users, being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly

I don't think so. Anyone can set up a server with a DNS entry and then hand out subdomains to users. It's only sekf-hosted folk who need to pay for a domain name

I’ll go farther: for most users being distributed is actually worse.

They don’t care about copyleft or “information wants to be free”. They want a feed that isn’t full of Nazis and that all their friends post on

They don’t want to think about platforms, peering, distribution, server mutes, or any of that faff.

Personally, I haven't really seen any "Nazis" on Twitter that I keep hearing about (though that probably depends on the definition), I'm just excited about Bluesky because it has an open API that's not controlled by one dumb guy who can shut down whole businesses like Tapbots with a flip of a switch or decide that $100 per month is a fair price for "hobbyists" to use it... but I guess I'm probably an outlier.

There a tons of truly vile fediverse instances.

But fediverse isn't run by one man that personally uses his position to push those opinions.

I think the difference is that moderation is easier on the fediverse (as well as on Bluesky). If you want that vile content you kind of have to either be in that circle your self, or you have to explicitly look for it. On Bluesky there are popular mute and blocklists, hateful accounts get mass blocked, and engagements around hateful content is diminished (not proliferated like on Twitter). The Fediverse is even more so, where whole servers are mass blocked by because hateful content is allowed to fester.

Someone has to do it though. A default federate-everything install will, well, federate everything.

Sort of. Somebody still has to follow the other or find a post from outside their server and comment on it before any communication takes place. How likely that is depends on who's on your server.

If you're hosting people who already have a large audience, or are especially vulnerable to harassment, that's probably going to happen sooner or later and it would be wise to craft or copy a denylist before it does.

I run my own Mastodon server and I've never had to take any moderation actions with a few hundred followers. I know the names of a few vile servers and can't recall seeing them among my followers. I suspect I'm fortunate in just not being interesting enough to vile people.

True, but apart from moderation, the engagement driven algorithm on Twitter also does a ton to proliferate vile content. On the federated platform the algorithms tend to be simply chronological and limit the content to account you explicitly follow. Meaning there is way less exposure to undesired content. One of your follows must be the one to repost it (which may warrant an unfollow or mute, etc.) or you must opt into an algorithm that gives you unwanted content (which you may then simply swap out for a better one).

.. and I as a mastodon server admin can just unilaterally block them at the behest and for the benefit of my users.

Yes which is a feature of the fediverse, not a bug.

If the admin blocks an instance it's either a community you as a user won't want to be interacting with, or the user has chosen the wrong instance for them to be on.

I don't know why people say that every instance not federating with every other is a bad thing. It's not. I definitely don't want to interact with the extreme right instances around so I choose one that I feel at home with and that has them all blocked. I think that's the beauty of the system.

No, it's a bug, not feature. Those content should not flow into your timeline if your friends are all nice and vile accounts are banned on your instance. The fact that instance owners not just can, nor just do, but HAVE TO block a bunch of demonized instances as a checkbox obligation and compromise and virtue signaling is a bug.

How my community wants to operate is not beholden to your standards if my instance wants to block the stormfront mastodon instance it's going to and nothing you say is going to make anyone on my instance change their minds about that.

I have not seen any evidence of any major instance ban another instance because it refuses to ban yet another instance. There would be no reason for that. Messages from the controversial instance still won't make it to the instance that demands the 'virtual signaling' even through my instance.. unless some user on my instance essentailly quotes whole posts.

On the Icelandic twitter, Nazis—or at the very least extremely and explicitly xenophobic rhetoric—has been getting more and more prominent. There was a time where you could look past it for the most part, but currently every time I go on Twitter I’ll spot a very hateful comment or two.

It may be that most of my circle has migrated over to Bluesky and the only people left on Icelandic twitter are either public figures or nazis. So the nazi content is just a greater proportion of the diminished Icelandic content. Or that nazis feel empowered inside the current Twitter atmosphere, which honestly is very scary to think of. I tend to think that the reason is a mix of both.

How does Iceland end up with Nazis? Isnt Polish your largest non-native ethnicity? Don’t think they were exactly fans, by and large.

> Personally, I haven't really seen any "Nazis" on Twitter ... but I guess I'm probably an outlier.

Or a Nazi yourself. "Waaaaaaahhhh no protections for people!!!!" "Also, I can't look around a room full of Nazis and see any Nazis. I am not the problem."

Lmao americans bruh

What

(not an American, been to the US once for 3 weeks)

This reminds me of one of those old jokes where someone is called stupid and ugly and they respond "I'm not ugly".

The response to the first line was contained in the "What" because I was speechless

I’m talking stormfront reading kill-all-the-Jews actual Nazis.

Yikes :| Yeah so luckily I've never come across those...

If you've ever seen someone chanting "From the river to the sea", that's a euphemism for "kill all the Jews"

No it is not. In the mainstream, is either that Palestinians should have full access to their historical lands, or at its extreme that it should be a fully Palestinian state. Of course some people on the fringes take it further. From the now hard-right Israeli side, Likud literally used this expression in its initial charter[1], and N. dog whistled it in recent statements about two states.

1. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform...

That's very far, etnically and ideologically, from "Stomfront nazis" though.

In my experience, these kind of extremists kinda get banned immediately. I might be wrong though: do you have any example of right-wing accounts publicly saying that one entire ethnic group should be killed?

There a fediverse instances that are explicit homes for such content. I don’t read them. They are blocked from most mainstream servers.

Apologies, I thought you were talking of X / Twitter.

That's surprising. Before I left twitter I had probably came across more than ten accounts that were openly white supremacist or explicitly calling for the extermination of the Jewish race

I didn’t understand why people kept saying there were so many nazis on Twitter. I thought that maybe people had less tolerance for spicy replies and such.

Then Elon turned off the app access and I had to use the official app. There they were! White supremacists, algorithmically injected straight into my feed.

I played around with the api and it is one of the most easiest apis I have seen. Very good for hobby projects as well as advanced usage

Question is: when BSKY goes belly-up, will all those users have somewhere they can turn to?

The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance).

> The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance).

Can you tell me more about that? If you just redirect webfinger requests, don't you still lose everything if your current instance disappears or you move to a new instance?

I would also like to hear more about this. AFAIK there's no way to keep your ActivityPub identity if you (or the instance owner) loses access to the domain it's hosted on.

It's more complex and depends on what you consider your identity.

Webfinger redirects control what people look you up by.

The domain of the URL of the actor webfinger resolved to defines how clients access your profile.

They are usually the same domain, but don't need to be. Effectively your webfinger address functions as an alias (and you redirect multiple URLs to the same actor)

Follows follow the actor, so your webfinger may break and follow relationships will continue.

If the actor url becomes unavailable, however, your profile is inaccessible whether or not you redirect the webfinger.

To get Bluesky like portability we'd need either for that actor url to be possible to point to a DID or other means of decentralized lookup mechanism, and/or for servers to store the webfinger handle and recheck that regularly, and a way for clients to control a key that can be used to sign claims to say "this new instance key is also mine".

It's very much doable, but not done, nor is there consensus about exactly how.

Best current option if you don't want to host your own instance is to control your webfinger domain; if your instance goes without warning so you can't use the normal migration, you'd still need to manually get people to follow you again, but at least you can point them to the same id.

The complexity of your answer illustrates my frustration. Identities should be URIs (a la IndieWeb).

IMO WebFinger was a bad idea for ActivityPub in the first place (and it's not in the spec). It makes it a lot more hacky to statically host your profile, and the indirection is confusing. As far as I know the presupposition that users would find URIs as IDs confusing is just an assumption that was made early on.

> To get Bluesky like portability we'd need either for that actor url to be possible to point to a DID or other means of decentralized lookup mechanism, and/or for servers to store the webfinger handle and recheck that regularly, and a way for clients to control a key that can be used to sign claims to say "this new instance key is also mine".

Or just eschew this complexity entirely and use URIs as IDs. Make permanent personal domains much easier to buy and use.

> Identities should be URIs (a la IndieWeb). IMO WebFinger was a bad idea for ActivityPub in the first place (and it's not in the spec).

ActivityPub only deals with URIs. Including in Mastodon. Mastodon then layers WebFinger on top, but you can still give Mastodon the actor URI and it works just fine, and all underlying interactions use the actor URIs. E.g. follows are between actors by URI, not between webfinger IDs. If you want to pretend Webfinger isn't involved, you can choose to do so.

> It makes it a lot more hacky to statically host your profile, and the indirection is confusing. As far as I know the presupposition that users would find URIs as IDs confusing is just an assumption that was made early on.

I wish WebFinger specified a URI format that made it possible to do fully statically without breaking the spec -, but the minimal "implementation" using an otherwise static file takes a URL rewrite with a single small regexp. It's not an issue for anyone who understands what's going on well enough to need/want to decouple their webfinger response from their ActivityPub actor. If you just want to point at an instance you can just do a static redirect.

However, that is mostly orthogonal to the portability issue.

> Or just eschew this complexity entirely and use URIs as IDs. Make permanent personal domains much easier to buy and use.

Then you've traded one kind of complexity that provides decentralization as an option, for a massively larger complexity problem that involves navigating a lot of government bodies, a highly self-interested bureaucracy, and a number of major multinational companies. I co-founded the company that launched ".name" - the bureaucracy may have tapered off a bit, but it's still a nightmare. Reforming that space in any kind of meaningful way that wouldn't leave your identity beholden to an intersection of centralized government and corporate interests in not likely to happen anytime over the next decade or three.

The portability matters to some of us. It just doesn't require ditching ActivityPub. And it doesn't require all that much complexity - all it requires is to allow DIDs to be used as an alternative means to identify or update the actor URL in a relationship. You can keep backwards compatibility by allowing resolved actor URLs to keep working, and just add a signed reference to the DID in the profile and the webfinger response. Then clients and servers that supports it can use the DIDs to allow discovering a moved profile, while clients and servers that don't support it will behave just as before (work as long as the actor URL works; fail if it stops working without a preceding move).

Because of federation, it's even fairly trivial to sort out a simple DID method that needs no central authority: Spread the DID document to all the instances you have followers on, and allow rediscovery by pinging those servers from a new instance with a request to use the keys to validate an updated DID document at a provided new instance. Let every instance act as a first resort to bootstrap recovery, and every instance you interact with act as fallbacks to help you recover control, as long as your clients keep backups of the relevant private keys.

And if you include those DID references in the profile as well, then just as now you can choose to ignore webfinger if you prefer.

Yes, this will take time to get right, but some variant of proper portability is just a question of time.

You lose your history, but that's the same story as every situation where someone else is hosting your content ("there is no cloud, there's just someone else's computer"). But once you set up on a new instance, you can redirect your webfinger and everyone following that will know where to find you.

It's a good point, though not one I'd really considered because I never consider microblogging to be anything but ephemeral data (note the lack of a robust search solution also; this is not a place to chisel the words for which countless generations will remember you).

I'd love to see the ability to import a timeline. Sadly, that's not a feature of Mastodon right now AFAIK (though an admin handed a SQL dump and relevant image blobs could probably merge it into their node, but it'd be a hassle).

Thanks, I appreciate the additional detail!

The other key thing you lose is your identity. In the fediverse, your identity is your Webfinger handle, ie @[email protected]. Your server is literally part of it. Sure, you can migrate to @[email protected], and keep the username part, but your identity still changes.

Truly portable identity via DIDs, ie you can keep your underlying identity even if you migrate servers, is one of the key reasons the Bluesky team made their own protocol. https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub

You can indirect webfingers, so @you@site-you-own points to @you@someone-else-owns-this-server.

It's not ideal because there isn't a reverse link; if someone-else-owns-this-server dies, people who were following you on it will see you evaporate. But you can edit @you@site-you-own to point to @you@your-new-site so that at least people holding your ur-name can find you.

But unfortunately, there are few better solutions when someone else owns the data. One nice thing about the Fediverse is you can ameliorate most of this by setting up your own server (though I won't pretend that's going to be the solution that replaces everyone using Twitter; I maintain my own server and it is the same pain in the ass that self-hosting has always been).

The better solution is for implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy to let users bring their own custom domains, and have robust data export APIs. Then even if your home instance disappears overnight you can migrate to a different instance.

The webfinger handle does not need to be on the same domain/hostname as the Mastodon server. E.g. not on completely different domains, but for Mastodon it makes no difference, but my personal Mastodon install is on m.galaxybound.com but my webfinger handle is on galaxybound.com.

And there was no need to make a new protocol for a portable identity - a change to ActivityPub to support did's as actor urns would be sufficient, and would also open the door to unilateral account migration fairly easily.

This is my big problem with Bluesky - all of their gripes about ActivityPub would be easily solved in ways that'd make interop a temporary problem of getting people to buy into protocol tweaks, instead of inventing something from scratch.

Their claim that it's not easily possible to retrofit e.g. did's and signed repositories onto ActivityPub makes me question whether they understand ActivityPub at all, because there's nothing about it that would be problematic. E.g. objects are already signed - their mechanism for migration would require some changes to the signing mechanism to allow users to make a unilateral assertion that the key on their new instance belongs to them, but not much more. DID's is down to how ActivityPub clients and servers resolve URLs, nothing more.

You wouldn't even need everyone to buy into these changes - the worst case would be lack of federation w/instances that fail to support it - in other words no worse than starting your own network.

Even then it'd be possible to maintain fairly broad interop by announcing the did's in ways that'd allow also specifying resolvable urls to a proxy.

So, the thing that made Mastodon click for me was when I reminded myself social media doesn't matter. That's really the whole point of this stuff to me. Twitter's long failure began when people were convinced they should make it more important in their lives than it ever deserved to be. When the daily news started to earnestly read nonsense like "X tweeted in response …" for minutes on end, or when the RCMP used Twitter to communicate important public safety information, I felt it in my bones (though I might not have understood exactly why): this was wrong.

I set my Mastodon posts to auto-delete after 6 months so I don't care if I lose them, and I made sure to have some "me" links in the appropriate places pointing at my profile. Even if I were to lose that paper trail from doing proper account migrations, it's pretty easy to say which profile is mine. And if I lose followers, so be it. I'll follow people when I remember who they are. I'll make new posts. If I don't, that's fine. Life happens.

Was the death of MySpace identity-ending? Or bebo or Orkut or pownce or friendfeed or any other service? Users will move on regardless, and it won't be identity-ending.

I just looked into this (I didn't know it was possible!), and like much of the Fediverse, it seems more complicated than necessary:

Why do I need to run a webserver for this redirection? I don't have one; my TLD is essentially for email only.

AT proto lets me achieve the same goal using just a TXT DNS record.

There are not many people on this planet that would consider messing with DNS records less complicated than running their own webserver.

shouldn't Metcalfe's law apply here?

Metcalfe's Law is fake BTW. There's no one answer to these questions because some people want to be part of a tight-knit community and other people want to be part of a global network.

I still don't know what this supposed burden is [0] ... you pick an instance (is that actually hard?) ... done.

[0] migration is a challenge if your instance vanishes without warning, but that's true of Bsky too.

It wasn't hard for me because I grokked what I was doing, but for a lot of people they've never had to make a decision like that before. Especially so early in an onboarding process. And they get caught up trying to decide if they should join the instance for web developers or the one for cat lovers, because both interests are important to them. It turns people off to the idea of federated social media.

I'm going to push back on the migrating being a challenge even for Bluesky if an instance vanishes. If nothing else, you do not need your old host ("PDS" in atproto parlance) to cooperate — or even be online — if you wish to migrate in Bluesky. With a local copy of your data, you can send your social graph to a new host with ease and be right back in business.

What do I think? I think it turns them off because people (possibly yourself included) say that they should intimidated and confused by this, rather than encouraging them to make what is actually, for almost everyone, a rather simple and inconsequential choice.

I don't think they should be intimidated, I'm just saying they are: https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when...

But I wouldn't say it's a fully inconsequential choice, either. Your instance and how it's situated in the wider fediverse does matter to some degree. Not having a full view of the network, missing meaningful replies, at the mercy of some admin #fediblock drama, etc.

Or maybe you finally find a good instance but your admin dislikes Meta so you're defederated from threads.net now. That's a bummer.

> Or maybe you finally find a good instance but your admin dislikes Meta so you're defederated from threads.net now. That's a bummer.

If you don't agree with your admin's choices on such important matters, your instance is not a good one for you.

The differentiation between instances, the way each can have their own community with its own morals is a strength, not a weakness. As the fediverse gets bigger, the bigger platforms will diversify more and have more of their own identity. For example beehaw, it's not really a Lemmy instance with some policies configured, it's beehaw. As the fediverse gets bigger, instances will develop their own identities more and it will be easier to choose.

And gab, for the cesspool it is, you can't deny it's got its own identity. Of course it's one that almost nobody wants to federate with but that's their right too. Freedom of speech doesn't mean everyone has to listen to you. The system works as intended.

The thing is, if you're aligned with your platform you probably agree with most of the choices your admin made. If not you can just pick another one.

I don't disagree with any of the stuff in the linked post (and I've seen it before).

But I think that's all about a totally different problem: people not finding the culture they want on Mastodon.

> It wasn't hard for me because I grokked what I was doing, but for a lot of people they've never had to make a decision like that before.

They've picked an email provider. They've picked a mobile phone provider. They've picked their car insurance. They pick what bars to socialise at. Yes people have no issues making choices like this at all.

> They've picked an email provider

Not likely. The world picked gmail for them

Even the top 5 - never mind - Gmail - of e-mail providers just about cracks half of all e-mail users depending on which datasets your trust.

In the US maybe? Here there's still a lot of diversity. People using their provider's email service. People using local ones like gmx in Germany. Hotmail, live and outlook.com. Even some non techies using their own domain (and of course all the techies do). Most people with their own business use that domain. Proton seems to be a rising star too.

Gmail is the biggest but not the only one by far. The privacy movement getting more traction here than in the US might be playing into that too.

The initial premise was you can make an account anywhere and it works transparently anywhere.

The new premise after the "de-federation" update is it still works transparently so long you're a good citizen with nothing to be ashamed of, which is enough to make users feel the Fediverse lost its thing or something along that.

> The initial premise was you can make an account anywhere and it works transparently anywhere.

No, that premise is a misunderstanding of the actual initial premise: build a bigger system via federation, that is a series of independent systems that can agree or disagree on precisely what level of interoperation they will engage in.

Some people mistakenly imagined that everyone would make the same choices, and thus "make an account and it works everywhere".

If being distributed means the API is more easily accessed than other apps', it can contribute to its success by facilitating excellent third-party clients that users love.

The Fediverse “is complicated” only because it has been designated as such by countless bullshit media online posts, when Mastodon started to boom after the Twitter/Musk episode.

At some point, if people/users are able to understand the concept of emails, emails accounts and emails providers, they are able to understand the Fediverse that’s all.

> _I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong._ The Fediverse got nothing wrong or did nothing wrong, it was just portrayed as complicated, by some fing community manager of I don’t know which fing bulls*t company that must have been pissed/worried that all his job had to be redone on another service.

To me, a Twitter successor has to do exactly two things: Look and feel almost exactly like Twitter, and have an escape hatch once things go south that lets me preserve my handle (essential), social graph (important), and post history (nice to have).

In other words, I want what has always been possible for email: Gmail with a personal TLD.

I haven't looked too deeply into AT proto, but at a first glance, Bluesky might be that.

Twitter didn't become big by being almost exactly like something that came before it. Learning something new was not a burden for all the users that jumped on to the Twitter train.

Elon has weakened Twitter substantially and now it's leaving the door open to newcomers with ideas in a different direction.

It's the churn. Platforms rise and fall. But this time the power vacuum is so big a non commercial platform might have a fighting chance.

There was almost nothing to learn on Twitter: Sign up, write about anything in 140 characters or less. Replies/tagging, hashtags etc. augment the experience, but aren't necessary (and weren't even natively supported in the beginning/were just convention anyway).

For Mastodon? I need to:

- pick a server and remember it (I've actually lost my own handle a couple of times between months of giving it a try!)

- manually copy-paste the handles of people I want to follow back on my server, since there is no native single-click way to just follow an account I am looking at on my own server

- do the same on mobile, because all Mastodon apps can't possibly be associated with all server URLs on iOS and Android

- remember to follow people I care about, since otherwise there is no way to discover interesting posts outside my bubble

- give up on the idea of global search entirely, which is one of the things I miss most from Twitter: "flight delays XYZ", "MTA line X delay", "<bandname> <cityname>" would allow me to find content by people about any topic of interest in a way that web searches don't.

All of these are annoying but doable for me, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're a major deterrent for many non-sophisticated users.

I never used Twitter and I don't use Mastodon directly because I abhor the idea of Twitter: forcibly shortened messages which emphasize nonsense and make it hard for people who actually have something to say to get their message across by having to split it in tens of threads. I've always hated Twitter.

So I can't compare the platforms at this level of detail but I have used Reddit and Lemmy a lot. And I think Lemmy is really great and just as good as Reddit. No issues with follows across instances following my mobile apps, having searches work etc.

And Voyager allows me to be signed into many instances (and in fact have multiple accounts on the same instance)

> - remember to follow people I care about, since otherwise there is no way to discover interesting posts outside my bubble

And this really is a feature for me, I hate algorithmic feeds. I just want to see who I follow and no other suggested or promoted stuff :)

I used to use both Twitter and Reddit (until they both succumbed to an Eternal September of their own, in my view, although for different reasons), and at least to me they serve very different purposes:

Twitter was great for following the updates of a given person/company/group etc. It allowed me to keep up to date with various topics of interest (cryptography, engineering, my city's public transit system etc). The 140 character limit was always a red herring, in my view: People can just link to their blog or start a thread (which I can both easily follow and ignore).

Reddit was more useful for researching and discussing a given topic. Discussions are way more meandering, and the tree-based interface made that both acceptable (whereas spamming somebody's replies would be considered rude on Twitter) and ergonomic.

In that sense, Reddit was always the spiritual successor to self-hosted bulletin boards, in the same way that Discord has replaced IRC for many groups. (What makes me sad is that it's now seemingly also replacing discussion boards, which sucks because it's not anonymously searchable at all, but that's a different complaint.)

In that way, Reddit seems like a very low hanging fruit to decentralize: Its predecessor already was decentral, in a way! In contrast, there was never a successful decentralized microblogging service before Twitter (and no, RSS doesn't count).

> I hate algorithmic feeds. I just want to see who I follow and no other suggested or promoted stuff :)

That's very fair! I believe this is what ultimately got me quite hooked on Twitter, but in the long run has made me very unhappy while there and prone to doomscrolling.

>there was never a successful decentralized microblogging service before Twitter (and no, RSS doesn't count).

You say RSS doesn’t count, but the way you describe your use of Twitter sounds exactly like the purpose of RSS.

>Twitter was great for following the updates of a given person/company/group etc. … The 140 character limit was always a red herring, in my view: People can just link to their blog

I don’t see how this is appreciably different than reading headlines and the first sentence in an RSS feed and clicking through to the blog that backs it, if it seems interesting.

Twitter always felt like RSS for people who didn’t know what RSS is. Hence its popularity, as most people don’t know what it is, but the concept is very useful. A lot of people use Facebook for the same thing.

> Twitter always felt like RSS for people who didn’t know what RSS is.

Yes, but that’s a lot of people!

Other than that, RSS doesn’t support commenting somebody else’s post.

> (What makes me sad is that it's now seemingly also replacing discussion boards, which sucks because it's not anonymously searchable at all, but that's a different complaint.)

An anonymously searchable alternative to Reddit's search function is PullPush, an archive site independent of Reddit.

It has full-text search and will even search through deleted and removed content.

Main site: https://pullpush.io

Frontends: https://search.pullpush.io, https://ihsoyct.github.io

That was in reference to Discord, not Reddit. Reddit is searchable ~fine via Google and its internal search (but I wouldn’t be surprised if they at some point break that in exchange for more forced signups and to prevent “AI content theft” like Twitter).

At least apps instead of the web browser can handle the copy/paste a username thing.

But, I stopped using Mastodon because there is no algorithmic feed (either of my own follows or in terms of surfacing things)—-sorry I massively prefer something lightly curated to just a chronological firehose. Most-recent-first is an algorithm of course. One that’s biased in favor of constant posters and those in your own time zone.

> - manually copy-paste the handles of people I want to follow back on my server, since there is no native single-click way to just follow an account I am looking at on my own server

> - do the same on mobile, because all Mastodon apps can't possibly be associated with all server URLs on iOS and Android

these are all possible with the official app on Android and the web interface. You don't need to copy the handle, you can just open their profile page on your server's interface and click to follow.

Wasn't Twitter based to be an SMS-based social media? And that it was almost exactly like SMS, text-only and very limited in characters, to a point that you could use it via SMS?

Mastodon, Bluesky, Post and whatever else do just that. And they are not really successful at scale. So maybe people actually don't need those artificial protocol and GUI limitations?

There is an old adage about MBAs and CEOs - if we a pick a successful company in some period, can we really say that CEO helped it become successful? Or maybe he instead impeded its growth and company could have been x10 times more successful without him? Who knows, can't be tested repeatedly.

Same with Xitter clones. Maybe copying Xitter quirks is not the best way forward?

Mastodon does not "feel like Twitter" in the way that Bluesky does.

Maybe it's the fact that it's so server-centric: I've never felt like I could just enter a handle in the search bar and be confident that if the search comes back empty, that person is not on Mastodon. The same is true for search by hashtag or topic.

Meh. Users have no issue picking an email provider. They can pay with money (eg proton) or with their data (Google, Hotmail), champion their local identity (think gmx.de) and they manage to pick the one that works for them. Why should Mastodon's diversity be an additional burden?

In fact a lot of people are now on Mastodon because they picked Instagram. Soon another platform may follow suit and federate. I'm sure users will understand pretty quickly that they can communicate cross platform just like a Gmail user can mail a Hotmail one.

It's really not that hard to grok.

Which so far they've accomplished by not being decentralized at all, which is of course convenient.

I thought Bluesky was way more complicated to setup than Mastodon. It's a different concept and it's just like Twitter.

I still prefer Mastodon over all the extra features it has and it runs on ActivityPub. Bluesky is reinventing the wheel with a protocol only used by them. They could've built ontop of ActivityPub.