@timbray @blaine @evan

so just use email. /snark

sorry I'm trying to spark the deep conversation about why we should care about social media decentralization. what does it provide us? what do we imagine it could provide us? is there a difference between social networking and social media?

but I've made my case.

@timbray @blaine @evan just use email /srs

even so, email's problems these days are that power has concentrated in the hands of a few providers who make it hard for anyone new to get started because of all the antispam policies and opaque enforcement of such. but assuming you have deliverability, email works for pretty much anything, to varying degrees of automation.

The one thing is that atproto as designed is effectively centrally managed and top down.

For fun, we can think about three different protocols in the way that they function. ActivityPub, atproto, and nostr.

Nostr would be the most decentralized and most individualist. You don't even pick a single server, you pick on number of different relays which will accept your messages and provide messages to you. It really doesn't matter if in the end which individual relays you pick because in practice it's just a ledger with all the messages that it received, and the protocol itself handles identity through your secret key. If the relay that you were using goes down, your user experience doesn't even notice because there's probably 10 others.

ATproto would be the least decentralized and most collective. It is hypothetically possible to host your own instance, but in practice user management and a lot of other stuff is Central to the main Bluesky organization. Getting banned or getting blocked or whatever, it's not that different from Facebook in that regard. If the main Bluesky service goes down, it will effectively mean the end of bluesky.

ActivityPub would be somewhere in between. You have individual servers that people will pick one or multiple, there is a centralized point where your identity lives, and each server has its own moderation policies and administrator team. If one server goes down, everyone on that server loses access to the fediverse on that server and they also lose their identity from that server, but they can very easily go somewhere else. If mastodon.social goes down, a lot of accounts will become inaccessible but the broader fediverse will be unaffected.

Bridges are obviously possible between the three because we see it, but I tend to think that the three are mutually exclusive and mutually incompatible in their aims and technical details such that integrating any two immediately means giving up some of what that protocol is trying to do.

Mastodon

The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

^{Mastodon hosted on mastodon.social}

another question related to the why discussion.

is this a public medium like blogging with boosts or is the goal more private, your chosen community and conversations? the former I call social media vs the latter being social networking. old school twitter vs the friends, family and groups on Facebook.

@mackuba @evan @blaine it's all about context. context is everything. unfortunately, context collapse is the norm.

i think it should be apparent that someone who primarily or exclusively posts publicly is not going to have their needs align broadly with someone who primarily or exclusively posts privately.

the goal is whatever people want it to be. both are possible. practically speaking, i do not want "fully public" and "300 characters", so atp/bsky is a complete non-starter for me.

@evan @blaine at this point, I believe the most likely outcome now that MAGA has gained control of TikTok, is they will now come for the next-most-leftist American controlled social media platform.

Bluesky.

Which will probably make this discussion moot.

it is amazing. I guess my problem is that it's opt in.

*ducks*

and the burden is on two amazing dudes to pay for and manage it (hopefully with all our donations).