Oh, I misunderstood. So you mean federating with their network from other software implementing the AT Protocol? From skimming the docs it looks like it should be possible as long as you implement the correct schemas, but I didn’t dive very deep.
No it doesn't. If other people on bluesky servers want to see your content then obviously it will go through bluesky servers, but if you connect to a 3rd party relay and use a separate appview like zeppelin.social and use DID:Web for account ID then nothing involving the bluesky servers was used and it still behaves like native
PDSes only store user data. These are full instances that can be used to browse the network. The idea is to make your account really yours. Bluesky is hosting most of them. But there are some people who do it on their own.
But bluesky controls much more important components in the network, namely the Relay and AppView.
If Bluesky decides to cut off your PDS you are pretty much alone.
Bluesky is pretty much a centralized platform like Twittler.
Moderation is a crucial aspect of any social network. However, traditional moderation systems often lack transparency and user control, leaving communities vulnerable to sudden policy changes and potential mismanagement.
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O.
Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.
Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don't get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.
The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though...
I'm with you. To my knowledge all my irl woke friends ride only mainstream social media.
I had a local anarchist reach out to me on my ancient FB Messenger of all things.
I get that it's not the most important part if you're doing prefiguration, but as far as I can tell most people just want to be where most people are, even if it is supporting actually vile corporations.
Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.
Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.
Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra "stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions" endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.
this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details
Not weird at all; this was the case with cryptocurrency too. Otherwise qualified and intelligent people would invest in centralized scam coins because they had no understanding of economics, just tech.
It's sad but cool that it works the same way with social capital.
Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.
Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.
I feel like this speaks to an unchallenged myth in our society. That corporate organizations and government organizations are somehow completely categorically different from one another such that they exist in totally separate spheres of reality. But they're both political groups of people, exercising power over the peasants. It's not as different as people think. And they often have similar goals and use similar strategies, like propaganda, to achieve them.
Because, despite being wildly impractical, it's technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized. Only recent a new host launched called Black sky. So it is no longer just one host. But it's been one host for so long it almost doesn't matter because so few people will switch.
Because, despite being wildly impractical, it’s technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized.
Yes exactly, it reminds me of the logic of cryptocurrency boosters. I just found out that the bluesky CEO (not to mention jack dorsey) are both crypto advocates so it makes a lot more sense now.
In 2015, Graber began working as a software engineer for SkuChain in Mountain View, California. She then worked in a factory in Moses Lake, Washington, where she soldered bitcoin mining equipment. In 2016, she began working as a junior developer for the Zcash cryptocurrency.
So lately I have been trying to figure out why people are calling BlueSky decentralized and I noticed that fun fact. It made me realize how cryptocurrencies are something else that was often technically "decentralized" but in reality controlled by a single person or group.
In case it's also not known, Jack Dorsey who helped found BlueSky is a big cryptocurrency booster.
Doesn't BS have things in it's software that are hard coded to the main server, so it's not possible to make a completely independent host at the moment?
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O.
Technically, yes, if you squint; but, practically, no. It was designed with a prioritization of passing the information/data around to avoid any lack of missing anything (so you get a closer experience to the connectedness of Twitter than Mastodon) which means every instance hosts, basically, the entire world. Naturally, there's only going to be a few entities that can store and afford to store the entirety of the data of the network. There's no such thing as a small instance, in their protocol.
In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage. That is a nearly 5x increase in just four months, and my guess is that by next month, we'll see that doubled to at least ten terabytes due to the massive switchover to Bluesky which has happened post-election. As Bluesky grows in popularity, so does the rate of growth of the expected resources to host a meaningfully participating node.
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O.
They fixed the large cache needed to validate all traffic on your own relay. Now the cost is mostly bandwidth and whatever CPU power you want to spend on indexing
It's where the useful idiots are being herded. They are using it because it's "not twitter" and other people are influencing them. They don't care about decentralization.
Would have been nice if they went to Mastodon, but I wouldn't call them idiots. I don't use that media format, but if there isn't a lot of users there, I cant see the service being that useful to the users who do go there. It's like Lemmy struggles with niches. Not enough people, want to find something or ask someone about something, you'll hit a wall and find yourself looking for results elsewhere. Someday hopefully, but that movement from Twitter would have been a great time for activity pub to shine if it hadn't gotten skipped over
Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it's usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.
They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it's just a buzzword, I believe.
Wasn't there a similar promise made by Reddit at some point? I remember people referring it to often until it became just some myth ... and then at one point, people just realized it was never going to change and then it became a full blown private corporation that wanted an IPO and became a monolith that never even considered sharing anything.
I honestly have no idea, that would be going much farther back in Reddit's history than I was on the platform for. It reminds me of Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto, though. It's true until somebody realizes that there's a lot of money to be made doing the thing that you said you wouldn't do.
This site currently measures the concentration of user data for active users: in the Fediverse, this data is on servers (also known as instances); in the Atmosphere, it is on the PDSes that host users' data repos. All PDSes run by the company Bluesky Social PBC are aggregated in this dataset, since they are under the control of a single entity. Similarly, mastodon.social and mastodon.online are combined as they are run by the same company.
If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.
And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that's entirely fair. But if you're looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don't see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It's a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time
This is only true of Bluesky because everyone is using Bluesky's infrastructure at the moment. If Bluesky ever deindexes someone and they start posting to an alternative relay, you suddenly don't have a guarantee of a full view of a post's replies.
Content addressing means you can make your instance pull from both their relay and the bluesky relay and trivially merge threads and views without consistency issues, so that's solvable.
The bigger issue is all those other regular users who doesn't, and still get confused (unless they manage to pick a client app that does it for them)
I mean, this would become less trivial the more replays go into use, where to get a full view you'd have to pull from all the relays that exist.
ActivityPub's solution to this is just IMO better, the original post has a replies collection attached to it that acts as the authority the replies the post has. This also allows creators to eject replies from the collection. There are issues with the way fedi software currently handles fetching from these reply collections, but the missing replies thing is very solvable in ActivityPub.
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user's post goes viral.
And as for moderation bluesky also carries information with the top post from the post author and allows hiding replies too, etc. This gets enforced on the appview side, so the posting user's PDS is unscathed if it goes viral.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
Realistically, the relay network will likely end up voluntarily adopting a tree topology - hobbyist communities would run small relays bundling all activity from members' PDS servers, then a larger relay in front gathers everything from a ton of smaller relays and makes it available to appviews
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user’s post goes viral.
Setting up caching in the reverse proxy layer would alleviate this a lot of this. Like, GoToSocial only recommends to set up caching for the key and webfinger endpoints, where having it set up to cache posts and profiles for like 60 seconds (or however long the Cache-Control header says, Mastodon defaults to 180s) would alleviate the strain on the server so much.
There are other thing you can do, like this post explains some other things for Misskey, but the defaults should be sensible so you don't have to be a sysadmin expert to host an instance and they're currently not. I host 2 Lemmy instances (ukfli.uk and sappho.social) from a £5/month VPS and they're able to handle bursts of hundreds of requests without issue.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
People are already building small, non-archival relays so this assumption seems mute. It's also important to remember that relays are an optimisation, not a core part of the protocol.
i'm so tired of these posts. okay, fediverse, you won! you are more decentralized than bluesky. maybe it's time to create real useful and interesting content instead of reveling in your elitism?
first, no, it's fair to say regardless of how often i create content. posts like this is cancer, which adds nothing to the platform. second, even on this account my last post was 1 month ago.
I mean I agree... it's kind of the constant crux isn't it?
The IT nerds pick a protocol that's uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because... well obviously that's kind of the definition of uncontrolled.
Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc... that most people care about flock there.
Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify... open communities announce "hey we've got our alternative here", they say "thanks but nah that's too complicated, and you don't have the users that I want to see anyway". People complain more... and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal... or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.
I don't really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter... fundimentally I don't see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say... a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that's actually... well hostable.
It's basically like exactly what happens out in the real world... walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors... local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down... half of owners, etc... forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.
I think the difference is that while other services boom and bust, the fediverse keeps growing slowly because it is decentralized, and can't be enshittified in the same way.
It is not as easy or attractive as Bluesky right now, but it keeps growing slowly and getting more kinds of people.
Maybe it won't be the network of choice for journalists, metal celebrities, etc, like twitter and bluesky, but it already is making its way as something more like old school tumblr -- some people like it, some don't.
It's a double reference to osu player Cookiezi's two plays on Blue Zenith's [FOUR DIMENSIONS] difficulty using HR and HDHR respectively getting 727pp in both plays with a miss right around the end, and Aireu's reaction after getting a 727pp play
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Wouldn't that work more with a client or a server software than the protocol itself? The protocol shares the posts. It's the client and the instance which chooses what the user sees.
It's possible I'd say. The fediverse is very cool in how much choice it gives you without limiting who you interact with too much (except lemmy where you cannot follow users)
It's doable on Mastodon but significantly more complicated.
You need crawlers to index posts across the Fediverse (and avoid getting them blocked), personalized recommendation models per user, and you need pre-emptive caching on the user's instance for anything recommended (ideally the crawler would make a cache on behalf of each of the opted-in users' instances, but without content addressing this is a security risk). You also need to poll for edits / deletions.
On Mastodon, your instance doesn't receive posts until somebody on your instance interacts with the account posting it (following the poster, browsing directly to the post, etc).
Feeds with recommendations requires fetching stuff in advance to not be slow and janky. Basically the feed service would need a bot account on your instance and retrieving all popular posts, given the current architecture. Having thousands of these bots across every instance do this would cause a significant performance hit on smaller Mastodon instances when one of their users posts something popular. So you need something different, like a server plugin where the bot fetches the content once and tells all participating Mastodon servers about their cached copy, so they don't all have to hit the hosting instance. But that's a security risk with the Mastodon design.
Private posts is planned, but it's not trivial. Mastodon can't exactly brag about their nonintuitive technically just not broadcasted posts, where multiple implementations keep making private messages publicly discoverable due to bugs.
What kind of implementations do you mean? The last time I heard of such a thing (a few years ago), it was fixed within a few hours, and was on a dev instance
Federation requires openness and that goes badly with secrecy. You can argue that one has to trust instance owners anyway, but knowing the users and not just the tallies makes uncovering manipulation easier.
It's doable with E2E encryption, but lots of social stuff in large groups requires coordination which is incredibly hard to with a server that has no knowledge of what the data is because it can't index anything, etc.
They're implementing E2E encrypted social stuff. Voting privacy and encryption is linked.
Especially when you have users across multiple servers and both want voting privacy AND being able to deal with vote manipulation. You need stuff like pseudonymous commitments per account attested to by the hosting instance, etc. The only thing that's simpler but still private is having instances just digitally sign a total vote tally, which also means you can't detect vote manipulation on other servers at all.
I can check if my votes are federated correctly by checking if any of my votes are suppressed or votes in my name are made up. If my instance sends a different random token with each vote, I can still do that, as long as I know which tokens are assigned to my votes.
But vote tallies can also be manipulated by making up new votes through fake/bot accounts. If a vote can be connected to posts, this can be checked to some degree. Say, if an instance has a lot of voters that never post, that indicates a problem.
The very very short TLDR is that anonymization is very hard, but there's auditable cryptographic voting schemes which preserves anonymity by using anonymous cryptographic commitments and one of a bunch of different techniques to count encrypted votes (homomorphic encryption, threshold encryption, etc).
You could set it up so you know which server each set of votes comes from but not which users on the server. You could also make it prove each vote comes from one real account and that no account voted twice. You could even make use of commitments plus ZKP to prove banned accounts can't vote!
It sounds complicated because it is complicated. And somewhat inefficient. But it's possible. And it would be fully encrypted and anonymous voting.
A discoverable non-banned account. Not from "ghost accounts". If a server creates a massive amount of accounts to use them to vote, you can see that a small server has a disproportionate amount of registered accounts too, which probably will be otherwise inactive. Then you can reject votes from that server.
I assume it proves that there is a public key associated with each vote.
It doesn't sound like cryptography is able to add anything worthwhile. You have to trust the instance to police itself. Self-hosted instances still don't vote anonymously.
A group of users has to cooperate to hide their votes from others and each other. Only the tally is known, but you have to trust the group. On the Fediverse, such a group will be the users of an instance. The more users the instance has, the more anonymous the individual becomes.
You have to trust the instance admins to weed out bots and sock puppets, which is extra hard when they don't see the votes either. Presumably, compensating by collecting and keeping other data, such as IPs, for longer is undesirable. You have to believe that admins, volunteers all, are willing to do the extra work and that they don't actually favor manipulation for ideological reasons.
The only way to uncover untrustworthy instances is to look at aggregated data. I guess you'd have to get/scrape data for some community and then analyze by instance if the number of posters is out of whack with the number of voters. I wonder if anyone's ever done such a thing. It's certainly more challenging than looking at oddities among voters who brigade some topic.
Admins of large instances could get away with having many sock voters among the real users, if they wanted to manipulate discussions for, say, ideological reasons.
Im trying to get more content on a few hobby communities on lemmy. I’m not really a big poster. I love to comment. But I’m willing to go through and start trying to build some momentum.
It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.
Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of "Lemmy" could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.
ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀
It's a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.
otoh, atproto's PLC DID method is also not really decentralized... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).
This is a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful (and widely read) "How decentralized is Bluesky really?" blog post.
I am so happy and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public.
... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
In the blog post you linked, neither the author or myself came to your conclusion:
However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.
There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its "credible exit" (Bluesky's own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.
My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more "decentralized architecturally" I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.
Okay yes this makes sense. Although, honestly i think I'd prefer the AP method of doing it because BlueSky sends ALL content to all nodes, so it's MUCH less cost effective to join with a private server.
I run my own lemmy instance, so i know the data volume since 2023 has been probably like a terabyte or so. But, with BlueSky I'd have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes (a guess based almost entirely on nothing).
So it really boils down to yes I agree that AP has problems with data accessibility, but I'd prefer that over unnecessary data redundancy
with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes
I think this is a common misconception based on some critics' incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) "A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month" for some numbers.
If I understand correctly, to run a "full nework relay" does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren't interested in for any long period of time.
Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people's relays.
Disclaimer: I'm not an atproto expert, and I haven't set any of this up myself.
So like when bluesky starts having to pay back their investors I can portable my identity to.... one of the other equally populated blueskies out there?
We're counting hypotheticals as real now? I suppose your not-hypothetical girlfriend goes to another school too, right? Just not motivated to visit?
As you're no doubt aware, the reason 99.9% of bluesky users are on a single server is obviously not because "nobody is motivated" to create other servers.
I'm just going to respond to what you said before you edited your comment to be a reaction gif.
Since (as of November of last year) a majority of Bluesky's user base is non-technical, they have don't have the knowledge or motivation to switch to another PDS. If 30 million users joined mastodon.social, the fediverse would also be centralized.
The only way for Bluesky to be decentralized by the metrics you use is for them to force users onto other PDSes.
this is where there can be disagreement, specifically if someone wants help with an issue they don't care if the person is great thunburg or x_h1tt1er42069_x they just want a solution
I’m just not wasting my time trying to have a conversation with x_h1tt1er42069_x. I can find him at anytime on Reddit if I have a problem that only he has a Solution.
Having such a person in this community wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience.
I'm always shocked by the number of of BlueSky fans that show up on Lemmy. If they don't care about centralization why are they here and not on Reddit?
Because they've been told it's federated and don't understand that it really isn't. My bluesky profile reads "Created a profile until you all figure out Bluesky is another Twitter."
All I use it for is to read post from people not on mastodon and to reshare my bridged posts from mastodon.
Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about "not Reddit" and "not Twitter." I'm one of those users personally (not that I don't care about the idea, it's good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.
If I didn't dislike the Twitter format as much, I'd probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I'd probably be on Tumblr still if I didn't only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn't have such a horrible app.
People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn't care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by "newest posts first" went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.
The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you're into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants' company towns.
Oh yeah sure. I'm here after all, jumped ship from Reddit a year or so ago and I actually prefer Lemmy.
I jumped ship from twitter to mastodon around the same time. And while I like the idea of mastodon and I like the interface, fact is that Reddit / lemmy is a different sort of usage from twitter / bluesky / mastodon. Twitter I mostly used to keep up with my favourite content creators, and occasionally shout at clouds. Those content creators just aren't on mastodon, they've mostly moved to bluesky. Those are the users that are the foundation of a platform like that. So yeah, I use lemmy and bluesky now.
TBH I'm not sure mastodon could scale up big anyway - it would be a nightmare trying to regulate bad content and comply with local laws etc.
Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there's a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?
How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon?
The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?
BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.
It's the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren't federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.
The economy is also global, so, no. I mean, some indigenous people living as they have for a long time might be ok for a while. And I'd include some of the subsistance farmers from the poorer countries of the world, they still have the right skills. Everyone else, no.
Oh right of course, the economy being globalized also means everyone everywhere has the same standard of living, perfectly equally distributing resources despite massive local and regional differences in geography, culture, populatiion density, thank god communism has been achieved.
Also, of course, climate change will just have precisely the same climatic effects over all of these highly varied areas.
And finally, it certainly will not be the case that industrialized and militarized technologically advanced societies will displace and dispose of any indigenous populations on now relatively fertile land, nor will poor subsistence farmers who already live on extremely thin margins be obliterated by the slightest breach of those margins... or just physically displaced by rising sea levels or floods or fires literally permanently destroying the land they work.
No, there are just no historical precedents for anything like that, no.
Climate change was even mentioned in a mainstream movie in 1958. Specifically, “Indiscreet,” a charming romantic comedy starring two of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the time, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
In this innocuous scene, the two lead characters (Philip and Anna) have recently met and are out on their first date. To break the tense, awkward silence during a painfully long elevator ride, Anna attempts to make casual small talk with Philip.
————
INT. ELEVATOR:
ANNA: It’s unusual for the weather to be so muggy this time of year.
PHILIP: Yes, I read an article the other day that claimed the world’s weather was changing.
ANNA: Really? That’s interesting.
PHILIP: Yes, isn’t it?
———— Yes, Philip, it IS interesting. And you should’ve shared that article with Anna’s brother-in-law, the diplomat! Then we might not all BE in this situation…Philip! 😡
The first mentions of climate change are well over 100 years old.
It’s like Y2K; the first person to realize that it was going to be a problem did so in the 1950s, and it hit mainstream again in the 70s. But we didn’t throw billions at the problem until the mid 90s…
Except this time there is likely no amount of money that can keep the climate train from hitting the wall. But we might be able to slow the train down a little.
I really wonder what scenarios the billionaires have envisioned. After they close the hatches, what use do the security people have for a billionaire? Money is worthless and the billionaire, his family and all his friends will only consume limited resources faster. With no legal recourse on the outside, the security people will just kill everyone, loot the larders and live like kings.
This is why we need to teach the kids that if you find a mysterious air vent or hatch out in the wilderness you fill it with mud or pile rocks ontop of it.
And the next year, it will be worse, and the year after that worse than that. Until the oceans die, and the croplands, and a lot of the cities. Life will survive, probably our species too, but our civilization and the paradise world we currently inhabit will not.
"It’s so hot that even the famous cacti of the Sonoran Desert, such as the saguaro cactus —the Trident-like one you’ve seen in countless cartoons and cowboy movies —are struggling in the heat. They photosynthesize at night, when it gets a little cooler. But climate change
Has extended the times in which it is hot as hell not only further into the calendar year but further into the night. The saguaro cactus is struggling to photosynthesize when it’s still over 100 degrees, even after the sun has set."
Cacti, and plants in general, do not and cannot photosynthesize to any appreciable degree at night. Even the brightest, fullest moon and clearest sky full of stars is not enough light for this process to be effective/efficient. They do their carbon capture / gas exchange primarily at night, but that's a separate process and is not the same thing as photosynthesis.
But also, this whole section is just poorly formatted, unedited, incorrect, and badly written. Like even the tone seems to change in these "2" paragraphs. Why even include this in the article? It really undermines the rest of the content, in my opinion.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Honestly, I think it's good policy to announce when one is convinced that one's beliefs are wrong. Whether doing so preemptively is universally a good idea is debatable, but I thought it might be helpful for some who thought as I did and maybe it would even garner a laugh from you. Not that I know you in any particular manner.
All that cheerfulness and attempt at morality aside, it can be hard to take the same stance once one has defended one's position, so maybe this is good practice for when I've actually stated my beliefs and need to swallow my pride.
The world objectively would be a better place if more people spent more time second guessing themselves and their preconcieved knowledge sets and beliefs, in a way that at least resembled critical thinking.
Or, in less words... intellectual humility, as opposed to incurious and stubborn overconfidence.
That person has not yet allowed it, but I'm interested in what heartfelt compliment you have to offer them.
I know less about them than I do you (I've seen a few of your other posts on lemmy) so I'm genuinely curious. Complimenting strangers is a big part of my life and I'd like to learn from you.
Hah, I mean, I don't know them at all lol, my approach would just be to have a bit of chat about how their life has been going recently, and I'd bet I could find some admirable trait or accomplishment.
Or maybe they just dress particularly well, maybe they have a pleasant voice... possibilities are endless, so long as you keep and open mind and more or less just politely say what you really feel.
... Its funny, I am quite a cynic at a broad societal level, but actually person to person? Still tend toward naive optimist.
Coober Pedy, Australia found a solution for this one, about 50% of the town is underground. They've only ever hit 118.9° f though, so not quite beating Phoenix's 122° back in 1990.
Apple Intelligence is a set of generative AI programs and technologies designed and maintained by Apple.
Apple—one of the world’s most valuable companies—has invested substantial capital and engineering resources into Apple Intelligence. It regards Apple Intelligence as a breakthrough innovation that will make its users’ experiences “profoundly different” across various product applications. Through Apple Intelligence, Apple hopes to add trillions to its market capitalization in coming years.
But Apple is building part of this new enterprise using Books3, a dataset of pirated copyrighted books that includes the published works of Plaintiffs and the Class. Apple used Books3 to train its OpenELM language models. Apple also likely trained its Foundation Language Models using this same pirated dataset.
Apple is building another part of its Apple Intelligence empire by using Applebot, a software program that copies mass quantities of webpages (also known as “scraping”). Apple scraped data with Applebot for nearly nine years before disclosing that it intended to train its AI systems on this scraped data. Scrapers like Applebot can also reach “shadow libraries” that host millions of other unlicensed copyrighted books, including, on information and belief, Plaintiffs’ and Class Members’ copyrighted works.
The Foundation Language Models within Apple Intelligence depend on the contents of their training datasets. The Foundation Language Models operate by copying and later simulating creative expression found in copyrighted works. For this reason, the inclusion of expressive high-quality material—especially copyrighted material—in Apple’s AI training datasets is deliberate and commercially significant. For instance, to access even more copyrighted material to develop its valuable generative AI products, Apple entered into a multimillion-dollar licensing agreement with Shutterstock. But not with Plaintiffs or the Class.
Plaintiffs and the Class are authors who have registered copyrights for their published works. They did not consent to the use of their works in any Apple Intelligence model, including the Foundation Intelligence Models and OpenELM language models.
The licensing market for AI training data is burgeoning. Nevertheless, Apple did not compensate creators for use of their copyrighted works and concealed the sources of their training datasets to evade legal scrutiny. On information and belief, Apple continues to retain a private AI training-data library including thousands of pirated books to train its future models, without seeking Plaintiffs’ or Class Members’ consent or providing them compensation.
In sum, Apple has copied the copyrighted works of Plaintiffs and the Class to train AI models whose outputs compete with and dilute the market for those very works—works without which Apple Intelligence would have far less commercial value. This conduct has deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labor, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means.
A JOINT Services came under attack while transporting Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) officials and election materials near the Guyana-Venezuela border on
This is in my home state. The festival in question is Dasara and the inauguration is to offer first prayers to the deity and the procession of the idol on an elephant. This is a proper Hindu festival and procession. The issue here is not only that she is a Muslim, but she is staunchly against idol worship and has given many statements regarding the same. How can she inaugurate the procession and offer first prayers when she is opposed to it?
The political issue is that the openly Hindu hating party that is in power in the state (Indian National Congress) wants to do many such controversial things to degrade Hindus while chanting "secularism" and appeasing Muslims.
At JUPITER’s inauguration ceremony in Jülich, attended by Germany Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and NVIDIA unveiled ways the supercomputer is already spurring innovation across the world.
The majority of users lurk, and those that comment aren't all commenting on the same post. It's not at all plausible for 10% of the MAU to be commenting on one thread. Consider that no other thread sees anywhere close to those numbers, this is unheard of.
When I click that link, and go there in a browser without logging in, I only see 70ish comments listed. But I also see a lot of removed comments as I scroll down, mostly from a single user. My uneducated guess is that there was already some chicanery in the thread, which the Mods have dealt with, and you are seeing the result of that.
As far as what can be done about it, there really is little to be done, as log as Lemmy remains open (and federated). Posts and comments hop around from one instance to the other, and while some instances can take a hard line against bots some other instance can be more permissive then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole. Active, open moderation is the best cure, but takes effort.
Same, the comments created by a spammer have been deleted by the mods and the count in OP's screenshot still includes them, while 77 is the remaining count.
Which also explains my being banned from an instance after sleepily uninstalling my particular browser which stores passwords, rather than merely rm'ing from the home screen. I couldn't find my key at reinstallation, so had to rereg for some instances, then a few days later found it and was able to recover passwords. I can easily see why the admin of that instance assumed
Private instance, also clearly lying about forgetting password.
It happens. But I'm not bothering with re-regging.
@FuckingHellGenocida@lemmy.cafe has a ton of deleted comments, then this comment replies to one of them. in which @GenocideCuntFuckoff@lemmings.world replies over 2000 times.
You also have this comment asking about bots. To which JordanLund replies it is a single person running scripts. His reply garners nearly 1300 replies from @ZioDumbokrat69@lemmings.world
Between those two sets of replies, that is 3,310 of the comments. This is not counting the top level comment spam.
There are only a handful of comments remaining in the thread. Less than 20 legitimate comments.
Its all from one spammer who threadiverse folks regularly talk about needing to manage spam from (if I'm not mistaken about who it is. They change usernames all the time and I don't keep up with their accounts cause I'm not an admin)
The mods appear to have dealt with the issue appropriately. For me it only shows 77 comments as the "count", but there are like a bajillion deleted comments by the same guy
If it still says like a few thousand comments, it is because the bans of the people who spam commented stuff didn't make it to your server yet. Browsing this thread on lemmy.world just shows how many of them got removed
god that's toxic. is lemmings.world a common instance to see that kind of unhinged shit from? I'm considering blocking the instance to prevent ever interacting with one of that guy's alts
edit: apparently it's a known problem. but yeah it's only a matter of time before somebody like that starts hedging their bets and trying other places
I've heard about the Lemmy devs struggling financially to be able to support Lemmy in the past. A lot of users say they'd support the devs if they shut down lemmy.ml, but it can be hard to quantify the value of such statements.
Thus, a proposal: Some trusted team of admins from another instance, say .world or blahaj.zone for example, should set up an account for people who want to support Lemmy but not lemmy.ml to donate into. This account would immediately donate all the money sent to it, if and when lemmy.ml is shut down. The Lemmy devs could think of it as an emergency fund for a rainy day, and if the financial situation ever gets desperate enough for them, they could shut down lemmy.ml and draw on this fund.
A side effect of the fund's existence may be that people, now given the choice to support Lemmy without supporting lemmy.ml, stop donating to the devs directly and just put their money in the no-ml fund instead. if that happened, the devs would have no choice but to shut down .ml, but hey, that's the free gift economy for you.
I think it's kinda a dick move to hold a fund ransom until something is fulfilled, politician does this and it's already bad enough. What if the fund being held by said account being misused? What if lemmy dev insist that they will not back down? Would the fund be held until it does, which will likely take forever?
If i want to donate and 100% make sure some of the fund actually reach my goal, i would've just donate to them. If i don't agree with their political view point i will just don't donate, or donate to piefed which equally need the fund to progress. Having someone else holding the fund for me is very icky, financial-wise.
Just donate to them if you want to, why make it this complicated. If you don't want your money to go towards running the instance, then donate directly to those devs not involved with running the instance.
I haven’t heard anyone demand .ml shut down. I think people want A: allow for separate funding of Lemmy development and the server so people can avoid contributing to the server if they wish. And B: stop running the server as your personal fiefdom where any dissenting opinion or inconvenience facts result in an immediate ban.
FYI: communick pledges to take 20% of the profits from its hosting services and give to the open source developers of the underlying projects. So, the more people signing up to the $29/year package, the more we can support the developers from Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale and Matrix.
Lemmy.ml is literally the developers' home instance. You're confusing instance admins (basically randos) with the developers. Anyway I like it here on .ml. I moved here from .world because of too much censorship there. You're literally not allowed to discuss disapproved brands of cat food on .world. I still chuckle over that one.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
I tend to tell myself that I am not affected by advertising. But I suspect that most people think that. So I ask myself: What am I not seeing?
I have heard that many ads are designed to sell you a "lifestyle".
I was looking for this community and just noticed that the latest post is 3 months ago. ~~Is Raccoon no longer?~~ I found it while I was having issues with another app a few months ago and I find it great. Recently I noticed that Raccoon doesn't appear as an option to open lemmy links when I click on them on my phone. Also, while I was looking for this community I noticed that the search function doesn't work. ~~If Raccoon is no longer being maintained it would be a pity, because I prefer it over the other few that I have tried. I just find it more comfortable to use. Hopefully it's still going.~~ 🤞
I use raccoon. It still gets regular updates. Search works for me. Links open in my default browser - Brave. I'm on Android. Sound on embedded video clips has never worked in Raccoon.
Not sure what is going on for me. I still have voyager installed but haven't used it in months. Raccoon up to date, but when I get a lemmy link in the browser, I get a choice of apps, Voyager, IronFox even PL fantasy football 😅 , but no Raccoon. It may just be my phone, I have a new one just not transferred everything over yet. Nothing happening in search at all. It may just be the instance that I have tried searching within, as I have seen elsewhere that people have had issues with instances.
I noticed after I posted that the github page was updated 4 hours ago.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Former President Joe Biden has decided to build his presidential library in Delaware. He has also tapped a group of former aides, friends and political allies to begin the heavy lift of fundraising and finding a site for the museum and archive.
Some 88 postal operators have either fully or partially stopped sending mail to the US due to President Donald Trump's cancellation of a tax exemption for small packages, the Universal Postal Union said Saturday. In the week since the new rule was introduced, postal traffic to the US fell 81 percent, the group said.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Some 88 postal operators have either fully or partially stopped sending mail to the US due to President Donald Trump's cancellation of a tax exemption for small packages, the Universal Postal Union said Saturday.
The difference between Holocaust denial and Gaza Genocide denial is that Holocaust denial is illegal or a criminal offence in many countries, and is, for the most part, the preserve of marginalised kooks and conspiracy theorists.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities in Restaurant Brands International's assistant platform allowed complete control over 30,000+ Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes locations worldwide - including access to customer drive-thru audio rec…
Critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities in Restaurant Brands International's assistant platform allowed complete control over 30,000+ Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes locations worldwide - including access to customer drive-thru audio rec…
In a recent report about climate change from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), the authors state that “U.S. tide gauge measurements reveal no obvious acceleration beyond the historical ave…
I don’t have the time but I’d love to read this more thoroughly later.
One issue I have with change point models is the design of the model often assumes (or enables the likelihood function) to assume a change point exists. On a flat line it will fail to find a change point, but on a constant slope it will always select one.
I much prefer something like a restrictied cubic regression spline, where a change point can exist but the model has more freedom in accepting drift. Realistically most datasets don’t have a single change point, but there are plenty of times it’s worth asking.
In a recent report about climate change from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), the authors state that “U.S. tide gauge measurements reveal no obvious acceleration beyond the historical ave…
Ti capita che la stanza** giri o di sentirti confuso? Le **vertigini **sono molto più di un semplice capogiro e possono essere un campanello d'allarme importante per la tua salute. Distinguiamo tra vertigine oggettiva (il mondo gira) e soggettiva (sei tu a girare), ognuna con cause diverse: da problemi all'orecchio interno come la VPPB e la **labirintite, fino a stress, ansia o disturbi cervicali. Scopri quando le vertigini richiedono attenzione medica urgente e quali strategie puoi adottare per ritrovare la tua stabilità e il tuo benessere. Non sottovalutarle: il tuo corpo ti sta parlando!
An Amazon Echo owner has taken to social media to complain about their smart speakers, saying that the hardware is using too much data even when it's mostly unused. Dave W. Plummer, who helped develop the Windows Task Manager and ported Space Cadet Pinball to Windows, posted on X saying that his two Amazon Echo Show devices, which he said he "never" uses, exceeded 4 GB of data usage in 24 hours.
“There was the misconception that, because Africa is warm anyway, people are tolerant to the heat,” she said. “I think that tolerance level is now superseded.”
Declines in cooling sulfates combined with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations have increased the intensity and frequency of African heat waves. And the temperature spikes may be even more intense than has been recorded.
Live entertainment giant Ticketmaster recently inserted language into its user agreements that steers customer lawsuits into a corporate-friendly private justice system, just months after a federal judge ruled its use of such processes was illegal.
Thats a super cool visualization! This might make a really cool post for !dataisbeautiful@lemmy.world! Maybe a screenshot with a seperate link to the site
Actually there is a legal definition, a Public Benefit Corporation has statutes in its articles of incorporation which legally commit the company to pursue a set purpose which supersedes the fiduciary responsibility of the corporation to shareholders. This is important because it provides some degree of legal protection from activist shareholders suing the company for making spending or policy decisions which don't directly maximize shareholder value. The body of law around this issue is still relatively murky, but some defense is better than none at all.
For example, shareholders could attempt to sue BlueSky into increasing advertising placement or data sales functionality intothe core platform to increase company revenues, but if that is at odds with their stated public benefit purpose the legal team for BluSky would have grounds to attempt to dismiss the suit on the grounds that the shareholders purchase the shares under the explicit understanding that these functions would be subordinated to the public benefit goals of the platform.
No almost all of that is misconception. Shareholders can sue normal companies and "PBC" for not maximizing shareholder value. PBC are still legally required to cater to shareholders interests. Legal scholars say that PBCs do not provide any protection against shareholders suing and data shows it does not stop profit maximizing behavior. Its pure marketing.
Yes but we like mastodon because they're open and if they fuck up we can move away at any time. Bluesky is completely closed except the protocol and the network is fully centralized. They're just waiting until they have enough marketshare to enshitify.
Not at all. The issue with Bluesky's "federation" is, you can't really set it up at home, you need thousands of dollars and it's not really accessible.
Search up "Mastodon instances" and then "Bluesky instances" you see like thousands for Mastodon and only the official one for Bluesky. It's marketing gimmick for the mainstream normies who want to pretend they have freedom but in reality they're just jumping on the train with the billionaire who runs it.
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O.
[Edit: I see the problem, even with a self-hosted instance of 1, when you comment on posts in other instances that data is no longer held on your server, so you don't own it and can't control it directly, is that right?]
So as I understand it the big "advantage" of ATProtocol is the account portability via DID, however this is at the sacrifice of actually hosting an ATProtocol being extremely data heavy.
This has made me very curious about self-hosting ActivityPub (meaning an instance of 1 user), it would seem like focusing development on a client that makes it as close to as easy to self-host an instance as it is to join one would solve the issue of accountability portability, as you literally own all the data and rights when you self host. The Major challenge I see there is security, where experienced admins for larger instances should have some level of cybersecuroty expertise while the average use may have little to none. But then focusing group effort on auto-updating the client and the default settings of the client to maximize security would solve that issue it would seem?
So what am I missing? Other than hosting costs, what else is deferring a self-hosted-first development approach for the Fediverse?
Is it actually that AP development fundamentally believe moderation should be handled at the admin/instance level, and self-hosting makes moderation more difficult and less directly authority based?
Publicly shared blacklists and whitelists would seem the natural fit for a self-hosted-first network, akin to adblock and horizontal.
Edit: I see the problem, even with a self-hosted instance of 1, when you comment on posts in other instances that data is no longer held on your server, so you don’t own it and can’t control it directly, is that right?
The "problem" is also going the other way around. If a large instance is sharing data with your single user instance, they ultimately cannot control what you do with it.
Isn't that a non-problem? I mean, afaik, you cannot control any data after it's sent. If I send you an email with an attachment, I cannot stop you from forwarding it to everyone you know, nor can I stop you from editing it before forwarding. I guess it becomes a problem of reliability, then, which is only a problem if the original source is unavailable - which is not that uncommon in the fediverse.
It is a "problem" if your goal is full ownership and control over your user interactions and data footprint. ATProtocol in principle achieves this, you can delete or move your account and all your user interactions will be deleted or follow you (meaning edit permissions, full access to all the posts/comments, follows, updoots, etc.). The cost of this is a very high data load for the host, though I'm still not clear on exactly why it is so much more data intensive, is it the size of lookup instructions between hosts in addition to the actual markdown?
[Edit: I see the problem, even with a self-hosted instance of 1, when you comment on posts in other instances that data is no longer held on your server, so you don’t own it and can’t control it directly, is that right?]
Not quite. It's more like Bluesky works, but also not quite.
First, a note on the idea of "your" data. The law gives people rights over certain data. For example, copyright gives people rights over certain content, which translates to rights over data encoding that content. You may think of a movie as being yours because you have the file on your device. The copyright holder still considers it their data and will therefore demand control over your device through DRM.
Rights over data always means rights over what other people do with their computers and devices. Unfortunately, Fediverse users are not very tech-savvy. They demand more rights and regulations and then condemn Big Tech for the predictable consequences. They pull on one end of the string and blame dark powers when the other end moves.
The European GDPR also creates rights over certain data. You have GDPR rights over all data that is directly or indirectly related to you. For example, if I write about the current French President, then Emmanuel Macron has GDPR rights over that data, even if I don't mention him by name. Of course, his rights will be limited by freedom of information. Also, these rights are rarely recognized outside of Europe.
What legal rights you have over data depends on your location. Copyright is internationally recognized, but its precise reach depends on location; eg the US has Fair Use. Even at a specific location, those rights depend on context, with a lot of gray area. This cannot be implemented technically.
With Lemmy it's like this: When a user on an instance subscribes to a community, all (recent-ish) posts and comments in that community are downloaded to that instance. Users on that instance are served from their own instance.
Generally, a Fediverse instance keeps a copy of whatever data its local users might need. If your instance was the only source for some data, then every user in the whole world needing it would have to access your server every time they want it. Every user whether registered or unregistered would hit your server every time they reload. If a server buckles under the strain, you just get missing data. It just wouldn't scale.
Bluesky has Personal Data Servers (PDSs) for that role. Those are the definitive store of some user's data. This can be self-hosted easily. The data from all users is aggregated by a "relay", If a PDS is like a personal web server, then a relay is like a search engine. That's the one that you can't self-host; takes big time capital expenditure.
I don't think the Fediverse has a solution for this. Imagine Mastodon or Lemmy with 100M+ users. How do you find stuff? Well, making a crawler and search engine for the Fediverse would be simple. But that would also take major capital expenditure.
The Bluesky relay combines all activity into the "firehose". Anyone can write apps that get data from the firehose and present them to users. When Bluesky blocked Mississippi, that meant that the official Bluesky App did that. Other Apps still work in that state.
Final bit: When you self-host, you need to be your own legal department. When you use a service, you are shielded to some degree. Eg when you infringe copyright, a social media service will usually just take it down. If you infringe copyright on your web server, or even via torrent, you may get a pretty hefty bill.
Fedi-users cheer when Meta gets sued or settled with a huge fine. Well, good luck running your own Facebook server. Fedi-users mostly aren't very tech-savvy but when it gets to law, they are positively delusional.
James R Kirk
in reply to tfm • • •like this
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tfm
in reply to James R Kirk • • •GitHub - bluesky-social/pds: Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation
GitHublike this
DaGeek247 e yessikg like this.
James R Kirk
in reply to tfm • • •like this
DaGeek247 e FerretyFever0 like this.
Rivalarrival
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Yes. The relevant metric:
99.55% of posts are on a single instance. That is not "federated" in any meaningful sense.
James R Kirk
in reply to Rivalarrival • • •roofuskit
in reply to James R Kirk • • •f314
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Seems like it
GitHub - bluesky-social/pds: Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation
GitHubJames R Kirk
in reply to f314 • • •f314
in reply to James R Kirk • • •AT Protocol
AT ProtocolNatanael
in reply to James R Kirk • • •tfm
in reply to James R Kirk • • •PDSes only store user data. These are full instances that can be used to browse the network. The idea is to make your account really yours. Bluesky is hosting most of them. But there are some people who do it on their own.
But bluesky controls much more important components in the network, namely the Relay and AppView.
If Bluesky decides to cut off your PDS you are pretty much alone.
Bluesky is pretty much a centralized platform like Twittler.
Bluesky's Moderation Architecture
docs.bsky.applike this
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Natanael
in reply to tfm • • •Zeppelin.social is 3rd party appview and you can host your own
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
Add using DID:Web and you're now fully self hosted
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
whtwnd.com73QjabParc34Vebq
in reply to tfm • • •like this
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tfm
in reply to 73QjabParc34Vebq • • •like this
yessikg likes this.
IninewCrow
in reply to tfm • • •So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
Bluesky is the newest iteration of privately owned and controlled social media
like this
DaGeek247, FerretyFever0, loppy, yessikg, Infrapink e ammorok like this.
supersquirrel
in reply to IninewCrow • • •Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.
Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don't get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.
The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though...
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LibertyLizard
in reply to supersquirrel • • •James R Kirk
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •LibertyLizard
in reply to James R Kirk • • •dubyakay
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •LibertyLizard
in reply to dubyakay • • •dubyakay
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •grrgyle
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •I'm with you. To my knowledge all my irl woke friends ride only mainstream social media.
I had a local anarchist reach out to me on my ancient FB Messenger of all things.
I get that it's not the most important part if you're doing prefiguration, but as far as I can tell most people just want to be where most people are, even if it is supporting actually vile corporations.
supersquirrel
in reply to grrgyle • • •Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.
Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.
Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra "stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions" endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.
BeeegScaaawyCripple
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •explodicle
in reply to supersquirrel • • •Not weird at all; this was the case with cryptocurrency too. Otherwise qualified and intelligent people would invest in centralized scam coins because they had no understanding of economics, just tech.
It's sad but cool that it works the same way with social capital.
supersquirrel
in reply to explodicle • • •Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.
Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.
tfm
in reply to IninewCrow • • •They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.
like this
DaGeek247 e yessikg like this.
Rhaedas
in reply to tfm • • •"It's the same picture."
Always has been. The only difference is what they're selling.
LibertyLizard
in reply to Rhaedas • • •James R Kirk
in reply to IninewCrow • • •like this
yessikg likes this.
roofuskit
in reply to IninewCrow • • •like this
yessikg, Infrapink e giantpaper like this.
James R Kirk
in reply to roofuskit • • •Yes exactly, it reminds me of the logic of cryptocurrency boosters. I just found out that the bluesky CEO (not to mention jack dorsey) are both crypto advocates so it makes a lot more sense now.
James R Kirk
2025-09-01 16:39:23
HappyFrog
in reply to roofuskit • • •roofuskit
in reply to HappyFrog • • •Blisterexe
in reply to roofuskit • • •Natanael
in reply to roofuskit • • •whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
whtwnd.comNatanael
in reply to HappyFrog • • •tomenzgg
in reply to roofuskit • • •sp3ctr4l
in reply to IninewCrow • • •irelephant [he/him]
in reply to IninewCrow • • •HappyFrog
in reply to irelephant [he/him] • • •It's not:
dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent…
How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
dustycloud.orgirelephant [he/him]
in reply to HappyFrog • • •steal_your_face
in reply to irelephant [he/him] • • •irelephant [he/him]
in reply to steal_your_face • • •whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
Check atproto.africa, app.wafrn.net, zeppelin.social and altq.net
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
whtwnd.comsteal_your_face
in reply to irelephant [he/him] • • •Natanael
in reply to HappyFrog • • •Hanrahan
in reply to IninewCrow • • •Parrot the marketing hyperbole.
The enshitification continies.
humanoidchaos
in reply to IninewCrow • • •LifeInMultipleChoice
in reply to humanoidchaos • • •knexcar
in reply to humanoidchaos • • •EldritchFemininity
in reply to IninewCrow • • •Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it's usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.
They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it's just a buzzword, I believe.
IninewCrow
in reply to EldritchFemininity • • •EldritchFemininity
in reply to IninewCrow • • •oce 🐆
in reply to tfm • • •Thoralf Will
in reply to oce 🐆 • • •tfm
in reply to oce 🐆 • • •Bitswap
in reply to oce 🐆 • • •oce 🐆
in reply to Bitswap • • •LibertyLizard
in reply to tfm • • •tfm
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
lemmy.fediverse.observerLibertyLizard
in reply to tfm • • •tfm
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •evujumenuk
in reply to tfm • • •If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.
And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that's entirely fair. But if you're looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don't see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It's a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.
But in the end, I think there is space for both.
flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
in reply to evujumenuk • • •This is only true of Bluesky because everyone is using Bluesky's infrastructure at the moment. If Bluesky ever deindexes someone and they start posting to an alternative relay, you suddenly don't have a guarantee of a full view of a post's replies.
Natanael
in reply to flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc) • • •Content addressing means you can make your instance pull from both their relay and the bluesky relay and trivially merge threads and views without consistency issues, so that's solvable.
The bigger issue is all those other regular users who doesn't, and still get confused (unless they manage to pick a client app that does it for them)
flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
in reply to Natanael • • •I mean, this would become less trivial the more replays go into use, where to get a full view you'd have to pull from all the relays that exist.
ActivityPub's solution to this is just IMO better, the original post has a replies collection attached to it that acts as the authority the replies the post has. This also allows creators to eject replies from the collection. There are issues with the way fedi software currently handles fetching from these reply collections, but the missing replies thing is very solvable in ActivityPub.
Natanael
in reply to flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc) • • •Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user's post goes viral.
And as for moderation bluesky also carries information with the top post from the post author and allows hiding replies too, etc. This gets enforced on the appview side, so the posting user's PDS is unscathed if it goes viral.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
Realistically, the relay network will likely end up voluntarily adopting a tree topology - hobbyist communities would run small relays bundling all activity from members' PDS servers, then a larger relay in front gathers everything from a ton of smaller relays and makes it available to appviews
flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
in reply to Natanael • • •Setting up caching in the reverse proxy layer would alleviate this a lot of this. Like, GoToSocial only recommends to set up caching for the key and webfinger endpoints, where having it set up to cache posts and profiles for like 60 seconds (or however long the
Cache-Controlheader says, Mastodon defaults to 180s) would alleviate the strain on the server so much.There are other thing you can do, like this post explains some other things for Misskey, but the defaults should be sensible so you don't have to be a sysadmin expert to host an instance and they're currently not. I host 2 Lemmy instances (ukfli.uk and sappho.social) from a £5/month VPS and they're able to handle bursts of hundreds of requests without issue.
People are already building small, non-archival relays so this assumption seems mute. It's also important to remember that relays are an optimisation, not a core part of the protocol.
How to optimize your fediverse instance
Latte macchiato (Latte's Blog)froufox
in reply to tfm • • •like this
giantpaper e olorin99 like this.
GreenShimada
in reply to froufox • • •But....I came here just for the gloating fediverse content.
What else could there be?
like this
giantpaper likes this.
dil
in reply to froufox • • •froufox
in reply to dil • • •second, even on this account my last post was 1 month ago.
MotoAsh
in reply to froufox • • •TheFogan
in reply to froufox • • •I mean I agree... it's kind of the constant crux isn't it?
The IT nerds pick a protocol that's uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because... well obviously that's kind of the definition of uncontrolled.
Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc... that most people care about flock there.
Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify... open communities announce "hey we've got our alternative here", they say "thanks but nah that's too complicated, and you don't have the users that I want to see anyway". People complain more... and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal... or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.
I don't really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter... fundimentally I don't see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say... a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that's actually... well hostable.
It's basically like exactly what happens out in the real world... walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors... local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down... half of owners, etc... forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.
sem
in reply to TheFogan • • •I think the difference is that while other services boom and bust, the fediverse keeps growing slowly because it is decentralized, and can't be enshittified in the same way.
It is not as easy or attractive as Bluesky right now, but it keeps growing slowly and getting more kinds of people.
Maybe it won't be the network of choice for journalists, metal celebrities, etc, like twitter and bluesky, but it already is making its way as something more like old school tumblr -- some people like it, some don't.
desertdruid
in reply to sem • • •CaptainBasculin
in reply to tfm • • •NickwithaC
in reply to CaptainBasculin • • •like this
giantpaper likes this.
CaptainBasculin
in reply to NickwithaC • • •- YouTube
youtu.beFizz
in reply to tfm • • •like this
giantpaper likes this.
Flax
in reply to Fizz • • •Fizz
in reply to Flax • • •Flax
in reply to Fizz • • •Natanael
in reply to Flax • • •It's doable on Mastodon but significantly more complicated.
You need crawlers to index posts across the Fediverse (and avoid getting them blocked), personalized recommendation models per user, and you need pre-emptive caching on the user's instance for anything recommended (ideally the crawler would make a cache on behalf of each of the opted-in users' instances, but without content addressing this is a security risk). You also need to poll for edits / deletions.
Flax
in reply to Natanael • • •Natanael
in reply to Flax • • •On Mastodon, your instance doesn't receive posts until somebody on your instance interacts with the account posting it (following the poster, browsing directly to the post, etc).
Feeds with recommendations requires fetching stuff in advance to not be slow and janky. Basically the feed service would need a bot account on your instance and retrieving all popular posts, given the current architecture. Having thousands of these bots across every instance do this would cause a significant performance hit on smaller Mastodon instances when one of their users posts something popular. So you need something different, like a server plugin where the bot fetches the content once and tells all participating Mastodon servers about their cached copy, so they don't all have to hit the hosting instance. But that's a security risk with the Mastodon design.
airportline
in reply to Fizz • • •ClearSky
clearsky.appNatanael
in reply to airportline • • •JoJo
in reply to Natanael • • •Natanael
in reply to JoJo • • •General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •How?
Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •Peergos
peergos.orgGeneral_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •They're implementing E2E encrypted social stuff. Voting privacy and encryption is linked.
Especially when you have users across multiple servers and both want voting privacy AND being able to deal with vote manipulation. You need stuff like pseudonymous commitments per account attested to by the hosting instance, etc. The only thing that's simpler but still private is having instances just digitally sign a total vote tally, which also means you can't detect vote manipulation on other servers at all.
General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •But accounts are already pseudonymous?
Here's where I am at:
I can check if my votes are federated correctly by checking if any of my votes are suppressed or votes in my name are made up. If my instance sends a different random token with each vote, I can still do that, as long as I know which tokens are assigned to my votes.
But vote tallies can also be manipulated by making up new votes through fake/bot accounts. If a vote can be connected to posts, this can be checked to some degree. Say, if an instance has a lot of voters that never post, that indicates a problem.
I don't see how the second thing with E2EE.
Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •The very very short TLDR is that anonymization is very hard, but there's auditable cryptographic voting schemes which preserves anonymity by using anonymous cryptographic commitments and one of a bunch of different techniques to count encrypted votes (homomorphic encryption, threshold encryption, etc).
You could set it up so you know which server each set of votes comes from but not which users on the server. You could also make it prove each vote comes from one real account and that no account voted twice. You could even make use of commitments plus ZKP to prove banned accounts can't vote!
It sounds complicated because it is complicated. And somewhat inefficient. But it's possible. And it would be fully encrypted and anonymous voting.
General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •How would it prove that the account is real? I suspect that the meaning of "real account" is not the opposite of bot or sockpuppet.
Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •I assume it proves that there is a public key associated with each vote.
It doesn't sound like cryptography is able to add anything worthwhile. You have to trust the instance to police itself. Self-hosted instances still don't vote anonymously.
A group of users has to cooperate to hide their votes from others and each other. Only the tally is known, but you have to trust the group. On the Fediverse, such a group will be the users of an instance. The more users the instance has, the more anonymous the individual becomes.
You have to trust the instance admins to weed out bots and sock puppets, which is extra hard when they don't see the votes either. Presumably, compensating by collecting and keeping other data, such as IPs, for longer is undesirable. You have to believe that admins, volunteers all, are willing to do the extra work and that they don't actually favor manipulation for ideological reasons.
The only way to uncover untrustworthy instances is to look at aggregated data. I guess you'd have to get/scrape data for some community and then analyze by instance if the number of posters is out of whack with the number of voters. I wonder if anyone's ever done such a thing. It's certainly more challenging than looking at oddities among voters who brigade some topic.
Admins of large instances could get away with having many sock voters among the real users, if they wanted to manipulate discussions for, say, ideological reasons.
StupidBrotherInLaw
in reply to airportline • • •Cocopanda
in reply to tfm • • •tfm
in reply to Cocopanda • • •Captain Aggravated
in reply to tfm • • •It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.
Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of "Lemmy" could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.
Arthur Besse
in reply to tfm • • •ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀
It's a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.
otoh, atproto's PLC DID method is also not really decentralized... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).
Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
whtwnd.comjivandabeast
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •In the blog post you linked, neither the author or myself came to your conclusion:
Arthur Besse
in reply to jivandabeast • • •The blog post also says this:
My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more "decentralized architecturally" I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.
jivandabeast
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Okay yes this makes sense. Although, honestly i think I'd prefer the AP method of doing it because BlueSky sends ALL content to all nodes, so it's MUCH less cost effective to join with a private server.
I run my own lemmy instance, so i know the data volume since 2023 has been probably like a terabyte or so. But, with BlueSky I'd have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes (a guess based almost entirely on nothing).
So it really boils down to yes I agree that AP has problems with data accessibility, but I'd prefer that over unnecessary data redundancy
Arthur Besse
in reply to jivandabeast • • •I think this is a common misconception based on some critics' incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) "A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month" for some numbers.
If I understand correctly, to run a "full nework relay" does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren't interested in for any long period of time.
Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people's relays.
Disclaimer: I'm not an atproto expert, and I haven't set any of this up myself.
Protocol Overview - AT Protocol
AT Protocolirelephant [he/him]
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •You can design an appview that crawls PDSes directly, no relay needed.
AppViewLite does that
irelephant [he/him]
in reply to jivandabeast • • •James R Kirk
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •So like when bluesky starts having to pay back their investors I can portable my identity to.... one of the other equally populated blueskies out there?
airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Blacksky
Blacksky CommunityJames R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •There are already "other Blueskies" out there, and you can already port your identity to them.
However, most users haven't, and most users are not motivated to do so. Thus, OP created a website.
James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •We're counting hypotheticals as real now? I suppose your not-hypothetical girlfriend goes to another school too, right? Just not motivated to visit?
As you're no doubt aware, the reason 99.9% of bluesky users are on a single server is obviously not because "nobody is motivated" to create other servers.
airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •I'm just going to respond to what you said before you edited your comment to be a reaction gif.
Since (as of November of last year) a majority of Bluesky's user base is non-technical, they have don't have the knowledge or motivation to switch to another PDS. If 30 million users joined mastodon.social, the fediverse would also be centralized.
The only way for Bluesky to be decentralized by the metrics you use is for them to force users onto other PDSes.
tomenzgg
in reply to tfm • • •For those who enjoy in-depth write-ups, Christine Webber has looked at how decentralized BlueSky is really, before: social.coop/@cwebber/113527462…
Christine Lemmer-Webber
2024-11-22 16:06:44
Regrettable_incident
in reply to tfm • • •tfm
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •FauxLiving
in reply to tfm • • •Exactly.
Communities are not higher quality with a million people. Small communities where you can know who the other posters are are a much better experience.
ChaoticNeutralCzech
in reply to FauxLiving • • •jumping_redditor
in reply to FauxLiving • • •FauxLiving
in reply to jumping_redditor • • •There can be disagreement about anything.
I’m just not wasting my time trying to have a conversation with x_h1tt1er42069_x. I can find him at anytime on Reddit if I have a problem that only he has a Solution.
Having such a person in this community wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience.
Randomgal
in reply to tfm • • •Matt
in reply to Randomgal • • •Randomgal
in reply to Matt • • •roofuskit
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •James R Kirk
in reply to roofuskit • • •roofuskit
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Because they've been told it's federated and don't understand that it really isn't. My bluesky profile reads "Created a profile until you all figure out Bluesky is another Twitter."
All I use it for is to read post from people not on mastodon and to reshare my bridged posts from mastodon.
James R Kirk
in reply to roofuskit • • •EldritchFemininity
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about "not Reddit" and "not Twitter." I'm one of those users personally (not that I don't care about the idea, it's good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.
If I didn't dislike the Twitter format as much, I'd probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I'd probably be on Tumblr still if I didn't only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn't have such a horrible app.
People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn't care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by "newest posts first" went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.
The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you're into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants' company towns.
James R Kirk
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •Regrettable_incident
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Oh yeah sure. I'm here after all, jumped ship from Reddit a year or so ago and I actually prefer Lemmy.
I jumped ship from twitter to mastodon around the same time. And while I like the idea of mastodon and I like the interface, fact is that Reddit / lemmy is a different sort of usage from twitter / bluesky / mastodon. Twitter I mostly used to keep up with my favourite content creators, and occasionally shout at clouds. Those content creators just aren't on mastodon, they've mostly moved to bluesky. Those are the users that are the foundation of a platform like that. So yeah, I use lemmy and bluesky now.
TBH I'm not sure mastodon could scale up big anyway - it would be a nightmare trying to regulate bad content and comply with local laws etc.
Digitalprimate
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •daniskarma
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •Sausager
in reply to daniskarma • • •General_Effort
in reply to tfm • • •vga
in reply to General_Effort • • •General_Effort
in reply to vga • • •The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?
It's the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren't federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.
vga
in reply to General_Effort • • •The same way you manipulate Twitter, by tweaking the algorithm.
General_Effort
in reply to vga • • •zaphod
in reply to vga • • •acargitz
in reply to tfm • • •Capitalists love interoperability when they can use it to disrupt other capitalists. When they get in a dominant position they hate it.
It's basic enshittification theory.
airportline
in reply to tfm • • •