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ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

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Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#2

Post by echelon »

ActivityPub is ahead, but it feels like a dead end. It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.

Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and accessibility, but they're the only ones developing and implementing AT protocol.

Social media should be more P2P and learn from the 2000's era before the platform giants stole away the dream. Bittorrent, RSS, Atom, semantic web (FOAF, microformats) were the way to complete digital freedom.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#3

Post by mg »

The next hurdle to create distributed social media seems to be distributed likes and follows. Those are the social currencies of today's generation.

In a centralized system, you trust the central authority to show the correct number of likes a post got and the correct info who liked a post. Same for number of followers and who follows whom.

Do any of these 3 protocols have an approach to do the same in a decentralized world?

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#5

Post by systemz »

echelon wrote: post #2

ActivityPub is ahead, but it feels like a dead end. It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom. Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and accessibility, but they're…

The larger instances, the larger moderation issues.

People are only people so fierce moderation will happen. With smaller instances "blast radius" is smaller and it shouldn't be problematic like in centralized social media.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#6

Post by saurik »

mg wrote: post #3

The next hurdle to create distributed social media seems to be distributed likes and follows. Those are the social currencies of today's generation. In a centralized system, you trust the central authority to show the correct number of likes a post got and the correct info who liked a post. Same for number of followers and who follows whom. Do any of these 3 protocols have an approach to do the same in a decentralize…

It is not obvious to me at all that this problem needs to be solved or that it is even a good thing for social networks to provide such stats; but, if it actually somehow is important, it is also a problem that is trivially reduced to the same problem as spam: likes and follows are simply signed messages, not pre-aggregated counts, and if you balk at sending someone a list of a hundred thousand signatures they are trivially compressed using zero-knowledge proofs. Now... how to prevent people from making up a million real-looking bot accounts? That is harder (though I absolutely believe is tractable), but you have to solve that anyway lest rather than inflating likes and follows people just flood the system with replies (and it is also a problem the centralized system will also have to contend with, though it might have more strategies available to it).

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#8

Post by edent »

> it sends a copy per follower, meaning if 10 users on one server follow the same user on a remote server that remote server sends 10 copies of the message

That's not right. Most AP servers operate a shared inbox. So you only need to send one message - no matter how many followers you have on that server.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#9

Post by mariusor »

echelon wrote: post #2

ActivityPub is ahead, but it feels like a dead end. It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom. Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and accessibility, but they're…

> moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.

I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of view.

If you're not welcome in a community, join one that would hear you. Why would that be against your "freedom"?

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#10

Post by mg »

saurik wrote: post #6
mg wrote: post #3

The next hurdle to create distributed social media seems to be distributed likes and follows. Those are the social currencies of today's generation. In a centralized system, you trust the central authority to show the correct number of likes a post got and the correct info who liked a post. Same for number of followers and who follows whom. Do any of these 3 protocols have an approach to do the same in a decentralize…

It is not obvious to me at all that this problem needs to be solved or that it is even a good thing for social networks to provide such stats; but, if it actually somehow is important, it is also a problem that is trivially reduced to the same problem as spam: likes and follows are simply signed messages, not pre-aggregated counts, and if you balk at sending someone a list of a hundred thousand signatures they are tr…

Regarding whether it is "a good thing for social networks to provide such stats":

It's a central part of social media, even here on HN.

Look at the front page. Each post shows 6 pieces of information:

    Title, Domain, Points, Author, Time, Comments
2 of them = 33% are numeric indicators we trust because we trust HN.

Likes and follows are probably two of the main reasons that centralized social media sites have displaced websites, rss, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups etc.

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