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Are we decentralized yet?

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Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#281

Post by smt88 »

lukev wrote: post #266
smt88 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely doesn't "work in practice" for the web. Read-only sites, like personal blogs, are easy to self-host but vulnerable to DDoS attacks if targeted. Writeable sites, like anything with a form or message board, are now too expensive to run because of spammers and hacking bots. We're now all paying rent to Cloudflare or Substack or whatever because you can't just be an isolated island on the open web anymore.

What are you talking about? Tons of people run personal blogs/websites, with an enormous variety of hosting structures. I call that working in practice. The fact that any individual self-hosted site could not survive a DDOS does not negate the fact that, well, the internet actually does exist.

Absolutely false. Find me a non-trivial blog or website (>10k unique visitors per month) self-hosted by someone non-technical that isn't centralized by Cloudflare or a website host.

Like I said: if your site is read-only and you self-host, you're vulnerable to DDoS. You'll avoid it if you aren't very famous and aren't randomly targeted, but you're still vulernable.

And if your site has any kinds of comments, forms, or "write" ability, then you absolutely can't self-host. You will be blown away by spam and hacking attempts.

The "tons" of people you're talking about don't exist. They're mostly on WordPress, Ghost, Substack, or something similar with custom domains, and the ones who aren't are still mostly hiding behind Cloudflare.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#282

Post by robertlagrant »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #274
robertlagrant wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick buck would be the time from when you put your money in to when you get back your money and a profit.

If you have a sudden massive change in plans like this, it resets the timer. You were doing long term, but now you want a quick buck and you don't care much if the company survives. If I set up a get rich quick scheme based on overhyping and selling land, it doesn't matter whether I buy the land today or it's land I had for decades for a completely different reason. Either way I'm going for a quick buck now.

But they didn't have this for completely different reasons. They invested money years ago, that they could've bought government bonds with and just earned interest, and instead it went into BlueSky. At some point they'd like a return that would substantially beat the government bond they could've invested in with zero risk.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#283

Post by Dylan16807 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #282
Dylan16807 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a sudden massive change in plans like this, it resets the timer. You were doing long term, but now you want a quick buck and you don't care much if the company survives. If I set up a get rich quick scheme based on overhyping and selling land, it doesn't matter whether I buy the land today or it's land I had for decades for a completely different reason. Either way I'm going for a quick buck now.

But they didn't have this for completely different reasons. They invested money years ago, that they could've bought government bonds with and just earned interest, and instead it went into BlueSky. At some point they'd like a return that would substantially beat the government bond they could've invested in with zero risk.

They invested for the long term. If they suddenly want the company to go all-in on short term profit extraction that is a big change in plan.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#284

Post by robertlagrant »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #283
robertlagrant wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they didn't have this for completely different reasons. They invested money years ago, that they could've bought government bonds with and just earned interest, and instead it went into BlueSky. At some point they'd like a return that would substantially beat the government bond they could've invested in with zero risk.

They invested for the long term. If they suddenly want the company to go all-in on short term profit extraction that is a big change in plan.

I agree, but I doubt from their perspective it's a quick buck. I appreciate from the perspective of people who got a free service and it's now getting monetised it might feel quick, but surely not surprising at some point. And they got a quick buck up front from not having to pay for the service, which is nice :)

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#285

Post by Animats »

maxbond wrote: post #10
Animats wrote: post #8

Keep the needle pointing north. Towards the center of that dial. Too decentralized, and you can't find anything. Nobody uses it. Too centralized, and censorship takes over. Nobody can speak freely.

I don't disagree but I do wonder if a.) discoverability is really so intractable in a decentralized environment if you're willing to throw a lot of resources towards indexing and b.) if that middle ground isn't like balancing a pendulum upside down - a very fragile equilibrium. A bunch of decentralized units might join together, or a large centralized unit might fail, pushing the pendulum to either side. You can thin…

You can have decentralized discovery via flooding. Everybody gets everything. That's how USENET worked. Torrents sort of work that way.

This hits scaling problems. USENET ran into that.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#286

Post by immibis »

INTPenis wrote: post #4

We're more decentralized in fedi but we're also not really consistent either. Which I think is the number one gripe for users who manage to get into the fedi. I don't mind, I still think it's a huge leap forward, but it's important to set realistic expectations.

I think that thinking of "the fediverse" as one thing at all is a mistake. It's Gilbert Ryle's classic category mistake:

> A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks “But where is the University?” .....

"The fediverse" is not a thing. There are many separate sites and the collection of all of them in total may be called "the fediverse", but that is not a thing by itself. They don't even all share a protocol in common. You cannot join the fediverse any more than you can join the game industry or the startup scene. You have to join a specific server, game company or startup (or more than one). And while from the outside you might have heard a lot of "the game industry is cut-throat" or "startups work together to innovate technology", once you are inside one of them, you'll find that it's a lot more fragmented than it at first appeared, and totally incohesive, and although from a bird's eye view it looked like you and your competitor down the hall were both making VR happen, they won't work together with you.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#287

Post by immibis »

hoidofyolen wrote: post #246
immibis wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you're making stuff up that obviously has no basis in reality here. Migration would be impossible because the bsky.app PDS wouldn't allow anyone to access the data except for the bsky.app relay. other appviews wouldn't display bsky.app data because both the PDS and relay would block them.

First of all, Bluesky the company would have to implement auth on the communication between relay and AppView, cut off everyone from using their relay, and specifically stop ingesting content from non-Bluesky PDSs. There would be time when we realize that's happening to get another AppView up and running. There are arguably enough resources in either the ATproto dev community or other funding sources that another App…

> First of all, Bluesky the company would have to implement auth on the communication between relay and AppView, cut off everyone from using their relay, and specifically stop ingesting content from non-Bluesky PDSs

Yes, that's as simple as an IP address check, since they own all of it. Could alternatively be a password (bearer token).

> And Bluesky wouldn't likely stop existing altogether,

In fact, the change would be noticed by almost nobody, because 99.9% of users would still see 99.9% of their following (including 100% of the ones who populate the default feed) and would have to go far out of their way to see any change.

> There would be time when we realize that's happening to get another AppView up and running. There are arguably enough resources in either the ATproto dev community or other funding sources that another AppView could pop up within a week or two, and be maintained by the community for months without issue. And Bluesky wouldn't likely stop existing altogether, so people would log into Bluesky, see the news (or hear it elsewhere), and see people talking about how to get access to your account.

All irrelevant since it wouldn't have the content and people go there for the content. Views go where the content is.

> some copies of the entire network exist in the community

All irrelevant since it wouldn't have the new content posted after the block and people go there for the new content. New views go where the new content is.

> and some seriously pissed off community members who would now want to do everything they can to take up the mantle temporarily

Yes, exactly like the people who were pissed off at Twitter so they started Mastodon. Made literally no difference to Twitter. Most of those people even remained on Twitter and posted as much on Twitter as on Mastodon. Because views go where the content is. Thinking anything else is wilful delusion.

> Soon Bluesky the app, as well as Instagram and Twitter, would be flooded with tutorials of how to recover your accounts

Why recover? If you're part of the 99.9%, nothing changed for you.

> and migrate to another PDS.

I have no doubt there would be a flood of tutorials of how to make sure that only 0.1% of former Bluesky users will ever see your tweets, but nobody will follow that tutorial because they don't want to make sure that only 0.1% of former Bluesky users will ever see their tweets.

> If your point is that we'd lose at least half of the users of Bluesky

0.1% would be lost.

> But ATproto would be just fine

but completely useless, since its main use case is getting Bluesky feeds and that would be switched off

> and if people want to get their data back they likely can

This is nobody's goal. People log into Bluesky to see tweets from the people and topics they follow, not to "get their data".

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#288

Post by immibis »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #280
immibis wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't everyone abandon Twitter for Mastodon when Elon bought it? Why didn't they even abandon it for Blue Sky until years later? Why is Twitter still as busy as it was when Elon took it over?

Because it requires a new account. Migrating PDS on bluesky does not require a new account, is invisible/transparent to your followers and following, and the end goal is that migration will be easy enough that you can do it in less than 5 minutes with no technical skill. Bluesky/atproto is still very early/very young but the general theme is to focus on the UX and ergonomics to make decentralisation viable without fo…

Migrating PDS on Bluesky requires a new account if your old PDS doesn't want you to migrate, or if you get banned from the PLC directory.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#289

Post by INTPenis »

alethic wrote: post #278
INTPenis wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it's off by default for a reason, it's not realistic to expect every node to fetch all messages. This is a catch 22 because the reason fedi is more decentralized is because of the low barrier of entry to run a node, but at the same time that low barrier means it takes less resources because it does not fetch every single message and piece of media.

It's currently on on the flagship instance and will be on by default in the upcoming 4.5 release.

Creating more monolithic centralization.

Us small instances can't afford it.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#290

Post by shadowgovt »

danabramov wrote: post #172
shadowgovt wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

(update: it turns out fetching all the discussion posts is now supported in Mastodon v4.4. https://mastodon.exitmusic.world/@james/115147206129637513)
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