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Does that mean after Bluesky reaches critical mass, it'll turn the federation off, like Google Chat killing its XMPP federation? For clarity: I'd love to see t
by bayindirh 3y ago
Does that mean after Bluesky reaches critical mass, it'll turn the federation off, like Google Chat killing its XMPP federation?
For clarity: I'd love to see this comment and say "I was wrong" 5 or 10 years later.
- jakebsky 3y agoThe network is designed to be "locked open" in a way that prevents this. The architecture is designed to work like the web.
- yupyup54133 3y agoNothing against Bluesky, but I think we are all a little jaded after seeing decades of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern.
- lolinder 3y agoThis would be more "create, extinguish", because there's no existing AT protocol network to embrace.
- hardcopy 3y ago"embrace" would be the rise of decentralized social media
- lolinder 3y agoIf there can exist an "extinguish" step for the concept of decentralized social media itself then decentralized social media has already failed. The whole point is supposed to be about changing hearts and minds to embrace self-governance, a rug pull should just result in people moving somewhere else.
- secstate 3y agoBut that's sort of why Bluesky is not really decentralized, just federated. It's a pretty significant difference. Mastodon is federated and decentralized. Twitter is non-federated and centralized. Bluesky is trying to be the federated, centralized option. Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's nothing like the disaster my online life was before I gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social media functions against my person.
- steveklabnik 3y agoHow is BlueSky centralized? I could see that argument before this feature shipped, but "BlueSky is trying to be the federated, centralized option" goes counter to what the team has said directly. I could maybe see an argument not based on technical premises, but instead something like "it will defacto become one because running a relay is too expensive" or such. Is that what you're going for?
- Balladeer 3y agoI'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to pay back the money it owes investors. I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes. Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness. I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed. - [1] https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-culture-is-the-dominant-term/ https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu...
- secstate 3y ago
- steveklabnik 3y agoBeing jaded is understandable, but because this critique is generic, it is applicable to literally anything and everything. I don't see how you can ever get something that's considered good if you always assume it will turn into something bad regardless of its current stance.
- bayindirh 3y agoActually it's very hard, and becomes tiring after some point. I personally always keep a hope that I'll be wrong in the long run. Sometimes I'm spot on, sometimes I stand corrected. The problem is, as time goes, your free time reserve starts to decline. You optimize things, consolidate services, etc., and these kind of migrations start to take tons of time. Because of this, I gave "big web" up and moved to "small web", and always have plans to evacuate any service in a moment's notice. It's like being a doomsday-preparer from a point, but at least I have backups and backup plans for everything.
- itsanaccount 3y agoThats easy, you don't have a structure made with a single large actor capable of changing the rules of the game mid flight. You get something good system by sharing power, not by once again falling for "trust us bro." You get it by understanding power imbalances and avoiding them the same way my dog avoids objects with large amounts of potential energy, because they're predictably dangerous.
- steveklabnik 3y agoI understand this, yet, when presented with exactly this, the response was "well what about EEE."
- preciousoo 3y agoThe protocol and hosting mechanisms are open source. There’s one actor currently sure, but it seems like bluesky is not holding onto that.
- mcherm 3y agoSo presumably today's announcement that they are now supporting self-hosted instances is welcome news to you -- it is a huge stride in the direction you are advocating for.
- micromacrofoot 3y agowhat binds this? I have no interest in joining if Jack can sell to Elon again and a switch gets flipped
- steveklabnik 3y agoThat specific scenario is impossible, in my understanding, because Jack does not have an ownership stake in the company. This release, of federation, is in my mind a major answer to the real question you're asking, which is the same but with "the employees" instead of "Jack," as they have the equity stake. Once things are federated, other folks gain power over the protocol, by virtue of usage. If Bluesky PBLLC starts to do shady things, the other instances can refuse to do so, and talk to each other instead. This is why the split between AT and BlueSky is important, and why this news matters, as it is meaningfully delivering on the desire to protect against such a thing.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoRight I didn't mean to get into the business aspect, but essentially "what prevents someone from undoing this for money." Thanks for the detail.
- steveklabnik 3y agoIt's all good. The Jack thing is, in my mind, a bit sensitive, because a lot of people criticizing BlueSky talk as though Jack runs the place, owns it, etc, all of which seems factually incorrect. He has a board seat, but seemingly cares about it so little that he deleted his account. From what I hear, nostr is his focus, but I'm not on there so I can't speak to that personally.
- mort96 3y agoJack has certainly been successful in building a general perception that bsky is "the Twitter founder's" next social network project, intentionally or otherwise
- 3y ago
- jorams 3y agoIn the same way that Google stopped federating by no longer accepting connections from others, as long as most people keep their stuff at Bluesky they can also just close themselves off from others again. I don't necessarily think it is a big risk, but the only reason the web is resilient to this is that no single ISP controls enough of the network to take it "private". Basically, until atproto is much bigger than bsky.app, the situation is not very different.
- mort96 3y agoHow can it "lock open"? If 90+% of users are on the official bluesky servers, what could possibly technically prevent bluesky from just no longer federating with other hosts?
- Repulsion9513 3y ago> A central directory server collects and validates operations, and maintains a transparent log of operations for each DID. (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/R... linked from https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation)
- stonogo 3y agoSo is Signal, and yet here we are
- torginus 3y agoYou are not in control of what you see in your feed, it's the algorithm that chooses for you. So while technically all kinds of content can exist, most users will only see what's officially approved.
- steveklabnik 3y agoBlueSky literally allows for users to create their own feeds with whatever algorithms they want, and to share them with others. You can follow them as easily as you can follow an account. I'm already following several.
- rsynnott 3y agoThat would only work if Bluesky stays the only significant network node. Which is _possible_, but we haven't seen it with, say, Mastodon. Google Chat was arguably a bit of a special case; vast majority of users never used federation at all, whereas any Bluesky user will, pretty much, just by naturally using Bluesky.
- treyd 3y agoIt worked with Mastodon because it was diverse and well-distributed from the beginning even when it was young. I'm skeptical that other people are going to run their own BS servers at scale now that it's been normalized to always just use the firstparty one.
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago… and if not, what the heck is the business model here?
- steveklabnik 3y agoBlueSky's first revenue generation (in my understanding, I don't work there) has been a partnership with NameCheap that makes it easy for non-technical users to purchase a domain name and use it as their BlueSky username. They have been a bit vague about other ways to generate revenue, except in one case: they will not be using advertisements to monetize.
- threeseed 3y agoThat business model is laughable. The percentage of users who care about a domain name, are willing to pay a subscription for it and don't have one already has to be in the single digits. They better have a good answer to this because it's a threat to the ecosystem as a whole if they don't. Because relying on VC money in this environment is not the smartest thing to do.
- steveklabnik 3y agoI would agree that if that were "the business model" instead of "a thing that generates some revenue," it would be laughable. However, nobody, including BlueSky, believes that this is solely enough to power the business. I agree that a healthy Bluesky PBLLC is a good thing, and hope they manage to pull it off. Time will tell.
- threeseed 3y agoWell hopefully they take it more seriously. Because based on them raising $8m in a seed round middle of last year they aren't going to have much time to decide and implement a strategy before they will need to start thinking about raising a Series A. Or maybe Jack does become a bigger investor. Either way I think it's insane to prematurely rule out advertising.
- nomdep 3y agoIf they can do that, then the whole federation idea is useless and just a theatre. But I don’t think Bluesky will ever reach critical mass anyway.