81–90 of 198 posts
Decentralization is the new Centralization. For information ownership, the protocol needs to be distributed.
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Peer to peer, not federation, is the way forward. We should only build peer to peer social protocols. Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control). {Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}. Bluesky and Mas…
We don't need large scale social networks in the first place. The Discord model of small communities is the way forward. Keep groups small enough for natural human social rules to apply. Slows down global dissemination of information for sure, but that's what the news is for, and anything important will eventually travel between communities anyway.
It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
But the complaint it builds up to is that instance-wide bans can ruin you when there are super big instances, and that's not something that can be fixed.
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According to them. They shared their opinion.
No, they asserted their opinion as a fact. There is a world of difference between "I prefer x" and criticising something while asserting "everyone should do x (because I prefer x)".
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Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users…
People often mention email as an example of federated communication, but the way email works in practice doesn't entirely live up to that ideal. Good luck getting your own self-hosted email server to send emails that actually reach anyone using a major email provider; they'll just be blocked as spam. In practice, email is much less federated than it seems. A significant proportion of people are just using gmail. You…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peer to peer, not federation, is the way forward. We should only build peer to peer social protocols. Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control). {Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}. Bluesky and Mas…
We don't need large scale social networks in the first place. The Discord model of small communities is the way forward. Keep groups small enough for natural human social rules to apply. Slows down global dissemination of information for sure, but that's what the news is for, and anything important will eventually travel between communities anyway.
Like at least suggest old school forums, IRC, or usenet.
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Can you clarify - are you implying that BlueSky team made protocol hard on purpose, in order to "tell regular people that they are not allowed to participate"?
No, OP is saying that they have over-engineered the protocol, and that this acts as an *effective* barrier to participation, regardless of whether it was intended or not. Bluesky's protocol is focused on twitter-scale use-cases, where every node in the network needs to be able to see and process every other event from every other user in able to work properly. This fundamentally limits the people who can run a server…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peer to peer, not federation, is the way forward. We should only build peer to peer social protocols. Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control). {Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}. Bluesky and Mas…
Bluesky is designed the way it is because of scale. How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Bsky is designed so that the microservices themselves can be decentralized and so multiple different types of apps can be built on the same protocol/infra. Obviously, it’s early days, and hopefully there is even more experimentation in the p2p space. But at…
People want to build store and forward systems because that is their mental model of the problem. store and forward system are fine, and there are many advantages to them, but direct request systems scale much better. basically have each user fetch their messages from the locations they want rather than delivering the messages to them. think how the web works vs how email works.
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So I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes. What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.
> What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? The same problems as always. Allow federation and you get... - federation wars and moderators conducting these wars using their own users as hostages - I left Mastodon years ago when some particularly dumb morons decided to do bitchfights regarding Israel / Palestine. No I'm not interested in your pointless squabble, but I do care when I suddenly don't see posts from a bun…