Including Threads with Fediverse might have an interesting impact.
adding Threads's 400M users changes the ActivityPub fediverse centralized market share to 99.72%, beyond that of BlueSky's share of 99.55%.
Are we decentralized yet?
171–180 of 292 posts
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet I could have a realtime public threaded conversation on Twitter, and am having one on Bluesky (regardless of which PDSs or AppViews other people are using), but cannot in principle have on Mastodon (unless everyone I talk to shares my instance). Does this say anything about relative ability of ATProto vs ActivityPub to meaningfully compete with centralized services? I hear your point that slower conversation…
I'm not sure where you reached the conclusion that you can't have a realtime public threaded conversation on Mastodon; I do it frequently. The way it generally works is that clients will auto-at-tag people in the conversation, which makes sure the message is routed to all in the conversation within more-or-less milliseconds. Auto-at-tagging doesn't scale to dozens and dozens of actively-engaged speakers, but neither…
I realize that we might be arguing over definitions here, but to me part of the experience of Twitter-like conversation is seeing other replies appear in real time even when they’re not directed at me — same as how you’ve noticed this thread on HN.
Seeing the existing convo in real time lets me decide which points to engage with and which have been explored, and to navigate between branches as they evolve in real time (some of which my friends participate in). I do earnestly navigate hundreds of times within an active thread — maybe it’s not your usage pattern but some of us do enjoy a realtime conversation with dozens of people (or at least observing one). There’s also something to the fact that I know others will observe the same consistent conversation state at the time I’m observing it.
You might not consider such an experience important to a product you’re designing, but you’re clearly taking a technological limitation and inventing a product justification to it. If Mastodon didn’t already have this peculiarity, you wouldn’t be discussing it since replies appearing in realtime would just seem normal.
In either case, whether you see it as a problem to be solved or not, it is a meaningful difference in the experiences of Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon — with both Twitter and Bluesky delivering it.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#173Can someone explain how Fediverse instances or any decentralized platforms deals with most obvious issues of decentralization? Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost. I mean surely instances usually don't disappear without notice but it still a totally possible thing. Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating? I don't want to lose m…
> Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost
They just disappear. You're not appending to a long-term immutable blockchain-like archive. You're posting things to the internet and the nature of posting things to the internet (or anywhere for that matter) is that nobody guarantees they will be around forever.
> Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating
Identical to "what about those times when Twitter bans someone whose tweets I want to read?"
> What all this talk about fighting censorship while actively engaging
Censorship and moderation are the same word
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For a lot of stuff though ATProto is built in a way that you shouldn't have to host your own; you can implement your own algorithmic feed that reads from the Bluesky Relay's firehose, or your own frontend that still gets data from the Bluesky AppView. ATProto isn't "built this way". Twitter was also built in a way where you could implement your own stuff - and then Twitter took that away. With Mastodon, there is on…
No I think ATProto is "built this way". The firehose is just the output of the Relay. If Bluesky wanted to shut off the firehose, they would have to make changes to ATProto or stop conforming to ATProto. I understand that Bluesky's conformance to ATProto is just a promise, but it's a better promise than you get from most websites. Also in the meantime, if you migrate to a self-hosted PDS, you can ensure that even if…
What do you think would happen if the Bluesky company suddenly blocked everyone but https://bsky.app/ servers from using their relays?
And what if, before they did that, they updated the PDS code so it blocked all relays except for their one?
I'm not asking what you would do. I'm asking what would happen because of what everyone does. I think the name "Bluesky" would refer to the fully centralized bsky.app, and 99.9% of users would never notice a difference. Users who had other PDSes would either quit (nobody noticing their departure) or sign up to bsky.app like everyone else. The events of Twitter show it's probably the latter - people bent over backwards to comply with Musk to keep their accounts.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The federal part doesn't actually work in practice. It's just a marketing gimmick.
This is factually wrong, and disproven by the fact there are now fully independent federated instances such as BlackSky and soon to be NorthSky. Furthermore, they have independent codebases which are fully compatible. Compare to ActivityPub where most instances are just running Mastodon or some close fork or risk breaking compatibility. What's the point of federation if you are stuck with a monoculture of implementat…
Mastodon is definitely not the only fediverse setup that is popular, Misskey, Pleroma and forks of those integrate perfectly well. Given that the main Misskey instance is one of the largest fediverse instances (certainly by activity) it seems a bit unfair to criticize the fediverse on this. I mean, how many completely independent microblogging implementations does a network actually need? (Not even including things like Lemmy or Peertube which are also ActivityPub instances.)
On the other hand I really think you're underselling how much more popular Bluesky services are than any existing alternatives. I don't think we can actually see the distribution of network traffic, but I would be willing to bet decent money that the sum of all alternatives to the Bluesky AppView wouldn't even crack 0.01% the traffic of the main Bluesky AppView. And, honestly, I would probably bet even more money they'll never even come close to cracking 1% ever for the entire lifetime of the protocol, unless Bluesky Social PBC literally goes out of business.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#176Can someone explain how Fediverse instances or any decentralized platforms deals with most obvious issues of decentralization? Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost. I mean surely instances usually don't disappear without notice but it still a totally possible thing. Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating? I don't want to lose m…
> Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost. I mean surely instances usually don't disappear without notice but it still a totally possible thing.
This happened to me with julialang.social which just stopped running after the guy hired to host it was poached by Google and he lost all interest in the Julia language community. Lost everything. Not going to look back at activitypub as ATProto is the future for me.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#177"Decentralization" isn't the end-goal so measuring it here isn't all that meaningful. Personally, I care about: 1. How hard is it to censor the network. 2. How hard would it be for some major player to enshittify the network. Furthermore, while the fediverse has a single axis for decentralization, BlueSky has 3: number of "big index servers", number of PDSs, number of domain names (how many people own their handle):…
> “ Decentralization" isn't the end-goal…
it would be high in my list of desirability because decentralization means agency to move freely.
i like the fact that if i find the city or state i live in to be boring or economically terrible, i can move.
i like it that if i don’t like the food or atmosphere of a restaurant, i can go to a different restaurant.
i like that if i think billy is a constant asshole, me and my friends can move to the next table over and leave billy behind.
social networks are absolutely no different, no matter how hard certain people try to convince online is different, it isn’t.
we should be soooo incredibly leery of anyone who tells us it’s a good thing to have no agency to eat different food or go party at a different bar.
the hair on the back of our neck should stand up every time someone tries to convince us to go to only a couple of places with the same set of rulers and tries to convince us this is somehow good for us.
how many times have you heard “you want to avoid echo chambers” followed by “therefor everyone should all be on the exact same set of websites with the same set of rulers” followed by “anything less than everyone on the same site is a failure”
it’s double speak: if you are not trapped here, you have an echo chamber.
freedom of movement, freedom of association, etc… are incredibly important to the future health of the internet.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#178Decentralized has a problem. Its premise is that anyone can set up and run a node, cheaply. If the decentralized network allows for some kind of targeted broadcasting, it becomes attractive for spamming (e.g: email). If the decentralized network allows for concentration of responses on something, it becomes a potential tool for a DDoS attack (e.g.: DNS amplification). So running a node should be somehow expensive, bu…
But this problem isn't fatal, and can be mitigated directly. The internet itself is extremely decentralized and while both of these things can be issues, it works in practice.
I disagree that building economics into the protocol is the way forward. There's so much power and creativity that can be unlocked when the substrate is free.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gets really interesting when you look at the precinct and county level in the US, and similar types of views in European countries where they do real representative government.
It's ironic that national level politics mirrors the kind that the founding fathers did not ever want happening, while local politics has the kind of representation that they actually had in mind (in most places).
I'm not sure that is ironic.
Re: Are we decentralized yet?
#180The honest truth is that: Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. At some point, everything converges to centralization. No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that. There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization. Hell, I would even say that threads is the bi…
This just doesn't seem to sink in with a lot of people. The very second most people need to think about implementation details, like what instance is connected to what instance and what that means, they're done. It's not like they couldn't understand it if they tried: they don't want to try because they don't care. In fact, they don't want to care. What they care about is interacting with their friends and family and…
spot on, same reason irc never spread to the masses