I stopped reading when the “journalist” asked this question:
How did you end up starting a decentralized social platform?
How little research must one do to credulously repeat that PR talking point for a platform that is in fact completely centralized?
I stopped at the bit about revolutionizing communication online. That revolution happened over a decade ago with the rise of social media. More social media is just more, not new.
Decentralisation via activitypub is the next revolution
or possibly something else, but definetly not atproto as it stands
I think that it’s fair to want the interviewer to ask more critical questions and in general be more precise with their phrasing but
repeat that PR talking point
is a very cynical and uncharitable take on bluesky and decentralization. Cynical takes aren’t necessarily wrong but they’re not necessarily correct either.
The AT protocol is by its own account an ongoing project with problems that still need be solved before it is able to provide a social network with all the properties that they’re interested in.
I don’t think that it’s accurate to say that bluesky is “completely” centralized (it is less centralized than most social media) as much as it’s de-facto centralized. One reason for this is that it’s prohibitively expensive to self-host relays. This is something that the AT protocol devs have plans for addressing, so it’s possible that this de-facto centralization is a temporary stage in the evolution of bluesky and AT proto.
It is of course possible that they are lying or that they will be unsuccessful despite best intentions but taking for granted that it’s just a “PR talking point” is, once again, very cynical in a way that I don’t think is completely motivated.
I don’t think that it’s accurate to say that bluesky is “completely” centralized (it is less centralized than most social media) as much as it’s de-facto centralized.
That’s like me calling myself a millionaire because I could theoretically be one at some point in the future. I am de facto not a millionaire, but I also have more than zero dollars. so I’m not completely a non-millionaire.
So first of, the part of my comment that you quoted doesn’t make sense because what I’m saying is that bluesky theoretically allows for decentralized relays but it’s impractical in practice. Your analogy doesn’t really apply to that.
I do think that it’s misleading to call bluesky decentralized today (at least without any caveats). The goal of the project however is to eventually create a more meaningfully decentralized social network and they have tangible plans for moving in that direction so I think it’s unfair to dismiss this aspect of bluesky completely.
If they do achieve decentralization in the future I’ll gladly call it decentralized, but “tangible plans” don’t warrant use of a descriptor like that. If someone is training in the hope of making their country’s Olympics team they don’t get to call themselves an Olympian. You have to have gone to the Olympics to justify that title. Working towards decentralization is the same thing. You don’t get to call yourself decentralized just because you wrote it down as a goal on your roadmap.
I agree that the interviewer shouldn’t have implied that they are decentralized today! I don’t know if bluesky even say that they are decentralized themselves, on their website it says that they’re “building an open foundation for the social internet” which is more accurate but maybe they mischaracterize themselves somewhere else.
Let’s see here… ahh yes, it’s a company run by a board with a CEO based in Amerikkka. Who gives a shit if it’s non-profit or not, the users are not in control. No thanks.
It’s also very much not non-profit.
You’re right, I guess the original thing by Jack Dorsey (Bluesky Protocol) was non-profit, but since becoming its own entity it is for-profit now. I conflated the two.
They consider themselves a Benefit Corporation, which I just learned is likely for-profit pretending to be socially aware.
What I don’t get is why anyone would ever choose commercial social media again given there are Activity Pub clones for practically everything now, where you aren’t the product. So many people learned nothing from the ongoing Twitter debacle and the zillion Facebook privacy scandals apparently.
Try using Mastodon and Bluesky at the same time. Bluesky is a twitter clone and perfect replacement. Mastodon is an excellent micro-blogging platform, but has none of the features people actually liked about twitter. People love recommendation algorithms and quote tweet dunking. That’s the core of what it’s all about. Mastodon is glorified RSS, which is great if you miss those days.
Perhaps open federated systems should have recommendation algos too, just optional and open
It would be cool to download different algorithms people created to see how it feeds
Doesn’t PeerTube already do this? Maybe I am mistaken.
In any case there’s nothing inherently preventing this, just because a platform gets some of its data from other servers instead of its own users, it doesn’t mean it can’t use that data to run a recommendation algorithm.
I don’t want it though. I prefer choosing for myself what sources I want to get information from instead of getting any of it recommended by the platform operator.
Follow a few interesting hashtags and you have your recommendation algorithm, but one you’re in control of.
fuck people liking shit … and fuck people going back to american corporate tech… yes, I’m mad like that.
Honestly I have used Blue Sky and Mastodon and Mastodon feels a lot more elegant to me, personally.
Is Activity Pub integrated into Lemmy yet?
It is and always has been as far as I’m aware
They just follow the herd. I wonder who directs the herd…
Commercial software has advertising: people whose job is to advertise it. That means TV and web ads for Bluesky, influencers talking about it. It also means a team of software engineers building parts of the system specifically to draw people in, whereas non-commercial software often rejects that (lack of infinite-scroll on Lemmy’s default UI, for example).
Activity Pub also requires a different mind-set that doesn’t exist elsewhere on the internet today. You need to decide which instance to join, or maybe to host your own instance. But it doesn’t really matter, because you can federate with other instances. But you have to drive some of that federation, so it does matter a little. It’s pretty complex and confusing and its a problem that only exists in this one niche of software.
Bluesky gives you an infinite feed that feels like you’re connected to the entire Internet without you doing any work. I think the AP service are doing really well, considering what they’re up against.
All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.
… but probably not.
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Mastodon didn’t eat the world, but it’s pretty successful. I have a great time over there.
Decentralized app plotting a total takeover of the social internet? Are these tryouts for the mental gymnastics invitational?
The mental gymnasics part is the claim that Bluesky is decentralized.
Yes
“What are we doing today, Jay?”
“The same thing we’re doing every day, Kate. Trying to take over the social internet!”
“Egad, Jay, brilliant! Oh, wait, no, it’s just going to become enshittified like every other centralized platform.”
The fediverse will still be here when bluesky is killed by VCs
this is potentially the last social identity you have to create.
…as long as you stay centralized on the central BlueSky instance. Once you move out to a (potential, future) federated server, that identity (and it’s super duper verification) doesn’t follow you.
Are they building an army with troops, tanks, aircraft and naval ships? Are they going to physically and violently take over the social internet?
Normies will be using weibo before they use Mastodon
Oh no, the twitter people going back to twitter after sold them out. This will end in tears.
Now if only I could get a meaningful reply to a bug preventing complete account deletion, either on github or from support. It seems they modeled their support structure on Google’s.
Y’all are forgetting how hostile Mastodon users can be. Personally I feel a little bit scared of posting anything there.
As I waited to meet with Pleroma-tan, the mascot and CEO of Pleroma, on the 5th floor of a walk-up in Alphabet City, I stared out at the city’s grimy streets and thought: Goddess forbid it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically kaleidoscopic fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after some kind of ancient Greek spiritual shit, or something. In camera, no less.
Then something miraculous happened. Moments before the legendary fox-maiden showed up, the haze lifted. Avenue D glittered in the sun. I could see past shitposter.club’s rolling hills all the way to a emoji-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally whirling.
The 324-year-old executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckleborg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Pleroma-tan was busy doing a 24-hour live stream of Mario Kart while delivering a lecture about the metaphysics of Stoicism and didn’t even hear about it.
Indeed, she seems most energized when she’s talking about the unique infrastructures underlying social media and all reality as well as several smaller apps, the Fediverse, or Fedi, which is a spellbook that servers use to communicate. The open source protocols allow the sovereign nations of the digital mindspaces to fully integrate with one another as needed. Any number of apps with complementary or contradictory ideas about moderation or immoderation or teleportation can work in tandem — or not. It’s up to them.
Pleroma-tan sees fedi as nothing less than the deocratized future of the social socials, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects, here and elsewhere. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Manhattan. Her ambitions might not be kinky, in other words, but they are fluffy. For now, call her an insurgent wonder worker — on whom the sun still shines.
