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Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there’s a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?
How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon? BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.
How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon?
The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?
BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.
It’s the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren’t federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.
How do you manipulate Bluesky?
The same way you manipulate Twitter, by tweaking the algorithm.
That’s not how it works.
If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.
And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that’s entirely fair. But if you’re looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don’t see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It’s a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.
But in the end, I think there is space for both.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time
This is only true of Bluesky because everyone is using Bluesky’s infrastructure at the moment. If Bluesky ever deindexes someone and they start posting to an alternative relay, you suddenly don’t have a guarantee of a full view of a post’s replies.
Content addressing means you can make your instance pull from both their relay and the bluesky relay and trivially merge threads and views without consistency issues, so that’s solvable.
The bigger issue is all those other regular users who doesn’t, and still get confused (unless they manage to pick a client app that does it for them)
I mean, this would become less trivial the more replays go into use, where to get a full view you’d have to pull from all the relays that exist.
ActivityPub’s solution to this is just IMO better, the original post has a replies collection attached to it that acts as the authority the replies the post has. This also allows creators to eject replies from the collection. There are issues with the way fedi software currently handles fetching from these reply collections, but the missing replies thing is very solvable in ActivityPub.
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user’s post goes viral.
And as for moderation bluesky also carries information with the top post from the post author and allows hiding replies too, etc. This gets enforced on the appview side, so the posting user’s PDS is unscathed if it goes viral.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
Realistically, the relay network will likely end up voluntarily adopting a tree topology - hobbyist communities would run small relays bundling all activity from members’ PDS servers, then a larger relay in front gathers everything from a ton of smaller relays and makes it available to appviews
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user’s post goes viral.
Setting up caching in the reverse proxy layer would alleviate this a lot of this. Like, GoToSocial only recommends to set up caching for the key and webfinger endpoints, where having it set up to cache posts and profiles for like 60 seconds (or however long the
Cache-Controlheader says, Mastodon defaults to 180s) would alleviate the strain on the server so much.There are other thing you can do, like this post explains some other things for Misskey, but the defaults should be sensible so you don’t have to be a sysadmin expert to host an instance and they’re currently not. I host 2 Lemmy instances (ukfli.uk and sappho.social) from a £5/month VPS and they’re able to handle bursts of hundreds of requests without issue.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
People are already building small, non-archival relays so this assumption seems mute. It’s also important to remember that relays are an optimisation, not a core part of the protocol.
ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀
It’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.
otoh, atproto’s PLC DID method is also not really decentralized… but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).
So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
Bluesky is the newest iteration of privately owned and controlled social media
Because, despite being wildly impractical, it’s technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized. Only recent a new host launched called Black sky. So it is no longer just one host. But it’s been one host for so long it almost doesn’t matter because so few people will switch.
Technically, yes, if you squint; but, practically, no. It was designed with a prioritization of passing the information/data around to avoid any lack of missing anything (so you get a closer experience to the connectedness of Twitter than Mastodon) which means every instance hosts, basically, the entire world. Naturally, there’s only going to be a few entities that can store and afford to store the entirety of the data of the network. There’s no such thing as a small instance, in their protocol.
So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.
Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.
Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don’t like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don’t get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.
The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though…
Does it? None of my normie progressive friends are on the fediverse. The ones that tried it didn’t like it.
The tech press is talking to your normie friends?
No I’m saying the logic and propaganda of corporate social media seems to work on them, despite it being in obvious contrast to their ideals.
I’m with you. To my knowledge all my irl woke friends ride only mainstream social media.
I had a local anarchist reach out to me on my ancient FB Messenger of all things.
I get that it’s not the most important part if you’re doing prefiguration, but as far as I can tell most people just want to be where most people are, even if it is supporting actually vile corporations.
Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.
Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.
Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra “stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions” endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.
this seems to work better on techy people who don’t like thinking about politics but understand the technical details
Not weird at all; this was the case with cryptocurrency too. Otherwise qualified and intelligent people would invest in centralized scam coins because they had no understanding of economics, just tech.
It’s sad but cool that it works the same way with social capital.
Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.
Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.
Because it is decentalised, and beats the fediverse in many aspects.
There are a lot of cool features from at protocol that activity pub should steal. The way users can pick their algorithm is game changing
Isn’t that algorithm thing not just a server-side feature? Don’t see how that’s part of AT Protocol
The tradeoffs Bluesky made to achieve that means that Bluesky doesn’t have private posts. In fact, Bluesky doesn’t have private blocks.
I do enjoy how that couch fucking fascist cunt is the most blocked person.
Private posts is planned, but it’s not trivial. Mastodon can’t exactly brag about their nonintuitive technically just not broadcasted posts, where multiple implementations keep making private messages publicly discoverable due to bugs.
Wouldn’t that work more with a client or a server software than the protocol itself? The protocol shares the posts. It’s the client and the instance which chooses what the user sees.
Idk the wizardry required to make it work its just something i think would be cool
It’s doable on Mastodon but significantly more complicated.
You need crawlers to index posts across the Fediverse (and avoid getting them blocked), personalized recommendation models per user, and you need pre-emptive caching on the user’s instance for anything recommended (ideally the crawler would make a cache on behalf of each of the opted-in users’ instances, but without content addressing this is a security risk). You also need to poll for edits / deletions.
Doesn’t Mastodon already receive the posts?
On Mastodon, your instance doesn’t receive posts until somebody on your instance interacts with the account posting it (following the poster, browsing directly to the post, etc).
Feeds with recommendations requires fetching stuff in advance to not be slow and janky. Basically the feed service would need a bot account on your instance and retrieving all popular posts, given the current architecture. Having thousands of these bots across every instance do this would cause a significant performance hit on smaller Mastodon instances when one of their users posts something popular. So you need something different, like a server plugin where the bot fetches the content once and tells all participating Mastodon servers about their cached copy, so they don’t all have to hit the hosting instance. But that’s a security risk with the Mastodon design.
i’m so tired of these posts. okay, fediverse, you won! you are more decentralized than bluesky. maybe it’s time to create real useful and interesting content instead of reveling in your elitism?
I mean I agree… it’s kind of the constant crux isn’t it?
The IT nerds pick a protocol that’s uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because… well obviously that’s kind of the definition of uncontrolled.
Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc… that most people care about flock there.
Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify… open communities announce “hey we’ve got our alternative here”, they say “thanks but nah that’s too complicated, and you don’t have the users that I want to see anyway”. People complain more… and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal… or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.
I don’t really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter… fundimentally I don’t see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say… a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that’s actually… well hostable.
It’s basically like exactly what happens out in the real world… walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors… local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down… half of owners, etc… forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.
But…I came here just for the gloating fediverse content.
What else could there be?
Wait, there are 1600 BlueSky instances to join? Are they counting people using a custom domain name as an entire instance?
I suppose PDS instances are included: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
OK so it sounds like there is still just the single BlueSky that is “federated” with a handful of single-user BlueSkies?
PDSes only store user data. These are full instances that can be used to browse the network. The idea is to make your account really yours. Bluesky is hosting most of them. But there are some people who do it on their own.
But bluesky controls much more important components in the network, namely the Relay and AppView.
If Bluesky decides to cut off your PDS you are pretty much alone.
Bluesky is pretty much a centralized platform like Twittler.
Zeppelin.social is 3rd party appview and you can host your own
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month
Add using DID:Web and you’re now fully self hosted
