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.
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@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".
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@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".
@jaz@toot.wales fair, and I'm certainly open to user education, but I refuse to engage with individuals who have demonized me from step 1.
I'm not planning to put in the effort to try to win back the trust of someone when I didn't do a damn thing to lose it.
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@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)
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia @cwebber
I would argue that neither the AP nor atproto are built directly for patterns of human communication that exist in the real world.
The "everyone messages everyone else and must have access to any message from anyone at any time" pattern embodied by the present Bluesky is not a real human way of communicating and forming communities, it is a figment of tech companies' imaginations and represents a massive amount of over-indexing that relies on, and therefore tends towards, centralized platforms.
The "everyone preferentially messages people in their nearby vicinity but sometimes people further away" view embodied by most present Fediverse software assumes a flat social network in which "non-local" is functionally the same in all cases and does not model human social networks very well.
AP assumes you are building bunch of villages with a flat road network between them. atproto assumes you are building Saudi Arabia's The Line.
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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.
@irelephant yup, and this weird protocol tribalism hurts projects like wafrn and bridgyfed, because it drives a wedge between two communities that roughly care about the same thing: better social media/networking.
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@cwebber
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia Content addressing and portable identity is so important and hurts so much everytime a server closes or (like me) had to switch domain name.@maswan @cwebber @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia ActivityPub is mostly fine with decoupling domain name and identity. From my understanding, you could have an activitypub account on a self-hosted server and have multiple domain name have webfinger software point to it and that account would have multiple handle.
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@maswan @cwebber @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia ActivityPub is mostly fine with decoupling domain name and identity. From my understanding, you could have an activitypub account on a self-hosted server and have multiple domain name have webfinger software point to it and that account would have multiple handle.
@gkrnours @maswan @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia ActivityPub is mostly oblivious to the concept of "instances". It's more actor model, and more like sending mail, and less like villages. Heck, ActivityPub doesn't even have webfinger. Technically, sharedInbox doesn't even need to be on the same domain!
Both instances-as-important and webfinger are activitypub-in-practice rather than activitypub-as-written. But maybe that's immaterial. "The purpose of the fediverse is what it does"???
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@skarnio @mastodonmigration @baralheia as someone *actively* developing on AT Protocol, I can tell you that Bluesky PBC could disappear tomorrow, and we'd just work around it. There's complete mirrors of the did:plc directory, and we'd just pick one to replace the existing directory. Sure, it'd be hugely disruptive, but life would go on. We would work around it.
There's alternative relays, hostile migration of PDSes is possible, and changing the plc directory is possible. Blacksky probably couldn't handle all of Bluesky's users suddenly all using it, because they're still new, but *shrug* life would go on.
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia When I talk about governance, the "disappearance" of a corporation is the least of the problems. The problem is what that for-profit corporation can do to the network while it retains total control. As long as the code doesn't officially transfer its governance to the community in the form of a non-profit organization or something similar, the technology will continue to be controlled by a corporation. Even with the best intentions of the contributors (which I believe are truly very good), that's the reality.
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@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia When I talk about governance, the "disappearance" of a corporation is the least of the problems. The problem is what that for-profit corporation can do to the network while it retains total control. As long as the code doesn't officially transfer its governance to the community in the form of a non-profit organization or something similar, the technology will continue to be controlled by a corporation. Even with the best intentions of the contributors (which I believe are truly very good), that's the reality.
@skarnio @mastodonmigration @baralheia but there is code, that does the same thing that is owned by a community: https://blackskyweb.xyz
Bluesky isn't the only group building the protocol layer parts. The spec is going to the IETF for standardisation, did:plc is being transfered to a swiss association.
So bluesky has as much control over the network as we let them have.
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@skarnio @mastodonmigration @baralheia but there is code, that does the same thing that is owned by a community: https://blackskyweb.xyz
Bluesky isn't the only group building the protocol layer parts. The spec is going to the IETF for standardisation, did:plc is being transfered to a swiss association.
So bluesky has as much control over the network as we let them have.
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia Great. Our main problem isn't technology, but politics... the more independent we can be from corporations, the better. I'll look into this information. Thank you!
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@gkrnours @maswan @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia ActivityPub is mostly oblivious to the concept of "instances". It's more actor model, and more like sending mail, and less like villages. Heck, ActivityPub doesn't even have webfinger. Technically, sharedInbox doesn't even need to be on the same domain!
Both instances-as-important and webfinger are activitypub-in-practice rather than activitypub-as-written. But maybe that's immaterial. "The purpose of the fediverse is what it does"???
@gkrnours @maswan @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia Still, if I am going to sad-cassandra-complex about it, which of course I do all the time, I do think it would be completely possible to build a social network system that's even *more* flat than AP-in-practice is today, and I think some decisions along the way, while made for good reasons, ultimately make that harder.
But, as @vv reminded me the other day (about @spritely actually), "You aren't going to have control over when people start using your tools and when they do, you will always feel like you weren't quite ready for that moment."
Which is universal... not just on the fediverse, but the ATmosphere too.
I have more to say about this soon. It's been over a year since I wrote my pieces analyzing how decentralized the Fediverse vs Bluesky/the ATmosphere is, and it deserves a revisit. Ultimately, I think my core analysis was fully correct, but the ecosystems have changed.
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@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia Great. Our main problem isn't technology, but politics... the more independent we can be from corporations, the better. I'll look into this information. Thank you!
@skarnio @mastodonmigration @baralheia yeah, and it's a very niche form of political tribalism around protocols, which in the grand scheme of things, don't really matter to every day people.
Protocols are just a means to an end user product that's simple and joyful to use.
There's interesting design choices on both sides, but at the end of the day, it's better to have two open protocols collaborating and being up against walled garden tech giants together.
Like, the repayable repository structure in AT Protocol, or the OAuth profile that they use would be s huge win to the ActivityPub ecosystem to adopt. The "apps are separate from identity and data" is also a vision in the original spirit of ActivityPub (client to server)
I'm just so sick of folks trying to divide what are otherwise two similar projects, where each project could learn a lot from esch other.
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@gkrnours @maswan @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia Still, if I am going to sad-cassandra-complex about it, which of course I do all the time, I do think it would be completely possible to build a social network system that's even *more* flat than AP-in-practice is today, and I think some decisions along the way, while made for good reasons, ultimately make that harder.
But, as @vv reminded me the other day (about @spritely actually), "You aren't going to have control over when people start using your tools and when they do, you will always feel like you weren't quite ready for that moment."
Which is universal... not just on the fediverse, but the ATmosphere too.
I have more to say about this soon. It's been over a year since I wrote my pieces analyzing how decentralized the Fediverse vs Bluesky/the ATmosphere is, and it deserves a revisit. Ultimately, I think my core analysis was fully correct, but the ecosystems have changed.
@cwebber @maswan @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia @vv @spritely from my point of view, which is a bit naive and superficial, more flat mean more message between actor which is less efficient. Meanwhile, I think the current design could "proxy server" with little work. Instance that would provide a handle with a domain, forward message and little more. Then specialized light-weight server, easier to self host, could take advantage of that.
I need to write a PoC for that -
@cwebber @maswan @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia @vv @spritely from my point of view, which is a bit naive and superficial, more flat mean more message between actor which is less efficient. Meanwhile, I think the current design could "proxy server" with little work. Instance that would provide a handle with a domain, forward message and little more. Then specialized light-weight server, easier to self host, could take advantage of that.
I need to write a PoC for that@gkrnours @cwebber @maswan @mastodonmigration @baralheia @vv that would probably be an interesting prototype!
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@vetehinen @mastodonmigration @baralheia @skarnio
ActivityPub is also a standard with a few dominant players involved, who get to decide things for the rest of the network. The difference you think is here really isn't.
There's like 20-30 people that work on standards in ActivityPub, maybe 200 implementers I'd guess.
Like, it's a small community, and some people/organisations have significant power in the dynamics of this network.
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@dansup capital corrupts. Nearly every damn time.
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@skarnio @mastodonmigration @baralheia yeah, and it's a very niche form of political tribalism around protocols, which in the grand scheme of things, don't really matter to every day people.
Protocols are just a means to an end user product that's simple and joyful to use.
There's interesting design choices on both sides, but at the end of the day, it's better to have two open protocols collaborating and being up against walled garden tech giants together.
Like, the repayable repository structure in AT Protocol, or the OAuth profile that they use would be s huge win to the ActivityPub ecosystem to adopt. The "apps are separate from identity and data" is also a vision in the original spirit of ActivityPub (client to server)
I'm just so sick of folks trying to divide what are otherwise two similar projects, where each project could learn a lot from esch other.
@thisismissem @skarnio @baralheia
Again, apologies for not following all of this discussion at a detailed technical level, but reject the accusation of protocol tribalism as it implies irrational advocacy of one system over the other.
The goal here is to understand the way two different networks scale, and whether from an practical standpoint each enables power sharing sufficient to actually be resilient to a principle bad actor.
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@vetehinen @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia There is a very big difference between the W3C and its relationship with the AP community and the Bluesky Social PBC.
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@thisismissem @skarnio @baralheia
Again, apologies for not following all of this discussion at a detailed technical level, but reject the accusation of protocol tribalism as it implies irrational advocacy of one system over the other.
The goal here is to understand the way two different networks scale, and whether from an practical standpoint each enables power sharing sufficient to actually be resilient to a principle bad actor.
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@thisismissem @skarnio @baralheia
The assertion has been made that AT Protocol exhibits quadratic scaling amoung independent nodes. If this is the case, it is very hard to see how it can scale 'wide.' And, we seem to be seeing evidence of this as people like Blacksky attempt to do so.
The reason for concern about this is the political environment we live in where bad actors can, and do, acquire control of social media networks and assert political influence thereby.
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Honestly, it has nothing to do with fighting each other. The concern is the continued dependence of AT Proto on Bluesky PBC, and what happens if the management of the company asserts an agenda. But, that is a discussion for another forum.
@mastodonmigration @thisismissem @baralheia Well, and more likely, what happens if the PBC can't find a business model and shuts down?
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@vetehinen @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia There is a very big difference between the W3C and its relationship with the AP community and the Bluesky Social PBC.
@skarnio @vetehinen @mastodonmigration @baralheia but as we've previously discussed, AT Protocol isn't going to live with Bluesky PBC, it's being standardised at the IETF, where a working group is in the final stages of being setup.
Also, historically, ActivityPub was based on a technology Evan's startup created, and it only later became ActivityPub through standardisation efforts.
