Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund and failing to disclose it... for a full year?

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@_elena @mat

if a message is public, it's public. people need to understand anyone can scrape you, on any protocol

but there is a difference between the fediverse which has no financial motivations, and bluesky, which does have creepy financial motivations. they can, and will, eventually, simply as a matter of the inevitable financial imperative of seedy cryptobro creeps, to do things with your data *on the inside*

(private messages, linking it with data in other plutocrat silos, etc)

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@_elena

I've been feeling this way myself. A lot of what ATProto does well can be implemented in the fediverse, from what I've been reading, there's just not enough funding to get it done fast enough.

@benroyce @mat

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@stefan frankly I don't think that migrating from URLs to DIDs as identifiers would still qualify as the same protocol in the case of ActivityPub.

So, if ActivityPub is the main component of the Fediverse - which it is for me - I don't think we'll be able to reproduce _all_ the functionality ATProto has.

@_elena @benroyce @mat

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@nickapos @_elena

yeah but there's a difference between someone screenscraping your posts somewhere

and a financially motivated effort by seedy cryptobros *on the inside* linking all sorts of private data

- using your email and birthdate to link to other plutocrat data silos

- ingesting your private messages

- profiling your posting behavior

- feeding it all to AI

etc

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@_elena

And I really believe that Bluesky got ahead because it's been essentially a centralized Twitter 2.0, only now slowly starting to open up, and that's already creating UX problems people have been complaining about with Mastodon/fediverse.

Here's a random post: https://witchsky.app/profile/did:plc:rtf3bjc3w2yn4syxtm4r7jt2/post/3mfrp6tovy22g

Try replying from https://bsky.app. The old "put the URL in the search box" trick doesn't work here.

And developers are disagreeing over "log in with Bluesky" vs "with ATProto" vs "Atmosphere", because the first one erases the diversity of the network, while the more accurate labels are "too confusing for normies".

Plus, "pick a PDS and an AppView and an app" sounds a lot more daunting than "pick a server".

@benroyce @mat

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@mariusor

Right, I didn't say all of it, so I don't disagree. But we can definitely fix all the major issues people have with the fediverse in some way.

@_elena @benroyce @mat

[wjmaggos@liberal.city]

@tedmielczarek @_elena

Is there any requirement to make it public within 1 year? otherwise I wonder why they're announcing it at all.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@mariusor @stefan @_elena @mat

mastodon was playing around with DIDs at some point

you can find references to it in the documentation (deprecated now for a long time)

example:

IdentityProof - Mastodon documentation

Represents a proof from an external identity provider.

(docs.joinmastodon.org)

not sure why they abandoned it

maybe because DID just isn't there yet

[benjamineskola@hachyderm.io]

@_elena Yeah, I don't believe this for one minute.

Considering what a big deal it is for most companies to successfully raise VC money, they want us to believe that it wasn't important enough to make time to announce it? Any other company would drop everything to shout it from the rooftops.

And a funding round is a significant amount of work already, so are we supposed to believe that after all that work they had to put into it, they didn't schedule time to even do the tiniest announcement about it?

And like, I would have guessed that the VC firm itself also has PR people whose job it would be to help out with that, and they were still too busy? No.

[javascript@app.wafrn.net]

yeah actually the concept of DID as decentralized identifiers can have its equivalent in the Portable Objects Proposal described here: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md

This is just more complex to do in an ecosystem like the fediverse where implementations are (and have been for a long time) less standarized

[otfrom@functional.cafe]

@ainmosni @_elena @patpro @Codeberg we do need something like 50 to 500 codebergs

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@benroyce I wasn't speaking of Mastodon because they barely do any effort into being a spec compliant ActivityPub service...

@stefan @_elena @mat

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@mariusor @stefan @_elena @mat

not in an effort to start a fight but just divulging my honest views on the topic:

so fucking what

just build shit

the spec can follow behind later

waiting for perfect spec structuring before doing anything is an exercise in inertia

[amoshias@esq.social]

@_elena oh, Mike. oh, oh, oh, Mike.

I like the guy and appreciate what he does but just...

this isn't a thing.

does he think all the other companies are just sitting around eating bonbons, and this one specific company is busy?

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@javascript I thought I was pretty clear in my initial statement: if DIDs are used as primary identifiers for objects, the resulting specification is no longer ActivityPub.

Unless the SocialCG comes up with ActivityPub 2.0 that has DID as identifiers, I wouldn't call the implementations that use that FEP as ActivityPub compliant.

@_elena @benroyce @stefan @mat

[jaypeach53@mastodon.social]

@mat @_elena @benroyce B$ky is BullShit.

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@benroyce maybe you want to look through my post history before giving me advice to build shit. I'm not speaking from a point of ignorance.

The reason why some of us are trying to stick to the specification is to maximize compatibility between implementations. Each project adding their little flavour of functionality before even bothering to have a solid common foundation is detrimental to the health of the ecosystem as a whole.

@stefan @_elena @mat

[bazkie@beige.party]

@markmetz @_elena what's narrative capture?

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@mariusor @stefan @_elena @mat

i don't give a shit about your post history. i have no doubt you're quite knowledgeable and i don't think you're ignorant at all

but i think "stick to the spec" is purposeful impotence

just build shit and fuck the spec. the spec can follow along later, and if a feature is useful and popular, other projects can copy it

nevermind that demanding spec authority in a decentralized system is a fool's errand

just do whatever the fuck you want, fuck specs

[wjmaggos@liberal.city]

@_elena @benroyce @mat

imo we should think of social media (the social news feed ala bluesky and mastodon etc) as totally public like blogs you can boost. that's different than messaging and groups that need privacy, what I call social networking.

I think bluesky's goal is to be the Google/Gmail of all of social media. "it's open so you could use other services but we make it easy and provide a better experience." the way the app view works makes that possible unlike how AP works. enshittify.