I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@aeva @cthos either you rely on bluesky to get the content (meaning you have to trust them to convey the content) or you prepare and mirror the content yourself. No real third option, fundamentally. If there were several blacksky-like towers then they could potentially pool resources, but no other actor has gotten as far as blacksky so there's no one to pool with.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@jdp23 "Having their own client lets them make different blocking decisions from Bluesky"

How?

[jdp23@neuromatch.social]

There's some info about costs in https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/115200210981454279 and https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/115204185294385151

Moderation is certainly a big problem, that's driving a lot of the momentum for independent infrascture.

@nlupo @mcc

[swetland@chaos.social]

@mcc @aeva Even if Blacksky has full coverage of the stack (or will soon), your point about bsky controlling well over 90% of the users means that their moderation rulings are effectively universal.

It's cool if folks are able to run their own standalone implementations, but a couple of those on the far edges of a large centralized system does not a truly federated network make, as we have seen time and time again over the years (XMPP comes to mind...).

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@txtechnician @mcc

this is the ticking time bomb

venture capital has sunk a big investment in bluesky, and at some point they are going to ask for a return

and then bluesky goes the way of twitter

"black fedi vs queer fedi" is mostly confined to a few notable drama ego characters

it's not devouring communities, there's plenty of black folk and queer folk on the fediverse completely untouched by it

but drama *is* drama

it does drive people away

and the bullying is real

[jdp23@neuromatch.social]

@mcc Blocks are "enforced" at the client level. I know, I know, that probably merits another "oh dear" but that's how Bluesky is doing it. So blacksky.community as a client doesn't do age verification for DMs in the UK, or block access to Mississippi.

Takedowns by contrast are at the AppView and someties PDS level.

[groupnebula563@mastodon.social]

@jef @mcc well, it's better to be optimistic. if you condemn yourself to never believing something will happen, then what's driving you to try anyways

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@swetland @mcc @aeva

they unfortunately moved from #twitter to a ticking time bomb

since #bluesky is #crypto bro #ventureCapital fueled, when the investors ask for their return, they will change the ethos and ruin bluesky with #monetization digs. and maybe even put an elon #musk in place at the top and warp it for a political agenda, since all these #plutocrat money pools are connected agenda-wise

and then bluesky goes the way of twitter

and then people have to move all over again

[swetland@chaos.social]

@benroyce @mcc @aeva A lot of these folks have had very negative Mastodon (well fedi, but from their POV it's about the "app" not the network) experiences and are somewhere between unconvinced that federation is a good thing, believing it's actively a *bad* thing, or just completely unaware or uncaring about the implementation vs the UI/UX experience of their social app.

[swetland@chaos.social]

@benroyce @mcc @aeva No argument from me on that account. I mean even if they were completely benign, just being a VC funded enterprise means they're going to need an exit (ideally a profitable one for the investors) and one way or another it'll probably end up being a crap deal for the users.

Many of the folks who moved there for "classic twitter" even acknowledge this and are resigned to move again someday... valuing the familiar experience over everything else.

[txtechnician@mastodon.social]

@benroyce @mcc I figure it was probably a few figure heads throwing scat.

Pretty much anytime I hear (racial and or sexual group a and b) are fighting. It's actually just a handful of ppl who claim that identity. And no one else who claims that identity really gives a crap.

[jrose@social.belkadan.com]

@markc568 Yeah, but Mastodon GmbH runs it and also develops Mastodon-the-software, so it could have in practice had the same effect as bsky.social. But it sounds like it doesn’t, and that’s good! (even if there are plenty of other issues with Mastodon GmbH and mastodon.social)

[swetland@chaos.social]

@mcc @cthos @aeva I feel like fedi's cost/scaling problem mostly centers around issues with the implementation and deployment of Mastodon (the most popular server), with some features of the protocol being not entirely optimal, compared to the fundamental design of atp being hostile to lightweight independent instances.

Somebody could build a "better Mastodon" and instantly give people a lower resource / less complicated option for small or self-hosted yet fully interoperable fedi servers.

[msh@coales.co]

@swetland that is pretty much the intention of the ATmosphere's design. The vision of this "composable moderation" is to allow independent "labeller" or filter services be able to process the firehose of relay traffic.

I do find the atmosphere approach interesting but its "service oriented" design seems to fight against the nature (or original intentions at least) of the host-centric internet we all try to navigate.

I think that, if reasonableness prevails, ATproto and ActivityPub will end up cross pollinating ideas and resembling each other more. Oddly enough they are both hobbled by the same problem to some degree...the dominance of a single entity hampering the true potential each has (Bluesky and Mastodon or at least Gargron's Big Instances).

One thing is pretty certain at least... The dominant platform within the fediverse driving certain communities away was a more significant factor in why Bluesky gained traction than any technical design decisions either network made.

@mcc @gbargoud

[alter_kaker@hachyderm.io]

@esoteric_programmer so this is all within my ability. But what about the rest of the stack? To my understanding, the PDS and view? As @mcc says things have to change in a social level but the first step is more nodes...

[timbray@cosocial.ca]

@mcc Hmmm Thanks for the thread. Sad, but glad I heard it.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@msh @swetland @gbargoud From what I see, some communities were driven away by community issues, others (im thinking indie gamedev Twitter and comics artists) just couldn't navigate the additional friction of Mastodon's model. It wasn't all one thing. And I doubt you can chalk up the community issues to just one server, or at least, if there were one server I don't think it would be mastodon dot social (I have an instance in mind but don't feel like naming names)

[makeworld@merveilles.town]

@mcc great thread. I've been thinking about this, and about the ActivityPub alternative. Which to me looks like either

- Best case: "Gertrude" can speak freely on a friendly instance (which she used originally) and unfriendly instances/users can block her. But she keeps posting to her audience

- Worst case: "Gertrude" is banned by her instance, and now does not even have the option to continue speaking to her followers, she has to start a new account/identity from scratch, try and integrate into the community again, prove she's not an impostor, etc

With ATProto you don't get that best case scenario. But you don't get that worst case scenario either.

Btw, I saw pfrazee say they don't do PDS deletions except for illegal content (since they have to by law in that case). But on that note, they could even go further if they wanted (I think?) and block PDS migrations at which point we are back in the worst case scenario.

The comparisons and tradeoffs here are really complex! Just starting to wrap my head around it.

[contrasocial@mastodon.social]

@mcc

I'm mainly surprised that the facade fell so early with Bluesky. I expected atleast another few years before something happened to expose the reality.

[eblu@activitypub.space]

@msh@coales.co Something that I also feel is important is that moderation services are all responsible for the entire network. They can limit scope by just focusing on Bluesky posts or zeroing in on a specific subject, but it seems like a very steep mountain to climb and the more likely situation is that they just leave space for someone else to come in. Considering that Bluesky's moderation service has been the only global one for years at this point, it's safe to assume that it's load-bearing which makes it that much harder to actually unsubscribe from the moderation service without being exposed to all sorts of harmful content. It's a sort of "decentralized, but the barrier of entry is so high that it's mostly effectively centralized" situation there—hopefully we'll see someone (probably Blacksky) overcome that hurdle.