Is there any systematic study going on about the mechanism of censorship in the fediverse?
was around a year ago
Of course pressuring mainstream servers to adopt such a rule is not reasonable. Automatically applying a content warning to all media from servers that don't have the same rule would be a good solution. Bluesky's labelers provide a way to do something similar, but I don't think the Bluesky appview has a way to express something like "blur all media without the 'safe for my needs' label".
I think some instances block all Pleroma instances, because there is an association of Pleroma being used by right wing folks.
Here are failed attempts to ban Pleroma instances outright:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708
Here's an example of an instance that blocks other instances if the other instance doesn't have a code of conduct similar to theirs:
Note - they partially block mastodon.social!
So don't join them if you don't want to be coddled. Anyone who does wants to engage with a different slice of the fediverse, and why do you care if they don't see you?
I shopped around for another home and found fussy rules. I got rejected for reasons that made no sense.
It encourages narrow minded balkanization and it retains your identity so you have to form a new one.
A bad user experience is just that: bad.
The only reason there was even an opinion about Twitter was mainstream news started reporting "what was on Twitter" and it's still centralized in that way - it "felt" non-optional.
That’s due to barriers to entry and lack of critical mass.
It will also shake out, in that most people will tend towards well-known, large instances that will survive and grow exactly because they refuse to engage with the more obnoxious part of the drama.
I think it's not at all comparable to a corporate entity like X being in full control and able to censor any content.
You may create your own instance and federate with the instances you want. If an instance chooses not to federate with yours you get to decide what's more important to you, your principles or their content.
The solution is to create your own instance. I understand your frustrations but I have a hard time being empathetic to these issues when you are using someone elses instance, probably administered by volunteers in their spare time.
My email provider doesn't prevent me from sending an email from someone at Gmail because someone at Gmail happens to have opposite views to the admin.
Yet email is still federated.
Right, you can get kicked off for your emails.
But nobody is going to ban you based on which domains you do or do not put on your block list.
Moreover social media faces distinct issues that require specific tools, causing the email analogy to break down a bit. A lot of organized harassment campaigns leverage network effects of platforms in ways that wouldn't work over email. The per instance federating capability helps to mitigate that, and if mitigating harassment is not something that is a priority there are instances you can join that take the open-to-all approach.
Those domains are being blocked because of what they send.
They're not being blocked on the basis of what domains they block. There's no recursive blocking that wants you to take a stance and punishes you for being a neutral acceptor of emails. Those blocks are the behavior that can make federation suck.
But I also think that's an oversimplification, because the block list is a helpful proxy for content characteristic of an instance.
But this is a case where I think the analogy to email breaks down insofar as its instructive to social media generally, because some things about email don't cleanly map on to what federated instances are managing. It makes sense that you would want to block instances and their enablers, to connect to an ecosystem consistent with the intentions of a particular instance.
As parent commenter said you can use a general purpose provider (with email) or general purpose instance (with Mastodon), so you are accessing the fediverse. The only thing you are "missing out" on is the ability to make it compulsory for other users to listen to you against their consent.
Then stop trying to make a public discourse and instead make a private forum.
And social media posts in this design are pull, not push, so nobody is ever forced to listen to anything. If you block an instance you won't see their posts, no need to block any intermediates.
Some people are so insecure about their own opinions that the pure idea that someone exists that might not agree the same is a threat, never mind seeing their content.
* if their viewpoint agrees with Mr. Musk.
It doesn't. It's the other way around; if you want something niche you'll be likely be searching and custom setup, but otherwise you're getting the default experience with the normal amount of discoverability.
The echo chamber argument itself is a politicized argument that I think fundamentally misunderstands why communities converging on common values can be beneficial rather than simply echoing.
If people are interested in astronomy, or tech security, or FOSS, or politics, weeding the garden leads to more dynamic, diverse and nuanced communication, not less, and the diagnosis of such things as "echo chambers" is a shallow misdiagnosis. Opening up your garden to weeds kills everything and leads to takeover of the one dominant kind of weed that already dominates everywhere else, which is more echoey.
??? i'm not using it because no one else is using it
> If social media is about having interesting, dynamic interactions with people, then you need to go to the place that maximizes the chance of this happening
if that was the case people would stay with Twitter/X
> For example, one of its core features - federated servers and identity - is actually a pretty confusing UX pattern for the vast majority of people that don’t care about that kind of thing (“you’re telling me there’s a @[email protected] and a @[email protected] and they’re two different people?!”).
how on earth is this confusing to anyone? it's a different model
> Moreover, while having federated servers means that communities have more control over their norms and rules, it also means communities have to do a lot more work to understand the idiosyncratic policies of each server. These are features if you think of a social networks as a tightly-interconnected and self-contained community, but the appeal of these kinds of platforms is having global reach to people that you may otherwise never have met.
people forget in real life that we aren't all in the same social network and there are different protocols for different meat-space social networks and we internalise and navigate them all the time – in fact there are genres of literature out there (comedy of manners) that exploit social misunderstandings
In fact, any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political, as the only ones that care about decentralization are the ones who care about politics.
Everyone else is just trying to see what the famous person said last week or what their friend did on vacation.
Corpo social media does solve for that.
> any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political
This hasn't said anything of value, since everything is political.
Limiting your interaction with the world to sanitized corporate/Hollywood social media is political. Using no social media at all is political. And so on.
I really disagree with this statement. Many things are political, but not everything. (Unless you’re abstracting the word political to the point of it meaning any human relationship. At which point the word isn’t useful)
Some choices are just convenience.
Most people with an iPhone don’t choose to text on messenger because of a political opinion, it’s just because it’s the default app on their phone.
I use discord frequently because all of my friends are on there, not because I particularly care for their politics.
My choice to not use social media sites like fb and Twitter was fueled by mental health concerns and the time I’d sink into them, not because they lean left or right.
> Limiting your interaction with the world to sanitized corporate/Hollywood social media is political.
Not necessarily. Most people don’t know they’re limiting their interaction.
They just want updates about things they care about. That need not be about politics.
Just because a choice may have political ramifications doesn’t mean that it was a choice made for political reasons.
Sure, but they often carry political implications (even if the choice/chooser was unconscious of them)
> Most people with an iPhone don’t choose to text on messenger because of a political opinion, it’s just because it’s the default app on their phone.
That's not the best example to make your point considering many people see iPhones (and its "exclusive" text bubble color) as an economic and social class signifier.
The insane planned obsolescence model of the iPhone necessitating constant replacement has environmental consequences, etc. Once again, the end user being unaware of all of this does not prevent it from still being very real.
> Just because a choice may have political ramifications doesn’t mean that it was a choice made for political reasons.
Never said otherwise. A reminder of what I replied to:
> In fact, any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political, as the only ones that care about decentralization are the ones who care about politics.
My original point was that merely "avoiding political things" by using platform Y instead of Z does not exempt one from being political. The act of choosing to opt out of politics in this way or any other is literally political and has real consequences.
Also, it just seems like an excuse for mob mentality. It's "if you're not for us you're against us" with extra steps.
That’s… exactly what I was saying with “ any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political”…
Any platform that uses "not decentralized" as a selling point is also political. The inverse of Political Thing is still political.
Common Lisp is not political. Technical people might say it is political, but non-technical people outside would just chuckle at the conversation — nerds fighting among themselves in an unseen corner with no power, thinking that there's "politics" there and perhaps everywhere too.
It doesn't need to be Mastodon. You don't need to be on Mastodon to interact with the Fediverse or be part of it, and that is the key strength. Mastodon can be corrupted and the Fediverse is still there.
That could include Bluesky over time - you can follow my Mastodon from Bluesky via a bridge [1] - any desirable parts of their protocol, will be copied or emulated or bolted on the side for other Fediverse projects.
[1] https://brid.gy/
What BLuesky does do is keep the door open for competition. If you want, you can stand up a version of its entire system (all open source). Or, you could write your own system that uses the AT Proto DID stuff to let people access their posts and follows, etc, in any way you want.
And, BLuesky also serves as a bootstrap for AT Proto writ large. The whole distributed identity thing has huge potential going forward and it’s use by Bsky is an excellent start.
Bluesky seems the least pushy with rage bait content of all the social media’s.
Personally I'd prefer if there was no default algorithmic feed but I know that just doesn't work. People will create an account, see nothing in their feed, and leave because the site seems dead or because they can't even fathom how to get started finding people to follow or custom feeds to add.
with the new accounts it is also asking to like 10 posts and follow 7 accounts so that it can try to figure shit out. it can be trained for sure but when I first joined to try it out it was just politics - mostly left-leaning praising Dr Fauci (very confusing) and stuff like that. I don’t use social media - no X, Facebook, Insta, TikTok… all were tried but eventually discarded … bluesky will suffer the same faith :)
i’ve also found that due to shareable ban lists, im often already banned by someone i want to follow (merely on the basis of who i follow, i don’t think i’ve ever posted on bkuesky)
Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed? I feel it's relatively common for someone to want to keep an eye on, say, what Trump is posting even if they detest him.
Probably becomes self-reinforcing in that by treating follows as a public endorsement, many people start following only what they want to be seen endorsing instead of what they want on their timeline. Which leaves a void for a timeline of what I want to see instead of what I want to be seen endorsing, probably currently filled (slightly awkwardly) by using an alternate account or visiting the profiles manually.
Emphatically no, and it’s one of the things that I dislike about what blocklists have become on Bluesky.
The fact that many people now view follows as some kind of endorsement speaks to how much social media has deteriorated and arguably makes the polarization problem worse - not just because people are making themselves ignorant of what public figures are saying, but they’re isolating themselves from the people they actually do align with who choose to keep themselves informed, further reinforcing the echo chamber.
Depending on your primary reason for using social media, I realize how attractive it is to quickly lock down your feeds. But it comes with a dark side, and blocking someone for no reason other than following an account is part of that dark side IMO.
It is for those that need safe spaces. I love hearing the nonsense on both sides so I’m sure I would be blocked by people not ready to listen to such views due to fragility issues.
Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values. Is it always accurate, no, you stand as an example of such a person but their feed is still full and the kind of people they have in mind they don't want to see are gone.
Reddit has a similar culture with extensions that let you hide users that subscribe to or have ever posted in certain subreddits. It works better than it has any right to.
I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO.
What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.
+ most of my inclusion in these blocklists is due to actions taken by someone i follow after i followed them (some AI person I followed who posted bluesky posts on huggingface). it really is ridiculous to read a follow as an endorsement
i think this is more of a cultural issue with bluesky than a technical issue/flaw
I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers. The forward direction being a thing and that thing in a for loop are equivalent in essence, and the reverse being that a property being true about a set means it's true for its members (can decompose aggregate statements into an equivalent for loop acting on each member).
Maybe I misunderstood your comment, but isn’t that exactly the opposite of what you’re saying here?
> Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values
If your position is closer to “on average, people who follow other people tend to be more aligned with the people they follow”, I’d probably agree. But this is a vastly different statement than “following someone strongly indicates endorsement”.
> I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers.
I think it’s problematic to bring too much of an engineering mindset to a social issue like this. Algorithms can be cleanly and rigidly defined. Social issues tend to be messy and complicated.
In terms of pure utility, it may be true that blocking people based on who they follow results in a clean feed at a low (effort) cost. But perpetuating the idea that following someone equals endorsement has longer term social costs and gets into dystopian territory pretty quickly, and depending on why someone is using social media, the impact of entirely excluding the group of people that “follow but disagree” is likely not small. If you’re on there for cat memes, probably not a big deal. If you’re trying to stay informed or be politically active, probably a bigger deal.
And regardless of use case, believing things about other people reflexively based on something like follow status is not a healthy place for society to be. Most people do not appreciate the nuance of what you’re describing as “scale invariant fallacy”.
My biggest issue here is the framing and the questionable/harmful conclusions that can be derived from it.
Maybe it's a semantic thing but is that not what is meant by this usage of the word signal?
"A child growing up in an affluent neighborhoods is a strong signal of their future success." implies => "The proportion of the set of all kids who live in affluent neighborhoods who achieve success as adults is high."
Putting people on lists for who they follow is a growing trend and it’s pretty clear in Bluesky culture that many people actually believe following someone implies some kind of support for that person and “taints” the follower somehow. This goes alongside a host of problematic behaviors ranging from all-or-nothing thinking “if you’re not with us you’re against us” to simple bad faith.
My goal isn’t to argue here, but to understand and clarify what you meant.
It sounds like you didn’t literally mean that on an individual basis, following someone strongly indicates their values, but that in the aggregate (due to the current social climate), it’s more likely they won’t follow people they disagree with.
I don’t think this is just a matter of semantics given the context, but a necessary clarification.
In the affluent neighborhoods example, there’s no call to action (block people), the situation isn’t a highly charged issue in the cultural zeitgeist, and there aren’t a lot of reasons someone would interpret that example in some other way.
The same is not true for the current social media climate.
Call it an echo chamber, but nobody has a right to have their posts be seen
If you’re just using social media for entertainment, I don’t care who you block or how. But perpetuating the idea that “follow equals endorsement” is a problem regardless.
This has less to do with people having a right to be seen and more to do with the perpetuation of ideas that make society more polarized in spaces where such things matter.
To put this another way, I’d react less strongly to “blocking people based on who they follow weeds out almost everyone I don’t want to see and I accept the false positives”. I’d still express concerns about the resulting echo chamber but that’s a far more reasonable position.
It can also be pretty effective for stopping brigading. Back in the day, when he was still a darling of the far-right, I managed to offend Milo Yiannopolis on Twitter (turns out he twitter-searched his own name) and he siced his followers on me. It took about a day of mass blocklists (back when these kinda worked on Twitter), and individual blocking, to stem the flow of spam; a button to simply block everyone who followed Milo Yiannopolis would have been convenient, and nothing of value would have been lost.
I feel you're calling something a good heuristic based solely on how predictive it is, and not considering the impacts of using that heuristic. A property tax based on the number of windows in a house[0] may have acceptably low false positives, but encourages people to brick up their windows.
Here it makes follows performative rather than just about what I'm interested in seeing on my timeline, since I'd now be hesitant to follow content that doesn't align with my views. In addition, everyone on the site being discouraged from receiving content from outside their bubble seems likely to exacerbate echo chambers.
yeah, a lot of bluesky members seem to hold this attitude - but it is not correct & moreso incentivizes epistemic bad practices
komerad iteriasky, our sources tell us that you poses book on kaptialism. Why you share depraved views, komerad? This very bad for you.
alternatively...
Mr. iteria, we see that you've checked out a book by Marx from the public library. Why are you a communist mr iteria, and do you know that by being one you're putting our brave republic in grave danger? We shall revoke your right to work in any government position from now on. Red danger, mr iteria.
----
How on earth did we go through all that crap in our recent history, and people still think that reading something is sharing those values?! And banning them preemptively?
The block issue could probably be resolved by a 3rd party server which could let you still follow users who have blocked you. All this data is publicly available on the api. Obviously they wouldn't see your posts still.
I got back on it recently to give it another try, and it's somewhat better now - in that the proportion of USpolitics posts is still likely the same, but at least in absolute numbers there's enough non-USpol posts to make a good experience.
> Bluesky seems the least pushy with rage bait content of all the social media’s.
Yesterday, I opened up BlueSky on a non-logged-in computer, and 90% of the default feed was US politics, most of it rageful. I don't know what you qualify as "rage bait", but a majority of BlueSky content is at least angry and caustic.
On top of that, the whole Fediverse is extremely political. Email providers don't care much what you write or with whom you communicate outside of spam, so it works quite well. Meanwhile Fediverse is blocking people and servers left and right, it's completely unusable unless you follow the group-think on whatever server you are on.
Real decentralization is what Nostr is doing, where serves are just dumb relays, user-ids are public-key pairs and all the intelligence is in the client. BlueSky's AT-protocol should be capable of similar stuff, though in practice is still very much focused around the main BlueSky server.
So run your own server.
That seemed to me like it should have been the next evolution of the net, and still seems that way. All right there in your browser (which was also a server, it United those two groups of functions) democratising the internet...
Mastodon to me feels like it was built with the explicit goal to keep out anybody non-technical, and for technical people, only the type that wants to corner you at a party and discuss the deep philosophical and moral choices of your Linux desktop environment.
Easy is seldom truly free.
Moaning that federation is not decentralisation without even considering running their own instance, and when you suggest that, they turn around and say 'oh it's too hard'...
Oh how I miss the times of interest-based forums with ACTUAL moderation, large IRC channels where assholes got kicked and none of this amorphous mass of people and bots producing unmoderated brainrot that then gets turned into AI slop-based timelines optimised for the sole purpose of stimulating people's dopamine receptors until they burn out...
No, Mastodon was not designed to keep out anybody non-technical. In any given social circle, there is almost undoubtedly at least ONE person who can fire up a server and administrate it. You only need one sysadmin for your whole community - the rest can be moderators, and members can chip in some coin here and there to keep things running. That's about the simplest and most sustainable model I can possibly picture. If you don't know of someone in your social circles who runs a community, that's fine: start out on a public/larger one in the meantime to get things started, and you can move over later! If this is still too hard for someone, that's fine, there are countless centralized services they can remain on, like Facebook, iMessage, WhatsApp, SMS, etc.
Poor and uneducated people exist.
it isn't? I'm not aware of any relay servers being run but the AT protocol makes affordances for this functionality. Are those features a lie? I read the protocol specification only a few weeks ago, perhaps this is new?
You're correct that the grandparent's PDS isn't the same as a Mastodon homeserver but that's probably a good thing; the network functions much differently than the ActivityPub federation
> A world of full self-hosting is not possible with Bluesky. In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
> The cost of running a full-network, fully archiving relay has increased over time. After recent growth, our out-of-box relay implementation (bigsky) requires on the order of 16 TBytes of fast NVMe disk, and that will grow proportional to content in the network.
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t
> The fediverse currently hosts around 27,000 servers (many more users, but let's focus on servers). Adding just 5 more servers would be a blip in terms of the affect on the network. Adding 5 more servers to an ATProto ecosystem with that many fully participating nodes would be an exhausting number of additional messages sent on the network. ATProto does not scale wide: it's a liability to add more fully participating nodes onto the network. Meaningfully self-hosting ATProto is a risk to the ATProto network, there is active reason to disincentivize it for those already participating.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
[plus more]
https://mathewingram.com/work/2024/11/28/is-bluesky-really-d...
https://en.futuroprossimo.it/2024/11/anatomia-di-bluesky-e-d...
Anyone can host their own data.
Bluesky has said they have zero intention on opening advertising because the platform isn’t built for that paradigm.
No investor or potential buyer would get ROI from an open network. If they tried, anyone could open a new public good atproto network and users could easily migrate their data.
The very thing that gave Twitter value was it owned all its data. Bluesky does not own anyone’s data. They just host it.
Bluesky has a new crypto investor with a board seat, but there are no signs the investor has made any demands.
I think Bluesky will beat the odds.
The whole appeal of email-style decentralization is that even in those cases, Google can only block you from GMail - not email as a whole, which would be far more deleterious, and is the ever-present threat in non-decentralized platforms.
1. https://www.litmus.com/email-client-market-share
2. https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients
...and what a miserable bunch most of them were: 2 MB attachment limits and 10 MB mailbox quotas?! GMail had to drag all of them kicking and screaming into the 21st century when they debuted with a 1 GB mailbox quota.
People add their Gmail account to their iPhone and get Apple Mail.
Virtually all email goes to Gmail between personal accounts and GSuite stuff.
Just install some software from your distro PM and go through some configs. Nothing stopped some hacker from bundling configs with a point and click installer for android eg - A mail server doesnt need 100% uptime - or for servers.
As for reaching others, ive never had problems because my domains had dkim and whatever else was available set up - could be easily automated like web certificates were, and i never send spam... How is that inherently more difficult? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to argue - just citing my own experience.
What's to stop major servers ("gmail" and "hotmail" of AP) from blocking you? Obviously some aspects are different from mail as it is geared for wide distribution rather than directed communication, but it's not obvious to me that the decentralization problem is solved by a model that seems superficially close to email.
Again, im not trying to troll you as im unfamiliar with AP - i genuinely don't know.
Sender-reputation management and anti-spam automation is far advanced and far more stringent for email than it is for Mastodon/the fediverse. Setting up a Mastodon instance is a matter of installing a package and going through a browser wizard comparable to setting up a Wordpress instance, not difficult at all.
Or like happened with the original decentralized web. there was once a thing called a “blog” that you could host on your own server from your home, but these days everyone is “blogging” through fb twitter and instagram (or your choice of a few platforms). Why is this time different?
The fediverse, like email and most other human systems that benefit from economies of scale will have a Pareto distribution with very large free providers > ISP / work and community instances > individual instances. Banking is decentralized and interoperable, this doesn't prevent banking giants from existing the world over - I expect them to exist, I also am in favor of smaller regional and local banks and credit unions.
To start with, yes banking giants exists but everyone finds this undesirable to a certain extent and regulators would object if suddenly eg elon musk decided to buy out goldman and chase.
banks are highly regulated and enjoy completely different economies than email. Banks of the same nation are often legally required to be interoperable with others. Yes, there are still big players and you can eg get sanctioned by the US - which is why BRIC countries are working on alternative banking networks.
with banks, most jurisdictions would disallow a merger of two large banks specifically from decentralization considerations - guess what would happen if two email providers merge? exactly nothing.
With email, if gmail decide to ban you, you are unable to communicate with 90% of people with no recourse. A support engineer can decide to ban you on a whim and besides crying on social media, you can’t do much.
With banks, you need a large and powerful nation to tell other banks not to play with you, and you can contest this decision legally.
Most importantly, with banking money is the product and every transaction brings revenue, so there’s a strong incentive to cooperate. With email - and AP - cooperation incurs a cost on all parties instead and benefits are distributed and vague in monetary terms.
Finally, banks are required to deal with you as a customer - provided you meet certain requirements. An email provider can ban you for no reason and your only recourse is arbitration.
Compare to bitcoin. Will you still be calling it decentralized when one pool controls 90% of compute (i don’t think this can really happen tbh as there are disincentives to go 51% without abusing the network)?
Don’t get me wrong AP sure feels in the right direction compared to eg FB. Just on the principle of being able to run it completely in your own. However it would be nice if whatever new alternative that grew popular treated users, rather than providers, democratically.
To reiterate my point (and perhaps what you said in your first sentence) this is completely unrelated to the decentralized nature of email, and is proof that decentralization is ill-suited to avoid that problem: legislation and oversight are what works for banking. "Decentralized" has never meant "there are no dominant players"
Edit: when it comes to tech platforms or protocols, the ability to decentralize is binary: it's present or absent. There is one Twitter/Instagram namespace with no other instances, there are countless email MTA and MDA and standards for interoperability defined in RFCs. That GMail is dominant is not a fault of the protocol - it happened to be a superior product for reasons not included in the protocol like generous mailbox storage quotas, and superior spam identification.
1. To start, if decentralization does not "solve the problem" then what do all AP platforms bring to the table? There was already a decentralized facebook before mastodon - it used to be called a "web site". You could get a feed with just what you wanted by subscribing to rss feeds, which were also decentralized. You were not tied to 140 characters per post either, and nothing stopped someone from making an rss client that clipped posts at 140 characters in the the feed or whatever. What problem does AP solve for me? Indexing all that content? The hosting? If the whole thing is about getting banned from the domain twitter.com, open your own domain and publish your content - problem solved. 2. If we're solving a solved problem, why not bring something new to the table? eg anonymity of nosr. 3. If "decentralization is not the solution", how come other protocols - eg mentioned above - claim (convincingly imho) to offer an actual improvement if not solution? 4. You claim "decentralization is not the solution" then define some ad hoc line in the sand regarding what is "decentralized" and then make some bold claims based on that. Decentralized could mean many things: could be like ssh keys, could be like gpg keys with directories and web of trust, could be like dns or certificate authorities. Could be like email. Like torrents or like i2p, or kad. All of these are slightly different. Heck, could even mean like fb vs twitter - you are free to move to a different platform. Takeout your data, import contacts - done.
Where you claim that decentralization is not the answer i will say maybe insufficient decentralization is not the answer - with email, AP, and many other protocols, the platform ("domain") is the first class citizen so you get strong platforms and weak users. Regulation will help here just like it helped with banking - ie wont. What makes banks cooperate is mutual desire for profit.
Banks are truly fungible for the most part - make users first class and you will get the same for platforms
Personal websites still soundly lost to the Yahoo, MSN and AOL home pages (remember those?) Pareto distributions are everywhere, even with systems whose decentralized nature is as unquestionable as websites - I'm probably sounding like a broken record now, but it's clear as day to me.
You mention of old-school websites crystalized some inchoate thoughts I had. The fediverse is the spiritual successor to Web 2.0 / the blogoshpere in the age of social media and mobile apps. Instead of RSS feeds, loosey goosey comment and pingback implementations, everything is in a fairly well-defined spec that allows the conversations to be viewed on one web application or app by simply scrolling. What AP brings to the table are:
A. the ability to own the platform as an individual, or as a collective of like-minded people. There's a qualitative difference between r/math and Mathstodon, even both are on on the surface self-moderated Math communities. Even if such communities are blocked and defederated from the rest of the world, I think there's incalculable value in the community self-reliance as an end to itself without being mediated by a profit-seeking entity. I acknowledge this is an ideological proclivity, YMMV.
B. gives more editorial power to users over what they see (though this is woefully underspecified, but apps can and do fill the gap)
C. Better aggregation and discovery than websites. Closed and centralized social platforms are inherently great at this, but RSS feeds, not so much. If you find a website commenter particular insightful, you can't "subscribe to their newsletter" - you can with AP.
2. why not bring something new to the table? eg anonymity of nosr.
It's good to have many approaches tried out and available to people. I want the balance of power to be shifted more towards people - protocols are just implementation details. Id people choose to fo with the megacorp-hosted implementation of an interoperable standard (like Threads is claiming to aspire to), so be it. The existence of AP does not preclude nostr or AT, or Wordpress or Ghost
3.If "decentralization is not the solution", how come other protocols - eg mentioned above - claim (convincingly imho) to offer an actual improvement if not solution
I suppose everyone has well-reasoned and well-intended bases for their opinions, even when we disagree. I don't believe any protocol can counteract economies of scale without detrimental effects to smaller players, which is why I don't they can solve it - it'd be fantastic if they pull if off - I don't think they will - but I'm glad someone is trying. I wish nothing but the best to each project
> 4. You claim "decentralization is not the solution" then define some ad hoc line in the sand regarding what is "decentralized" and then make some bold claims based on that. Decentralized could mean many things: could be like ssh keys, could be like gpg keys with directories and web of trust, could be like dns or certificate authorities. Could be like email. Like torrents or like i2p, or kad
I don't know what kad is, but most of the things you list on your spectrum of decentralization had dominant players, whether it's DNS, gpg keys, CAs, or torrent trackers. I'm not going to split hairs on whether the dominance of keybase meant gpg is not really decentralized.
That being said, > I don't know what kad is, but most of the things you list on your spectrum of decentralization had dominant players, whether it's DNS, gpg keys, CAs, or torrent trackers. I'm not going to split hairs on whether the dominance of keybase meant gpg is not really decentralized.
Most of what i mentioned is indeed semi centralized - but also semi decentralized. it and that was the point - there is no one true way to “decentralize” - is the star trek federation decentralized? is banks’ culture?
You make some very general claims regarding what decentralized systems don’t solve, but whatever your argument, you base it off some specific model of what is decentralized (you define a binary criterion). Whatever you claim, you can claim only for that model and indeed! that model doesn’t attempt to solve many problems that found in previous decentralized models and that are desirable to solve, and hence my criticism.
We’ve designed a slightly more advanced wordpress. Let’s celebrate! I would hope for something more imaginative. And indeed some are trying.
And, people are free to work on what they like of course - who am i to judge? Well, unfortunately i find myself to not be in the position and with a strong enough passion about this to do something myself, but im affected just as everyone alive is.
I do see seemingly better attempts as we’ve discussed, and in this particular case im worried that worse is the enemy of better, due to network effects. Any traction of a worse platform takes away from a better one.
Finally, gpg keys existed way before keybase and are actually one of the actually distributed and decentralized systems, so it’s curious that you picked specifically on this example.
gpg keys are entirely local first. Actually decentralized and usable to the individual user level. On top were built various webs of trust by mutual signing and publication of public keys to various public directories.
Keybase were able to package this neatly with added features and they enjoy some network effects but their data is public - you could spin up a compatitor before the end of the year ( it is dec 31 :) without losing any data. Or with a completely separate web of trust, that could also trust keybase keys.
ssh keys are similar in this regard, except the usage patterns are different and so keys are trusted on an individual basis or when signed by some organization/“community” wide ca. Im sure you know all this already.
Both of these last two examples demonstrate that in some cases decentralization does work, well. If we go with your “decentralized” model - “power to the states, not the people” - inevitably you get monopolistic players that kill off the standard as youve observed yourself. Like happened with email, with jabber, with rss, with browsers, like will happen with AP.
This is not a faster, quieter, cleaner or more efficient dishwasher. This is the exact same one we had last year, except with chrome finish, touch buttons and built in wifi. It will get picked up by the same sort of people that bought the old version - namely ones buying their first one or whose 10 machine broke.
It will fail and be unsatisfactory in fundamentally the same ways, since nothing changed in the mechanical specs. And in 10 years some extra features will be added like a voice assistant, to justify the raised priced on the same old crap.
Had to set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC, then it started working again.
Also, if you want to operate a home server, you also have to be willing to have a public file upload endpoint capable of receiving and storing arbitrary data on your server (because that's how ActivityPub works), and people send your server a lot of data, and a lot of that data will be extremely unsavory, and it will be your responsibility to make sure you remove anything illegal that someone on another server uploads to yours.
I wasn't willing to take that risk, myself.
Or am I confusing with Gab ?
Imposter accounts will be attempted for anyone of significant standing or authority posting anything authoritative (e.g., product or policy announcements) controversial or notable, and with no way to shut them down and maintain an authoritative presence of you, no one of note will even go there, or stay once they encounter the problem. Easier to stay somewhere else like Bluesky or Spoutible where they at least attempt moderation and authentication and declare "Any Mastodon accts purporting to be me are fake.".
I've personally spoken to authors/speakers/officials who checked it out after Twitter was sold to Musk, and once they understood the no-authentication-in-principle problem, said "NFW".
I don't see this at all. Quite the opposite in fact.
From what I've seen, BlueSky is trying very hard as a company to stay apolitical in an extremely naive way that's going to ultimately drive away users. There's simply no way to to be apolitical as a general social media platform today when social media is so widely used for discussing politics and current events, is a key target for propaganda campaigns, and in a highly fractured political climate.
BlueSky gained momentum primarily from people who were driven away from X as it started to move further right, with a lot of engagement driven by left and center-left leaning people, along with people who might not have been directly engaged in politics except for being the target of right-leaning hate campaigns (LGBT people in particular).
If they'd doubled down on that, I think they'd be a lot more successful in the long run. Sites like Truth Social, Parler, and X have demonstrated that there's a significant market for politically aligned social media spaces for the right, and both the significant activity in left and center-left spaces in Twitter before the buy-out, and the growth in Bluesky point to there being a significant market for an unapologeticly left leaning social media site as well (I'd point to Tumblr here as another example, although I don't use it and only have a passing idea that it seems to be a predominantly left leaning space).
Instead of embracing product market fit with an underserved market though, BlueSky seems to be both-sides-ing themselves into a situation where they're likely going to see an exodus. By inviting and protecting right-wing provocateurs on the platform they are driving away their core audience in order to attract people who already have their choice of established competitors (X). The only value they can add over sites like X and Truth Social is a group of users ready to be the target of trolling and bullying, but having recent experience with migrating away from Twitter I don't see them sticking around BlueSky for long in that environment.
In the end, the attempt at being apolitical will doom BlueSky to being a worse less populated X or Truth Social, rather than making the most of the opportunity to be a more decidedly left-leaning social media platform for an audience that prefers to avoid a strong right-wing presence in their social media experience.
Add some more tools to facilitate selection of people to block and the only real problem left will be people demanding performative loyalty acts.
Anecdotally, as someone who mostly used Twitter for math and theoretical CS (plus some news and current events) I feel like I ought to have been able to fairly easily find a community on mastodon but I never did. BlueSky is doing much better as a replacement for tech twitter and math twitter.
I suspect the centralization is necessary to an extent to get critical momentum. You could replicate something like that in mastodon maybe, but nobody seems to have done so in practice and I’m skeptical they will. Truth Social is probably the best example but from what I know, but it never hit the scale of Twitter even with a fairly ravenous core audience.
BlueSky's moderation team has traditional Twitter-like biases but my understanding of the AT protocol, from reading the spec, is that they do not have a monopoly on moderation in the AT network.
BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. It has a future, but the branding in very tainted.