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I am still tremendously bullish on AT, as well as BlueSky. I think AT solves a lot of problems that have plagued federated systems, and I think BlueSky’s focus

I am still tremendously bullish on AT, as well as BlueSky. I think AT solves a lot of problems that have plagued federated systems, and I think BlueSky’s focus on product concerns first and technical concerns second, while somehow still nailing the tech, is the right way to go.

candiddevmike 3y ago
When it comes to federation, you really need to focus on the technical concerns first...
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Right, which is why the separation here is important. The user-facing app can focus on product concerns, the protocol it's built on top of can focus on technical concerns. The two can then feed back into each other in a virtuous cycle.
- btbuildem 3y ago
  I think that's a narrow perspective. When Twitter was sabotaged, lots of people made noise about moving to Mastodon - but even with all that momentum, the adoption was less than lukewarm. The issues were not technical, but of usability. The average person is less than interested in the inner workings of a thing, what make a service "better" in their eyes is how easy it is to use. Federated social media is not it.
  - Xerox9213 3y ago
    I think what matters even more to most people is not even how easy it is to use, but who else is using it.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      These two things are connected: if something is easier to use, it is more likely that the others you want using the thing are going to be on there. Doesn't mean they will be, of course.
  - hereme888 3y ago
    Twitter was sabotaged?
    - soapdog 3y ago
      Yes, someone threw a billionaire of mass destruction into it.
      - hereme888 3y ago
        Huh. Per my observation it's doing better than ever. New and better features, more user-hours than ever before, etc.
        solarpunk 3y ago
        where are you observing this?
        hereme888 3y ago
        Example of statistics: 22.3% increase in annual traffic (112.9 billion visits in 2023, compared to Instagram - 87.3 billion visits in 2023, and TikTok - 41.8 billion visits in 2023) Example new features/improvements: - Community Notes (huge feature). - Grok AI. - Long form messages. - Open Sourced ranking algorithms. - Monetization for creators. - Audio/video calls. - Job listings/search portal. - Passkey support (at least for iOS) - Upcoming features like money transmissions/payments.
        stephen_g 3y ago
        Biggest things I noticed (and why I hardly use it anymore): - Tweets from a lot of the people I really cared about dried up as people left - Discourse in replies became noticeably worse as low-quality replies were brought to the top because the poster had paid for “verification”, when most of these posts would probably have been (and rightly so) under the ‘more replies’ section before due to how low-quality they were.
        3y ago
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    I wonder how much of the narrative about Mastodon adoption (or the lack thereof) was that professional content creators didn't know how to adapt their Twitter workflows to it. It's definitely retained a mostly non-commercial flair, which makes me think people have had a hard time monetizing it. The community I've found on Mastodon has been incredible—I'm reminded of early Usenet days.
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      Which Mastodon instance are you on?
      - organsnyder 3y ago
        I'm on Hachyderm. I'm sure instance choice makes a difference in one's experience.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        Yes it does. That's why the instance choice isn't a burden but such a huge strength. If we could choose Twitter instances everyone who cared would have simply switched to the one without Elon and there would have been no problem.
- psionides 3y ago
  They absolutely did, which is why the project was started sometime in 2021 I think, and they only got to where they are now...
lumb63 3y ago
Why? I don’t mean this as a dig against the tech, since I’m not familiar with it, or with BlueSky, but where and why is there demand for a new social media product? I’ve certainly come to view social media as so close to useless that I don’t use it, and it seemed to me that e.g. Twitter becoming X or Reddit blackouts were impetuses that people eventually were thankful for as they left the platforms.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Twitter is among the top three websites that has organized my life over the past fifteen years or so. It's now totally collapsed. I like having a place to post little things. I like keeping up with other people posting little things. It isn't Twitter, but we don't have Twitter anymore, so. Just kinda giving things a go. I don't think we really can have "twitter" anymore, those days are past. But yeah, that's just BlueSky. AT isn't geared towards a specific thing, like it is not a social networking protocol. It's kind of like if RSS was Git, if I squint.
  - hereme888 3y ago
    Twitter (X) is doing great and has added tons of new features. What do you mean it's totally collapsed? I use it daily.
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      Ok elon-simp, unfortunately most of the users I engage with left because elon is toxic. Twitter is now only tolerable by other elon-simps.
      - hereme888 3y ago
        Besides your insults, can you provide any examples of Elon being "toxic" on twitter? There's tons of people on Twitter who don't like Elon, so that part of your statement is false.
        3y ago
apitman 3y ago
I definitely find the AT folks to be the most pragmatic when compared to ActivityPub and nostr. The best example IMO is how neither of them have a realistic identity migration story. ActivityPub implementations need to support bringing your own domain to any Mastodon/Lemmy/etc server. As for nostr, PKI has yet to prove that it can provide a viable UX for identity management. I'm still fairly optimistic about ActivityPub since a lot of the problems there are in theory solvable, but we'll see.
- sunshowers 3y ago
  Mastodon is my primary social network for two reasons: * it has by far the highest-quality conversations I've ever seen * no right-wing freaks disparaging trans people in the replies to everything ActivityPub does have a migration story -- people move servers all the time. But it's not as good as it could be, and there are rough edges.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    On Mastodon I only have to block half of the obnoxious people.
  - apitman 3y ago
    > ActivityPub does have a migration story -- people move servers all the time Correct me if I'm wrong (and in this case I would love to be), but you can migrate your account to a new server, but you have to create a new identity (ie profile URI) on that server. This would be fairly easily solved by servers allowing users to bring their own domain names. In the age of Let's Encrypt it's much easier to manage certs for many domains. They've known about this for 6+ years[0]. The fact it's not a high priority is concerning. [0]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
    - sunshowers 3y ago
      Yes, that's the biggest rough edge -- it's not portable (and that was the promise of Bluesky).
ttepasse 3y ago
In this case the technical concerns are also ecosystem concerns: BlueSky’s protocol depends on large scale indexers or relays which index the data from the PDSs and transform the nominal decentral streams into a firehose. That firehose then get’s labeled and filtered – and those services again must be somewhat Twitter-scale just to survive that firehose. Now there seem to be alternative relays (and alternative labelers/filterers), but my concern is less with the man in the middle but the needed scale for the man-in-the-middle. I think because of this need for scale inherent in the protocol there will only be very few of them, only by very well capitalised companies. If Twitter is a monopol, an AT protocol network will be an oligopoly, possibly a cartel. I’m astonished that so many technologists who grew up in the more indie 90s and 2000s, in the time of the blogosphere, of individual servers, loosely joined via protocols, don’t seem to see that – or don’t seem to care.

candiddevmike 3y ago

When it comes to federation, you really need to focus on the technical concerns first...

steveklabnik 3y ago
Right, which is why the separation here is important. The user-facing app can focus on product concerns, the protocol it's built on top of can focus on technical concerns. The two can then feed back into each other in a virtuous cycle.
btbuildem 3y ago
I think that's a narrow perspective. When Twitter was sabotaged, lots of people made noise about moving to Mastodon - but even with all that momentum, the adoption was less than lukewarm. The issues were not technical, but of usability. The average person is less than interested in the inner workings of a thing, what make a service "better" in their eyes is how easy it is to use. Federated social media is not it.
- Xerox9213 3y ago
  I think what matters even more to most people is not even how easy it is to use, but who else is using it.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    These two things are connected: if something is easier to use, it is more likely that the others you want using the thing are going to be on there. Doesn't mean they will be, of course.
- hereme888 3y ago
  Twitter was sabotaged?
  - soapdog 3y ago
    Yes, someone threw a billionaire of mass destruction into it.
    - hereme888 3y ago
      Huh. Per my observation it's doing better than ever. New and better features, more user-hours than ever before, etc.
      - solarpunk 3y ago
        where are you observing this?
        hereme888 3y ago
        Example of statistics: 22.3% increase in annual traffic (112.9 billion visits in 2023, compared to Instagram - 87.3 billion visits in 2023, and TikTok - 41.8 billion visits in 2023) Example new features/improvements: - Community Notes (huge feature). - Grok AI. - Long form messages. - Open Sourced ranking algorithms. - Monetization for creators. - Audio/video calls. - Job listings/search portal. - Passkey support (at least for iOS) - Upcoming features like money transmissions/payments.
        stephen_g 3y ago
        Biggest things I noticed (and why I hardly use it anymore): - Tweets from a lot of the people I really cared about dried up as people left - Discourse in replies became noticeably worse as low-quality replies were brought to the top because the poster had paid for “verification”, when most of these posts would probably have been (and rightly so) under the ‘more replies’ section before due to how low-quality they were.
        3y ago
- organsnyder 3y ago
  I wonder how much of the narrative about Mastodon adoption (or the lack thereof) was that professional content creators didn't know how to adapt their Twitter workflows to it. It's definitely retained a mostly non-commercial flair, which makes me think people have had a hard time monetizing it. The community I've found on Mastodon has been incredible—I'm reminded of early Usenet days.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Which Mastodon instance are you on?
    - organsnyder 3y ago
      I'm on Hachyderm. I'm sure instance choice makes a difference in one's experience.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        Yes it does. That's why the instance choice isn't a burden but such a huge strength. If we could choose Twitter instances everyone who cared would have simply switched to the one without Elon and there would have been no problem.
psionides 3y ago
They absolutely did, which is why the project was started sometime in 2021 I think, and they only got to where they are now...

lumb63 3y ago

Why? I don’t mean this as a dig against the tech, since I’m not familiar with it, or with BlueSky, but where and why is there demand for a new social media product? I’ve certainly come to view social media as so close to useless that I don’t use it, and it seemed to me that e.g. Twitter becoming X or Reddit blackouts were impetuses that people eventually were thankful for as they left the platforms.

steveklabnik 3y ago
Twitter is among the top three websites that has organized my life over the past fifteen years or so. It's now totally collapsed. I like having a place to post little things. I like keeping up with other people posting little things. It isn't Twitter, but we don't have Twitter anymore, so. Just kinda giving things a go. I don't think we really can have "twitter" anymore, those days are past. But yeah, that's just BlueSky. AT isn't geared towards a specific thing, like it is not a social networking protocol. It's kind of like if RSS was Git, if I squint.
- hereme888 3y ago
  Twitter (X) is doing great and has added tons of new features. What do you mean it's totally collapsed? I use it daily.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    Ok elon-simp, unfortunately most of the users I engage with left because elon is toxic. Twitter is now only tolerable by other elon-simps.
    - hereme888 3y ago
      Besides your insults, can you provide any examples of Elon being "toxic" on twitter? There's tons of people on Twitter who don't like Elon, so that part of your statement is false.
      - 3y ago

apitman 3y ago

I definitely find the AT folks to be the most pragmatic when compared to ActivityPub and nostr. The best example IMO is how neither of them have a realistic identity migration story. ActivityPub implementations need to support bringing your own domain to any Mastodon/Lemmy/etc server. As for nostr, PKI has yet to prove that it can provide a viable UX for identity management. I'm still fairly optimistic about ActivityPub since a lot of the problems there are in theory solvable, but we'll see.

sunshowers 3y ago
Mastodon is my primary social network for two reasons: * it has by far the highest-quality conversations I've ever seen * no right-wing freaks disparaging trans people in the replies to everything ActivityPub does have a migration story -- people move servers all the time. But it's not as good as it could be, and there are rough edges.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  On Mastodon I only have to block half of the obnoxious people.
- apitman 3y ago
  > ActivityPub does have a migration story -- people move servers all the time Correct me if I'm wrong (and in this case I would love to be), but you can migrate your account to a new server, but you have to create a new identity (ie profile URI) on that server. This would be fairly easily solved by servers allowing users to bring their own domain names. In the age of Let's Encrypt it's much easier to manage certs for many domains. They've known about this for 6+ years[0]. The fact it's not a high priority is concerning. [0]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
  - sunshowers 3y ago
    Yes, that's the biggest rough edge -- it's not portable (and that was the promise of Bluesky).

ttepasse 3y ago

In this case the technical concerns are also ecosystem concerns: BlueSky’s protocol depends on large scale indexers or relays which index the data from the PDSs and transform the nominal decentral streams into a firehose. That firehose then get’s labeled and filtered – and those services again must be somewhat Twitter-scale just to survive that firehose. Now there seem to be alternative relays (and alternative labelers/filterers), but my concern is less with the man in the middle but the needed scale for the man-in-the-middle. I think because of this need for scale inherent in the protocol there will only be very few of them, only by very well capitalised companies. If Twitter is a monopol, an AT protocol network will be an oligopoly, possibly a cartel. I’m astonished that so many technologists who grew up in the more indie 90s and 2000s, in the time of the blogosphere, of individual servers, loosely joined via protocols, don’t seem to see that – or don’t seem to care.