@_elena I mean, I run a mastodon, I'd surely not forget to disclose that!
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@_elena are you aware that any record is public on atproto and checkable on pds.ls? there's nothing new .....
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@_elena @pascaline also, think about it: what were they so busy at that they didn't have the time during that whole year to talk about the money.
Bain Capital are notorious for using investments to hollow out companies and turn them into puppets they eventually discard. their business practices are a mix of cannibalism and parasitism.
Bain most likely dangled the money contingent upon meeting a set of demands. a bespoke API/backdoor of private BS info must be it.
@_elena @mat reminder, the Bluesky team explicitly mentioned commercial use of their data in their 2024 arXiv preprint:
“…as Bluesky grows, there are likely to be multiple professionally-run indexers for various purposes. For example, a company that performs sentiment analysis on social media activity about brands could easily create a whole-network index that provides insights to their clients. Web search engines can incorporate Bluesky activity into their indexes,…” pg. 5
it’s been part of the model from the start…
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@UlrikeHahn
> as Bluesky grows ... a company that performs sentiment analysis on social media activity about brands could easily create a whole-network index
DataFarming much? E tu, BS?
This is one of many unsavoury reasons why the ATProto network absolutely depends on a central 'firehose', designed to give any intermediary that operates a Relay a global view of the network.
The ATmosphere is a panopticon, *by design*.
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So of course all the US identi-Moonies aligned to the corporatist Democratic party all rushed in to BS. It's the perfect fit ....
Meanwhile the independent left continues to do the patient community organising necessary to build the fediverse. I'm just about to publish a post on disintermedia.net.nz on exactly that.
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@UlrikeHahn @_elena how is it different from the fediverse? as long as there's a firehose, anyone can crawl mastodon.social or any other instance and do the same
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it seems both legally different to me and different in design:
https://write.as/ulrikehahn/bridging-to-bluesky-the-open-social-web-consent-and-gdpr
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@UlrikeHahn it surely is, but nothing technically prevents anyone to crawl data from https://[any_instance]/public/local automatically. It's even worse on AP because you never really delete a post as it's duplicated on a thousands different instances. Someone already did a firehose of activitypub but I can't remember his @
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@mat @_elena I think the legal aspect matters. And once someone downloads an ATproto post it’s not going to vanish by the author deleting it either. There is a freely available archive tool that lets you download your entire Bluesky post history with two clicks. And given how ATproto works, that means you can use the same tool to download, archive and search another users entire history of posts as well
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@_elena permissive data/spaces is coming this year, and you can use E2EE messaging germ using your pds. if you want to delete any data, you can just connect to pds.ls and delete any record you want (e.g. all your likes, comments, etc)
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if you post a public message, someone can ingest that message. there's no protection in what you're citing
(for the record, no such protection on public mastodon messages either)
you're claiming a protection that does not exist
bluesky is a capitalist endeavour funded by cryptobros, while mastodon is not. they have the incentive to do quiet seedy things beingd the scenes with your data mastodon does not. any secrecy like elena cites is a warning you should heed
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imo we should think of social media (the social news feed ala bluesky and mastodon etc) as totally public like blogs you can boost. that's different than messaging and groups that need privacy, what I call social networking.
I think bluesky's goal is to be the Google/Gmail of all of social media. "it's open so you could use other services but we make it easy and provide a better experience." the way the app view works makes that possible unlike how AP works. enshittify.
imo we should think of social media (the social news feed ala bluesky and mastodon etc) as totally public like blogs you can boost. that's different than messaging and groups that need privacy, what I call social networking.
I think bluesky's goal is to be the Google/Gmail of all of social media. "it's open so you could use other services but we make it easy and provide a better experience." the way the app view works makes that possible unlike how AP works. enshittify.
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AFAIK AT has a fatal centralization flaw but otherwise I agree that it's doing a lot of stuff AP wants to. but that's what VC gets you. a Faustian bargain. AP would be further along if people saw this obvious future of the two protocols and invested here, but paid for PR is currently winning.
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mastodon dot social and bluesky are both centralized parts of their respective networks. the question is how much of each network do they currently represent and how is that likely to change going forward. MS is announcing efforts to address exactly this situation while BS is hiding their massive round of VC funding (this time will not be different and it's not being given for altruistic purposes).
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And I really believe that Bluesky got ahead because it's been essentially a centralized Twitter 2.0, only now slowly starting to open up, and that's already creating UX problems people have been complaining about with Mastodon/fediverse.
Here's a random post: https://witchsky.app/profile/did:plc:rtf3bjc3w2yn4syxtm4r7jt2/post/3mfrp6tovy22g
Try replying from https://bsky.app. The old "put the URL in the search box" trick doesn't work here.
And developers are disagreeing over "log in with Bluesky" vs "with ATProto" vs "Atmosphere", because the first one erases the diversity of the network, while the more accurate labels are "too confusing for normies".
Plus, "pick a PDS and an AppView and an app" sounds a lot more daunting than "pick a server".
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@stefan @_elena @benroyce @mat
Telling how one of the answers is about being able to monetize on the user end (« Culture problems w/ ActivityPub/Mastodon on a number of levels. Seemed openly hostile to anyone potentially making money, even small biz »). That’s a feature, not a bug as far as I’m concerned :)
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@sknob Honestly, being hostile to people who are just trying to make living doesn't feel like a feature.
I make music as a hobby, but if I was trying to promote an album or a show, and got harassed off the fediverse for that, I'd just have to stick with commercial social media, I guess.
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i think the way to handle that is to bake it in to your presence, make it part of your identity that you engaged in commerce
people need to eat
if someone else has no financial worries, good for them, but it's entitled to weaponize that against you
some parts of mastodon will be hostile to you, some won't. so you simply block the hostile parts, and they block you, and everyone carries on
@stefan @_elena @benroyce @mat
A lot of people promote their DIY arts and crafts on the fedi, including me, and I think that’s fine. It’s still not a cool place for businesses to aggressively advertise and sell their wares, and I think it’s more than nice to have a place that is essentially free from consumer culture.
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@sknob I've seen/read about that sort of behavior on here, so really mainly referring to that.
And there is a lot of gatekeeping, people looking down on those who are not tech savvy enough or intimidated by some of the complexities of how fediverse works.
Really not a fan of that.
(Not saying this applies to you, just a general comment!)
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@benroyce Yes, but telling people "just block everyone" gets tiring after a certain point, and we all have a different threshold.
This is why we need to:
a) implement reply controls, and
b) fix the culture here
Honestly, rather than telling people "block the harassers", we need to teach people to block/ignore those they feel like harassing.
See also my semi-serious, only-joking-unless proposal: https://static.stefanbohacek.com/mansplaining/
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This focuses on the anti-Black racism, but highly recommend reading, if you haven't already:
https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/115995510270880689
But yes, you are right that these issues are not unique to the fediverse. Mekka explains really well why people still prefer being elsewhere.
@stefan I don't understand what your issue is, you want to reply to this post with your bsky handle? just log into witchsky with your bsky identity
https://witchsky.app/profile/did:plc:rtf3bjc3w2yn4syxtm4r7jt2/post/3mfrp6tovy22g
it's also way easier to switch from pds/appview as it's way more modular than a mastodon instance, you can connect into any appview regardless of where your pds is. you can also change your pds hosting very easily and keeping all of your existing data from any service
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@mat Not much of an issue on my end, rather, try convincing a few million people that logging into random websites just to reply to or like a post is a safe and fine thing to do.
But don't take my word for it, let's see how this all look once there are more independent ATProto communities.
We're still very much in the early days.
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@benroyce Yeah, honestly, this is why I don't get into these "is Bluesky really decentralized?" debates.
Arguably, people are making a lot of progress.
Have you seen this?
https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/116126040489956521
Yes, we're very much in the very early days, in practical terms you could argue Bluesky is very much still "centralized", but it's starting to change.
Best to accept that, and prepare for how things will actually look when this gets meaningful traction, because, as you said, fediverse may actually get advantage by already having some of these issues resolved by then.
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@stefan actually you can host an appview for 10-20€/month, it all depends on how much data you want to federate with. just like a mastodon federation, it doesn't make sense to store the integrality of the bsky app view (+18To), you can just host the last 2 weeks of the bluesky activity or just 500go/1to and have the same user experience as the bluesky centralized one
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@stefan frankly I don't think that migrating from URLs to DIDs as identifiers would still qualify as the same protocol in the case of ActivityPub.
So, if ActivityPub is the main component of the Fediverse - which it is for me - I don't think we'll be able to reproduce _all_ the functionality ATProto has.
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if a message is public, it's public. people need to understand anyone can scrape you, on any protocol
but there is a difference between the fediverse which has no financial motivations, and bluesky, which does have creepy financial motivations. they can, and will, eventually, simply as a matter of the inevitable financial imperative of seedy cryptobro creeps, to do things with your data *on the inside*
(private messages, linking it with data in other plutocrat silos, etc)
