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Ok, so what? if my email provider blocks gmail, I just leave to a diff provider. At the end of the day, the servers either provide the experience users want, or

Ok, so what? if my email provider blocks gmail, I just leave to a diff provider. At the end of the day, the servers either provide the experience users want, or users leave to a server that does. (But I still don’t think meta is going to enable activitypub)

Sunspark 3y ago
If a server admin ragequits and pulls the plug on the server without notice you are going to have trouble getting your data out or migrating.
- shagie 3y ago
  This is an ongoing issue with one of the Lemmy instances. https://lemmy.world/post/1232070 https://lemmy.world/post/1232070 And a Mastodon instance (mastodon.lol) from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 (though there was some warning)
  - crtasm 3y ago
    > https://lemmy.world/post/1232070 https://lemmy.world/post/1232070 The image they're looking for is on Wayback machine, if that's helpful: https://web.archive.org/web/20230614091556/https://vlemmy.net/pictrs/image/928b2f95-a37c-4e94-bd70-bc014c8655d4.jpeg https://web.archive.org/web/20230614091556/https://vlemmy.ne...
- vidarh 3y ago
  Ability to recover from that is one of the few things of value in the AT protocol (Bluesky) and something I expect will get pilfered in one way or another eventually.
  - Kye 3y ago
    A lot of people only seem to see "portability" as some magic feature without understanding it. So they're going to be surprised when they get suspended from bsky.social or they decide to sunset it and everything is lost because they didn't associate their identity with a domain they control. Everything people found complicated about Mastodon is there in Bluesky in some form.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      AT separates the handle (the domain) from the DID, which is the identifier for the repository. You can change your handle, including from bsky.social subdomains to one you own. The bigger issue currently is that there is a problem where the did:plc method used for all the currently issued did's is stupidly centralised. Though if Bluesky were to mess that up badly enough there in theory nothing really stopping other parties from deciding to crawl the audit log and take over processing of DID's if clients agree. They do certainly need to fix that DID bullshit, though, or they have a chokehold that is worse than the bsky.social domain. It's the rough outlines of a good idea but a really dumb mechanism full of the idiotic NIH issues that you can find throughout. I'm certainly no fan of the protocol, and their "why not ActivityPub" part just demonstrates that they don't really understand either ActivityPub nor the space. E.g you don't need a stable ID and they made a stupid choice in assuming so. The recovery keys allowing the user to update the DID could equally be used to sign claims about a change of id and push them to the followers/following. As such the recovery key part is good - it's all the Fediverse would need to adopt to be able to let users do unilateral migrations (coupled with regular backups/exports; frankly having a standard API for the clients to pull that would be good).
      - Kye 3y ago
        How are the keys currently managed? That's something I'm not clear on. Any user-managed key is a lost cause outside use cases where it's obvious to all parties why it's important and everyone has the patience to manage it. Secret management always seems to end up centralized, adding potentially adversarial parties to the chain of trust. I at least know I never had to set up any kind of recovery key for my Bluesky account, so I assume this is handled on bsky.social even though my handle is @ my domain.
        vidarh 3y ago
        As far as I can tell their intent (and I don't know if this is followed through) is for the clients to hold both keys and copies of your other data, without really making much of a point of it to users. I think that's a good idea as a worst case fallback, but a bad idea to rely on, but in either case it ought to be made clearer to users.
lanstin 3y ago
The point about email/gmail is that Google's rather declining spam processes don't keep spam out, but do make it excruciatingly difficult for a family to run their own SMTP server and their own DNS and send mail to Google without it going into the spam folder. If I exchange 10 emails with my ex-wife who is hosted on gmail, about 50%, of the messages in a consistent thread, will be in the spam folder. If I'm dealing with some government email, I might or might not be able to send them email, it's a crap shoot. Good thing I kept my AOL.com email address which I can use as a last resort (as well as a contact info for my DNS registrars and cloud computing). If mastodon stays just a larger number of smaller players, then it is likely to be accessible to the "run my own servers" crowd; if Meta and other very large companies come in, then the economics shift and the odds are that it will become more difficult for small operators over time.

Sunspark 3y ago

If a server admin ragequits and pulls the plug on the server without notice you are going to have trouble getting your data out or migrating.

shagie 3y ago
This is an ongoing issue with one of the Lemmy instances. https://lemmy.world/post/1232070 https://lemmy.world/post/1232070 And a Mastodon instance (mastodon.lol) from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 (though there was some warning)
- crtasm 3y ago
  > https://lemmy.world/post/1232070 https://lemmy.world/post/1232070 The image they're looking for is on Wayback machine, if that's helpful: https://web.archive.org/web/20230614091556/https://vlemmy.net/pictrs/image/928b2f95-a37c-4e94-bd70-bc014c8655d4.jpeg https://web.archive.org/web/20230614091556/https://vlemmy.ne...
vidarh 3y ago
Ability to recover from that is one of the few things of value in the AT protocol (Bluesky) and something I expect will get pilfered in one way or another eventually.
- Kye 3y ago
  A lot of people only seem to see "portability" as some magic feature without understanding it. So they're going to be surprised when they get suspended from bsky.social or they decide to sunset it and everything is lost because they didn't associate their identity with a domain they control. Everything people found complicated about Mastodon is there in Bluesky in some form.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    AT separates the handle (the domain) from the DID, which is the identifier for the repository. You can change your handle, including from bsky.social subdomains to one you own. The bigger issue currently is that there is a problem where the did:plc method used for all the currently issued did's is stupidly centralised. Though if Bluesky were to mess that up badly enough there in theory nothing really stopping other parties from deciding to crawl the audit log and take over processing of DID's if clients agree. They do certainly need to fix that DID bullshit, though, or they have a chokehold that is worse than the bsky.social domain. It's the rough outlines of a good idea but a really dumb mechanism full of the idiotic NIH issues that you can find throughout. I'm certainly no fan of the protocol, and their "why not ActivityPub" part just demonstrates that they don't really understand either ActivityPub nor the space. E.g you don't need a stable ID and they made a stupid choice in assuming so. The recovery keys allowing the user to update the DID could equally be used to sign claims about a change of id and push them to the followers/following. As such the recovery key part is good - it's all the Fediverse would need to adopt to be able to let users do unilateral migrations (coupled with regular backups/exports; frankly having a standard API for the clients to pull that would be good).
    - Kye 3y ago
      How are the keys currently managed? That's something I'm not clear on. Any user-managed key is a lost cause outside use cases where it's obvious to all parties why it's important and everyone has the patience to manage it. Secret management always seems to end up centralized, adding potentially adversarial parties to the chain of trust. I at least know I never had to set up any kind of recovery key for my Bluesky account, so I assume this is handled on bsky.social even though my handle is @ my domain.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        As far as I can tell their intent (and I don't know if this is followed through) is for the clients to hold both keys and copies of your other data, without really making much of a point of it to users. I think that's a good idea as a worst case fallback, but a bad idea to rely on, but in either case it ought to be made clearer to users.

lanstin 3y ago

The point about email/gmail is that Google's rather declining spam processes don't keep spam out, but do make it excruciatingly difficult for a family to run their own SMTP server and their own DNS and send mail to Google without it going into the spam folder. If I exchange 10 emails with my ex-wife who is hosted on gmail, about 50%, of the messages in a consistent thread, will be in the spam folder. If I'm dealing with some government email, I might or might not be able to send them email, it's a crap shoot. Good thing I kept my AOL.com email address which I can use as a last resort (as well as a contact info for my DNS registrars and cloud computing). If mastodon stays just a larger number of smaller players, then it is likely to be accessible to the "run my own servers" crowd; if Meta and other very large companies come in, then the economics shift and the odds are that it will become more difficult for small operators over time.