21–30 of 83 posts
The genie is already out of the bottle for thirty years, and it's called the open web. Luckily I don't need half the world's population to agree upon and use something that already exists out there. Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.
Yes, historic ones. It's not a prediction about the future shape of the internet.
Haven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)
Definitely agree that centralized services have a lot of advantages. Bluesky deserves some criticism for trying to have their cake and eat it too, though. They told a good story about being decentralized, and lots of people repeated it while ignoring technical experts pointing out it's not true. Even on HN, the claim that they're decentralized was repeated a lot.
A lot of the content on bluesky, but especially in its early days, is about how the protocol is great, its potential and what bright future it will lead us into. Their main investors are a crypto bro company. Their CEO has built her career around crypto. It's the same rhetoric.
Now it's about decentralized "verification". They still haven't defined what they're verifying except a vague term "the person posting is who they say they are", but it's not actual identity verification.
The endgame is probably monetizing the protocol by connecting it to some form of identity for crypto-bs or paywalling engagement via the verification.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main reason is that they have marketing of a corporate entity behind them and someone to sign a contract with. I've seen many times - company switching from free, open-source, distributed solution to a worse, closed-source, coporate-backed solution just so they have someone to sign a contract with. First time it was moving from self-hosted Jabber to MSN Messanger (is sucked, worked less reliably than self-hosted…
The first startup I worked for had 1 IT guy among 12 people, and everything was in-house, including servers. The second grew to 50 people and did not ever employ an IT guy for internal work - most stuff was run on SaaS and the total cost was less than an IT guy salary. Any admin was done by taking engineering time, and no-one wanted to divert that away from product to do in-house stuff. Because when you're taking tim…
I used to not care about centralized or decentralized services, I just wanted to best product. Now I see how each of the major social media networks has been involved in censorship of Israel's genocide in Palestine (including btw HN), it makes me realize how important decentralization is. I think a lot of Americans (and other countries who have essentially handed over their media to US social media companies) are goi…
Reddit is extremely centralized, and you can find hundreds of subreddits that do cover Israel's ethnic cleansing. However, most popular subreddits are heavily censored, while the smaller communities become an echo chamber, and often get radicalized.
Decentralized bubbles are still bubbles—even worse, since the barrier to entry is higher.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
or activitypub ! Part of w3c, tons of servers and clients, even Meta runs an instance I don't think it's as easy to run nostr relays as activitypub instances but maybe I am wrong. ActivityPub seems way more active than nostr also. Most of what I see on nostr is either cryptocurrency discussion or the kinds of alt-lite content you would find on Gab or Minds
Nostr relays are in essence extremely dumb websocket servers. The most popular relay software is nostr-rs-relay a single binary written in rust that automatically spins up an SQLite database. Bitcoin discussion yes, but mostly because bitcoiners are avid self hosters. Cryptocurrency not much. The “crypto” people created their own thing if I’m not mistaken. Nostr was spun out as a truly censorship resistant protocol s…
Hell there's even a streaming platform on nostr too. The common criticism is that its all bitcoiners, that's mainly because it uses Lightning Network for zaps and that's how people get paid in nostr. So naturally its a lot of bitcoiners in the nostr communities.
Use nostr. checkout primal.net
or activitypub ! Part of w3c, tons of servers and clients, even Meta runs an instance I don't think it's as easy to run nostr relays as activitypub instances but maybe I am wrong. ActivityPub seems way more active than nostr also. Most of what I see on nostr is either cryptocurrency discussion or the kinds of alt-lite content you would find on Gab or Minds
It's possible to spin up alternative relays. For example: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of tak…
Genuine question: if it's so easy and cheap to host a relay, why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]? Most of that money must be earmarked for administrative and human expenses then, right? [0] https://freeourfeeds.com/ [1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-free-social-media-from-bi... [2] https://freeourfeeds.com/ § FAQ § What will the money be used f…
the relay at this point is non-archival and can be spun up trivially. with a small sliding history window for subscriber catchup u can use like 32gb of scratch disk space and keep a few hours, the relay is literally just a subscribeRepos forwarder from PDSes.
the AppView is vastly more expensive to run since you need to handle the write volume of all bsky activity. if you build a non-bsky app on atproto this is a non-issue
the issue here really is that nobody writes about the state of things in long form outside the network so it's not really known how fast things move and change by those not engaged with the platform
I used to not care about centralized or decentralized services, I just wanted to best product. Now I see how each of the major social media networks has been involved in censorship of Israel's genocide in Palestine (including btw HN), it makes me realize how important decentralization is. I think a lot of Americans (and other countries who have essentially handed over their media to US social media companies) are goi…
Decentralization doesn't really help, it only creates more bubbles. Reddit is extremely centralized, and you can find hundreds of subreddits that do cover Israel's ethnic cleansing. However, most popular subreddits are heavily censored, while the smaller communities become an echo chamber, and often get radicalized. Decentralized bubbles are still bubbles—even worse, since the barrier to entry is higher.
I used to not care about centralized or decentralized services, I just wanted to best product. Now I see how each of the major social media networks has been involved in censorship of Israel's genocide in Palestine (including btw HN), it makes me realize how important decentralization is. I think a lot of Americans (and other countries who have essentially handed over their media to US social media companies) are goi…
Decentralization doesn't really help, it only creates more bubbles. Reddit is extremely centralized, and you can find hundreds of subreddits that do cover Israel's ethnic cleansing. However, most popular subreddits are heavily censored, while the smaller communities become an echo chamber, and often get radicalized. Decentralized bubbles are still bubbles—even worse, since the barrier to entry is higher.