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Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

chrisholdgraf.com

271–280 of 561 posts

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#271
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number of people using Gmail is basically 100%

Your implausible estimate got me curious; so I checked[1,2] the first couple of result from Google on email marketshare. GMail is 27.7%. Apple has double the share, at 54%, you should be worried about Apple instead. 1. https://www.litmus.com/email-client-market-share 2. https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients

That's unbelievably high for Apple when its hardware market share is much less than that (around 30% for iphones and significantly less than 20% for laptops and desktops, hard to quickly find consistent numbers).

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#272

When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers). Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go throu…

I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia.

Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dream of a “classic web” as well. Principles: (a) non minification and no binary code – this is so that the platform is user and dev centred and not corpo and advertiser centred (b) static only mode as default, as in a site will be considered broken if it needs dynamic scripts to work, or at least it won't be considered a "classic" site – this is for (1) accessability and (2) command line (non-GUI) browser access a…

> non minification and no binary code I believe you want human comprehensibility, but going with "no minification, no binary" may throw out a baby with the bathwater. Everything about computers is binary code underneath, even this message (and even UTF-8 is not exactly a trivial spec - it's just that we have tools that make it super accessible). I suspect you rather want lack of deliberate obfuscation for the sake of…

Custom CSS or userscripts become much harder with obfuscated JS.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#274

When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers). Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go throu…

I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia. Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

> Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

And what did they get trained on in the first place?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't really set up a completely separate server that can exist without Bluesky's central servers (because that's not possible), so it's not a fair comparison. 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 b…

> because that's not possible 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 Activi…

To my knowledge you can't run your own self-contained Bluesky server/network that doesn't go through (or at least partially rely on) services owned/operated by the Bluesky corporation.

> 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...

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia. Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

> Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal. And what did they get trained on in the first place?

Which is funny because if Wikipedia dies, who will continue providing updated training data to these models? It's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy that consolidates without financial replacement.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#277
post #16

>“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!” Yes, and choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@ibm.com are different email-people, too. This is not a hard concept.

You'll be surprised how many people think they can just use first.lastname@gmail.com and have email magically appear in their account. And even more people have no idea what the @gmail.com/@ibm.com is about. All they know is that some of their emails don't reach their contacts, probably because "the computer broke again". It's not a hard concept, but it's a concept that was only ever explained in school to a sliver o…

> It's not a hard concept, but it's a concept that was only ever explained in school to a sliver of the population actually using email every day.

It's not hard to someone with exposure to a certain medium. Though its a bit dismissive like it would be for a mechanic to question why a person doesn't know know about rotors, spark plugs and other "simple" car concepts.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#278

When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers). Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go throu…

I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia. Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

>Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

LLMs hallucinate/confabulate. I use Wikipedia to check source info and to find additional information. Of course there are more reliable sources than Wikipedia, but it's useful, still.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#279
post #16

>“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!” Yes, and choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@ibm.com are different email-people, too. This is not a hard concept.

Wait until you find out the tuple to identify you logging in on Amazon is {user@host.dom, password} or used to be: I had two distinct accounts using the same email address. Confusing!

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never ran my AP server but i did run my own mail in my late teens/early twenties. I don't recall it being particularly difficult, compared to eg setting a webserver. 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 othe…

Setting up a mail server is now more complicated due to blocking of residential blocks, specific IP addresses needing good reputation, and the general stance taken by most MTAs is to assume senders are guilty until proven innocent. Setting up Mastodon now is easier than setting up email in the past - you don't even have to worry about DKIM or not spamming - most Fedi instances consider other instances innocent until…

I understand this, but you seem to have ignored my point in that it is trivially easy to make something similar for email and yet no one did, and that it is unclear what’s to stop the same situation from happening again when 90% of users have a lemmy.org or whatever address.

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?

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