Returning to the #FreeOurFeeds (FOF) initiative discussion (for background see links below)...
@pluralistic has a new piece (pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap…) that extends his "fire exit" analogy and discusses how it is not corporate ownership, VCs or profit motive alone that causes enshitification. It also requires captive users, and FOF will make it so Bluesky users are not captive. It all sounds good, but it's not realistic because the assumptions behind it are based on vaporware marketing.
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Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Somewhere in the 1980s software companies discovered that they could announce products with fabulous features long before they were developed as a means of getting potential customers to delay purchase decisions for their competitors actual real products. The term 'vaporware' came to refer to these schemes. Over the years vaporware has evolved to be used for all sorts of clever market manipulations and you could say that most of Silicon Valley now runs on vaporware.
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Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Sometimes vaporware products actually get made with a small subset of the promised features, but more often they just continue to get delayed serving their market manipulative purpose. One thing about vaporware products is that there is no shortage of complex and detailed descriptions of what they WILL DO.
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Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Enter Bluesky and the AT protocol. We are told it is a simple matter to make Bluesky distributed. All we need to do is make another 'relay'. Seems easy, right. But Bluesky hasn't done this yet because [insert reason here]. Enter FOF, who figures, well Bluesky won't build a second relay with their technology, we will do it!
Do you see the problem here? Maybe, building complex undeveloped, unproven, untested relays is a huge engineering challenge. Maybe it's impossible.
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Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Certainly seems like it will be impossible without Bluesky's active involvement and support. But, the whole reason for this effort is we imagine a day where Bluesky will be the adversary and something they actively oppose. People running to the fire escapes while Bluesky is pulling up the ladders.
FOF is untenable. It's an engineering nightmare based on vaporware marketing and even if it miraculously got built it is impossible to imagine Bluesky not able to sabotage it.
Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •References
Supporting FOF:
freeourfeeds.com/
technologyreview.com/2025/01/1… (@elipariser)
pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/con… (@pluralistic)
pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap… (@pluralistic)
Critique of FOF:
mastodon.online/@mastodonmigra…
notes.ghed.in/posts/2025/blues… (@cebedo)
malici.ous.computer/@shellshar… (@shellsharks)
Background:
dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent… (@cwebber)
dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-blue… (@cwebber)
We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky
Eli Pariser (MIT Technology Review)Mastodon Migration
2025-01-14 22:31:03
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Steve Popovich
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈⧖
in reply to Steve Popovich • • •Mastodon Migration
in reply to Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈⧖ • • •@dgoldsmith @sspopovich
Tough to fault that logic.
Meanwhile did you see the European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRi) report which calls for "substantial" investment in public social media and in particular Mastodon and the Fediverse to counter X and Meta
edri.org/our-work/meta-and-x-a…
Would be really good to see Europe get serious about this space.
Meta and X are going rogue. Here is what Europe should do now. - European Digital Rights (EDRi)
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Laurens Hof
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •There are multiple relays currently in production, somewhere between 5 and 10. It costs lower than 50 dollars per month to run your own non-archival relay, with the cheapest I've seen is someone running it for 23 dollars per month (single consumer)
there are also alternative software implementations of the relay, cerulea is one done in rust for example
relay is not even the centralising aspect of atproto, other aspects are
Mastodon Migration
in reply to Laurens Hof • • •"non-archival relay" is doing a lot of work here.
Laurens Hof
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •it really is not, and it is very clear that you dont know how atproto works, and what the actual risks to the system are
atproto has clear failure points, and relays are very much not one of them lol
Mastodon Migration
in reply to Laurens Hof • • •@laurenshof
Love this kind of techmansplaining. You are correct, no idea how atproto works, and don't care. Not being specific in the use of the term 'relay'. Have no idea what that is, and don't want to know. Not getting drawn down into the marketing lingo.
What would be convincing that it could be distributed is if it were actually, you know, distributed.
Not interested in tech vaporware buzzword salad or theoretical papers. Where do you sign up for this distributed network?
shellsharks
in reply to Laurens Hof • • •In the context of FreeOurFeeds, I think the discussion is less about "is Bluesky decentralized", or "can Bluesky be decentralized", it's "why is FoF asking for 4mil (up to 30 mil) to stand up a single 'other Bluesky' ". I understand some of that money is earmarked for "governance stuff" and for the developer community it hopes to support, but it raises the question of "how expensive is it to run Bluesky", just talking operations, not active development, not salaries, etc... If it's TOO expensive to run a single Bluesky, then it'll be too expensive to create enough federated Bluesky instances to make it truly defederated in a way that would truly free us from billionaires. If the FoF experiment can prove that instances of Bluesky can be stood up and run by non-corporate interests, then maybe they're onto something, otherwise, Bluesky isn't likely to free us from anything. I say this not as some Fedi zealot, but as someone who wants to see folks free'd from centralized, billionaire-controlled media in whatever way will work. If it's Bluesky, then GREAT! I think this is a healthy amount of skepticism given what's at stake, and the countless other times we've seen social platforms become...well, what they've become.
Sad the tone has to turn nasty here too 😢. I think we're all just trying to learn and educate.
Mastodon Migration
in reply to shellsharks • • •Mostly agree, but 30 years of software development management experience screams when someone says that it is easy to do something big and complicated and you don't necessarily have access to all the inner workings or know the quality of the code. People generally way underestimate what it takes to get big production software working, and if you are on the outside trying to do something with someone else's interface, good luck.
Miro
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •I also agree with @shellsharks.
5M–30M funding would be more effective if invested in improving the Fediverse, e.g. adding composable moderation, instead of trying to spin up one other Bluesky relay.
Tbf, Bluesky is bigger than the Fediverse. So one can argue that you help more people investing there.
@mastodonmigration @laurenshof @pluralistic
Bishop Greer Godsey
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Paul Harrison
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Why would you expect Bluesky to create a second relay? They already have one.
The entire point about relays is that to keep the ATverse federated, independent relays should exist. It has to be a third party that creates the next relay.
Paul Harrison
in reply to Paul Harrison • • •Mastodon Migration
in reply to Paul Harrison • • •@paulh
Would expect them to build "a second relay' because that would prove it was possible to do so.
Let's be clear, we are using the term 'create a relay' here to mean actually create whatever technology is needed to make the AT Protocol distributed at scale, in a production environment. So far, Bluesky has demonstrated that they have a centralized social media platform that can accommodate 10s of millions of users.
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Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •They have not demonstrated that they have a distributed platform that can accommodate multiple nodes in a system that can handle tens of millions of users. This is a much much harder thing to do.
All we have is their description of how the AT Protocol should work to do this and assurances that it can be done. We have no idea what is "under the hood" or how many shortcuts they took to get the centralized system up and running.
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Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •@paulh
And the whole shooting match is bursting at the seams, growing like a weed with engineers doing whatever it takes to keep it up and running while adding new features in response to management demands.
It's chaos everyday over there. And into this environment FOF is supposed to show up and get access to their inner workings and make the whole network distributed. Slim chance.
Paul Harrison
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Mastodon Migration
in reply to Paul Harrison • • •Unfortunately, that's not how it works.
Paul Harrison
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Yes, that's exactly how it works.
Bluesky is an active, up and running, social network that's built upon the three technologies that make up AT. It currently has something in the region of 30 million users, 3.5 million of which are active.
Saying they haven't "proven" that they can build a relay is essentially a ludicrous moon-landing-hoax level conspiracy theory at this point.
Mastodon Migration
in reply to Paul Harrison • • •@paulh
No. They have proven they can build a centralized system that services 30 million people. They have not proven that the system can be distributed at scale. That is a complex engineering matter even if the underlying protocol was designed with this intention.
All this talk of 'relays' is just pseudo technical descriptions to make it seem like it is less complicated than it is to actually create such a big distributed networked system.
Paul Harrison
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •All of the other components (PDSes, App Views, etc) have been replicated in some way and are somehow able to talk to this "only works if it's centralized" relay? That's what you're claiming?
Like I said earlier, there's a clear, logical, reason why there's only one relay: there's no incentive to run one, and they're expensive to run. There is NOTHING exotic and hard about the concept. (1/2)
Paul Harrison
in reply to Paul Harrison • • •But sure, it can't be that, it must be that Bluesky are lying and haven't really created a relay at all! The messages are flowing from PDSes to App Views etc via some... uh... magic? A room full of squirrels?
This is just silly. Especially when it'd be easier to build one than to fake building one. (2/2)
Mastodon Migration
in reply to Paul Harrison • • •So you get the last word. Don't feel like we are making any progress and your tone is becoming sarcastic and hostile, so exiting the conversation.
Paul Harrison
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Sorry if I come across that way. I'm just increasingly bewildered. There's huge criticisms one can make of the Relay concept, notably the lack of incentives to run one and the huge amount of resources needed. But you're focusing instead on an assertion instead that makes no sense. Yes, a relay exists!
Incidentally, after reading up on it, I found that you weren't even right claiming Bluesky hadn't stood up a second one. They did just that: whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7…
Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024) | bryan newbold
whtwnd.comPaul Harrison
in reply to Paul Harrison • • •Mastodon Migration
in reply to Paul Harrison • • •Love your confidence.
⚯ Michel de Cryptadamus ⚯
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Demian
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •Mastodon Migration
in reply to Demian • • •Found the examples of previous standards efforts interesting too, and don't know enough about any of those cases to know if the analogy to AT Protocol is valid. Historically most standards efforts that came out of proprietary technologies were based on the recognition that interoperability among different corporate technologies was beneficial, and that attempts to lock in everything was non-competitive. Not sure that really applies here.
Demian
in reply to Demian • • •They're thinking pretty broadly about challenges, but still didn't seem that clear what the plan is to create the fire exits.
What's New at RightsCon? And How to Free Our Feeds
The Sunday ShowMastodon Migration
in reply to Demian • • •@dgodon @justinhendrix
Not that you'd expect a show like this to be anything else, but they do a very good job of articulating a vision, without offering anything convincing that what they want to achieve is doable. Don't expect a detailed technical presentation. There are plenty of those. The bottom line is that unless the company has demonstrated this technology at scale (and has a convincing story about how it all is open sourced) it is a fools errand to head off to develop it.