We need a federation of forges

I wonder how much this translates to places outside the US... Bluesky being the place for everything Center-left and left of it by US standards would just make it the place for mainstream opinion in much of the EU.

Personally I found it much easier to avoid politics on Bluesky than on other platforms. Which is why it's been more sticky for me than Twitter was. And I put that down to having good feed control, and not being beholden to an algorithm that tries to keep me engaged.

What is it you're trying to communicate here? I know and understand what PLC is already, mind actually answering the previous questions?

I believe YC is a organization run by bad people. Like, people who actually want to do harm to you. You can peek at Garry Tan's X to get a taste of the type of things I'm talking to.

Fuck yes it is. Centralizing everything & owning all the data & giving users no rights is technically easy as hell. Walk in the fucking park!

It's also abjectly awful. Sites change hands, change owners, change terms of service, change moderators... sites shut down. Taking "your" content with them. To accept centralized services is technically simple but it means accepting the infinitely long timeline of social and corporate complexity, that plays out, day by day & decade by decade.

As a user it is much simpler for me to have a PDS where my data is, that I control, and manage.

And it's all my data. I don't have to manage my data across thousands of different profiles on different sites. On that hostile unstable ground I've spoken of, each of these sites evolving and devolving in their own multi-variate ways.

It's perhaps sometimes simpler to have experiences that only exist in one site. But it's much richer and more interesting when different apps can interoperate, can adversarially interoperate/competitive cooperation. I also think that for users, once you get the hang of it, the patterns of having a PDS emerge, and provide a consistency of experience across apps, where-as each site has to be learned on its own terms: it's simpler having a single sign on from your PDS, having tools you can manage all your data with. (https://pds.ls)

We have atproto experiences like the just launching Disperse that work across the different apps, that bring them together. Multiple different apps do bookmarking using the same lexion, some with their own add-ons. A single site can't give you that ability to work across systems, to work broadly. You are reduced to working on a site by site basis. That's simple until it becomes overwhelming, at which point better tools becomes simpler: having a PDS leaves the door open to making these better tools, that work more broadly, across systems. https://bsky.app/profile/quillmatiq.com/post/3mkq2hzfjn22s

Whereas you might get stuck with a complex bad app hosted on one site, with atproto your data is yours to manage and you can use whatever app you please, and those different apps can attune to different user types: users who want a rich complex app might use one app, other folks can prefer a simpler less complicated app. Not being evolutionarily handcuffed to one company's app your whole life lets everyone explore not just what us "more complicated"/simpler, but a whole range of preferences that suits the user, that better matches what the user wants, that can grow and evolve with the users and their data, in a way that the "simple" centralized system by definition cannot enable.

It's so wild to me how much I see the dual of complexity. Rich Hickey talking about complecting is spiritual holy matter to me, is deeply cherished. But I see so so so many people who use aversion to complexity as a tool to turn off thinking, to not regard the complexity: endless Chesterton's Fences, no curiosity about why the fence might be there. There's such strong swelling of dark energy to tear down destroy and berate, the smugness of those so happy to criticize ram usage or to say software is all bad now. I dunno man. It really tires me out having such shallow engagement such superficial reactions.

Personally my soul craves a deeper connection with systems, wants to engage and explore, to sift what complexity brings interestingness from that complexity which is incidental. I've written a bunch of posts in this submission what I think is so so so interesting in the inherent choices of having an Authenticated Transfer Protocol, where you can send my data around over http, or web sockets, or MoQT, or IP over avian, or tin cans and shoe string, and still have it be clear to the world that that data is mine. Very few other systems offer that. ActivityPub certainly doesn't practice that widely, maybe doesn't offer that at all. All these systems we've built assume a host that stays online forever, that owns the responsibility fully. It's wicked deeply compelling to me to march into some complexity to liberate us from this ancient bitter internet constraint. Hello & thank you, complexity.

It doesn't. I don't really believe this meme of the center-left and left in the US being the mainstream in the EU. It's true that certain attitudes around labor and economics are shared between the American left and more center left and center EU parties, but our stances on social issues are completely different. There's an entire fabric of multiculturalism that's present in the US that just isn't in the EU that has a very different lens. For example, the US just doesn't have anything resembling an EU-style Christian Democratic party from a social values perspective at all.

Bluesky is mostly about day-to-day American politics, which means talking about how a court ruling is bad, how Trump did something stupid, or how the current admin is corrupt. The complaint I've read from most EU folks is how American day-to-day politics takes up way too much of the site.

I was unable to turn off politics without pretty much completely nuking my feed. I tried using mute words but that ended up just turning off most of my timeline. I build a US Politics labeler that worked pretty well, but ended up in a similar effect. Content outside of the politics on the network just isn't very interesting. Pretty much none of my hobbies are well represented there except some photography, and the photography is mostly about sharing pictures (which is definitely cool) rather than talking about shooting weddings or events or street the way it tends to shake up in other photography communities.