Jack Dorsey skipped ActivityPub, built AtProto, lost Twitter, funded Bluesky, watched it become a company with VCs and a board, said it was "repeating all the mistakes," left, and now funds Nostr.

@renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup rich people who believe in the vision and want to see the future you're promising. They might not expect a 10x return, but let's not kid ourselves, they're putting in because there's something in it for them and they get a nice tax write-off.

If your donors stop donating because they no longer believe in the vision/team/etc, then that'll limit the project. You need these wealthy donors to stay happy, as much as Bluesky PBC needs their investors to stay happy.

Wealthy people with money to give/invest in support of a future you've sold them.

@thisismissem @renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup you do still agree there is a massive difference between a donation and an investment right?

@ikuturso @renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup it's really not that massive. It's still money from a billionaire.

@mastodonmigration @baralheia @cwebber in Christine's article (and I've just spoken with her about it), it assumes a network topology that does not exist in the real world.

It assumes that every user is on a different pds, and every user runs a full network relay. The reality is that multiple users are usually on a single PDS, and there's only like 12 relays.

- 2 from bluesky (+ 1 deprecated)
- 2 from hose.cam
- 1 from blacksky
- 1 from upcloud
- 3 from firehose.network

plus a few more from various people.

In the ActivityPub ecosystem for every user to message every other user, you need connections between 30,000 servers.

For the same in AT Protocol, you need connections between N PDS to one or more relays (most use the bluesky relay, which others get their list of PDSes from).

@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia My analysis assumes a network architecture in which each node is a major participant in the functionality of the network, because as I argue in the piece, from a power distribution perspective of decentralization, it is important. What I describe in the piece is that if you want more than a pantheon of gods-eye view participants, then not having addressed delivery means that the system can't scale down.

And this is true: you can run a gotosocial node that isn't *dependent* on other major players in the network, and it scales down great.

The question is whether or not that matters and is important to people. Maybe it doesn't, I don't know. It matters to me, though.

@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia I also think that the ATmosphere and the fediverse could both learn a lot from each other. ATproto could adopt directed messaging, and the fediverse could adopt content addressing and portable identity, both of which I believe are important. This isn't a pivot, I have been saying these things *since 2017*, before ActivityPub became a recommendation, and before ATproto even came on the scene, including even in my co-proposal with Jay Graeber about what Bluesky could be, and including in the articles referenced previously.

Unfortunately, I think there is a real risk that the fediverse is going to learn the *wrong* lessons from the ATmosphere, and adopt some of its "shared centralization" components, rather than the decentralization components that ATproto has that the fediverse doesn't yet.

@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @quillmatiq @dansup @evan I appreciate this information, but my main interest in modern decentralized social media protocols is for social media (microblogging, as well as picture & video sharing), and I am not a developer - just a nerd. My primary concern in all of this is I simply don't trust Bluesky PBLLC. That's why complete and total independence from their infrastructure from a microblogging standpoint is important to me before I would ever consider using an ATproto-based service as my primary social media platform. While I'm okay using community resources for now, I *want* the ability to host my own completely independent full stack so I would never need to rely on a company or community to stand up a relay or AppView or something. I can do that easily and *cheaply* today with Mastodon or WAFRN (the ActivityPub side of it, anyway) or Pixelfed or Loops - it's not a big lift because these platforms were already designed with the full stack as a single deployment. This makes the network highly resistant to adversarial takeover, especially as things exist *right now*. It's a far, far, far bigger lift to stand up a similarly independent full stack of Bluesky (for example), and far far far easier for the majority of the network to be compromised if all statuses must be funneled through corporate or community chokepoints.

Tl;dr if I can't easily host a full stack that can run completely on it's own (while still being able to federate with others), that's not independence. *Every* service built on top of ActivityPub can give me that independence *by design*. It's the difference between human-scale networking and corporate-scale networking.

If there's an easy, lightweight, fully independent way for me to participate in Bluesky-compatible microblogging on ATproto with an experience that is comparable to what I'd get from using Bluesky directly, I'm interested to learn more - because I'm not currently aware of anything like that. I can get that from multiple platforms on AP *today*.

@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia I also think that the ATmosphere and the fediverse could both learn a lot from each other. ATproto could adopt directed messaging, and the fediverse could adopt content addressing and portable identity, both of which I believe are important. This isn't a pivot, I have been saying these things *since 2017*, before ActivityPub became a recommendation, and before ATproto even came on the scene, including even in my co-proposal with Jay Graeber about what Bluesky could be, and including in the articles referenced previously.

Unfortunately, I think there is a real risk that the fediverse is going to learn the *wrong* lessons from the ATmosphere, and adopt some of its "shared centralization" components, rather than the decentralization components that ATproto has that the fediverse doesn't yet.

@quillmatiq @dansup I do know how toxic the response was to Bridgy Fed when Ryan first announced the Bluesky bridge, and I think his ability to weather that storm will go down as one of the most heroic efforts in the history of the social web.

@thisismissem @stefan the reason for doing this multiplier is not so much for getting MAU right in absolute terms, but because mastodon/fedi MAU data also includes lurkers in their data. So you need it to get a fair comparison between fedi and the atmosphere

@evan @quillmatiq @dansup

To be fair, most of what I saw against Bridgy Fed wasn't against _bridging_. It was against (a) the initial decision to make it opt-out, (b) the justification "if we make it opt-in, people might not opt in, so making it opt-out will make it more useful". After Ryan listened to people explaining what's wrong with that, and switched to opt-in (respect to him for listening), I don't remember seeing further opposition, though of course there could've been some I didn't see.

@evan @quillmatiq @dansup

To be fair, most of what I saw against Bridgy Fed wasn't against _bridging_. It was against (a) the initial decision to make it opt-out, (b) the justification "if we make it opt-in, people might not opt in, so making it opt-out will make it more useful". After Ryan listened to people explaining what's wrong with that, and switched to opt-in (respect to him for listening), I don't remember seeing further opposition, though of course there could've been some I didn't see.

@mastodonmigration @baralheia decentralized *where* and *how*

Is ActivityPub really decentralized when everyone builds for compatibility with Mastodon (apart from Lemmy) or is it only decentralized in operations? Where mastodon.social accounts for a significant portion of the network? What about Pixelfed? How much decentralization there? Loops? I think there's only really one maybe two loops servers of any size?

Decentralization doesn't mean "run absolutely everything myself", I mean, sure, you *could* but that's expensive, complicated, and time consuming. Moderation? Most servers just import some blocklist snapshot at a given point in time.

Thing is, decentralization isn't the goal, the goal is better social apps.

Decentralization focuses on technology, not people. It's the "how" not the "why" and "for who"

@laurenshof So your estimate is based on one "skeet" from a CTO of a company with a multi-million dollar VC "loan" that *needs* their numbers to look good?

Fair enough!

@thisismissem

@stefan @thisismissem

two, not one: https://bsky.app/profile/laurenshof.online/post/3lf7v2h2ygk2f

@dansup@mastodon.social there are walls.. perhaps you don't see them because Pixelfed is large enough that it gets benefit of the doubt.

I got called a VC funded tech bro once, simply because that person found their public posts and profile on NodeBB (because, you know, federation), and absolutely did not back down until their instance's mod told them to quit it.

The smaller devs doing interesting things with fedi get absolutely fucked over for simply exposing the fact that... public stuff is public. 🤯

That's not even getting into any of the tech arguments that make AP federation harder than it should be.

@thisismissem@hachyderm.io @evan@cosocial.ca @quillmatiq@mastodon.social

@julian @dansup @thisismissem @evan @quillmatiq

I need to call this one out, sorry.

"The smaller devs doing interesting things with fedi get absolutely fucked over for simply exposing the fact that... public stuff is public"

More and more, people joining this space are entirely unaware that this is a technical foundation of the space, and more and more people come to me as a service provider asking me why their content is on Web sites they did not sign up for.

@julian @dansup @thisismissem @evan @quillmatiq

I understand why.

You understand why.

Thousands of people do not, and tens and hundreds of thousands being invited in will also not understand this.

We need to do better than "public is public".

@mastodonmigration @baralheia @cwebber on activitypub, if I have 30,000 followers (1 follower per server), and I want to post a message, my server has to send out 30,000 messages.

In AT Protocol, if I want to do the same write operation, I send one http request to my PDS, the PDS then publishes that message to N connected relays (where N =< 12)

A cool project you may like is appviewlite: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite

You can run an appview entirely locally--i was even able to run this on my phone.

Its possible to directly crawl PDSes, meaning there's no reliance on a relay.

There's also https://reddwarf.app, which runs entirely in your browser, without an appview or relay.

And there's wafrn (which I'm using right now), which natively supports atproto and activitypub. It has its own appview, but it currently uses an external appview for notifications and fetching possible missing posts iirc.