I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says “a world without Caesars” in Latin.
As much as I hate to be that guy, it’s worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It’s better to leave your money elsewhere.
ActivityPub is just as susceptible to centralization as people claim Bluesky is with the only difference being that at least Bluesky has made some sort of mechanism for credible exit. It’s old news that its expensive to run the perceived expensive parts, if fact you could do without it as many devs in the community are doing. ActivityPub is literally the easiest one to monetize because it can lead to moat building and user capture. It’s why Meta is more than willing to become the biggest node in the Fediverse with Threads.
I obviously support ActivityPub or I wouldn’t be posting this here but one of the AtProtocol developers bought a Raspberry Pi with 8GB ram and added an NVME drive. He’s trying to prove (or possibly make) this point wrong. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team
So far, it seems like it’s “working” but he’s found some things that are way too slow and needs to be fixed for it to run on a Raspberry Pi. But that gives me some confidence that the developers, at least, aren’t trying to make it so only people with deep pockets can run an instance. (I don’t know what the investors want but the developers aren’t scheming assholes.)
It’s probably going to ultimately be a situation where anyone with a high end PC (by today’s standards) can run their own instance. It’s definitely not an A.I. situation where you have to reopen Three Mile Island and piss away more water than Nestle to self-host.
That’s cool!
I’m also a big fan of what Bridgy Fed is capable of doing towards Bluesky - it does show that there is a lot one can actually do with the protocol.
As I read the situation it’s complicated. They are not inherently evil—on the contrary, I think they are trying to do good—but they are locked down by the structural chains around them. The whole thing was initiated by Jack Dorsey, and from the onset they wanted to re-create Twitter while solving what they perceived as “moderation challenges”, and with the starting point that they were to create the next Twitter, not a decentralized network of services.
Hell, wasn’t the original idea that Twitter itself would become part of the network?
When I see Bluesky today I see Twitter 15+ years ago. A lot of optimism and goodwill, but nevertheless a project that is doomed from the start.
Yeah, I have more faith in the Fediverse long term. But we’ve all been through multiple enshittification cycles where everyone abandons a platform and settles on a new one. At least BlueSky is currently open source.
I don’t want to make too much of this but BlueSky is registered as a B-Corps and not a C-corps. For those unfamiliar with US corporate setups, a C-corps is a typical corporation where maximizing shareholder value is the goal. People can disagree on what that means — long term value or short term value, for instance — but ultimately, C-suite executives serve shareholders and only shareholders.
A B-corps (in the U.S.) is a “Public Benefit Corporation” and executives have a duty to serve all stakeholder in the company, from shareholders, to customers, to employees. So, theoretically, BlueSky doesn’t have to be evil.
That being said, it’s not something to rely on. We just saw it with OpenAI, which started as a project at a non-profit and is now a regular ass company that the old non-profit happens to have shares in. A few corporate lawyers can fuck up a good thing very quickly.
I must admit seeing Mozilla get worse and worse has also made me more cynical on behalf of Bluesky. And then there’s the issue of moderation - I’m beginning to think that big ethical platforms cannot really exist, as there is no such thing as a perfect place to draw the line with regards to moderation.
Maybe Bluesky would be the most likely to succeed in operating a large online platform in a good way. I have just lost all faith in such platforms.
One good thing about BlueSky’s moderation over Mastodon’s is that it’s (partially) chosen by users. Mastodon/Lemmy instance hosts almost all do an admirable and often thankless job by defederating and booting people but in the end, you’re relying on your instance host and your own one-off blocks.
BlueSky currently does have centralized moderators who kick people off all the time. But if the law changes in any country, BlueSky has the fallback of relying on user-created blocklists and user-created algorithmic feeds. In the U.S., Section 230 is apparently hated by Congress and, while I agree it could be updated and reformed, I’m not confident our corrupt gerontocracy will strike the right balance.
I’d love it if the future of ActivityPub-based platforms uses that approach. Even Instance moderators would probably be thrilled.
That was something I liked about ZeroNet; in addition to it being incredibly easy to universally block a specific user, there were also block lists anyone could create or subscribe to.
(Although IIRC ZeroNet blocks would only mean you didn’t see blocked users; others could still see that person’s comments etc on your content.)
I actually view it the opposite. Lemmy isn’t necessarily doomed from the start but we will not reach mass adoption because we are too clunky to use for most users because of its distributed nature.
Bluesky has enabled tons of non tech users to immediately reap the rewards without having to worry about instances or who can see their posts, while maintaining decentralization (albeit with a high cost).
The true path forward will probably be a world like Bluesky but instead of running your own relay, you’re contributing compute power to a Kubernetes cluster. Instances and having to worry about federation is far too clunky for most users, it’s the reason mastodon never saw mass adoption while Bluesky almost immediately did.
I think the difficulty to use ActivityPub as a user is a side effect of what makes it resilient. It does not grow quickly amongst the masses, but it also can’t be taken out with one company changing. I think in the long run, more and more people will see it as a legitimate social network and it will grow over time.
I don’t think usability problems in Lemmy are related to the protocol. For me open source alternatives carry the promise that they will only get better, while profit-oriented alternatives will eventually have to get worse.
I don’t think any of what makes Lemmy difficult to use is a necessity based on its distributed nature; its a result of the developers being more geared towards the back-end than towards the front-end. Which is not an inherent weakness - the back-end needs to be good before a nice front-end can make sense. So I’m optimistic. :)
Exactly. If I want to subscribe to a group (sublemmy?) that isn’t on my home instance, then I have to search for it from my home instance and then click the “Subscribe” button. This is a somewhat painstaking process, but there’s no reason that I can see why that couldn’t be streamlined.
Because of how Bluesky is designed, to meaningfully federate, your server needs to ingest all data from everywhere, and every new message needs to be sent to every single other federated server.
This means that Bluesky just isn’t set up for federation currently: it scales quadratically.
Self-hosting a PDS is not the same.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
I’m glad to see someone attempting to run their own index but the protocol is not meant to scale that way, and it gets worse the more indexes there are.
Yeah nope. At least not so far and i dont see why it would change. The current situation is that you can host stuff yourself, but you wont be able to connect and federate with any other servers or users without bluesky’s permission. Its not a level playing field and it never will be.
Lemmy (and similarly any other federated system) is only NOT enshittified because people successfully grew lots of competing servers and therefore prevented a monopoly power. If lemmy.world hosted 90% of lemmy users, i guarantee that it would have quickly turned to shit.
Even if bluesky was using proper federation and people started setting up other AT Protocol instances, bluesky would still hold 99.9999% of all users. They have literally zero reason to change this situation and changing it would cost them millions in advertisement for other completely independent instances.
It is waaay too late for bluesky to change in any meaningful way.
Their federation doesn’t work the same as Lemmy & Mastodon there’s no federation to individual servers.
If Bluesky introduced ads to their app, you can take all Bluesky data from the relay and host your own app without ads. This is working today and easy to do.
If they started charging for access to the relay you can host your own relay and it will parse all users data for you to use. This is also working today but it’s a little expensive.
Something would have to SIGNIFICANTLY change with the protocol for Bluesky to change how the relay interacts with the PDS, that would require such a large infrastructure change there’s no reason even questioning further.
The reason you don’t see anyone doing it right now is because there’s not much incentive to. On Lemmy we’re each on our own little “community” but Bluesky is just here’s everyones data no matter what when hosting a relay.
Still a cool shirt tho.
Well, most people don’t read Latin, so there’s a high risk of ending up looking exactly as pretentious as the asshole one seeks to make fun of. That said, taste is individual, each for their own.
That’s a fair point. If you’re concerned about people judging you, you probably wouldn’t want to be seen as a Fuckerburg fanboy.
he probably wore it when visiting latin america.
I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. The IT world is full of people developing their own thing because they think they can do better, and sometimes they succeed and make something nice. Who knows, maybe they’ll turn out alright?
Then they took crypto bro venture capital and my charitable optimism went out the window.
Traditionally, that’s what new major version numbers are for. IF (and I stress the “if” because I have no clue about protocol design) it turns out that AT has useful features, a merger of ideas of both ActivityPub and AT could lead to ActivityPub 2.0.
That would be somewhat similar to AMD’s proprietary Mantle leading to Vulkan (which was originally intended to launch as OpenGL 5.0).
AP is flexible enough that you can do most AT stuff within AP.
Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.
Because AT protocol has features that are incompatible with ActivityPub, and those features are important to some users.
The fact that we don’t see this yet, and that Bluesky has accepted the amount of money they have from actors I would not want to be associated with, makes me doubt this is possible.
Even if a non-profit wanted to operate with good intentions, the expense of running an AT proto hub would eventually prove a challenge, and the non-profit would either go under or need to start looking around for money. Meanwhile people can self-host their Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi.
Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub, I have tried and failed to understand exactly which feature is the AT proto folks so desperately wanted that they found it impossible to achieve through ActivityPub. The whole thing with having a mobile identity or whatever seems like a nothing burger to me - at the end of the day it just means that your user name is your DID number, and that web addresses can redirect towards that one. It’s hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol.
It can be done on the fediverse anyway.
My one complaint about fediverse is I have half a dozen baronvonj@<service> accounts in order to get the features and UI experience of each. They are all separate, with the data for each spread out, and we all have to redundantly follow on each. If I could have one fediverse identity with all my data self-hosted, that would be the awesomesauce. But I can’t with fedi and I can with AT.
I guess that’s fair, as a way to make users identifiable with the same user name all over the internet, no matter which platform they are on.
When people sign in using bluesky on https://frontpage.fyi/, they are still bluesky accounts? Or does the account somehow transform into something that exists between both sites?
Is there any real innovation here beyond a combination of “sign in with x service” and having your domain appear as your user name?
frontpage will store its data on your user server.
I’m not sure if it’s good window dressing on top of SAML/OAUTH but I see the same username on both. Not this is not me, I just scrolled frontpage.fyi and picked a poster at random then searched the same username on bsky.app.
https://bsky.app/profile/tonybark.com https://frontpage.fyi/profile/tonybark.com
Yeah, they will use their domains, and they can sign in with Bluesky. So it is the same account to a pretty significant degree. What I’m wondering is if the Frontpage user would break if Bsky.app disappeared, or if the user could still sign in as the identity is somehow truly decentralized.
As for domains as user names, I guess ActivityPub could achieve something by allowing users to have verified websites (mastodon style) appear as their user names. I don’t really see what would have to change on a protocol level to make this possible.
Identity is decentralized through the protocol so they’d be fine. Bluesky at the end of the day is just app view that sits on top of the protocol so it can disappear and everything will continue operating as long as there’s a relay online.
But on frontpage.fyi, if you want to sign up, you have to sign up through Bluesky. They direct you to bsky.app to create your account.
I just don’t see how this is a real functional example of a portable account. Maybe it is not supposed to be - if so, is the decentralized nature of accounts demonstrated anywhere in a practical way?
I struggle to understand things I cannot see.
There are significant differences in account portability. ActivityPub allows you to transfer your followers to a new server, but not your content.
Nothing in ActivityPub says you can’t move your content from one platform to another. It’s just that Mastodon does not have this feature at the moment.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure whether Bluesky has this feature or not, but it’s somewhat irrelevant considering the fact that there are no other platforms to move your content to. The only thing I’ve actually seen from this is that you can use an URL as your username in the front-end, though it just points towards the same DID in the backend. I struggle to see what the great achievement here is.
If this was the reasoning behind Bluesky, they could have developed a platform running on AP supporting the transfer of content between instances, and it would have been a whole lot easier than developing a whole new protocol.
Your content in ActivityPub is linked to the home instance. So for example I can’t move this post from lemmy.world to another server. I could copy/paste the content into a new post on another server, but it would be a broken piece of our conversation with no context or replies.
Also, hosting a ATProto self-instance is not as expensive as you suggest. This person did it for $150/month.
Fair - you could host a copy or a link (or a sort of combination between the two, I guess), but it wouldn’t transfer the ownership of the original post. I’m still not sure this is such a pressing feature that I accept it as the actual raison d’etre of AT proto, especially considering how it very much exists there only in theory at best. But it is interesting technology, and something they could maybe have worked with ActivityPub to try to achieve.
I’m glad to hear that maybe Bluesky is more decentralized than I suspect, but Bluesky engineer whose blog post you linked still links to his bluesky account on bsky.social. If running a separate instance is achievable, I would love to see people actually do it.
You full on misunderstand the protocol. The .bsky.social subdomain does not denote what “instance” you are on. There are no instances on atproto. That user could be self hosting all there data and still use that subdomain. It’s not mutually exclusive. Atproto is far more atomic than AP.
Right. I guess that’s similar with bridged users - you see them on bsky.app, even though they are actually located elsewhere.
What I struggle with is seeing the decentralization in practice, when the only place I can ever see AT proto in action is when Bluesky users are bridged to the fediverse. Bluesky has a shitload of users and there are a bunch of people jumping on the technology - why is there not so much as an understandable proof of concept out there?
On ActivityPub it’s so easy to understand. “See this post? Well, here’s the same post on some other domain, hosted by other people”.
I don’t understand how Bluesky can be this difficult to understand, yet apparently fulfil such a fundamental need.
My understanding is that running most of BlueSky is possible on small to moderate hardware. However, running all of BlueSky requires basically cloning 100% of all the content on BlueSky (which, as of Nov 2024, was ~5 TB).
So, like, yes, one can run part of BlueSky or a clone of BlueSky which has none of the main instance’s user’s content without much trouble, but actually running an entire BlueSky stack is eventually going to become cost prohibitive.
I found this write-up to be enlightening on the subject.
Which benefits does AT have in comparison to Activity pub? Except currently single point of entry/failure?
They want decentralized moderation on a centralized platform. That’s how on Bluesky, there’s an understanding that the removal of hate speech “conflicts with Bluesky’s decentralized goals”. On Mastodon, the decentralized nature is how we can show bigots the door without them getting to whine about their freedom of expression. Bluesky manages to create a problem using the very same concept by which Mastodon solves it.
I guess this didn’t really end up being a post about the benefits of AT. Oops.
At least in Germany there is a mandatory German filter list that seems to be maintained by Bluesky themselves. They couldn’t legally operate here if they allowed holocaust denial and such.
There are minimum standards they’ll have to abide by, but that’s similar to Meta after their change of policy. It really is not enough that it should make anyone feel comfortable.
Basically big platforms can choose between making moderation expensive, minimal, or arbitrary. Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they’re legal. Reddit is leaning into arbitrary, having AI banning folks on account of upvotes. Facebook used to dabble with expensive, but have made a recent shift into minimal.
This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.
I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this
I don’t mind people setting up for-profit businesses. After all it’s what you’re supposed to do in a capitalist society, but the issue with it is when company start putting profit before people. As long as they don’t do that I’m not bothered that they make business-minded decisions.
The real problem begins when one has to consider how to make money from a social media platform. Selling T-shirts with sick burns written in Latin is not going to work forever.
Right… isn’t the obvious response to this “holy shit, they really don’t have a business model even remotely figured out here???” which immediately leads you to the realization that everything they promise (no matter how genuine the employee making the promises is) is subject to being sacrificed at the alter of “sorry we had to monetize and make difficult decisions”.
This isn’t difficult, it is just exhausting.
What this says is that Bluesky has no idea how to make a profit off of social media ethically and they would be better off spending their time selling smart political and funny t-shirts than distracting people with a false vision of the future that is going to end up just making everybody even more cynical in the end when it inveitably enshittifies the same exact way every other for-profit social media venture has…
Nah I am good, I will put my energy into helping the fediverse grow because I know how this story goes and I can’t stand the rising headache I get from seeing it repeat endlessly. I want a different future and so I am here.