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ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

nate.mecca1.net

51–60 of 76 posts

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#51

These all feel quite over-engineered. I feel like a combination of a webpage with your bio and a feed of posts with an associated RSS feed could cover the "follow a user/microblogging" side of social media, and email could cover direct messaging and threaded conversations. What am I missing that these protocols bring to the table?

Semantics. Notions of tags, replies, metadata, what kind of entity a link is refering to. Stable identifiers (how do you canonically refer to content rehosted elsewhere?). Authenticity for rehosted content. There was/is an idea and attempt at "semantic web" aka "web 3.0" but it never caught on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

Also, a common requirement is authenticated reads and fine-grained access control of pull-based content. E.g. I want to share my vacation photos with a different subset of friends/followers vs my tech blogging, only some of which should be public.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#53
post #15
post #4

ActivityPub isn't perfect but still seems better vs putting everything in one basket controlled by big corp (Meta's FB, IG etc).

With ActivityPub you are still putting everything in one basket. All the federation is completely optional and identities are not transferable. But unlike big corps, that generally care very little about what you do, a whole lot of ActivityPub instances are heavily politically motivated and love to block or defederate.

That's not entirely correct. Mastodon already implements a feature to migrate to a new instance. Also there is a draft for identities that are not bound to an instance.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#54
post #13
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say so on a website that displays the number of likes (here: "points") for every post right on the front page.

This take is so tired. They’re stuck posting where engagement is because there’s nowhere near the level of discussion elsewhere. Participating in something and trying to discuss how it could be improved when you disagree with it is normal human behavior.

Why do you think the engagement is here, and on other sites that do keep track of imaginary internet points -- and not so much on sites that don't?

Begin with "this take is so tired" if you want, but then I want to hear actual reasons.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#55
post #50
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon is thought of as "distributed social media", when in reality it's not much different than Reddit without central corporate control and profit. Instance owners can block anyone based on manual or automated rules. It's just an extension of the status quo. This is fantastic for building insular communities, but it doesn't get us into a better place with respect to individual user freedom. There are still power…

The status quo is that most people don't want pure anarchy, they want communities, and communities have boundaries. Uncensored free-for-all discussion only results in the most aggressively toxic elements and effective spammers driving away the rest. Even the guy who runs Gab recently found that out. If that's what you want, I'm sure you can already find it somewhere. But I think you're in the minority, and it certain…

Why would you think I want anarchy? I want a public park. A protocol as free as the old web and BitTorrent.

Gab attracted its group because it was the anti-Reddit. People banned from Reddit went there. Of course it was filled with anarchy and racism.

I don't want all of our protocols and platforms to have a higher class of user with God mode. That's inequitable, and that's what Masto is today. And Reddit. And HN. And every other centralized platform.

I'm a moderate centrist and I get censored by everybody. The right, the left. People want to shut you up unless you agree with them. And often times it's not about silencing harm, but rather power tripping. People get off on that.

More than anything, I'm deeply afraid of censorship. It's a real and very slippery slope. You might think you're the one getting to pick and choose the topics today, but very quickly that will escape you.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#56
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…

My friend runs an activity pub instance, but the software he uses is called snac2. One of it's stated features is that is does not report follower counts. It also only reports likes or boosts on the home instance (not on federated feeds). The atmosphere on this instance is markedly different than elsewhere in the fediverse.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#57
post #55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The status quo is that most people don't want pure anarchy, they want communities, and communities have boundaries. Uncensored free-for-all discussion only results in the most aggressively toxic elements and effective spammers driving away the rest. Even the guy who runs Gab recently found that out. If that's what you want, I'm sure you can already find it somewhere. But I think you're in the minority, and it certain…

Why would you think I want anarchy? I want a public park. A protocol as free as the old web and BitTorrent. Gab attracted its group because it was the anti-Reddit. People banned from Reddit went there. Of course it was filled with anarchy and racism. I don't want all of our protocols and platforms to have a higher class of user with God mode. That's inequitable, and that's what Masto is today. And Reddit. And HN. And…

>I want a public park. A protocol as free as the old web and BitTorrent.

Public parks have rules, and police. Every forum on the old web had administrators and moderators, which you seem to be against. You said you wanted a system where "no node can impose its will upon others." In other words with no hierarchy, and that's definitionally anarchist.

Which again, is fine if that's what you want, but not everyone does. And I believe any platform run that way will inevitably devolve into a cesspool. Show me an example to the contrary.

>I don't want all of our protocols and platforms to have a higher class of user with God mode.

Different platforms and instances are owned by different people and operate under different rules, but there is nothing in the protocols of either the web or any federated system that imposes any specific political or ideological view on anyone. If you don't like Hacker News, you can make your own Hacker News with blackjack and hookers if you want. You just can't force everyone to care. But then, you don't have the right to force anyone to care.

>I'm a moderate centrist and I get censored by everybody. The right, the left. People want to shut you up unless you agree with them.

Please... you're acting like you're trapped in a dystopian nightmare, being censored like some radical political dissident. But scrolling through some your comment history I see the vast majority of your comments are untouched, or have at worst a couple of downvotes. And even in those, you seem capable of having conversations. You don't seem to be the victim of egregious censorship, so much as having opinions that some people disagree with slightly.

>You might think you're the one getting to pick and choose the topics today, but very quickly that will escape you.

I doubt anyone is going to come after me or my gamedev Mastodon instance anytime soon but if they do I'll say you told me so. And then just spin up another one.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#58

What about Matrix? I think the protocol would compete well against the others in this list.

I think that’s more like Signal, right? Maybe you could tunnel AP or BlueSky over it? I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but that’s how it seems to me.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#59
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques. The cliques form around moderation, politics, whether they federate with Threads.net, what content warnings are used, and even whether alt text is “required” for images. Then some instances defederate otherwise innocent instances that don’t have sufficient agreement on all those points, regardless of actual content. It is kind of tiring and honestly hard to recommend.

>I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques.

It's social networking. Of course there are going to be cliques. That's what happens when you put a non-trivial number of humans in one space (be it virtual or physical).

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#60
If I understand this right: A supposed benefit of Nostr and Bluesky is the idea of having a strong cross-server identity.

Nope. This is most likely a bad idea. And we've already essentially proven this because the overwhelmingly most important method of internet communication DOESN'T centralize like this and has no need to. Email works fine, probably better, WITHOUT this strong centralization.

So while I agree with all the current short term clique-related critcisms of ActivityPub/Mastodon, it's still the smartest model.

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