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Earlier quoted context omitted.
And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm.
In common usage, there is a distinction between "an algorithm" and "the algorithm". The latter is often shortened to "the algo".
Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. It doesn't solve some of the problems that come with centralization, it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server). And funnily, it doesn't even solve data portability entirely (you can't actually move your posts). Mastodon's "decentralization" is even worse than a "theoretical promise" of one, cause it's a just marketing prom…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In common usage, there is a distinction between "an algorithm" and "the algorithm". The latter is often shortened to "the algo".
I’ve never heard this before in my 20+ years of software engineering. Perhaps this is within the context of a conversation.
Like when people get a random post or video served to them they found interesting they'll say "the algo decided I should see this today"
Content creators will discuss what they need to create for "the algo" to like and promote them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the federation also made the spam email problem a lot worse ;-) Anyhow, federation should be seen as a part of specific strategy for decentralization; federation itself is not decentralization and cannot achieve it without more bits---like topological consideration. Many federated protocols tend to push those bits into the horizon and fail at scale when that horizon eventually approaches, while ATProto is at leas…
Saying the fediverse is not decentralized is a wild take.
One particularly visible weakness of Mastodon is that there is no working and efficient mechanism to operate on the entire network. Searching and algorithmic feed [1] would be major features affected by this weakness. I know some consider this to be intentional, but if that's true then Mastodon can't be really said to replicate a social network at all. It is yet another matter whether such features are warranted or not, but if we believe that something like a worldwide social network should exist, then we don't yet have a clear answer that a social network without such features would be technically or socially scalable to that extent, so not being able to fully replicate an existing social network is important enough to consider.
[1] This includes trivial feeds like all posts from my followers, because in my knowledge a large number of follows is not really scalable in Mastodon.
Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. It doesn't solve some of the problems that come with centralization, it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server). And funnily, it doesn't even solve data portability entirely (you can't actually move your posts). Mastodon's "decentralization" is even worse than a "theoretical promise" of one, cause it's a just marketing prom…
Bluesky's marketing is rather annoying on my opinion. They're not defederated in practice and they probably never will be, but that's okay. People don't want a new Mastodon, they want a new Twitter after Musk fucked that up worse than ever. Their promises of portability may ring empty but so far their lack of AI algorithm and ad feeds are what people actually come to Bluesky for If you want federation, ActivityPub is…
How did Musk "fuck [Twitter] up worse than ever"? It has more functionality and is more stable since Musk bought it.
https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/internet-report-twitter-to...
Twitter appears to be an outlier in that respect. Instead of displaying the usual post-acquisition stability, ThousandEyes’ data indicates that the number and frequency of outages did increase commensurate with the acquisition. If we compare the two periods (pre- and post-acquisition), it’s apparent that there were fewer and less frequent outages prior to the purchase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re trying to self host your account, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting If you’re trying to build an application, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/applications If you’re looking to run the bluesky application, you need to run the codebases in https://github.com/bluesky-social .
If mastodon.social shuts down tomorrow, my own instance continues to operate fully independently. For PDS is that true? If bsky.app shuts down, will my PDS be able to function as an independent instance incl the web frontend etc.?
I'm not sure how we can get the point that a centralized seamless UX experience is core to any platform though the thick skulls of people designing decentralized federated services. Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time freq…
https://slrpnk.net is an exception in that it’s a cute place for activism and related news, but that’s obviously not the only thing I want to use the internet for, especially when I’m looking to relax.
So far, with an n of 5 days: BlueSky is what I was waiting for. Especially for scientific content - memes or otherwise!
Read this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers AT Protocol works like the Web, where each user is a website and each application is a search engine. The apps crawl the network of hosts and aggregate activity. We have over 100 outside hosts and at least 3 aggregating apps out there. It’s a different model than ActivityPub, which is more akin to email. We never said no algorithm. I don’t know whe…
(I've updated this post as I've learned more). Thank you. ATProtocol is really cool, but I share some concerns about the centralized resolution of identities to custom servers and the conflict of interest in Bluesky's stewardship of ATProtocol development (what is good for the ATProtocol Network vs what is good for Bluesky). If I understand Bluesky correctly: When you follow users on Bluesky (even those on a hosted c…
1. Basically, yeah. That said, I still think it may be a bit early to do this. A consortium would be useful if it was meaningfully independent of bsky, so you need to grow and gain interest first. Otherwise the “independent group” would be run by the same people, which is pretty meaningless. Plus, working on that means les time for working on other things. I would expect to see this happen once there’s another non-toy atproto application, and for representatives from it to be involved too. Before then feels premature to me, but I can appreciate others may feel differently.
2. I do. The team has continually set out a vision, and then executed on it, over and over. Including following through on things that actively reduce their control over things. Tons of folks asked a similar question previously: “they’re saying that you’ll be able to host your own PDS someday, but do you trust them to actually ship that and not just say they’re gonna a do it and put it off forever and keep control?” And then they shipped it.
3. Any application has semantics built on top of the underlying protocol: that’s what an application is, in some meaningful sense. But I do agree that without independent governance for atproto, doing things like that could stifle other users of atproto, sure. We’re back in the same realm as 1, imho. I’m following the devs of various other apps and none of them have expressed that they think bsky is hoarding the goods so far, at least.