It's been many years without social networks for me. At gatherings, I'm often the only one without a phone in my hand, and it feels strange. Eventually, the "phoners" make eye contact and chat a bit, usually about something they all saw on a screen. But it never lasts. They always go back to the screen. It seems silence and quiet time make them uncomfortable. Even in a formal business meeting, screens are open, and attention is lost.
Will decentralized social networks fix this plague? I don't think so. The only thing that works is disconnecting. Just a few weeks into it, you'll realize you have so much free time. Time for hobbies, time for loved ones, time for finding peace and joy, time for creating and sharing. You will regret the thousands of hours wasted on that useless addiction. A few months in, you'll hear the birds singing again. You'll notice the evening skies. You'll find comfort and joy. The time you get back will help you build incredible things.
> At gatherings, I'm often the only one without a phone in my hand, and it feels strange
I’m curious, what country is this from? I’ve been living in NZ and Japan last 5 years and people love their phones here too. But the gatherings (even random meet ups!) almost never have people with phones in their hands.
> Even in a formal business meeting, screens are open, and attention is lost.
This would be considered incredibly rude and would lose businesses here
I agree there’s a ton of benefits from fully disconnecting. I’ve had periods completely off social media which were quite blissful, though I’ve always ended up coming back to some extent due the social aspects you described.
Given the choice between apps controlled by large corporations preying on attention vs decentralized protocols, I’d much rather have the latter.
I think having examples of apps that don’t demand one’s attention so fiercely, or provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,” are an important step towards ending the mass social media addiction society is currently experiencing.
> provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,”
Instead of a non-obvious "algorithm" with tailoring, just have a social app with a purpose (or per group purpose), and nothing but absolute direct control.
I.e. follow/link with friends, family or whatever in groups. The feed is time-weighted to recent posts or communications. Any other filtering or prioritization can be done, by selection. I.e. deprioritize reposts by default, except persons A, B and C. Etc.
There could be like/dislikes that accumulate into priorities, for those who think that is convenient, but those priorities are just private settings that can be observed and changed.
No hidden/obscure/unclear algorithms, no third parties, no ads, and no Zuck's with any ability to access/impact/insert into the feed.
A scrapbook group, that is just a scrapbook group. Etc.
When did software products/services start "needing" boogymen?
This is pretty much exactly what Bluesky / Blacksky offer in the form of custom feeds. Gives users the ability to choose whatever type of feed they want, algorithm curated or not.
And if you’re unhappy with the selection, you’re free to create your own.
The best middle ground I've found is checking social media on a web browser on a computer. On my time, when I decide.
I still check Instagram every few weeks just to see what everyone is up to. And it's honestly really nice. I never think about it until I'm thinking "hmm, what is X up to?"
The best part is I don't burn through all the posts in 5 seconds and then get reels suggested. In a few weeks or a couple months, a lot of stuff happens! There's a bunch of cool posts from my friends from me to see, and no algorithmic BS.
This, this, this and more this!!! Sorry, the below is long, but I haven’t really shared before anywhere and it’s just flowed out of me this morning…
I dropped Facebook over 15 years ago, instagram maybe 7 or 8 years ago, Twitter just before Elon took over, Whatsapp and Strava I guess might be the only things I use considered “social” and I have all group notifications muted on WA at all times.
I’ve watched this parallel reality grow and evolve over the years and I hate it. Everyone everywhere seems to be permanently staring at a screen!
A month or so back, I watched my wife awake in the morning, she didn’t realise I was awake watching her (lovingly) - I got Black Mirror IRL - instantly upon awaking, without looking, she reached for her phone and the endless scrolling started, she was so engrossed, after 10 mins not noticing her husband awake, intently watching her, I had to say “Morning”. Later that morning, alone, I wept tears for myself, for her and all of humanity.
Two to three months ago, I had realised that while I wasn’t addicted to social media, I was absolutely addicted to news media/politics/etc. Like a key in a lock, it clicked one day, i’d wasted at least a decade, nearly two of adult life obsessively reading, commenting and talking about UK, global events & politics.
Worse than that, I realised how all the negativity from that world was directly feeding my own negativity and then into those around me. Then after another week or two where I blocked it out entirely at home, I felt “recovered”. My fingers were no longer blindly typing in web addresses in moments of boredom - I’d dip into a book chapter of technical paper for 5 minutes instead. Political podcasts were all dropped, replaced entirely with music and podcasts that don’t engage with political comment.
I was only granted this moment of clarity as I attended a technical conference for a week, where I was up at 7 every morning to hit the early sessions and not getting back to my hotel till nearly 10 or 11pm. Amazingly, the whole week, there was barely a whisper of anything about politics - I think I might have heard the word “Trump” once.
I was so full of energy and excitement about what i’d been learning and talking to people about all week, as soon as I returned to my normal reality, the world of international politics suddenly appeared to me exactly the same way a bottle of booze did after knocking alcohol addiction on the head. The mere mention of any of the MSM trigger words suddenly produced in me a deep feeling of revulsion.
I couldn’t imagine not knowing what was going on in the world 6 months ago, now I actively avoid any mention or conversation that might go that way. The sky hasn’t fallen in, foreign invaders haven’t taken my country, what has happened though is I’ve been devouring books and technical papers like a mad man, learning new instruments, creating art on the computer and finally facing my demons and creating art on paper!
My life has improved beyond all rational logic, probably moreso than quitting alcohol, which was also a horrible, slow growing, hugely negative addiction for me. My emotional state feels more balanced than ever as I’m finally feeling totally free from all the emotional manipulation these things ultimate come with. If something awful happens out in the big bad world painted by the media, I’ll deal with it when it happens as it happens in my actual reality. The best tools I can arm myself with are knowledge, gratitude and love. Sitting around arguing on political blogs has achieved the square root of fuck all and will continue to achieve that.
People seem shocked when they attempt to talk to me about politics and I just shrug my shoulders now. I shudder to think now about the energy I blindly invested into that world, never making one single bit of difference, just generating negativity inside of me, which then spirals out to those I most love around me. When you flip all that negative energy into positive energy, and honestly it really is that easy, you very quickly start getting the insight that maybe you aren’t just human, you’re superhuman.
I am not a big social media user, to be honest it is too stressful. Minimal social interaction is fine for me, and I'm happy with the boundaries IRL social encounters create where you can walk away (politely at the end of course) and it's over.
News and politics was a big waste of time for me too. Before 2015 I just kept up to date with big issues, but Brexit and then Covid really got me addicted to news and politics.
I ditched Reddit (with the API thing) and news websites about a year ago. It really is nice not knowing about every tiny event. It's not even necessary for being politically aware as so much of the "news" is hearsay and random Tweets turned into content by the media.
I have started looking at the BBC News business section every now and then. This really shows what a content factory other news media sites are. The BBC business page adds new articles maybe twice a day. There is no point checking more often than that (unless you go down a comments rabbit hole).
Sites like The Guardian have new articles hourly and sometimes multiple "live blogs" going on at once. That sort of output can happen in just the "business/economy" section, never mind the rest of the site.
Like social media there is just no way that amount of content can be useful, in fact it's most likely the opposite.
I'd bet she was probably scrolling through the endless stream of fear (war, poverty, crime), guilt (diets, fitness, beauty), and shallowness (jokes, celebrities). In those moments with loved ones, I choose to engage, explain what's happening, and make them aware of how it's making them feel. Then I guide them toward alternatives. We play, we cook, we read, we plant, we dance.
It isn't entirely our fault. It's deliberately made and constantly adjusted to be addictive, for the sole purpose of selling ads, swaying votes, counting more MAUs, and increasing valuations.
Still, knowing something is bad for you isn't enough to make you stop, right? Yet, once you are out, you can choose to help others, especially the ones you care about.
One of the most insidious things about politics news is that there's always more non-actionable trivia factoid bullshit that you can read instead of anything productive
Trump said this? Supreme Court said that? Some poll is up? Okay. That doesn't tell me if we're in danger in my town, that doesn't tell me who's protesting, whose meetings to attend, what our threat model is
It's a sugar fix and it's frustrating when I step back and realize that really caring about politics would start with me leaving the house
maybe just thinking or being internet heroes doesn't matter. Maybe the real change happens at leaving the house.
But I wonder, if that is real change too. Like, maybe the system is so fucked up that even that wouldn't have an impact. Should I invest my energy into such a gamble? maybe, there is no right answer. a part of me who has watched movies and watched good guys win makes me want to say yes but uh reality says otherwise for the most part.
But maybe reality happened because there are people who are on the fence like me who said nah, noone else would do it, then peer pressure happened and welp nobody did anything and that became an evidence for the next generation who can again say nah and the cycle of suffering repeats.
But can this cycle truly change with just the will of one person like me? I doubt that my presense makes a change.
I have started to think that the best way I can make real change is maybe by open sourcing / working in a non profit / maybe helping them with some linux expertise in my community since I love linux. I can set up self hosted stuff for them so that they can control their infrastucture. I can reduce their costs from these bloated app subscription hell holes, maybe help these non profits and donate to the right causes and work on fixing my life too. Does this make sense?
Wow, I was writing a comment trying to defend watching a news, and I realized that basically I have almost become miserable due to news.
Please read the previous comment that I have posted on hackernews for some reference about "freedom", basically its about freedom and how I feel like a lot of issues are political and thus I don't trust the people of the world to do whats right and therefore the world won't always grow/ I am not an optimist , also here's a cookie if you did read my whole post there!!
I feel like politics is the (truest?) way of making real change. Unfortunately, I doubt that I can enter into politics and I also doubt that people in my area would vote for me. I bet that they would much likely more follow racial, caste based issues rather than tackling real things. And I doubt I will ever get funding from someone for speaking against the absolute rich in my country. maybe my life would be in danger, that's more likely. My appearance is also really nerdy and I love tech. I doubt if people would think of me as a leader. I loved giving speeches in class but I wonder if I can bring real change in the system.
To me, its this system that feels so convuluted man. Like we have freedom and not at the same time.
Do we have the freedom to bring real change?-> I feel yes
But can I bring real change though? -> Maybe
Is it worth trying? -> I don't know
I feel like news essentially boils down to the is it worth trying? option. No need to be a hero, I feel like I wanted to be different / mature so followed news, but I mean, from a completely logical point of view, Idk man.
This is what I have in question. Is it worth trying to do discussions and bring a political reform as to what I believe/ experts say at the same time into reality.
Like georgism, nuclear etc.
Is it worth discussing these things even though they might be a headache but maybe the mere discussion of them increases their likelihood of being spread and maybe adopted.
Are my thoughts having a real impact.
I feel so tiny in this world man. I feel like money buys influence but I am not a sociopath who can play a billionaires game for my "good" political ideas to be implemented, and If I become something like that, then what's the difference b/w me and them.
I feel like a lot of billionaires are freeloaders. NO Matter how much risk you take, it shouldn't be rewarded as such. It almost feels like the freemarket isn't efficient in this sense. I genuinely don't know :/, but the fact that you can almost buy presidencies is... wild.
Should I still watch the news? like, uh, are you getting what I am feeling? I feel like I can't bring real change so why bother but a part of me believes that the fact that I am saying it is wrong and needs to be proven wrong. I wish to be an optimist, I wish for the world to be saved, because I see people suffering. I wish to bring an impact, or maybe die trying. Would the french revolution had happened if people gave up on news? Or have the people getting news from sources whose only agenda is to stop anything like french revolution from happening (billionaires?) and they want us all to fight each other.
Man, I don't know, can we bring real change? I have seen people do it, but can I? Should I? I don't know. Its so messy and breaks my heart. Definitely hard to explain as I wish to be an optimist but am stuck being a pessimist/realist (almost murphy-esque in the sense that anything can happen, will happen) with my logical deductions.
The questions boils down to ,
is ignorance bliss? or should I pursue the truth of knowledge even if its bitter, maybe I can live my life built around that bitterness, that things are real, that I don't have to be an optimist. You have picked ignorance, and there is no wrong answer but I wish for a discussion so that someone can help me pick my answer.
You seem to believe that not following the news leads to ignorance?
My question to you is - Is following the news even a form of participation?
I would argue that news has an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. Most news anchors and talking heads and commentators talk a lot but convey very little. It's obvious they understand very little and ultimately focus on regurgitating what is "commonly understood" that everyone else also repeats. Plus usually there's heavy biases involved - so many implicit assumptions every time they open their mouth. Hardly any nuance is conveyed.
Anyways let's forget news for a second and discuss how to make some kind of impact, some kind of change.
To my mind at least 3 options occur to me:
1. Writing. Don't write to a wide audience, write to a narrow one. Really get in deep on a political issue.
2. Start local. Participate in town council, or similar, get involved as an active member in local politics to gain practice/exposure. Don't need to be a politician or be elected yet.
3. Or my favorite - focus on some technical solution for helping people to organize perhaps..
I mean I don't watch traditional news and more youtube from genuine indpendent journalists who are transparent about their reporting and even their company in general. (Tldr news) etc. and I am way more focused on the economy side of things.
I do watch a lot of atrioc and I think that he's a decent enough source to be trusted compared to journalists in the sense that I get both fun and news at the same time but yeah.
Like I said (I think) I am way more interested on things financially and so plain bagel who I consider to be an excellent finance youtuber who isn't a grifter and literally has no incentives to sell you a course or something. ( crazy that I feel like I have to mention it, that's how scummy most finance youtubers are)
Even then, even such amount of news which I consider to be a signal makes me depressed. I may have a left leaning bias but that's because of the incompetence of the govt. and I am not even an american but its interesting to watch american politics because it impacts us all and my countries politics is a shit hole that its not worth watching, both parties suck, (tbh america is same, bernie is the only person that I trust for the most part imo)
My point that I was trying to make is that maybe mass scale of people depress me with what is happening in the world. I wish to be ignorant but I wish to know if that makes sense.
Regarding 3rd point, to me 3) is also my favourite as I love finding technical solutions to organize/build etc., yet I find it that I am not an effective oranizer for stuff, maybe I am better off just helping non profits in their mission that might align with my political beliefs, but I wonder if I can do it without it being my full job or taking full time efforts. Like, decentralizing the communications by moving to matrix or helping them in self hosting their stuff comes to my mind. Does this make sense? Do non profits need this?
Let them be rich. Stoicism would recommend you not try to control what isn't in your hands to control; just accept it. Can you imagine that centuries ago, the same rules of class, power, and money drove society, and some very smart philosophers came to the right conclusions? Let it be. Meanwhile, those hands, freed from frustration and fear, can build the extraordinary.
Has nothing changed from thousands of years ago from the greek democracies though?
I thought that we have changed for the better, if not, then well, I am forced to accept it. But it is so fucking sad that we have to accept that same rules of money drove society and it would continue doing so. That's really fucked up if we think about it.
Incidentally the size of sockets and screws (including the Allen wrench) is very much a technology. William Sellers pushed standards in the mid 1800s specifically to benefit American industry through interoperability. Standards we still use today.
And the gauges are just as important. Obligatory ref to Brad Cox seminal 1990 paper, Planning the Software Industrial Revolution, and it's compelling analogy with Eli Whitney.
I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. Then Threads added federation. What am I supposed to do with each account? They have different posting histories, they can’t be merged, but if I post the same thing to both of them, I’ll be repeating myself. Am I supposed to discontinue using one of them? If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. It’s a mess.
This is why centralized social media took off. It is easy to understand and use.
Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.
I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?
Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.
There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.
I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
Keeping the accounts separate seems like an extremely mandatory feature to me. If I had multiple Google accounts I would absolutely not want any information leakage from one to the other.
IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation.
I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.
Just give me P2P social media and put me in the swarm. BitTorrent for Reddit and Twitter.
It shouldn't matter what servers are anywhere. It should all be eventually consistent for some agglomerated cluster sampling of the world. Make the content immutable and ephemeral. People that care to archive it will.
Federation is silly and is part of the problem. Plus it creates more little fiefdoms.
I'll subscribe to my own filters if I care, and my agent will handle the rest.
I don't think this approach will work for most people. Assuming the Bluesky firehose is 50GB/day, that's a massive amount of data to have to download just to filter for the handful of events a person might actually be interested in. My phone barely goes through a couple GB per month!
But perhaps for efficiency I should rent a server to do the filtering on the cloud and then sync it down to my phone? Well then why not instead consume from a server which already did most of the filtering that I wanted? And now we get back to something like usenet, or the modern day fediverse.
I guess this is when it gets fuzzy. A true peer-to-peer social network would mean that every node has to be able to get everything and also be able to share whatever it has with every other node. If every participant on this kind of social network was required to maintain their own "seedbox", then it implicitly limits access to only people with means.
But if there were hubs funded by groups of interested people that allowed those folks to share the cost of "seeding" and in return only "leech" the information they care about... then isn't that essentially the same kind of decentralization that already exists on the fediverse? The way I understand it, instances are set up by communities of people with similar interests and those instances are configured to only propagate a subset of the events that their community is interested in.
how i solved for this was reciprocal pinning so any node owns all their data (personal log) + whoever they follow (mutual follow reprocity) last x content (indices so its easy to get last n, or last since xyz) and so anyone can decide exactly what they keep or not on their node and thus share by simply following or not (maybe two level, so you can choose to not pin people you follow) heh, smt like that
anyways the idea is very much to do like bittorrent or kademilia but for social media posts i need to research more the fediverse before building anything tho
That's more or less what atproto is, except the indexer is called a relay and provides the data directly. Currently bluesky is providing their relay for free, but I don't believe there's any reason they couldn't make it paid in the future.
Well you can run your own ActivityPub Server/Client and subscribe (and thus federate) with anyone who hasn’t explicitly blocked you from federating with them. Bridge that with AT and you can see and interact with whatever you want on the Fediverse.
I just commented above, but it's really more like being a student at a university. You can enter all the buildings with your student ID. You can be friends with people in other dorms and enter the building. Even though you're an engineering student you can take classes in the economics or theater or applied science schools.
Though, IMO Mastodon not the better of the fediverse platforms, but I don't love microblogging social media. But it's all going to end up being like Linux. Some people tried it once, didn't like it, and then 10 years from now it'll be totally different and everyone will wonder where it's been all their lives.
At one point I had 2 accounts. One was on my phone and one was on my laptop. I was in the process of moving to the one on my laptop (I know migration exists, but I'm weird and didn't want to do that). Anyway, I was on my phone and saw a post with my one account from some other federated server. When I went on my laptop I couldn't find it. I figured it might just need to propagate. I waited days... nothing. I've seen behavior like this a lot. You're not seeing a problem, because you can't know what you don't see.
If you're just scrolling a bunch of random stuff, you might not care. But what if we want this to be like old Facebook, where you follow people you actually know? Am I going to miss wedding and birth announcements? Party invitations? Other important life updates from friends and family?
You could criticize the modern algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook for not showing some of these things as well, if they don't think it will engage you enough, but at least the post is there and available. When I ran into that issue between my 2 accounts, I looked for the post specifically, I had the ID... it simply wasn't available to me.
I don't think that's a good way of stating it. You get the posts from the people anyone on your server follows. An admin can block or silence accounts, or run a relay, but these are edge cases.
you can say "hey could you refollow those instances"
you could throw more money into the instance's tip jar to make it easier for them to decide to rehost a larger part of the data firehose - that may not be the entire reason they defederated from an instance but it may be part of it
you could move to another instance whose admin's choices are more in line with yours
True, so it's not an improvement. I guess it is even worse because when they unfollow an instance they may ban hundreds of users just because there are a few problematic ones.
I use Lemmy, and while federated social media might seem like this up front, a good comparison is dorms and classes at a large university.
Every dorm/housing and school program has its own vibe and attitude. Your student ID gets you in to all of them, but you live in one dorm building in particular, let's call it Jones Tower. There might be some seeming overlap between buildings - maybe Dinkley Hall and the Rogers Building both have Engineering floors, but they're not the same at all. You can cross-list classes between the geology department and theater school and gerontology, that's cool. You can have friends that live in Dinkey Hall and the Blake Apartments, and they can all go anywhere they want.
Is it a mess? Not really. Is it as plain and one-size-fits-all as single-story high school like Facebook? Not at all. Does it take time to understand how to sign up for a cross-listed class? Sure. To some it's worth it to be there, and plenty drop out because it's not for them, and that's fine. IMO, the benefit is the barrier to entry. It's not for everyone and doesn't need to be.
Threads added federation, but only Mastodon servers are connected, and not all of them - this is like Threads is the private medical school across town that lets grad school students from the Fediverse Uni come over for specific classes.
Really though is this a real world issue? Tombstone one and use the other. No reason to quit just because you don’t have perfect agency. Post both if you want, people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
So, is the problem that you have accounts on both networks. You would be OK with just posting to both accounts, but for people who have the federation toggle on, they’ll get a duplicate view of your posts?
That actually does seem annoying. You probably can’t do anything about it, but it seems like it would be extremely easy to fix on the platforms’ sides. Since you are intentionally trying not to have people get dupes of your posts, they could just add the ability to tag a post with some identifier, then not show posts that have the same identifier, and rely on you tag your posts appropriately (and an obvious feature would be to automate that tagging and include it in the various “share to <other platform>” buttons).
Right so your quibble is that part of your audience is not portable, not that federation makes posting harder. You either maintain a centralized service account or you don’t. That hasn’t changed with Meta services. It is Threads that doesn’t allow for portability.
Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio.
How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.
well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.
I am having trouble imagining the failure mode you are trying to avoid.
It sounds like threads implementation of federation is broken. What effects does toggling that federation setting on or off do?
Like if someone is following “duplicate” accounts of yours and therefore would see double posts, that person can unfollow one. Still double work for you that kind of sucks.
Scuttlebutt had some work done on publicly declaring two identities as the same, I wonder what that would look like for posts. Like a post-id or simple equality comparison or hash could work server side or client side.
One thing I like about Mastodon and Bluesky (and Twitter before 2023) is that most of it can be read without having an account, so users can ignore all federation features and just treat them like old school websites.
The fact that they have different implementation details that is not so important to me, though personally I replicate all my posts for readers who prefer one place over another.
Threads didnt even up properly federating. Its only 1 way, so from Mastodon you can follow people on threads if your instance hasnt blocked it (it probably has) and from threads you cant follow anything in the fediverse. You also need to enable a setting ot make your account followable.
One of these gives you ultimate control (mastodon / AT) if you want it (you can host and own the domain) or the ability to ride along with your choice of admin.
The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for)
There was a time when tweets were just good ol' regular HTML pages. Today it's unbearable if you remember that you're just trying to read one small paragraph.
When I went browsing through their GitHub I was surprised at how little web-specific code they have. It's basically just their React Native mobile app and a tiny go server. I understand that with a small team they've got to prioritize, I do hope at some point they implement server-side rendering for when you click on a direct link to a post.
I get as much out of bluesky as I ever did from twitter. It may be honeymoon phase but since I mostly just follow experts, journalists and the like I see as much as I ever did. There's less silliness on there but definitely some and I expect that's due to the times we're in and not the users.
Unlike Bluesky, which is a website and community, "Lemmy" is software. There are many Lemmy instances; the content varies wildly, just like it does between Mastodon instances, or web sites.
What instance is more wholesome? As written, your comment is like saying IRC is more wholesome. It is? On what server?
I'm thinking of programming.dev in particular but suspect my wholesome comment is pretty universally true. The type of crowd that sets up their own servers like these are in my experience slightly biased towards wholesome side. Setting up software, build initial user base etc...there is a level of intent there that you don't get with the free for all that is reddit or whatever.
Maybe that's just my impression but suspect there is a kernel of truth there
Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded".
In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.
When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.
I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.
The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.
This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.
I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.
I feel like that's more the "small" effect. Humans are generally more community-minded in small groups than in big ones because we were built for groups where everyone recognizes everyone else. So big groups where nobody recognizes anyone else can be a problem.
(From this perspective, it matters much less whether someone is self-hosting the servers or not if the group is small, those two things just happen to coincide.)
Hrm, this is actually a frustration of Bluesky for me; I find it relatively sluggish, particularly compared to a decent Mastodon server. I also remember Twitter as being faster, but I haven't had an account for a couple of years, and it _was_ getting slower before I nuked my account, so maybe it's worse now.
I wonder how they came up with two million Blacksky users. Who counts as a user? Do they host that many users' accounts? Is it any Bluesky user who subscribed to their feeds? Something else?
Edit:
> Feed subscribers + moderation service subscribers
The article reads so weird. "Blacksky grew to millions of users" and "new kind of social network", when it's really just a sub-set of bluesky.
Also given that there's 36 million accounts in total, it seems hard to believe that 2 million of those accounts are following blacksky (5.6% of the bluesky user count) so something is off with the count here perhaps.
A lot of decentralized projects focus on the philosophy, but most people just want something that works smoothly. Platforms like Blacksky probably grew not because of cutting-edge tech, but because they made it feel easy to use without overthinking.
Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear. Seems like a ton of work to manage the separate server. (a similar refrain from fediverse/mastodon things) But if they're happy sure.
A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.
The whole impetus for the original project inside Twitter was the recognition that centralized moderation at scale is impossible without ignoring what makes different communities unique. Context collapses fast and well-intentioned moderation decisions spark huge, unending imbroglios.
It's worth noting that they are using bluesky feeds and moderation services/labellers. They just have written their own rust implementations for the tools/services and their frontend (which is largely a fork of bluesky-social upstream) changes the default experience/settings.
So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse.
TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.
Unstated, but: they don't fully trust the Bluesky admins and especially their moderators. While not wanting to, er, segregate themselves from the wider "Bluesky" community.
> Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear.
Assuming you absolutely trust Bluesky-the-company to behave itself now and in the future, it probably isn't necessary. If you don't, then this sort of step towards real decentralisation is important.
This largely makes Bluesky-the-broader-network immune to the Elon Musk factor, tho; even if some idiot buys and breaks Bluesky-the-company, you'd expect more Blacksky-like thing to bud off.
I really want to make a decentralizable streaming video platform
Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams"
Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such
Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers
Haven't checked it out, but supposedly stream.place [1] is "the Twitch of Bluesky" (according to the HN comment I heard about it from), doing livestreaming using the AT Protocol.
"Decentralized" and "real money payment system": pick one. You could make it work with cryptocurrency and I'm sure someone's already done that for the 1% of users.
The central services take a cut, but they also provide an audience through the recommendation systems. Which is why everyone tries to game the thumbnails, Shorts algorithm, etc.
PeerTube is a project that already exists and fits some of those qualifications. Not certain if it quite meets all of your specifications, as I don't believe it has direct integration for payment processing. Most streamers, however, take third-party payment anyway, like Streamlabs, that give a much larger percentage to the creator compared to Twitch or YouTube. I am also not certain how easy it is to set up PeerTube.
It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.
I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.
All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
If it's a decentralised non-profit platform which doesn't have future plans to monetise the users somehow, isn't spending $0 on marketing the default? You'd hardly want to throw a few mil into ads for something that will never generate revenue.
Allot of people have a social media account rather than a website and allot of people use gmail rather than host their own mail. Decentralized means do it yourself, but most people just want something with batteries included that works well and don't really care about centralization.
Not necessarily. Just one famous example; BitTorrent is decentralized but for most people it's just "run this app, download files". "Decentralized" just means "doesn't rely on a centralized service to accomplish a goal". As long as the application isn't too complex to install and use, most folks won't care one way or the other whether it's decentralized or not, as long as it accomplishes the goal they're looking to accomplish.
There has to be a payoff though. BitTorrent is actually pretty hard to get working correctly, track down the torrent files... people do it because it's the only way to get some content and a way to get content you'd otherwise have to pay for. With social media, there's not much reward and most people's friends already post for free on other networks. Not saying it's not worthwhile, but it's hard to extract this lesson from BitTorrent.
But it can also be specialized forums like https://startrek.website/ which is hosted using Lemmy but you can use your federated login. It can help bring back indie forums and websites that aren’t controlled by Reddit or meta.
Yeah, for sure. Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use (or simpler) than existing social networks, and / or offer some genuinely unique and desirable feature(s) in order to attract any serious critical mass of users.
Interestingly the original Napster was a pretty good social network! I really liked being able to browse through all of a user's shared files. We should bring something like that back.
"Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use..."
In practice this issue arise something like this: A decentralized service is launched it is so decentralized the user has to store their own private keys. Later a centralized solution is launched where the user does not have to go through the trouble of storing the private keys, everything is managed for them... everyone joins the centralized service.
> ... "under this definition, bluesky and friends, dsspite all their talk, really does fit in the centralized camp."
In my mind, I put them somewhere in-between, leaning a tad more toward "centralized" because they still rely on an individual to host the service no matter how "federated" they are. Until they're truly peer-to-peer, there's still that aspect of centralization involved. We need something kinda like BitTorrent but for messaging / social connections.
Maybe Bluesky is analogous to Github, if the AT protocol truly does allow for migration away to an alternative?
Although Git repositories are portable, PRs, issues, actions and such aren't — so even if the migration away from Bluesky is lossy the comparison seems apt.
The issue is only developers know the benefits of those features. Most people just want to view content or post and get their likes. That is why they use social media rather than post on their own website.
I don't think this is a technology problem, its more of a socioeconomic problem. People tend to choose the centralized option and projects that start out decentralized tend to end up centralized WWW-Social media, Email-Gmail, Git-Github, Bitcoin-Coinbase etc
I think that used to be true, but influencers and such I believe would value some of the freedom of moving to other platforms and keep both their content and follower.
Also, I think many users would now appreciate more control over the moderation policies they want applied, and also be able to choose between different feed algorithms to find one that promotes things that they prefer.
Would most people still probably use the one big "instance"? For sure, but I think you'd still have a good 20-30% that would use alternatives.
Assuming it all just-worked. Which I think is what this article is trying to say, the AT protocol can provide these features and ease of use. I don't know if that's true, but it seems to be the claim.
This is where tech family and friends need to play a role. Host these services for them!
My family just thinks Jellyfin and Navidrome is another Netflix or Spotify they have access to. And most of them prefer Jellyfin as content doesn’t disappear and is much more curated.
Decentralised here means keeping companies honest by avoiding lock-in. It's fine to have the centralisation if it's easy to switch. BlackSky users don't need to care about the details, but if they don't like the community they can move their data elsewhere. Try doing that with Instagram.
Didn’t they just adopt DNS? I mean I guess you have a DID people can follow ( tho afaik there’s no other identity server for resolving DIDs besides bsky app), but the way to tell that someone is who you think they are is their handle being connected to their domain
did:web (DNS) is just one option for identity. did:plc is what you want, it's not reliant on ICANN or BlueSky.
Any PDS should be able to resolve a did:web or did:plc.
Apologies, I was mistaken. I'd confused the self-certifying bit with decentralization. did:plc relies on trusting a central server to accept all valid events and not allow users to rewrite their history.
I think Facebook is pretty useless and just not using the site is a great way to transfer away from it. But I feel like to engage with the idea of switching away constructively, I’d have to find some value in the content I had on the site.
Until you kids school uses it for organizing information for parents or that’s the only place a niche group you like is.
Getting banned from Facebook means loosing access to all of that. Kinda like getting banned from YouTube could mean loss of access to email, groups, drive and a bunch of other services. Hell I’ve heard of company contractors getting banned from Google Play’s Developer and everyone in the company then getting banned from all Google services!
If I get banned from a Lemmy community that doesn’t ban me from other communities or other servers and I can always run my own if I need to.
Naw, decentralized means not having everyone on one platform. ActivityPub-enabled sites (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) can be run by just about anyone, and can serve multiple users.
So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.
We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
> We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
This is not and was not ever true. IP was explicitly designed from the start to be difficult to operate without centralisation because the telecoms operators wanted to maintain their "monopoly" on communications infrastructure.
That is why IP insisted on not separating the interface address from device/service identity despite knowing ahead of time this would make multihoming a nightmare (as it did with ARPANET) and despite this problem already having been solved by CYCLADES (it being basically the one feature they explicitly avoided adopting from CYCLADES).
That among other things.
This is in large part why BGP is and always has been such a clusterfuck. There were known issues ahead of time but they were willfully ignored as they made relying on the heavily centralised telecoms operators essentially always the path of least resistance.
Why would decentralized technology be easy to use?
Limewire was installed on over one-third of computers world wide in 2007 [1]. That's because even grandma could press next->next->next on a window setup file and it just worked. There is no technical reason hosting your email isn't as easy as that.
Look at roof top solar panel. Literally hundreds of millions of households have roof top solar to generate decentralized power. The fundamental complexity in email hosting is hundred times less, but the software engineering community choose to not make it possible.
The distinction blurs with AT protocol. My data lives on Bluesky's PDS for now, but I can log in to that PDS from anything that supports AT. Like leaflet.pub
This post is stored in Leaflet's own lexicon in its own collection right next to all my Bluesky data. I could move this to a different PDS if I wanted. I could come up with a script to turn the collection into static pages or convert them to another platform's import format.
Nobody cares about decentralization until they do[0] and AT seems to have the best answer for that eventuality.
You misunderstood what I said. DNS is certainly a decentralized protocol and obviously not at all necessarily DIY. That’s all I was speaking to. Decentralized can be that simple.
What you originally said could be interpreted as either DNS-the-system or DNS-the-protocol. I assumed the former, since that seemed more likely.
Sure, the protocol could be used without the resolver hierarchy, but I would argue that's not a useful way to think about it, since it won't happen in practice.
I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.
ATProto is decentralized in that it allows you to choose a 3rd party like Blacksky to do all kinds of things for you. You can use the social media feed this 3rd party curates, use their moderation services like block lists, and even have your data hosted on a 3rd party’s servers.
All while using the same client app everyone else is using, or even a custom 3rd party client.
The nature of the protocol is that everything is connected, but services of the protocol can be decentralized when a user chooses to use a 3rd party to do certain things for them.
It is decentralised in the sense that it is not strictly dependent on Bluesky (in practice, because no-one else has really done this yet, Bluesky-the-network now consists of Bluesky-the-company, plus Blacksky). Most prior Bluesky 'decentralisation' has, in practice, been somewhat dependent on Bluesky.
I like bluesky like...a lot but too busy recently to post there and of course, lack of engagement from my part = lack of people to actually give a f@@@ about me.
I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
The structure of the atproto gives us the ability to ditch her and bluesky while keeping our data and connections. If your users aren't captive, why become the villain? They'll just leave.
‘Black folks have always been huge culture drivers on social media platforms and other tech products. Systemically excluded from access to capital and distribution, Black folks leverage creativity to make social media platforms their “own” without ever having true ownership.’
I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.
Not "digital spaces", but "capital and distribution".
It's basically saying that the black population does have an impact on culture although there are no black CEOs of social media companies, just in a vaguely victimist black pride sort of way.
There were a few dust-ups of this sort that I saw on Twitter back before Gamergate started (and during Gamergate) where there were accusations that people were brigading visible black users on Twitter to push them off the site or get them banned with report spam. I don't recall whether it ever got to the point that it was covered in the news - and I can't find any articles about it - but it wouldn't surprise me if things like that have continued to this day.
So at the very least, I recall hearing about it happening. It doesn't surprise me if people are claiming to have experienced it firsthand.
He means they don't own the social media companies, not that they're excluded from using them. But of course that's still silly because almost nobody of any race owns a social media company, at least not enough to have any control over it.
Twitter is a racist cesspit. I deleted my account a while ago but recently decided to give it another go to follow some sports reporters. The amount of racism, xenophobia and hateful content that gets pushed in front of you is absurd. I imagine huge amounts of racism is a turn off for people that aren't white.
Allowing every drive by commentator is a huge mistake in building an actual community. Communities are built by people invested in the platform.
In the early to mid aughts I was part of couch surfing. It had a lot of purpose built in friction and it created an amazing tight knit group of people that I still consider my best friends. Once the pressure from Airbnb and investment money caused them to remove that, it became terrible.
Sometime never growing a community over a small group of invested people is the right choice.
The same thing happened with NextDoor. When it was small and just involved a few hundred people in your immediate neighborhood there was a real community on there. Then the kept expanding the size and now you have people that live no where in your community ruining the experience for everyone.
I hate that they say public benefit corporation like it actually means anything. This is a corporate social media with a fully centeralized userbase and full control of the protocol.
The userbase is not fully centralized. It's mostly centralized, but users who care can manage their own data independently of bluesky.
While it's true that they have 'full' control over the protocol, they've stated that the goal is to hand it off to a more democratic organization once it's stable. This seems like a reasonable choice and I see no reason to distrust their motives here. Even if they did try something underhanded, it's not hard to fork the repositories and force the enshittified version to compete with the original.
> "Black users" isn't about skin color, it's about a group of people who came from US slavery
(I am having trouble phrasing this question to be unambiguously sincere and without intention of provocation, so please bear with me...)
I read your statement above as saying that "Black" means "descended from US chattel slavery".
Is that your intention? Is this a big-B vs small-b distinction? What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery?
Please assume ignorance and not malice. I really do not know what I don't know here.
OK I didn't fully qualify the question, but I was definitely not asking about African people, unless that's the context that was omitted from the original statement.
I'm familiar with all those nations. (In fact the ECOWAS nations are the ones I'm most familiar with.)
Every one of them, I've heard people calling black people "black".
I've also been all over Western Europe, and it's the same story. I've definitely heard the people in Paris, München, wherever call black people "black".
I thought the answer would be someplace I haven't been. Like maybe parts of Asia outside of Japan and China?
Maybe Eastern European nations use a different term?
Or maybe other parts of Africa? (SADC nations maybe?)
But they definitely call black people "black" in the Gambia and Nigeria.
I've also worked in a good many of the non G20 countries across the planet (geophysical field work) and while, yes, of course skin colour is referred to everywhere it's noticeably less frequent in many countries - I took the stance that the GP was commenting on a relative frequency as compared to (say) the US.
In my experience, which may differ to yours, it was as common in Benin to refer to someone as black as it was in Zurich to call another white.
Thank you. Suggesting that people never used the the term black would imply that I can overhear every conversation. So obviously I can't rule out that the term is used. I just haven't heard it. or, to be fair, I don't remember having heard it. The fact that English is not the majority language in most places is obviously also a factor. And maybe I just haven't been talking to people enough yet.
Given they said "this is another case of liberal whites pretending to represent black people in some way in order to manipulate other white people", they don't know anything either.
No other term has had the cultural staying power with regards to identifying the descendants of African slaves in the US (and the earliest generation of immigrants from elsewhere; namely the Caribbean) as a distinct ethnic/cultural group.
Of course the term “Black” can be applied to other ethnicities in general, but in the context of US history, descendants of African slaves make up the primary demographic.
> Everybody remembers when the first black stuff came to their country. The first returned immigrant who changed your popular culture by imitating things that black people were doing in the US, whether it was rock and roll, or just how to dance.
What memories would Manu DiBango, Bongo Kanda, Touré Kunda, Salif Keita, Fela Kuti, et al have of "black stuff" do you suppose?
Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu shouts out to the works of Angélique Kidjo, not Chuck Berry.
I hate to drag myself into this kind of stuff. But you can’t really believe that an afrobeats artist isn’t somehow influenced by Black (as in US) culture.
I’d go as far as to say that an artist in that genre will not receive any mainstream popularity (to the extent to the likes of Burna Boy) without in some way appealing to parts of the African diaspora who themselves are influenced largely by Black (US) culture, even if its superficially (i.e., how they dress).
Cursory research about the influence you named of Burna Boy’s yields:
> She grew up listening to Yoruba and Beninese traditional music, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, James Brown, Manu Dibango, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Fela Kuti, Stevie Wonder, Osibisa and Santana.
The affect that the American acts had on her music, you’d know better than I. But the degrees between Burna Boy and Chuck Berry apparently are fewer than recognized.
>I hate to drag myself into this kind of stuff. But you can’t really believe that an afrobeats artist isn’t somehow influenced by Black (as in US) culture.
But by that token the one from the US is influenced by US culture tenfold
What goes around comes around and yes, musical forms from Africa that were remembered in the US and branched from over time feed back into their mother lode.
I seek not to dis the US modifications, just to remind some that these were not and never the OG sources.
> But you can’t really believe that an afrobeats artist isn’t somehow influenced by Black (as in US) culture.
I would like to hear more about the US precursors that influenced(?) Mory Kante's Yeke Yekehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Cmv2K07R0 .. I was unaware of an underground kora-playing griot scene in the US.
> I’d go as far as to say that an artist in that genre will not receive any mainstream popularity
Errr, by "mainstream" do mean "USofA" ? I can assure that all the names I mentioned are known to numbers that rival any audience that can be found in the US .. just not to audiences that register with the US zeitgeist.
If you care to listen to the linked tracks you might reflect on the influence there from "black USA" ... it's more that she joined in with the Hendrix legacy for the joy of collaboration than it formed an integral part of her background.
My comment was specifically about Burna Boy, a contemporary artist.
Granted I’m indifferent to the musical heritage of Black (as in native to the African continent and its diaspora) music and will yield considerable ground to people more interested in that than I am because of this.
But speaking about culture in general, I think it’s “goofy” (to borrow a term from the grandparent comment) to brush away the influence that Black (as in US) culture has on Blacks (everywhere else) today. Not 50 years ago. Right now. I’m specifically referring to acts who may be equal in relative notoriety to the one’s you named, but are popular today like Burna Boy.
We can split hairs about the influence that Black (as in African) music had on Black people in the US. I’m sure there’s arguments to be had that vary in how appreciable they are to this premise. It’s probably equally “goofy” to wave off the idea that the “degrees of separation between Burna Boy and Chuck Berry” extend further to Berry’s great(N)-grandparents who carried the remnants of what was to be “remembered” on US soil after crossing the Middle Passage.
But I don’t think that it’s as linear a process as we’d like to imagine, at least it isn’t anymore.
Bangs (and external agents independent of Black people) disrupted the matrix and the “mother lode” is no longer centralized at the “mother land”.
> I think it’s “goofy” (to borrow a term from the grandparent comment) to brush away the influence that Black (as in US) culture has on Blacks (everywhere else) today.
You'd probably best argue that point with someone that thinks US Black culture has had zero global travel and influence then.
What isn't 'goofy' is the notion that US and African Black culture have had a near continuous back and forth interchange throughout history, the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival featured a strong 'Back to Africa' thread that highlighted contemporary African music, polyrhythmic forms, call and response, specific artists, etc. all of which can be found in the US Black Culture musical production of today .. WhoSampled highlights sources of many drum beats used in early hip hop recordings of the 1980s that are now considered iconic, and so on.
> Bangs (and external agents independent of Black people) disrupted the matrix
Who or what is 'Bangs', to which matrix do you refer? <insert relevant Samuel L. Jackson quote>
> and the “mother lode” is no longer centralized at the “mother land”.
Not a great turn of phrase, mother lodes can be exhausted but they don't move.
To the point buried within, Africa may have been the point of origin of all humanity but it was never the point of genesis of all musical form, Gamelan is almost unique to the Sundanese peoples (Indonesia) with tenuous backlinks to Indian forms at best .. it's a long way from there to any prior African drum or percussion influences.
In greater human history people have made their own unique forms and variations across the globe, post near instant global communication, recording and playback, these forms all mutually intertwine and influence each other.
Well here I am thinking that a mother lode just meant a lotta stuff kept somewhere, and simultaneously surprised that you aren’t familiar with South Sudanese-born artist “Bangs” and that you didn’t catch on to “matrix” as a reference to Africa being the developmental environment for Black music [but were keen to pick up on the aforementioned mother lode gaffe that short circuited our little game of language surrounding the origins of Black culture].
Explaining a joke or a wry remark is about as deflating as either fallen flat. So you’ll have to pick up on the grander point that I was trying to make by yourself.
Suffices to say that you’ve managed to do that already anyhow in a manner far more sophisticated than my own.
I'm good - I enjoy a rambling conversation nominally centred about <something>
Mother lode comes from mining, the real or imagined source of tiny nuggets found washed further downstream (by current or ancient no longer present water flows). In that sense, to which I'm a little wedded by practice, they don't move about, at least not until mined dry and relocated to some treasury or rich persons pocket.
Bangs and matrix are overloaded, it's hard keeping up with what others mean in their use of terms, Gammon in the UK has a meaning different to it's use by urban aboriginal people in Australia.
For some the origins of local Black Culture have little remnant of African culture and predate both the arrival of convict ships upon the tide and the retreat of ice from Europe that allowed the settlement of the extremely white bits.
Is it just me but I feel "social" would imply centralization. After all, if I want to socialize I will want to go where other people go, using a tool/client/channel that works for most people --- this inevitably leads to centralization.
I don’t agree — I can socialize with my neighbor and I can also socialize in a centralized hub, like a club.
What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users.
I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
What if your neighbors decided it's just easier to socialize in a centralized club and go there all the time?
Gradually, you "lose" neighbors to socialize with because people (and things in general) gravitate towards the path of least effort. Eventually you will have to go to the club too.
This is something we lived through already, right? Centralized social media platforms are largely dominated by annoying people nowadays. The article is about a group that decided “hey, the club sucks, let’s make our own,” and they seem to be doing alright.
I think people are missing that there's a middle ground between "fully decentralized" (everyone in their own home) and "fully centralized" (entire population of the earth goes to one spot to converse, like the Hajj a hundred times larger.
Bluesky connects these things though, right? Isn’t that the point of the article? But even if someone was deliberately segregating them: if I don’t want to go to the club, but my neighbor wants to go to the club more than they want to hang out with me, then I don’t get to hang out with my neighbor. That’s life.
This is why I miss RSS so much. It is such a great way to keep up with people over a wide variety of platforms with your own powerful user agent.
I still use a self hosted FreshRSS heavily and fortunately many sites still accidentally support it, but it could be so much easier for non tech people.
its because of liberals and democrats who hates musk because he teamed up with republicans. They will buy poop if you sell them and you also hate republicans and Trump.
It's fairly specifically _not_ a fork; they've re-implemented atproto (in, what else, Rust). This is important, as there are now two real in-production-use AT Protocol impls (plus a bunch of toy ones).
Because approximately 0.5s after you create a whites-only group, you will be savagely attacked as the world's biggest racist. And that's actually fine... but only as long as that is the case for everyone. It's not ok to have self-segregation allowed for some groups, but not others, which is where we are today.
Genuine question here, not trying to anger anyone.
But we have Heaven only knows how many whites-only groups online. (In fact we have Heaven only knows how many Asian, Black, Native, and Latin groups online as well.) If you don't like them, you're free to ignore them. Or you're free to criticize them. Your choice. All of that is the great thing about the internet.
There is a depressing irony about a story on an effort to decentralize social media being published on a centralized social media platform. It feels like decentralized blogging will never come back, even though we have Ghost (not to mention Wordpress) right there.
With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.
I wouldn't say it's too depressing. It's just that's the platform the interviewer uses. Often bluesky adjacent blogs are posted via Leaflet (atproto based blog) nowaday. It's not always but tbh I see them more than I see substack in my circles now.
This is basically proof that you’re wrong: a separate entity hosts separate moderation, and anyone using a client of AT Proto (even the official app) can use this 3rd party as the moderation service for the content that they see. That’s decentralized moderation, where the user has choice over what moderation they use and what feeds they see.
Ok. As I see it, the primary hazard of centralization, and the concomitant moderation, is that control over our communication is given to a central authority.
This hazard exists whether it's a few centers or many.
Therefore any meaningful decentralization will do away with moderation.
> This hazard exists whether it's a few centers or many.
I think the primary hazard to focus on is one vs many. The major danger of moderation is when you can't opt out.
I would argue they're not quite the same here, because 3rd-party delegation can be revoked at any time, limiting the damage.
> any meaningful decentralization will do away with moderation
Perhaps if LLMs get way better than they currently are.
Otherwise, there's too many things to do in a day to make every possible decision in life yourself, so optional, revocable delegation feels like an acceptable compromise to me.
There's many cases where we just rely on others. Do you personally check all your lettuce for e.coli? Did you check your outlets for proper grounding? Did you examine your medications with a mass spectrometer to verify the chemical composition was correct? No, we rely on institutions, fallible as they are, because there's only so many hours in the day.
I definitely don’t think this is the next evolution. Decentralized just means you have to do work to find places to post to and no one is doing that. The only decentralized social media is going to be stuff that is too gruesome, illegal and hateful to post in regular spaces.
I might just be projecting from a certain phase of my life but if I had to bet on what social media will look like:
TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience
Twitter+offline meetups for everything else.
Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.
It's been many years without social networks for me. At gatherings, I'm often the only one without a phone in my hand, and it feels strange. Eventually, the "phoners" make eye contact and chat a bit, usually about something they all saw on a screen. But it never lasts. They always go back to the screen. It seems silence and quiet time make them uncomfortable. Even in a formal business meeting, screens are open, and attention is lost.
Will decentralized social networks fix this plague? I don't think so. The only thing that works is disconnecting. Just a few weeks into it, you'll realize you have so much free time. Time for hobbies, time for loved ones, time for finding peace and joy, time for creating and sharing. You will regret the thousands of hours wasted on that useless addiction. A few months in, you'll hear the birds singing again. You'll notice the evening skies. You'll find comfort and joy. The time you get back will help you build incredible things.
> At gatherings, I'm often the only one without a phone in my hand, and it feels strange
I’m curious, what country is this from? I’ve been living in NZ and Japan last 5 years and people love their phones here too. But the gatherings (even random meet ups!) almost never have people with phones in their hands.
> Even in a formal business meeting, screens are open, and attention is lost.
This would be considered incredibly rude and would lose businesses here
I agree there’s a ton of benefits from fully disconnecting. I’ve had periods completely off social media which were quite blissful, though I’ve always ended up coming back to some extent due the social aspects you described.
Given the choice between apps controlled by large corporations preying on attention vs decentralized protocols, I’d much rather have the latter.
I think having examples of apps that don’t demand one’s attention so fiercely, or provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,” are an important step towards ending the mass social media addiction society is currently experiencing.
> provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,”
Instead of a non-obvious "algorithm" with tailoring, just have a social app with a purpose (or per group purpose), and nothing but absolute direct control.
I.e. follow/link with friends, family or whatever in groups. The feed is time-weighted to recent posts or communications. Any other filtering or prioritization can be done, by selection. I.e. deprioritize reposts by default, except persons A, B and C. Etc.
There could be like/dislikes that accumulate into priorities, for those who think that is convenient, but those priorities are just private settings that can be observed and changed.
No hidden/obscure/unclear algorithms, no third parties, no ads, and no Zuck's with any ability to access/impact/insert into the feed.
A scrapbook group, that is just a scrapbook group. Etc.
When did software products/services start "needing" boogymen?
The right platform will allow users to choose between any of the algorithms you described and more.
This is pretty much exactly what Bluesky / Blacksky offer in the form of custom feeds. Gives users the ability to choose whatever type of feed they want, algorithm curated or not.
And if you’re unhappy with the selection, you’re free to create your own.
The best middle ground I've found is checking social media on a web browser on a computer. On my time, when I decide.
I still check Instagram every few weeks just to see what everyone is up to. And it's honestly really nice. I never think about it until I'm thinking "hmm, what is X up to?"
The best part is I don't burn through all the posts in 5 seconds and then get reels suggested. In a few weeks or a couple months, a lot of stuff happens! There's a bunch of cool posts from my friends from me to see, and no algorithmic BS.
Phones are basically vape pens these days.
I've been trying not to browse when I wake up.
Suddenly, I've been having much more free time in the morning!
“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury comes to mind
This, this, this and more this!!! Sorry, the below is long, but I haven’t really shared before anywhere and it’s just flowed out of me this morning…
I dropped Facebook over 15 years ago, instagram maybe 7 or 8 years ago, Twitter just before Elon took over, Whatsapp and Strava I guess might be the only things I use considered “social” and I have all group notifications muted on WA at all times.
I’ve watched this parallel reality grow and evolve over the years and I hate it. Everyone everywhere seems to be permanently staring at a screen!
A month or so back, I watched my wife awake in the morning, she didn’t realise I was awake watching her (lovingly) - I got Black Mirror IRL - instantly upon awaking, without looking, she reached for her phone and the endless scrolling started, she was so engrossed, after 10 mins not noticing her husband awake, intently watching her, I had to say “Morning”. Later that morning, alone, I wept tears for myself, for her and all of humanity.
Two to three months ago, I had realised that while I wasn’t addicted to social media, I was absolutely addicted to news media/politics/etc. Like a key in a lock, it clicked one day, i’d wasted at least a decade, nearly two of adult life obsessively reading, commenting and talking about UK, global events & politics.
Worse than that, I realised how all the negativity from that world was directly feeding my own negativity and then into those around me. Then after another week or two where I blocked it out entirely at home, I felt “recovered”. My fingers were no longer blindly typing in web addresses in moments of boredom - I’d dip into a book chapter of technical paper for 5 minutes instead. Political podcasts were all dropped, replaced entirely with music and podcasts that don’t engage with political comment.
I was only granted this moment of clarity as I attended a technical conference for a week, where I was up at 7 every morning to hit the early sessions and not getting back to my hotel till nearly 10 or 11pm. Amazingly, the whole week, there was barely a whisper of anything about politics - I think I might have heard the word “Trump” once.
I was so full of energy and excitement about what i’d been learning and talking to people about all week, as soon as I returned to my normal reality, the world of international politics suddenly appeared to me exactly the same way a bottle of booze did after knocking alcohol addiction on the head. The mere mention of any of the MSM trigger words suddenly produced in me a deep feeling of revulsion.
I couldn’t imagine not knowing what was going on in the world 6 months ago, now I actively avoid any mention or conversation that might go that way. The sky hasn’t fallen in, foreign invaders haven’t taken my country, what has happened though is I’ve been devouring books and technical papers like a mad man, learning new instruments, creating art on the computer and finally facing my demons and creating art on paper!
My life has improved beyond all rational logic, probably moreso than quitting alcohol, which was also a horrible, slow growing, hugely negative addiction for me. My emotional state feels more balanced than ever as I’m finally feeling totally free from all the emotional manipulation these things ultimate come with. If something awful happens out in the big bad world painted by the media, I’ll deal with it when it happens as it happens in my actual reality. The best tools I can arm myself with are knowledge, gratitude and love. Sitting around arguing on political blogs has achieved the square root of fuck all and will continue to achieve that.
People seem shocked when they attempt to talk to me about politics and I just shrug my shoulders now. I shudder to think now about the energy I blindly invested into that world, never making one single bit of difference, just generating negativity inside of me, which then spirals out to those I most love around me. When you flip all that negative energy into positive energy, and honestly it really is that easy, you very quickly start getting the insight that maybe you aren’t just human, you’re superhuman.
I am not a big social media user, to be honest it is too stressful. Minimal social interaction is fine for me, and I'm happy with the boundaries IRL social encounters create where you can walk away (politely at the end of course) and it's over.
News and politics was a big waste of time for me too. Before 2015 I just kept up to date with big issues, but Brexit and then Covid really got me addicted to news and politics.
I ditched Reddit (with the API thing) and news websites about a year ago. It really is nice not knowing about every tiny event. It's not even necessary for being politically aware as so much of the "news" is hearsay and random Tweets turned into content by the media.
I have started looking at the BBC News business section every now and then. This really shows what a content factory other news media sites are. The BBC business page adds new articles maybe twice a day. There is no point checking more often than that (unless you go down a comments rabbit hole).
Sites like The Guardian have new articles hourly and sometimes multiple "live blogs" going on at once. That sort of output can happen in just the "business/economy" section, never mind the rest of the site.
Like social media there is just no way that amount of content can be useful, in fact it's most likely the opposite.
I'd bet she was probably scrolling through the endless stream of fear (war, poverty, crime), guilt (diets, fitness, beauty), and shallowness (jokes, celebrities). In those moments with loved ones, I choose to engage, explain what's happening, and make them aware of how it's making them feel. Then I guide them toward alternatives. We play, we cook, we read, we plant, we dance.
It isn't entirely our fault. It's deliberately made and constantly adjusted to be addictive, for the sole purpose of selling ads, swaying votes, counting more MAUs, and increasing valuations.
Still, knowing something is bad for you isn't enough to make you stop, right? Yet, once you are out, you can choose to help others, especially the ones you care about.
One of the most insidious things about politics news is that there's always more non-actionable trivia factoid bullshit that you can read instead of anything productive
Trump said this? Supreme Court said that? Some poll is up? Okay. That doesn't tell me if we're in danger in my town, that doesn't tell me who's protesting, whose meetings to attend, what our threat model is
It's a sugar fix and it's frustrating when I step back and realize that really caring about politics would start with me leaving the house
Hm yea. I also feel something similar,
maybe just thinking or being internet heroes doesn't matter. Maybe the real change happens at leaving the house.
But I wonder, if that is real change too. Like, maybe the system is so fucked up that even that wouldn't have an impact. Should I invest my energy into such a gamble? maybe, there is no right answer. a part of me who has watched movies and watched good guys win makes me want to say yes but uh reality says otherwise for the most part.
But maybe reality happened because there are people who are on the fence like me who said nah, noone else would do it, then peer pressure happened and welp nobody did anything and that became an evidence for the next generation who can again say nah and the cycle of suffering repeats.
But can this cycle truly change with just the will of one person like me? I doubt that my presense makes a change.
I have started to think that the best way I can make real change is maybe by open sourcing / working in a non profit / maybe helping them with some linux expertise in my community since I love linux. I can set up self hosted stuff for them so that they can control their infrastucture. I can reduce their costs from these bloated app subscription hell holes, maybe help these non profits and donate to the right causes and work on fixing my life too. Does this make sense?
Wow, I was writing a comment trying to defend watching a news, and I realized that basically I have almost become miserable due to news.
Please read the previous comment that I have posted on hackernews for some reference about "freedom", basically its about freedom and how I feel like a lot of issues are political and thus I don't trust the people of the world to do whats right and therefore the world won't always grow/ I am not an optimist , also here's a cookie if you did read my whole post there!!
I feel like politics is the (truest?) way of making real change. Unfortunately, I doubt that I can enter into politics and I also doubt that people in my area would vote for me. I bet that they would much likely more follow racial, caste based issues rather than tackling real things. And I doubt I will ever get funding from someone for speaking against the absolute rich in my country. maybe my life would be in danger, that's more likely. My appearance is also really nerdy and I love tech. I doubt if people would think of me as a leader. I loved giving speeches in class but I wonder if I can bring real change in the system.
To me, its this system that feels so convuluted man. Like we have freedom and not at the same time. Do we have the freedom to bring real change?-> I feel yes But can I bring real change though? -> Maybe Is it worth trying? -> I don't know
I feel like news essentially boils down to the is it worth trying? option. No need to be a hero, I feel like I wanted to be different / mature so followed news, but I mean, from a completely logical point of view, Idk man.
This is what I have in question. Is it worth trying to do discussions and bring a political reform as to what I believe/ experts say at the same time into reality. Like georgism, nuclear etc. Is it worth discussing these things even though they might be a headache but maybe the mere discussion of them increases their likelihood of being spread and maybe adopted. Are my thoughts having a real impact.
I feel so tiny in this world man. I feel like money buys influence but I am not a sociopath who can play a billionaires game for my "good" political ideas to be implemented, and If I become something like that, then what's the difference b/w me and them.
I feel like a lot of billionaires are freeloaders. NO Matter how much risk you take, it shouldn't be rewarded as such. It almost feels like the freemarket isn't efficient in this sense. I genuinely don't know :/, but the fact that you can almost buy presidencies is... wild.
Should I still watch the news? like, uh, are you getting what I am feeling? I feel like I can't bring real change so why bother but a part of me believes that the fact that I am saying it is wrong and needs to be proven wrong. I wish to be an optimist, I wish for the world to be saved, because I see people suffering. I wish to bring an impact, or maybe die trying. Would the french revolution had happened if people gave up on news? Or have the people getting news from sources whose only agenda is to stop anything like french revolution from happening (billionaires?) and they want us all to fight each other.
Man, I don't know, can we bring real change? I have seen people do it, but can I? Should I? I don't know. Its so messy and breaks my heart. Definitely hard to explain as I wish to be an optimist but am stuck being a pessimist/realist (almost murphy-esque in the sense that anything can happen, will happen) with my logical deductions.
The questions boils down to ,
is ignorance bliss? or should I pursue the truth of knowledge even if its bitter, maybe I can live my life built around that bitterness, that things are real, that I don't have to be an optimist. You have picked ignorance, and there is no wrong answer but I wish for a discussion so that someone can help me pick my answer.
You seem to believe that not following the news leads to ignorance?
My question to you is - Is following the news even a form of participation?
I would argue that news has an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. Most news anchors and talking heads and commentators talk a lot but convey very little. It's obvious they understand very little and ultimately focus on regurgitating what is "commonly understood" that everyone else also repeats. Plus usually there's heavy biases involved - so many implicit assumptions every time they open their mouth. Hardly any nuance is conveyed.
Anyways let's forget news for a second and discuss how to make some kind of impact, some kind of change.
To my mind at least 3 options occur to me:
1. Writing. Don't write to a wide audience, write to a narrow one. Really get in deep on a political issue.
2. Start local. Participate in town council, or similar, get involved as an active member in local politics to gain practice/exposure. Don't need to be a politician or be elected yet.
3. Or my favorite - focus on some technical solution for helping people to organize perhaps..
I mean I don't watch traditional news and more youtube from genuine indpendent journalists who are transparent about their reporting and even their company in general. (Tldr news) etc. and I am way more focused on the economy side of things.
I do watch a lot of atrioc and I think that he's a decent enough source to be trusted compared to journalists in the sense that I get both fun and news at the same time but yeah.
Like I said (I think) I am way more interested on things financially and so plain bagel who I consider to be an excellent finance youtuber who isn't a grifter and literally has no incentives to sell you a course or something. ( crazy that I feel like I have to mention it, that's how scummy most finance youtubers are)
Even then, even such amount of news which I consider to be a signal makes me depressed. I may have a left leaning bias but that's because of the incompetence of the govt. and I am not even an american but its interesting to watch american politics because it impacts us all and my countries politics is a shit hole that its not worth watching, both parties suck, (tbh america is same, bernie is the only person that I trust for the most part imo)
My point that I was trying to make is that maybe mass scale of people depress me with what is happening in the world. I wish to be ignorant but I wish to know if that makes sense.
Regarding 3rd point, to me 3) is also my favourite as I love finding technical solutions to organize/build etc., yet I find it that I am not an effective oranizer for stuff, maybe I am better off just helping non profits in their mission that might align with my political beliefs, but I wonder if I can do it without it being my full job or taking full time efforts. Like, decentralizing the communications by moving to matrix or helping them in self hosting their stuff comes to my mind. Does this make sense? Do non profits need this?
Let them be rich. Stoicism would recommend you not try to control what isn't in your hands to control; just accept it. Can you imagine that centuries ago, the same rules of class, power, and money drove society, and some very smart philosophers came to the right conclusions? Let it be. Meanwhile, those hands, freed from frustration and fear, can build the extraordinary.
Has nothing changed from thousands of years ago from the greek democracies though?
I thought that we have changed for the better, if not, then well, I am forced to accept it. But it is so fucking sad that we have to accept that same rules of money drove society and it would continue doing so. That's really fucked up if we think about it.
Incidentally the size of sockets and screws (including the Allen wrench) is very much a technology. William Sellers pushed standards in the mid 1800s specifically to benefit American industry through interoperability. Standards we still use today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sellers
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3102001
And the gauges are just as important. Obligatory ref to Brad Cox seminal 1990 paper, Planning the Software Industrial Revolution, and it's compelling analogy with Eli Whitney.
It's amazing how much things that seem so ho-hum today are yesterday's incredible invention
Anyone who has used a #1 Phillips on a #2 screw or vice versa knows the pain that is available - and those are pretty standardized!
I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. Then Threads added federation. What am I supposed to do with each account? They have different posting histories, they can’t be merged, but if I post the same thing to both of them, I’ll be repeating myself. Am I supposed to discontinue using one of them? If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. It’s a mess.
This is why centralized social media took off. It is easy to understand and use.
Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.
I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?
Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.
> I know people like to compare it with email
There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.
I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
Keeping the accounts separate seems like an extremely mandatory feature to me. If I had multiple Google accounts I would absolutely not want any information leakage from one to the other.
IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation.
I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.
Just give me P2P social media and put me in the swarm. BitTorrent for Reddit and Twitter.
It shouldn't matter what servers are anywhere. It should all be eventually consistent for some agglomerated cluster sampling of the world. Make the content immutable and ephemeral. People that care to archive it will.
Federation is silly and is part of the problem. Plus it creates more little fiefdoms.
I'll subscribe to my own filters if I care, and my agent will handle the rest.
I don't think this approach will work for most people. Assuming the Bluesky firehose is 50GB/day, that's a massive amount of data to have to download just to filter for the handful of events a person might actually be interested in. My phone barely goes through a couple GB per month!
But perhaps for efficiency I should rent a server to do the filtering on the cloud and then sync it down to my phone? Well then why not instead consume from a server which already did most of the filtering that I wanted? And now we get back to something like usenet, or the modern day fediverse.
how i would make it work is you'd only download actual bits you care about, the rest can be handled by indexers you pay for to help you sort it out
I guess this is when it gets fuzzy. A true peer-to-peer social network would mean that every node has to be able to get everything and also be able to share whatever it has with every other node. If every participant on this kind of social network was required to maintain their own "seedbox", then it implicitly limits access to only people with means.
But if there were hubs funded by groups of interested people that allowed those folks to share the cost of "seeding" and in return only "leech" the information they care about... then isn't that essentially the same kind of decentralization that already exists on the fediverse? The way I understand it, instances are set up by communities of people with similar interests and those instances are configured to only propagate a subset of the events that their community is interested in.
how i solved for this was reciprocal pinning so any node owns all their data (personal log) + whoever they follow (mutual follow reprocity) last x content (indices so its easy to get last n, or last since xyz) and so anyone can decide exactly what they keep or not on their node and thus share by simply following or not (maybe two level, so you can choose to not pin people you follow) heh, smt like that
anyways the idea is very much to do like bittorrent or kademilia but for social media posts i need to research more the fediverse before building anything tho
That's more or less what atproto is, except the indexer is called a relay and provides the data directly. Currently bluesky is providing their relay for free, but I don't believe there's any reason they couldn't make it paid in the future.
yeah they had an outage in 2024 i think or was that registrations only?
You're describing ZeroNet.
It has ZeroTalk as a Reddit-like thing, ZeroMe as a social network and ZeroBlog as a Twitter-like thing.
https://zeronet.io
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroTalk
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroMe
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroBlog
I've spent a bunch of time in this space, and there are some really interesting options (SSB, matrix, etc).
They all have awkward tradeoffs which lead most people to use one of the centralized networks.
In the end, I return to whatever system has the people I want to interact with; I get very little out of social media unless they are present.
Boy, those of us that remember Usenet are probably getting deja vu…
Eternal amnesia.
Well you can run your own ActivityPub Server/Client and subscribe (and thus federate) with anyone who hasn’t explicitly blocked you from federating with them. Bridge that with AT and you can see and interact with whatever you want on the Fediverse.
I actually tried to vibe-code this, not finished tho
I just commented above, but it's really more like being a student at a university. You can enter all the buildings with your student ID. You can be friends with people in other dorms and enter the building. Even though you're an engineering student you can take classes in the economics or theater or applied science schools.
Though, IMO Mastodon not the better of the fediverse platforms, but I don't love microblogging social media. But it's all going to end up being like Linux. Some people tried it once, didn't like it, and then 10 years from now it'll be totally different and everyone will wonder where it's been all their lives.
> Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.
That's news to me, as a Mastodon user. I just scroll my homeserver's default feed and get stuff from all over the internet.
At one point I had 2 accounts. One was on my phone and one was on my laptop. I was in the process of moving to the one on my laptop (I know migration exists, but I'm weird and didn't want to do that). Anyway, I was on my phone and saw a post with my one account from some other federated server. When I went on my laptop I couldn't find it. I figured it might just need to propagate. I waited days... nothing. I've seen behavior like this a lot. You're not seeing a problem, because you can't know what you don't see.
If you're just scrolling a bunch of random stuff, you might not care. But what if we want this to be like old Facebook, where you follow people you actually know? Am I going to miss wedding and birth announcements? Party invitations? Other important life updates from friends and family?
You could criticize the modern algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook for not showing some of these things as well, if they don't think it will engage you enough, but at least the post is there and available. When I ran into that issue between my 2 accounts, I looked for the post specifically, I had the ID... it simply wasn't available to me.
no, you get the subset your homeserver administrator decides to rehost
I don't think that's a good way of stating it. You get the posts from the people anyone on your server follows. An admin can block or silence accounts, or run a relay, but these are edge cases.
An admin can decide to unfollow a bunch of instances and as a user you have no recourse.
you can say "hey could you refollow those instances"
you could throw more money into the instance's tip jar to make it easier for them to decide to rehost a larger part of the data firehose - that may not be the entire reason they defederated from an instance but it may be part of it
you could move to another instance whose admin's choices are more in line with yours
Other social networks can ban people I follow and I have no recourse.
True, so it's not an improvement. I guess it is even worse because when they unfollow an instance they may ban hundreds of users just because there are a few problematic ones.
Which in my case, includes stuff from all over the internet. I don't think anyone's feed includes everything from the internet.
To add: not even a centralized service includes everything from the internet.
I use Lemmy, and while federated social media might seem like this up front, a good comparison is dorms and classes at a large university.
Every dorm/housing and school program has its own vibe and attitude. Your student ID gets you in to all of them, but you live in one dorm building in particular, let's call it Jones Tower. There might be some seeming overlap between buildings - maybe Dinkley Hall and the Rogers Building both have Engineering floors, but they're not the same at all. You can cross-list classes between the geology department and theater school and gerontology, that's cool. You can have friends that live in Dinkey Hall and the Blake Apartments, and they can all go anywhere they want.
Is it a mess? Not really. Is it as plain and one-size-fits-all as single-story high school like Facebook? Not at all. Does it take time to understand how to sign up for a cross-listed class? Sure. To some it's worth it to be there, and plenty drop out because it's not for them, and that's fine. IMO, the benefit is the barrier to entry. It's not for everyone and doesn't need to be.
Threads added federation, but only Mastodon servers are connected, and not all of them - this is like Threads is the private medical school across town that lets grad school students from the Fediverse Uni come over for specific classes.
Really though is this a real world issue? Tombstone one and use the other. No reason to quit just because you don’t have perfect agency. Post both if you want, people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
> Tombstone one and use the other.
Like I said:
> If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post.
> people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
So, is the problem that you have accounts on both networks. You would be OK with just posting to both accounts, but for people who have the federation toggle on, they’ll get a duplicate view of your posts?
That actually does seem annoying. You probably can’t do anything about it, but it seems like it would be extremely easy to fix on the platforms’ sides. Since you are intentionally trying not to have people get dupes of your posts, they could just add the ability to tag a post with some identifier, then not show posts that have the same identifier, and rely on you tag your posts appropriately (and an obvious feature would be to automate that tagging and include it in the various “share to <other platform>” buttons).
If I’m interested in following you why would I subscribe to both your Threads and Mastodon account?
I don’t know. Maybe they post different types of content on each network, but there’s some content that they post to both.
It'd be nice to have an HTTP 301-equivalent forwarding option + verify control via hashing.
E.g. one could make a special post on the "continuing" feed, then tag the "killed" feed with 301+hash for auto-redirects (and/or dedupe)
Right so your quibble is that part of your audience is not portable, not that federation makes posting harder. You either maintain a centralized service account or you don’t. That hasn’t changed with Meta services. It is Threads that doesn’t allow for portability.
Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio.
How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.
well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.
> the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated.
It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting.
> you need to treat your thread account as not federated too.
But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.
I am having trouble imagining the failure mode you are trying to avoid.
It sounds like threads implementation of federation is broken. What effects does toggling that federation setting on or off do?
Like if someone is following “duplicate” accounts of yours and therefore would see double posts, that person can unfollow one. Still double work for you that kind of sucks.
Scuttlebutt had some work done on publicly declaring two identities as the same, I wonder what that would look like for posts. Like a post-id or simple equality comparison or hash could work server side or client side.
One thing I like about Mastodon and Bluesky (and Twitter before 2023) is that most of it can be read without having an account, so users can ignore all federation features and just treat them like old school websites.
The fact that they have different implementation details that is not so important to me, though personally I replicate all my posts for readers who prefer one place over another.
Threads didnt even up properly federating. Its only 1 way, so from Mastodon you can follow people on threads if your instance hasnt blocked it (it probably has) and from threads you cant follow anything in the fediverse. You also need to enable a setting ot make your account followable.
Think of them like different social groups.
Interop, standards and nature of ATproto brings ability to build different applications. for example you can easily build analytics on top of ATproto, like this one https://www.graphtracks.com/stats/bluesky/graph/rudyfraser.c...
How is that different from posting the same thing on Facebook and Twitter?
One of these gives you ultimate control (mastodon / AT) if you want it (you can host and own the domain) or the ability to ride along with your choice of admin.
The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for)
Those are the trade offs
None of that addressed any of the issues I have.
Haven't invested time into bluesky yet but I'm always shocked at how fast the pages load. The contrast to twitter is stunning.
Lemmy is a bit more hit/miss on loads but the content posted seems so much more wholesome than other socials
I'm shocked that it's as slow as Twitter.
There was a time when tweets were just good ol' regular HTML pages. Today it's unbearable if you remember that you're just trying to read one small paragraph.
When I went browsing through their GitHub I was surprised at how little web-specific code they have. It's basically just their React Native mobile app and a tiny go server. I understand that with a small team they've got to prioritize, I do hope at some point they implement server-side rendering for when you click on a direct link to a post.
I get as much out of bluesky as I ever did from twitter. It may be honeymoon phase but since I mostly just follow experts, journalists and the like I see as much as I ever did. There's less silliness on there but definitely some and I expect that's due to the times we're in and not the users.
Unlike Bluesky, which is a website and community, "Lemmy" is software. There are many Lemmy instances; the content varies wildly, just like it does between Mastodon instances, or web sites.
What instance is more wholesome? As written, your comment is like saying IRC is more wholesome. It is? On what server?
I'm thinking of programming.dev in particular but suspect my wholesome comment is pretty universally true. The type of crowd that sets up their own servers like these are in my experience slightly biased towards wholesome side. Setting up software, build initial user base etc...there is a level of intent there that you don't get with the free for all that is reddit or whatever.
Maybe that's just my impression but suspect there is a kernel of truth there
Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded".
In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.
When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.
I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.
The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.
This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.
I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.
I feel like that's more the "small" effect. Humans are generally more community-minded in small groups than in big ones because we were built for groups where everyone recognizes everyone else. So big groups where nobody recognizes anyone else can be a problem.
(From this perspective, it matters much less whether someone is self-hosting the servers or not if the group is small, those two things just happen to coincide.)
AP instances tend to reflect the same clusters that emerge in social media where most people are on the same app.
https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3ltda4vl5322z
It's just a different way of organizing communities.
Hrm, this is actually a frustration of Bluesky for me; I find it relatively sluggish, particularly compared to a decent Mastodon server. I also remember Twitter as being faster, but I haven't had an account for a couple of years, and it _was_ getting slower before I nuked my account, so maybe it's worse now.
Anyone remember how fast geocities pages loaded?
> Anyone remember how fast geocities pages loaded?
Yeah, they were slow. Mostly due to the low speed of dial-up modems.
And the heavy gif usage.
Huh? Bluesky loads very slow, a lot of loading circles and placeholder skeletons.
I wonder how they came up with two million Blacksky users. Who counts as a user? Do they host that many users' accounts? Is it any Bluesky user who subscribed to their feeds? Something else?
Edit:
> Feed subscribers + moderation service subscribers
https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-blacksky-grew-to-millio...
The article reads so weird. "Blacksky grew to millions of users" and "new kind of social network", when it's really just a sub-set of bluesky.
Also given that there's 36 million accounts in total, it seems hard to believe that 2 million of those accounts are following blacksky (5.6% of the bluesky user count) so something is off with the count here perhaps.
The vast majority of Bluesky users use a Bluesky-hosted PDS.
Social media's next evolution: state-owned, built by politically connected firms, and working poorly but there's no alternative....
And everyone must present ID to post, of course... to "protect the children".
A lot of decentralized projects focus on the philosophy, but most people just want something that works smoothly. Platforms like Blacksky probably grew not because of cutting-edge tech, but because they made it feel easy to use without overthinking.
And yet Threads pushed past that number in half the time.
Bluesky and Mastodon are still the fringe of human community.
Meta essentially forces every instagram user to install threads....so it's more forced growth than natural growth
No, they don't. They do heavily push suggested Threads posts in the IG feed, though.
That's because Blacksky and Threads address wildly different markets.
Blacksky's market is literally orders of magnitude smaller. That's quite a growth curve when adjusted for market size.
That's fine. The mainstream is a cesspool of shit and stupidity, and the rest of the world is welcome to drown in it.
Maybe someone can decentralize social media so much that it finally goes offline.
Like MyFace by TacoCorp[0].
[0] https://youtu.be/8GQrVgHh6EU
Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear. Seems like a ton of work to manage the separate server. (a similar refrain from fediverse/mastodon things) But if they're happy sure.
A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.
The whole impetus for the original project inside Twitter was the recognition that centralized moderation at scale is impossible without ignoring what makes different communities unique. Context collapses fast and well-intentioned moderation decisions spark huge, unending imbroglios.
It's worth noting that they are using bluesky feeds and moderation services/labellers. They just have written their own rust implementations for the tools/services and their frontend (which is largely a fork of bluesky-social upstream) changes the default experience/settings.
So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse.
TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.
Unstated, but: they don't fully trust the Bluesky admins and especially their moderators. While not wanting to, er, segregate themselves from the wider "Bluesky" community.
> Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear.
Assuming you absolutely trust Bluesky-the-company to behave itself now and in the future, it probably isn't necessary. If you don't, then this sort of step towards real decentralisation is important.
This largely makes Bluesky-the-broader-network immune to the Elon Musk factor, tho; even if some idiot buys and breaks Bluesky-the-company, you'd expect more Blacksky-like thing to bud off.
I really want to make a decentralizable streaming video platform
Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams"
Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such
Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers
Haven't checked it out, but supposedly stream.place [1] is "the Twitch of Bluesky" (according to the HN comment I heard about it from), doing livestreaming using the AT Protocol.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/stream.place
"Decentralized" and "real money payment system": pick one. You could make it work with cryptocurrency and I'm sure someone's already done that for the 1% of users.
The central services take a cut, but they also provide an audience through the recommendation systems. Which is why everyone tries to game the thumbnails, Shorts algorithm, etc.
PeerTube is a project that already exists and fits some of those qualifications. Not certain if it quite meets all of your specifications, as I don't believe it has direct integration for payment processing. Most streamers, however, take third-party payment anyway, like Streamlabs, that give a much larger percentage to the creator compared to Twitch or YouTube. I am also not certain how easy it is to set up PeerTube.
It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.
I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.
All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
If it's a decentralised non-profit platform which doesn't have future plans to monetise the users somehow, isn't spending $0 on marketing the default? You'd hardly want to throw a few mil into ads for something that will never generate revenue.
Allot of people have a social media account rather than a website and allot of people use gmail rather than host their own mail. Decentralized means do it yourself, but most people just want something with batteries included that works well and don't really care about centralization.
> "Decentralized means do it yourself" ...
Not necessarily. Just one famous example; BitTorrent is decentralized but for most people it's just "run this app, download files". "Decentralized" just means "doesn't rely on a centralized service to accomplish a goal". As long as the application isn't too complex to install and use, most folks won't care one way or the other whether it's decentralized or not, as long as it accomplishes the goal they're looking to accomplish.
There has to be a payoff though. BitTorrent is actually pretty hard to get working correctly, track down the torrent files... people do it because it's the only way to get some content and a way to get content you'd otherwise have to pay for. With social media, there's not much reward and most people's friends already post for free on other networks. Not saying it's not worthwhile, but it's hard to extract this lesson from BitTorrent.
But it can also be specialized forums like https://startrek.website/ which is hosted using Lemmy but you can use your federated login. It can help bring back indie forums and websites that aren’t controlled by Reddit or meta.
Yeah, for sure. Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use (or simpler) than existing social networks, and / or offer some genuinely unique and desirable feature(s) in order to attract any serious critical mass of users.
Interestingly the original Napster was a pretty good social network! I really liked being able to browse through all of a user's shared files. We should bring something like that back.
Soulseek has been around a while...
"Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use..."
In practice this issue arise something like this: A decentralized service is launched it is so decentralized the user has to store their own private keys. Later a centralized solution is launched where the user does not have to go through the trouble of storing the private keys, everything is managed for them... everyone joins the centralized service.
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Perhaps, but i feel like under this definition, bluesky and friends, dsspite all their talk, really does fit in the centralized camp.
> ... "under this definition, bluesky and friends, dsspite all their talk, really does fit in the centralized camp."
In my mind, I put them somewhere in-between, leaning a tad more toward "centralized" because they still rely on an individual to host the service no matter how "federated" they are. Until they're truly peer-to-peer, there's still that aspect of centralization involved. We need something kinda like BitTorrent but for messaging / social connections.
Maybe Bluesky is analogous to Github, if the AT protocol truly does allow for migration away to an alternative?
Although Git repositories are portable, PRs, issues, actions and such aren't — so even if the migration away from Bluesky is lossy the comparison seems apt.
I really like their listed user experience goals:
1. Cross-platform engagement
Create content via one platform and engage with users on other platforms.
2. Moderation choice
Voluntarily opt into moderation policies that reflect the experience you want.
3. Data portability
Data portability and credible exit are built in (you can take your data and followers with you).
4. Advertising disincentive
Portability prevents lock-in or captive audiences, which disincentivizes advertising.
5. Algorithmic choice
Users can choose the feeds and algorithms that work for them.
It's not do it yourself, it's more having more control if you want too.
The issue is only developers know the benefits of those features. Most people just want to view content or post and get their likes. That is why they use social media rather than post on their own website.
I don't think this is a technology problem, its more of a socioeconomic problem. People tend to choose the centralized option and projects that start out decentralized tend to end up centralized WWW-Social media, Email-Gmail, Git-Github, Bitcoin-Coinbase etc
I think that used to be true, but influencers and such I believe would value some of the freedom of moving to other platforms and keep both their content and follower.
Also, I think many users would now appreciate more control over the moderation policies they want applied, and also be able to choose between different feed algorithms to find one that promotes things that they prefer.
Would most people still probably use the one big "instance"? For sure, but I think you'd still have a good 20-30% that would use alternatives.
Assuming it all just-worked. Which I think is what this article is trying to say, the AT protocol can provide these features and ease of use. I don't know if that's true, but it seems to be the claim.
This is where tech family and friends need to play a role. Host these services for them!
My family just thinks Jellyfin and Navidrome is another Netflix or Spotify they have access to. And most of them prefer Jellyfin as content doesn’t disappear and is much more curated.
Decentralised here means keeping companies honest by avoiding lock-in. It's fine to have the centralisation if it's easy to switch. BlackSky users don't need to care about the details, but if they don't like the community they can move their data elsewhere. Try doing that with Instagram.
They can also liberate their identity, which is the real innovation of the AT protocol
Didn’t they just adopt DNS? I mean I guess you have a DID people can follow ( tho afaik there’s no other identity server for resolving DIDs besides bsky app), but the way to tell that someone is who you think they are is their handle being connected to their domain
did:web (DNS) is just one option for identity. did:plc is what you want, it's not reliant on ICANN or BlueSky. Any PDS should be able to resolve a did:web or did:plc.
https://atproto.com/specs/did
did:plc is currently centralized, it's 100% reliant on Bluesky. Lookups have to be done at https://plc.directory/
Apologies, I was mistaken. I'd confused the self-certifying bit with decentralization. did:plc relies on trusting a central server to accept all valid events and not allow users to rewrite their history.
I mean, facebook is pretty easy to switch from, just stop going to their website.
Personally i'm a little doubtful that bluesky is decentralized in a way that matters.
I think Facebook is pretty useless and just not using the site is a great way to transfer away from it. But I feel like to engage with the idea of switching away constructively, I’d have to find some value in the content I had on the site.
Until you kids school uses it for organizing information for parents or that’s the only place a niche group you like is.
Getting banned from Facebook means loosing access to all of that. Kinda like getting banned from YouTube could mean loss of access to email, groups, drive and a bunch of other services. Hell I’ve heard of company contractors getting banned from Google Play’s Developer and everyone in the company then getting banned from all Google services!
If I get banned from a Lemmy community that doesn’t ban me from other communities or other servers and I can always run my own if I need to.
Naw, decentralized means not having everyone on one platform. ActivityPub-enabled sites (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) can be run by just about anyone, and can serve multiple users.
So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.
We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
> We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
This is not and was not ever true. IP was explicitly designed from the start to be difficult to operate without centralisation because the telecoms operators wanted to maintain their "monopoly" on communications infrastructure.
That is why IP insisted on not separating the interface address from device/service identity despite knowing ahead of time this would make multihoming a nightmare (as it did with ARPANET) and despite this problem already having been solved by CYCLADES (it being basically the one feature they explicitly avoided adopting from CYCLADES).
That among other things.
This is in large part why BGP is and always has been such a clusterfuck. There were known issues ahead of time but they were willfully ignored as they made relying on the heavily centralised telecoms operators essentially always the path of least resistance.
Why would decentralized technology be easy to use?
Limewire was installed on over one-third of computers world wide in 2007 [1]. That's because even grandma could press next->next->next on a window setup file and it just worked. There is no technical reason hosting your email isn't as easy as that.
Look at roof top solar panel. Literally hundreds of millions of households have roof top solar to generate decentralized power. The fundamental complexity in email hosting is hundred times less, but the software engineering community choose to not make it possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire
The distinction blurs with AT protocol. My data lives on Bluesky's PDS for now, but I can log in to that PDS from anything that supports AT. Like leaflet.pub
Here's a post on one of my Leaflet publications under my own domain: https://foxes.kyefox.com/3lx46ftzhhc27
This post is stored in Leaflet's own lexicon in its own collection right next to all my Bluesky data. I could move this to a different PDS if I wanted. I could come up with a script to turn the collection into static pages or convert them to another platform's import format.
Nobody cares about decentralization until they do[0] and AT seems to have the best answer for that eventuality.
[0] https://kyefox.com/nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until...
DNS is decentralized
Sort of. In practice, there's a hierarchy of name servers, with authoritative root servers at the top of the tree, organized by ICANN.
You can run your own name server, but there's no good way for large numbers of people to voluntarily opt out of the existing system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
You misunderstood what I said. DNS is certainly a decentralized protocol and obviously not at all necessarily DIY. That’s all I was speaking to. Decentralized can be that simple.
> DNS is certainly a decentralized protocol
What you originally said could be interpreted as either DNS-the-system or DNS-the-protocol. I assumed the former, since that seemed more likely.
Sure, the protocol could be used without the resolver hierarchy, but I would argue that's not a useful way to think about it, since it won't happen in practice.
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"our users’ accounts and data are on our server"
I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.
ATProto is decentralized in that it allows you to choose a 3rd party like Blacksky to do all kinds of things for you. You can use the social media feed this 3rd party curates, use their moderation services like block lists, and even have your data hosted on a 3rd party’s servers.
All while using the same client app everyone else is using, or even a custom 3rd party client.
The nature of the protocol is that everything is connected, but services of the protocol can be decentralized when a user chooses to use a 3rd party to do certain things for them.
The unit of decentralization is the group, not the individual. The client-server relationship is still centralized.
Joining a community is a highly centralizing act. ;-p
It is decentralised in the sense that it is not strictly dependent on Bluesky (in practice, because no-one else has really done this yet, Bluesky-the-network now consists of Bluesky-the-company, plus Blacksky). Most prior Bluesky 'decentralisation' has, in practice, been somewhat dependent on Bluesky.
This is very cool, I'm glad someone else is doing the relay (or whatever it's called) hosting. But that's money right? Donated money is still money.
Does it depend on the benevolence of Bluesky for its existence?
I think they're hosting their own relay, so not really (besides did:plc identity resolution. Hopefully that can be made decentralized at some point)
I like bluesky like...a lot but too busy recently to post there and of course, lack of engagement from my part = lack of people to actually give a f@@@ about me.
I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
The structure of the atproto gives us the ability to ditch her and bluesky while keeping our data and connections. If your users aren't captive, why become the villain? They'll just leave.
For a brief moment I thought it’s talking about the satellite company
https://www.blacksky.com
The more decentralized social media platforms there are, the better, but I wonder if there's a reason they didn't go with Mastodon?
I thought bluesky is simply facebook's version of twitter?
You're thinking of Threads.
‘Black folks have always been huge culture drivers on social media platforms and other tech products. Systemically excluded from access to capital and distribution, Black folks leverage creativity to make social media platforms their “own” without ever having true ownership.’
I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.
Not "digital spaces", but "capital and distribution".
It's basically saying that the black population does have an impact on culture although there are no black CEOs of social media companies, just in a vaguely victimist black pride sort of way.
There were a few dust-ups of this sort that I saw on Twitter back before Gamergate started (and during Gamergate) where there were accusations that people were brigading visible black users on Twitter to push them off the site or get them banned with report spam. I don't recall whether it ever got to the point that it was covered in the news - and I can't find any articles about it - but it wouldn't surprise me if things like that have continued to this day.
So at the very least, I recall hearing about it happening. It doesn't surprise me if people are claiming to have experienced it firsthand.
He means they don't own the social media companies, not that they're excluded from using them. But of course that's still silly because almost nobody of any race owns a social media company, at least not enough to have any control over it.
Have you looked at response-Tweets on X lately?
I've opted out of social media so you will have to clue me in. (Mainly because of the trolling and the excessive moderation)
Twitter is a racist cesspit. I deleted my account a while ago but recently decided to give it another go to follow some sports reporters. The amount of racism, xenophobia and hateful content that gets pushed in front of you is absurd. I imagine huge amounts of racism is a turn off for people that aren't white.
Allowing every drive by commentator is a huge mistake in building an actual community. Communities are built by people invested in the platform.
In the early to mid aughts I was part of couch surfing. It had a lot of purpose built in friction and it created an amazing tight knit group of people that I still consider my best friends. Once the pressure from Airbnb and investment money caused them to remove that, it became terrible.
Sometime never growing a community over a small group of invested people is the right choice.
The same thing happened with NextDoor. When it was small and just involved a few hundred people in your immediate neighborhood there was a real community on there. Then the kept expanding the size and now you have people that live no where in your community ruining the experience for everyone.
Are you implying that white people are the most racist group of people (when classifying by skin color)?
I don't imply that at all. No idea how you came to that conclusion.
> I imagine huge amounts of racism is a turn off for people that aren't white.
Please explain what you mean by this then?
Yeah, this is gonna cause more and more segregation in online spaces.
Sucks, but I guess this is why we can't have nice things.
The fact my experience has been downvoted speaks volumes of the current state of online discourse.
Can I have an invite code please
I hate that they say public benefit corporation like it actually means anything. This is a corporate social media with a fully centeralized userbase and full control of the protocol.
The userbase is not fully centralized. It's mostly centralized, but users who care can manage their own data independently of bluesky.
While it's true that they have 'full' control over the protocol, they've stated that the goal is to hand it off to a more democratic organization once it's stable. This seems like a reasonable choice and I see no reason to distrust their motives here. Even if they did try something underhanded, it's not hard to fork the repositories and force the enshittified version to compete with the original.
I didn’t understand what are these Black users that blacksky is made for? Is it about skin color wtf?
Start here perhaps: https://theemancipator.org/2025/06/05/topics/books/in-we-tri... - it's an interview about 'black twitter' which arguably was before blacksky. Largely about surfacing stories & perspectives that don't typically get covered.
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> "Black users" isn't about skin color, it's about a group of people who came from US slavery
(I am having trouble phrasing this question to be unambiguously sincere and without intention of provocation, so please bear with me...)
I read your statement above as saying that "Black" means "descended from US chattel slavery".
Is that your intention? Is this a big-B vs small-b distinction? What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery?
Please assume ignorance and not malice. I really do not know what I don't know here.
What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery?
Africans? (in Africa at least)
I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black"
OK I didn't fully qualify the question, but I was definitely not asking about African people, unless that's the context that was omitted from the original statement.
I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black"
Wait.
What?
Where are you that you've never heard anyone call a black person, well, "black"?
At a guess, Nigeria, Benin, Mali, Gambia, etc.
As a function of language (black being an English word) and of fish not calling other fish wet.
Various EU countries are also a possibility, not all countries make such a deal of pigmentation as does the US | UK, etc.
I'm familiar with all those nations. (In fact the ECOWAS nations are the ones I'm most familiar with.)
Every one of them, I've heard people calling black people "black".
I've also been all over Western Europe, and it's the same story. I've definitely heard the people in Paris, München, wherever call black people "black".
I thought the answer would be someplace I haven't been. Like maybe parts of Asia outside of Japan and China?
Maybe Eastern European nations use a different term?
Or maybe other parts of Africa? (SADC nations maybe?)
But they definitely call black people "black" in the Gambia and Nigeria.
I've also worked in a good many of the non G20 countries across the planet (geophysical field work) and while, yes, of course skin colour is referred to everywhere it's noticeably less frequent in many countries - I took the stance that the GP was commenting on a relative frequency as compared to (say) the US.
In my experience, which may differ to yours, it was as common in Benin to refer to someone as black as it was in Zurich to call another white.
Thank you. Suggesting that people never used the the term black would imply that I can overhear every conversation. So obviously I can't rule out that the term is used. I just haven't heard it. or, to be fair, I don't remember having heard it. The fact that English is not the majority language in most places is obviously also a factor. And maybe I just haven't been talking to people enough yet.
> I really do not know what I don't know here.
Given they said "this is another case of liberal whites pretending to represent black people in some way in order to manipulate other white people", they don't know anything either.
Assume that the answer to your question is “Yes”.
No other term has had the cultural staying power with regards to identifying the descendants of African slaves in the US (and the earliest generation of immigrants from elsewhere; namely the Caribbean) as a distinct ethnic/cultural group.
Of course the term “Black” can be applied to other ethnicities in general, but in the context of US history, descendants of African slaves make up the primary demographic.
I mean, Rudy Fraser, the founder of BlackSky, appears to be a black man and not a white liberal.
And of course there are black users on Bluesky. They're there, I don't know why you would claim otherwise.
> Everybody remembers when the first black stuff came to their country. The first returned immigrant who changed your popular culture by imitating things that black people were doing in the US, whether it was rock and roll, or just how to dance.
What memories would Manu DiBango, Bongo Kanda, Touré Kunda, Salif Keita, Fela Kuti, et al have of "black stuff" do you suppose?
Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu shouts out to the works of Angélique Kidjo, not Chuck Berry.
I hate to drag myself into this kind of stuff. But you can’t really believe that an afrobeats artist isn’t somehow influenced by Black (as in US) culture.
I’d go as far as to say that an artist in that genre will not receive any mainstream popularity (to the extent to the likes of Burna Boy) without in some way appealing to parts of the African diaspora who themselves are influenced largely by Black (US) culture, even if its superficially (i.e., how they dress).
Cursory research about the influence you named of Burna Boy’s yields:
> She grew up listening to Yoruba and Beninese traditional music, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, James Brown, Manu Dibango, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Fela Kuti, Stevie Wonder, Osibisa and Santana.
The affect that the American acts had on her music, you’d know better than I. But the degrees between Burna Boy and Chuck Berry apparently are fewer than recognized.
>I hate to drag myself into this kind of stuff. But you can’t really believe that an afrobeats artist isn’t somehow influenced by Black (as in US) culture.
But by that token the one from the US is influenced by US culture tenfold
Certainly, just not in the ways I think are useful to whatever point you’re trying to make.
What goes around comes around and yes, musical forms from Africa that were remembered in the US and branched from over time feed back into their mother lode.
I seek not to dis the US modifications, just to remind some that these were not and never the OG sources.
> But you can’t really believe that an afrobeats artist isn’t somehow influenced by Black (as in US) culture.
I can say I struggle to see the line from R.L. Burnside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_DOnKJ232M to Touré Kunda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6u0omHFhqE
I would like to hear more about the US precursors that influenced(?) Mory Kante's Yeke Yeke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Cmv2K07R0 .. I was unaware of an underground kora-playing griot scene in the US.
Just for the chuckle value, here's arguably the greatest dis of US hardcore rap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ouDZkX1Yh8
> I’d go as far as to say that an artist in that genre will not receive any mainstream popularity
Errr, by "mainstream" do mean "USofA" ? I can assure that all the names I mentioned are known to numbers that rival any audience that can be found in the US .. just not to audiences that register with the US zeitgeist.
Early Angélique Kidjo was a traditional musician who went on to and jammed with European bands https://youtu.be/_-YlMyUgzC8?t=96 , slightly later AK was independent with European producers, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4NsRS3S1UY
Mature A-K played about, riffing on Hendrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN_K84TAxNs, reworking Talking Heads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR8jgFGmqvU, backing and supporting Australians*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGomSuDPeSU
If you care to listen to the linked tracks you might reflect on the influence there from "black USA" ... it's more that she joined in with the Hendrix legacy for the joy of collaboration than it formed an integral part of her background.
* For some value of Australian... :-)
My comment was specifically about Burna Boy, a contemporary artist.
Granted I’m indifferent to the musical heritage of Black (as in native to the African continent and its diaspora) music and will yield considerable ground to people more interested in that than I am because of this.
But speaking about culture in general, I think it’s “goofy” (to borrow a term from the grandparent comment) to brush away the influence that Black (as in US) culture has on Blacks (everywhere else) today. Not 50 years ago. Right now. I’m specifically referring to acts who may be equal in relative notoriety to the one’s you named, but are popular today like Burna Boy.
We can split hairs about the influence that Black (as in African) music had on Black people in the US. I’m sure there’s arguments to be had that vary in how appreciable they are to this premise. It’s probably equally “goofy” to wave off the idea that the “degrees of separation between Burna Boy and Chuck Berry” extend further to Berry’s great(N)-grandparents who carried the remnants of what was to be “remembered” on US soil after crossing the Middle Passage.
But I don’t think that it’s as linear a process as we’d like to imagine, at least it isn’t anymore.
Bangs (and external agents independent of Black people) disrupted the matrix and the “mother lode” is no longer centralized at the “mother land”.
> I think it’s “goofy” (to borrow a term from the grandparent comment) to brush away the influence that Black (as in US) culture has on Blacks (everywhere else) today.
You'd probably best argue that point with someone that thinks US Black culture has had zero global travel and influence then.
What isn't 'goofy' is the notion that US and African Black culture have had a near continuous back and forth interchange throughout history, the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival featured a strong 'Back to Africa' thread that highlighted contemporary African music, polyrhythmic forms, call and response, specific artists, etc. all of which can be found in the US Black Culture musical production of today .. WhoSampled highlights sources of many drum beats used in early hip hop recordings of the 1980s that are now considered iconic, and so on.
> Bangs (and external agents independent of Black people) disrupted the matrix
Who or what is 'Bangs', to which matrix do you refer? <insert relevant Samuel L. Jackson quote>
> and the “mother lode” is no longer centralized at the “mother land”.
Not a great turn of phrase, mother lodes can be exhausted but they don't move.
To the point buried within, Africa may have been the point of origin of all humanity but it was never the point of genesis of all musical form, Gamelan is almost unique to the Sundanese peoples (Indonesia) with tenuous backlinks to Indian forms at best .. it's a long way from there to any prior African drum or percussion influences.
In greater human history people have made their own unique forms and variations across the globe, post near instant global communication, recording and playback, these forms all mutually intertwine and influence each other.
Well here I am thinking that a mother lode just meant a lotta stuff kept somewhere, and simultaneously surprised that you aren’t familiar with South Sudanese-born artist “Bangs” and that you didn’t catch on to “matrix” as a reference to Africa being the developmental environment for Black music [but were keen to pick up on the aforementioned mother lode gaffe that short circuited our little game of language surrounding the origins of Black culture].
Explaining a joke or a wry remark is about as deflating as either fallen flat. So you’ll have to pick up on the grander point that I was trying to make by yourself.
Suffices to say that you’ve managed to do that already anyhow in a manner far more sophisticated than my own.
I had a great time, you?
I'm good - I enjoy a rambling conversation nominally centred about <something>
Mother lode comes from mining, the real or imagined source of tiny nuggets found washed further downstream (by current or ancient no longer present water flows). In that sense, to which I'm a little wedded by practice, they don't move about, at least not until mined dry and relocated to some treasury or rich persons pocket.
Bangs and matrix are overloaded, it's hard keeping up with what others mean in their use of terms, Gammon in the UK has a meaning different to it's use by urban aboriginal people in Australia.
For some the origins of local Black Culture have little remnant of African culture and predate both the arrival of convict ships upon the tide and the retreat of ice from Europe that allowed the settlement of the extremely white bits.
Great party hats though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_Gwion_rock_paintings
* https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro
RIP Kumanjayi Mowaljarlai - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-AgvUEVm4
Is it just me but I feel "social" would imply centralization. After all, if I want to socialize I will want to go where other people go, using a tool/client/channel that works for most people --- this inevitably leads to centralization.
I don’t agree — I can socialize with my neighbor and I can also socialize in a centralized hub, like a club.
What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users.
I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
What if your neighbors decided it's just easier to socialize in a centralized club and go there all the time?
Gradually, you "lose" neighbors to socialize with because people (and things in general) gravitate towards the path of least effort. Eventually you will have to go to the club too.
Centralization can be contagious.
This is something we lived through already, right? Centralized social media platforms are largely dominated by annoying people nowadays. The article is about a group that decided “hey, the club sucks, let’s make our own,” and they seem to be doing alright.
If they make it really right, then eventually the annoying people will come too and we are back to square one.
Not if you ban them, which is the missing ingredient.
I am afraid you might have seriously underestimated the number of annoying people around you.
I think people are missing that there's a middle ground between "fully decentralized" (everyone in their own home) and "fully centralized" (entire population of the earth goes to one spot to converse, like the Hajj a hundred times larger.
Bluesky connects these things though, right? Isn’t that the point of the article? But even if someone was deliberately segregating them: if I don’t want to go to the club, but my neighbor wants to go to the club more than they want to hang out with me, then I don’t get to hang out with my neighbor. That’s life.
This is why I miss RSS so much. It is such a great way to keep up with people over a wide variety of platforms with your own powerful user agent.
I still use a self hosted FreshRSS heavily and fortunately many sites still accidentally support it, but it could be so much easier for non tech people.
I know right. Seems like they’re just reinventing the wordpress blog.
its because of liberals and democrats who hates musk because he teamed up with republicans. They will buy poop if you sell them and you also hate republicans and Trump.
$0 plus spinning out of one of the world's largest social networks and news propagators. But yeah... $0.
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tl;dr
Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky, so running on the AT Protocol that has its own infrastructure, mod team etc.
It's fairly specifically _not_ a fork; they've re-implemented atproto (in, what else, Rust). This is important, as there are now two real in-production-use AT Protocol impls (plus a bunch of toy ones).
Sorry I got that from the description they've put on their GitHub repo. Suppose referring to the front-end as a fork of bsky.app. Shrug
Yeah, I think the frontend's just a fork, but that's not really the interesting bit.
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Grassroots protected spaces for/by oppressed classes != institutionalized segregation.
meh..
We do racial segregation offline all the time. Why wouldn't we do it online?
waterfountain.com ?
Because approximately 0.5s after you create a whites-only group, you will be savagely attacked as the world's biggest racist. And that's actually fine... but only as long as that is the case for everyone. It's not ok to have self-segregation allowed for some groups, but not others, which is where we are today.
???
Genuine question here, not trying to anger anyone.
But we have Heaven only knows how many whites-only groups online. (In fact we have Heaven only knows how many Asian, Black, Native, and Latin groups online as well.) If you don't like them, you're free to ignore them. Or you're free to criticize them. Your choice. All of that is the great thing about the internet.
Why would any of that be a problem for anyone?
There is a depressing irony about a story on an effort to decentralize social media being published on a centralized social media platform. It feels like decentralized blogging will never come back, even though we have Ghost (not to mention Wordpress) right there.
With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.
I wouldn't say it's too depressing. It's just that's the platform the interviewer uses. Often bluesky adjacent blogs are posted via Leaflet (atproto based blog) nowaday. It's not always but tbh I see them more than I see substack in my circles now.
Decentralized must necessitate abandonment of moderators.
To filter the bad stuff, to inform that algorithm, we will use a shared rating system. Rating the stuff and rating the raters too.
This is basically proof that you’re wrong: a separate entity hosts separate moderation, and anyone using a client of AT Proto (even the official app) can use this 3rd party as the moderation service for the content that they see. That’s decentralized moderation, where the user has choice over what moderation they use and what feeds they see.
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I think they're saying that delegating moderation to a third-party still constitutes decentralization, since it doesn't involve Bluesky proper.
Ok. As I see it, the primary hazard of centralization, and the concomitant moderation, is that control over our communication is given to a central authority.
This hazard exists whether it's a few centers or many.
Therefore any meaningful decentralization will do away with moderation.
Is this not obvious?
> This hazard exists whether it's a few centers or many.
I think the primary hazard to focus on is one vs many. The major danger of moderation is when you can't opt out.
I would argue they're not quite the same here, because 3rd-party delegation can be revoked at any time, limiting the damage.
> any meaningful decentralization will do away with moderation
Perhaps if LLMs get way better than they currently are.
Otherwise, there's too many things to do in a day to make every possible decision in life yourself, so optional, revocable delegation feels like an acceptable compromise to me.
There's many cases where we just rely on others. Do you personally check all your lettuce for e.coli? Did you check your outlets for proper grounding? Did you examine your medications with a mass spectrometer to verify the chemical composition was correct? No, we rely on institutions, fallible as they are, because there's only so many hours in the day.
I definitely don’t think this is the next evolution. Decentralized just means you have to do work to find places to post to and no one is doing that. The only decentralized social media is going to be stuff that is too gruesome, illegal and hateful to post in regular spaces.
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I might just be projecting from a certain phase of my life but if I had to bet on what social media will look like:
TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience
Twitter+offline meetups for everything else.
Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.
Why Twitter? Every time I go on there it seems like people who are seeking an argument as a way to connect. Those aren’t happy people.
Everyone I've met in person from twitter has been very well adjusted, smart, and surprisingly good looking.