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Are we decentralized yet?

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Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#71

Post by msgilligan »

oncallthrow wrote: post #59
msgilligan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way that makes any sense is if you subtract returns for sales made in a different period to the sales period you are considering Exactly. That's the way accounting works. They did not know in the previous quarter that the product would be returned in the following quarter, so they end up having negative sales in the current quarter. Yes it produces "garbage output", which I find amusing.

But that isn’t how you calculate market share, so what you’re saying is nonsense.

There are multiple ways of calculating market share (e.g. units vs dollars or for different time periods) but assuming it is measured in dollars for a quarterly time period, how would you calculate the market share based upon my sample data above?

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#72

Post by timeon »

colesantiago wrote: post #17

The honest truth is that: Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. At some point, everything converges to centralization. No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that. There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization. Hell, I would even say that threads is the bi…

This is true, but also the reason why it can get pretty cozy. Find the right corner - it will be sleepy - no need to check it constantly.

> Hell, I would even say that threads is the biggest mastodon instance.

So is Truth Social. But they are not federated with the rest.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#73

Post by DrewADesign »

colesantiago wrote: post #17

The honest truth is that: Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. At some point, everything converges to centralization. No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that. There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization. Hell, I would even say that threads is the bi…

This just doesn't seem to sink in with a lot of people.

The very second most people need to think about implementation details, like what instance is connected to what instance and what that means, they're done. It's not like they couldn't understand it if they tried: they don't want to try because they don't care. In fact, they don't want to care.

What they care about is interacting with their friends and family and celebrity personas that amuse them, and also get some news handed to them that fits their world view. They don't want to have a little independent social network-- they want to connect with whoever they want to connect with and access whoever they want to access and any barrier to that makes it worse for them. The centralization is the selling point for a lot of those people. Being at the terminal point in a federated service, as they exist, makes all of that harder. It makes it harder for great reasons but they're reasons that most people don't even want to care about. They trade good, easy experiences with the things that are important to them for things they never wanted and have no interest in learning about. Nerds get a kick out of being on a decentralized social network. Most people absolutely do not care. It's not like they don't want to be: it just doesn't matter to them, so if they have to give literally anything up to achieve that, it's too high of a cost.

It's almost like trying to get people to switch from mobile phones to amateur radio.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#74

Post by dev0p »

colesantiago wrote: post #17

The honest truth is that: Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. At some point, everything converges to centralization. No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that. There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization. Hell, I would even say that threads is the bi…

Users only care about content, how it's brought to them is inconsequential to 99.9% (likely higher) of users.

The chicken and egg problem is that users go where the content is, and content goes where users are.

In reality what this means is that the vast majority of both users and content tend towards a single solution, and that is where there is the least friction, aka the path of least reesistance.

Monetary incentives and various perks (features, first mover advantage, ...) can help but overall it seems to tend towards ease of use.

For users, TikTok is the king for a reason: EVERY SINGLE SWIPE (caps because I want to intentionally put a LOT of emphasis on this) is content that YOU, specifically YOU, are likely interested in. If not, the very next swipe is likely to be what your brain thinks is good, because the algorithm is so good it already knows what you want. Yeah, I know, that's because they spy on their users, whatever, sadly users do not care about that.

BlueSky? Even if you follow specific users, content discovery is so, so much harder. But the main problem is that the vast majority of users, especially new ones, will be subjected to subpar content compared to other platforms.

So why should a new user come back there instead of literally anywhere else? And if there are no users, why put the content there, and if there is no content, there are no users, and so on...

Notice how in all of this the underlying architecture has quite literally no relevance and is nothing but a technical detail.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#75

Post by msgilligan »

sema4hacker wrote: post #60
oncallthrow wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The story sounds fishy, but one way to have returns exceed sales is to ship 1,000 to stores on consignment, the store sells 500 of those for cash, the buyers return their 500 for refunds, and the store returns the remaining unsold 500. So 500 actual sales but 1,000 returns.

I've heard of companies doing things like this to "cook the books" for a quarterly report.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#76

Post by izacus »

danabramov wrote: post #38
d4mi3n wrote: post #2

Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization like we've seen in the AT-Proto ecosystem. I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon…

>I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems. This isn't quite right. ATProto has a completely different "shape" so it's hard to make apples-to-apples comparison. Roughly speaking, you can think of Mastodon…

That's a big post that doesn't really explain in what way can smaller players federate with ATProto or how the structure allows federation.

Reading through it, it just sounds like sharding/scaling for a centralized service that's meant to be owned and provided by a single entity.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#78

Post by alethic »

danabramov wrote: post #54
alethic wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't correct. Mastodon merged fetch-all-replies in March. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615 The only difference in visible replies is in the moderation choices of the server the post is viewed from.

How does it work? In ATProto, there is no need to do this on-demand because the data is already there in the AppView. When you want to serve a page of replies, you read them from the database and serve them. There is no distributed fetching involved, no need to hit someone else's servers, no need to coalesce them or worry about limiting fetches, etc. This is why it works fine for threads without thousands of replies…

There is a detailed explanation available at the link I posted. Second header, "Approach".

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#79

Post by fluoridation »

danabramov wrote: post #48
jchw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, it just won't be the Bluesky App View, so it's not really Bluesky. It's not like the fediverse where the instances own the URLs of the posts: they go through app views and there's a canonical URL to a Bluesky post and that's through the official app view.

This seems misleading. Different AppViews would obviously be branded differently, but the whole point of ATProto is that there is a shared "picture" of the world. People are running alternative AppViews that consume Bluesky posts (and serve Bluesky threads). Here's the same thread on three different AppViews: - https://zeppelin.social/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu... - https://blacksky.community/profile/did:pl…

So, it's the same underlying data structures (e.g. posts, threads, etc.), and the way they're exposed depends on the implementation? So there's one BlueSky, but BlueSky is just one interface (UI + API). Am I getting this right?

I just want to know if I can run my own node in my own hardware.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#80

Post by qustrolabe »

Can someone explain how Fediverse instances or any decentralized platforms deals with most obvious issues of decentralization? Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost. I mean surely instances usually don't disappear without notice but it still a totally possible thing. Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating? I don't want to lose my connection with potential friends from such instance just because of something like that. I even remember some time ago when there were news about Threads being federated some people deliberately gathered "signs" across lots of instances to collectively defederate from Threads and it's just ridiculous to me that this even happened. What all this talk about fighting censorship while actively engaging in constant "self-censorship" making own echo-chamber as tight as possible?
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