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 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.
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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?
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@ahltorp organisations try to raise crazy amounts all the time, especially when they thing there is sufficient hype to do so.
I haven't seen particularly much from anyone at FreeOurFeeds, and I don't think they are representative of the work going on in the ATmosphere.
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@jackwilliambell @j12t so that's the thing, with the ActivityPub API and you publishing to your outbox, and then that notifying others that you have, it's the same as current, but with your data in your control.
You don't need your PDS / outbox to participate in anything global, but it's certainly possible — you'd also have more control than you currently do with the existing Relays that bounce messages around heavily.
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I'm saying I don't want to participate in anything global. I'm saying I want a protocol designed to be actively HOSTILE to participating in anything global.
Maybe others still yearn to suck from the teats of some centralized authority, but I've learned my lesson and I'm not going back. I'd rather not have social media at all than regress to a state where the protocols can serve a profit motive or an authoritarian.
Even if it is tarted up to look like something different.
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@thisismissem But they *are* extremely representative of what is happening in the AT protocol space. It doesn’t matter if you like them or not. It doesn’t even matter whether they’re actually doing anything concrete or not (I suspect they aren’t).
From my perspective, supporting what FreeOurFeeds and Bluesky are doing is *exactly* what you’re asking us to support. Why would anyone even care about AT protocol if it weren’t for Bluesky?
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@jackwilliambell @j12t then you literally do not need to. You can choose not to federate with anything "global" (whatever that would mean)
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@ahltorp I never said anything about liking them or not, I said I haven't seen much from them, and consequently they are not representative, especially when there's so many other people doing amazing work within the ATmosphere.
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As I do. And, let me be frank here: I think anyone who *does not* is a fool and will eventually rue that decision.
Maybe I'm the outlier here. But I'm on the Fedi for a reason. I run my own server, for a reason. And I DO NOT want to see ActivityPub changed to accommodate global authorities, nor do I want 'bridges' to centralized systems – of any stripe.
And I will continue to speak out against those who do.
You, of course, may choose to block me. But that's the beauty!
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@jackwilliambell @j12t I'm not saying that it would be changed to support global authorities (though those already exist arguably), I'm saying that you can continue to have your own server and do whatever you want.
But I'm also saying that your server does not need to be your identity, and that data and identity can be separated from applications.
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@jackwilliambell @thisismissem i for my part like the idea that when protests break out in Tahrir Square, I can subscribe to a global feed that gives me an idea of what is going on … certainly a much better idea than if I turn on the TV. I have that use case maybe once a year, but I’m glad it exists.
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> "I … like the idea that when protests break out in Tahrir Square, I can subscribe to a global feed that gives me an idea of what is going on…"
I think the fact you would automatically trust such a global feed is incredibly problematic.
I'd rather trust people. Individually. And even then my trust only extends so far.
I had a similarly long discussion yesterday about Epistemology. There is a sense in which I am continuing that here today.
