Recently there has been a lot of discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol which has been quite dividing and heated.
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@thisismissem I sort of was in a similar situation (AFS) with a dominant implementation (Transarc, later OpenAFS), and our lesser known implementation (Arla), but Transarc never had anything like the lock-in effects Bluesky has. We were able to make things on a somewhat level playing field and interop just fine.
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@thisismissem Exactly. Haven’t these people ever heard of protocol gateways?
The only thing you need is a node that speaks both protocols.
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@thisismissem Search for Blacksky on English Wikipedia. In the first 20 hits, only one is not about the Peter Thiel company, and that is about a Japanese race horse.
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@mastodonmigration this erases all the hard work of the Blacksky team, along with all the other independent applications that exist like tangled.sh, smokesignal.events, bridgy fed, etc.
Yes, majority of PDS's are currently on Bluesky's PDS servers, however, that's not the full picture, and over time that picture will change.
Additionally, if we look back at ActivityPub adoption, that was originally quite centralized with Mastodon in many ways, and so many building in the ecosystem try to aim for compatibility with Mastodon.
So really, it's just a matter of time and age accounting for the differences.
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@ahltorp not sure why you're mentioning multiple completely unrelated projects/companies that aren't even in the social web space.
Bluesky doesn't have lock-in effects, arguably ActivityPub as widely implemented today has more. There are third-party implementation in multiple other languages, for instance Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) which is a fairly complete implementation in Rust
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@ahltorp well, snyway, now you have the links, you can educate yourself on how much non-Bluesky PBC work is happening
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Not erasing Blacksky's work at all. It is to be highly commended and holds enormous promise for spearheading real independent instances on AT Protocol.
Hope you are right and AT Protocol is on a real path to statistically relevant decentralization.
But, to say that discussion of the present reality is not warranted, only serves to undermine these efforts. The objective can only be understood in relation to a factual assessment of the current state of the network.
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@thisismissem You are perfectly free to ignore my unrelated examples, I’m just providing my personal context for this.
The Bluesky relay is lock-in, since they require considerable resources to replicate if you want to interop with Bluesky. What else is the point of the $30M freeourfeeds campaign? Why raise $30M to break the lock-in if there is no lock-in?
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@mastodonmigration right, but you've been given factual information that shows that not all of the network is centralised and that there's many efforts outside of Bluesky PBC, yet you keep going on about it.
We could talk about the centralisation of fediverse software implementations, too, because that doesn't necessarily look great either, for example Mastodon accounts for over 70% of the monthly active users within the ActivityPub ecosystem.
(source: https://fedidb.com/software?vi=list&st=active / https://fedidb.com/ )
Many moderators and server operators are really at the mercy of whatever Mastodon does or doesn't want to ship. Is that decentralisation?
We can agree to disagree.
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@ahltorp no they don't, it's possible to run a relay for like $30 / month now. PDS's are much cheaper than that to run, and can run on like $5 infrastructure.
You can also move all your data should your PDS shutdown or go rogue, with the Fediverse today, you can only really move your relationships, not your posts, though efforts on that are underway.
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@thisismissem I signed this document, as folks can see. My main motivation for doing so is to call for shared efforts to protect emerging, noncorporate social media from being destroyed through state regulations. Currently, that means age verification laws, but of course there have been other proposed or enacted laws that threaten the emergence of alternative social media.
1/2
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@mastodonmigration Apologies for butting in, but I think https://atp.fyi/network does a better job at showing how decentralized Bluesky/ATProto really is, compared to this site you shared, which, as it explains, only takes PDSs into account.
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The issue is the degree of centralization because that dictates the power of the dominant player to assert control. This issue, as you point out, is also a concern, to a lesser, but still very significant extent, for the ActivityPub Fediverse.
As proponents of open distributed systems we should be concerned about concentrations of technology, power and the potential to assert outsized influence wherever they occur in open networks.
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Appreciate the link. These kinds of ground truth analytics are important for framing the discussion and establishing objectives for the future.
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@stefan that visualization isn't particularly great at showing how (de)centralized it is though.
Things are not to scale in it: Single user PDS is as much as 1/50th the area of a Bluesky Corporate PDS with almost 400,000 users.
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@thisismissem Apparently, the group did not agree on the proposal, and the statement was published in the group's name without consensus.
This hurts our values more than the original disagreement!
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@nik I'd received multiple people saying yes, and been granted approval to merge. As it's not a specification change, the 14 day CFC did not look like it applied, and it did not need all members to agree or co-sign.
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@thisismissem Very obviously, some CG members did not get a chance to object, and some who did object were ignored.
But as I am myself only a passive observer of the SocialCG, I will not go into more detail – I just felt followers here should be aware that the statement is not a group publication with full consensus.
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@thisismissem Then I repeat my question: Why are freeourfeeds raising $30M to break the lock-in if there is no lock-in?
I’m not against people working on making AT protocol actually useful, but it so easily turns into an argument for “there are no problems with using Bluesky”. Why should I be positive about AT protocol when the only thing it does in practice is shit? Because that’s what you’re asking me to be (the “don’t argue” bit).
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I hope not. 'Global trending' requires a central authority with a view into EVERY message on the system. And the last two decades have convinced me ANYTHING requiring such centralized access is dangerous and will be misused.
Federation is the ONLY answer if want you want is something the users control. Because, in worst case, we can fall back to whitelists instead of blacklists and tunnel the messages.
Have we learned NOTHING?
