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Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar --

Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own. A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform. Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation. Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

throwaway48476 2y ago
I agree but I fear it would be used as an excuse to no longer interact with the public and turn off all reply comments by default.
gjsman-1000 2y ago
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- anonyfox 2y ago
  Not to disagree with your post, but I'd *love* to support a renaissance of RSS. It was/is essentially peak distribution of content in a proper decentralized manner, putting users first and letting providers use whatever they want freely to generate it. No walled gardens. No restrictions.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    And no good tools. RSS readers in 2024 still keep failing with the same failing interfaces that failed in 1999. No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed I follow. No, I don't want a listing like an email client. No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say something once, why say it again?") Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew such a thing was possible when I wrote this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/ but now it is not only possible but easy.
- palata 2y ago
  Podcasts are RSS. I don't think it's dead at all there.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    Except when they're on soundcloud, or spotify, or audible, etc...
    - palata 2y ago
      I have friends who share links to podcasts on Spotify, and I can always get them as RSS in my podcast app. Maybe it exists, but I have not encountered a situation where I could not access a podcast with RSS.
Retr0id 2y ago
> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds. both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  a bluesky appview that intertwingled RSS feeds into my home feed would be pretty killer.
archagon 2y ago
Well, Mastodon is not a private business. Government agencies could post on their own instances.
jtbayly 2y ago
One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above? I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.
- palata 2y ago
  > I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking. Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?
  - _aavaa_ 2y ago
    Interactivity from the part of the reader
    - jjulius 2y ago
      This is probably more rhetorical than anything, but why does it need to be interactive?
      - nullren 2y ago
        if it’s not interactive and not littered with “likes”, how will i know to care about it or not?
      - dymk 2y ago
        You are presently commenting on a platform that has upvotes and replies. Even you apparently want to use a platform that has interactivity.
        jjulius 2y ago
        I sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find the interactions to be the important aspect of the site, rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary, "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care. Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you know why that is? Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)
PaulHoule 2y ago
I think those sorts of publishers should have a script that posts notifications to all sort of places automatically. RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching done by https://superfeedr.com/ https://superfeedr.com/ which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.
- rakoo 2y ago
  This is exactly why WebSub, formerly Pubsubhubbub, was written. Publishers can push to a relay only when something new happens, never having to be polled. It was created more than a decade ago.
deleted 2y ago
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DSMan195276 2y ago
> These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform. The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering the service for free.
segasaturn 2y ago
The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as close as you can hope to get online. Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  But it's not because each node is still controlled by someone who can choose what's on it and who has access
  - eitland 2y ago
    Which is why it isn't each node that is the commons, but the entirety of the ecosystem.
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      You're collateralizing bad mortgages and rating them AAA. I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Huh that’s a great way of putting it. These ‘federated’ systems are just recreating feudalism in cyberspace. Edit: Well even worse in some ways, since it’s not like a majority of the ‘gentry’ and ‘nobles’ could challenge and seize control of e.g. a Mastodon instance from the owner.
      - anonymous_sorry 2y ago
        You're in danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Email is far from perfect, but good enough and its federated nature means it's reasonable for institutions to use it as a default mode of communication and authentication. What exactly is the alternative to federation? Is it possible for everyone to be their own admin? In any case, under feudalism serfs didn't have the freedom to choose and switch their feudal lord as they saw fit.
andrewclunn 2y ago
Newspapers filled this role once, and they're privately owned. You have two choices: privately owned or government run. I'll take the private ownership route. Better than prior, now users can openly write back outside of "letters to the editor" and without paying money. People used to complain about Twitter censorship, now they complain about its ownership. One is about free expression. The other is about political tribalism.
- orwin 2y ago
  > You have two choices: privately owned or government run Or worker owned, or shared ownership (basically 1/3 capital, 1/3 workers and 1/3 local council, ratios are not usually that, it is often 60% for the capital owners, but you see the point)
briandear 2y ago
[flagged]
mikegreenberg 2y ago
> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds. Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/)
- pier25 2y ago
  So in theory one could publish into the ATP network (or whatever it's called) and a bunch of ATP clients could receive it? And Bluesky is a publisher and a client?
  - mikegreenberg 2y ago
    Correct. Bluesky is dogfooding AT Protocol. https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applications https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applica...
kccqzy 2y ago
Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide educational value, not just empty rhetoric).
- TylerE 2y ago
  Yes. And it was a bloated sloppy mess I ran from screaming. It SUCKED, and STILL sucks.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Have you ever tried to stand one up?
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    Why would I need to? That's like saying before you can blog you must first write a static site generator.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      The bloated sloppy mess is on the backend so if you've not set one up it means you haven't looked in the places a bloated sloppy mess would be in. For consumers that just want to write posts and get comments, there are many platforms out there. http://threads.net http://threads.net is an example of one.
      - kccqzy 2y ago
        Why would I need to know that? Do you know that the Threads backend isn't also a bloated sloppy mess? Again as I have already said, it's like requiring a blogger to write an elegant static site generator. Who cares that the Wordpress backend is messy and bloated? Only on HN will you find this fetish about an elegant backend when you are merely a user.
        2y ago
krisoft 2y ago
> That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  Twitter is a place where they can reach some people. Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not. That I can agree with. Usually what I have seen, at least where i live, is that no public body used it exclusively. They still had a website, they still talked with journalist, talked with radios, used flyers, whatever was appropriate in each situation. (Or at least they tried, not saying everyone was getting it always right.)
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Twitter almost literally started as a place to get updates on celebrities, designed closely to UI's seen in tickerboard updates. So the metaphor is more apt than you'd think.
- asah 2y ago
  Twitter was never a majority of Americans let alone 80-90+% share that justifies being a single outlet for a taxpayer funded agency.
  - krapp 2y ago
    An account costs nothing. You get an intern or someone to post on it now and then. It isn't exactly a deep commitment.
madeofpalk 2y ago
> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds. To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple syndication.
mulderc 2y ago
I thought you could subscribe to an RSS feed for basically anyone on mastodon?
nikodunk 2y ago
For those who find Mastodon's default client a little bloated, please check out https://phanpy.social https://phanpy.social. It is one of the most thoughtful PWAs and websites I have ever used, and made Mastodon a daily for me now. It's feels like Threads but with deeper functionality. It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc
gfc67 2y ago
It will never make sense cause Claude Shannon already told us why. When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further. When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free. Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously. Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.
shombaboor 2y ago
folks should just go to wholly owned websites like back in the day. on the other hand most major websites are absolutely unreadable with the ads/autoplay videos.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
What is the commons then? I think it's the internet at large, email, RSS, etc.
deleted 2y ago
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chaxor 2y ago
What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess? It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more. The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess? Have you tried running a server? Even a single user instance is a resource hogger.
ahnick 2y ago
It's federation that is the problem. Federation leads to fragmentation, which ultimately is a headwind to adoption. IMHO you need a single network that allows people to choose the "channels" that you can view/join and then people that join that channel start hosting and replicating the content. Also, great filtering controls are critical to the success of such a platform. Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.
snowwrestler 2y ago
Your local TV channels and newspapers aren’t commons either; they’re as privately owned as Twitter or Bluesky. Yet local governments make good use of them too, and have for many decades. Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be useful to society.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  Hmm, that makes me think that maybe it would be a good idea to have non-commercial public-access television.
rakoo 2y ago
The ironic bit is that conceptually Bluesky is RSS with WebSub <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub> - PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher - Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host - App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after - PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI. A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed 1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats. 2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)> 3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
> that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own. Having seen this process of creation sustaining & decaying happen again and again, I totally get why you would feel this. And I forgive you for applying the thinning broadly like this, casting insidious doubt widely like this. But that's not what Bluesky is doing. Some links; first their o.g. app-lead (is that still right?), > The network should outlast the company. Imagine if the Web died when Netscape or Yahoo did! It's strange to even think that. The same should apply to social networks. https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g (Or see 18 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757) And ((new) board member) Mike Masnick & (founder) Jay Graber on protocols not platforms, 9 months ago (pre Mike on the board), https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6bd24 https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6... Steve Klabnik has a post, How Bluesky Works, that talks about what Bluesky is. Yes, right now a variety of the layers of At Protocol are run by BlueSky alone. But the data can retain its integrity even if they fail, the network & data is by design open & transparent to all & transferable, and it's all based on protocols. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work This hypothesis that everyone else has been rug pulled & so BlueSky will too defies a ton of very hard careful work that Jay began when she very specifically worked to make sure BlueSky could be independent, to make it based on protocols.
verdverm 2y ago
You can get an RSS feed for any user on Bluesky https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 | https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds My opinion is that their ATProto is better than ActivityPub b/c account migration and global search among other things
ineedaj0b 2y ago
no. i like twitter and think this is good.

throwaway48476 2y ago

I agree but I fear it would be used as an excuse to no longer interact with the public and turn off all reply comments by default.

gjsman-1000 2y ago

[flagged]

anonyfox 2y ago
Not to disagree with your post, but I'd *love* to support a renaissance of RSS. It was/is essentially peak distribution of content in a proper decentralized manner, putting users first and letting providers use whatever they want freely to generate it. No walled gardens. No restrictions.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  And no good tools. RSS readers in 2024 still keep failing with the same failing interfaces that failed in 1999. No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed I follow. No, I don't want a listing like an email client. No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say something once, why say it again?") Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew such a thing was possible when I wrote this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/ but now it is not only possible but easy.
palata 2y ago
Podcasts are RSS. I don't think it's dead at all there.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  Except when they're on soundcloud, or spotify, or audible, etc...
  - palata 2y ago
    I have friends who share links to podcasts on Spotify, and I can always get them as RSS in my podcast app. Maybe it exists, but I have not encountered a situation where I could not access a podcast with RSS.

Retr0id 2y ago

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds. both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds

jazzyjackson 2y ago
a bluesky appview that intertwingled RSS feeds into my home feed would be pretty killer.

archagon 2y ago

Well, Mastodon is not a private business. Government agencies could post on their own instances.

jtbayly 2y ago

One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above? I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

palata 2y ago
> I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking. Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?
- _aavaa_ 2y ago
  Interactivity from the part of the reader
  - jjulius 2y ago
    This is probably more rhetorical than anything, but why does it need to be interactive?
    - nullren 2y ago
      if it’s not interactive and not littered with “likes”, how will i know to care about it or not?
    - dymk 2y ago
      You are presently commenting on a platform that has upvotes and replies. Even you apparently want to use a platform that has interactivity.
      - jjulius 2y ago
        I sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find the interactions to be the important aspect of the site, rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary, "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care. Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you know why that is? Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)

PaulHoule 2y ago

I think those sorts of publishers should have a script that posts notifications to all sort of places automatically. RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching done by https://superfeedr.com/ https://superfeedr.com/ which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.

rakoo 2y ago
This is exactly why WebSub, formerly Pubsubhubbub, was written. Publishers can push to a relay only when something new happens, never having to be polled. It was created more than a decade ago.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

DSMan195276 2y ago

> These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform. The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering the service for free.

segasaturn 2y ago

The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as close as you can hope to get online. Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.

throwawaymaths 2y ago
But it's not because each node is still controlled by someone who can choose what's on it and who has access
- eitland 2y ago
  Which is why it isn't each node that is the commons, but the entirety of the ecosystem.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    You're collateralizing bad mortgages and rating them AAA. I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Huh that’s a great way of putting it. These ‘federated’ systems are just recreating feudalism in cyberspace. Edit: Well even worse in some ways, since it’s not like a majority of the ‘gentry’ and ‘nobles’ could challenge and seize control of e.g. a Mastodon instance from the owner.
    - anonymous_sorry 2y ago
      You're in danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Email is far from perfect, but good enough and its federated nature means it's reasonable for institutions to use it as a default mode of communication and authentication. What exactly is the alternative to federation? Is it possible for everyone to be their own admin? In any case, under feudalism serfs didn't have the freedom to choose and switch their feudal lord as they saw fit.

andrewclunn 2y ago

Newspapers filled this role once, and they're privately owned. You have two choices: privately owned or government run. I'll take the private ownership route. Better than prior, now users can openly write back outside of "letters to the editor" and without paying money. People used to complain about Twitter censorship, now they complain about its ownership. One is about free expression. The other is about political tribalism.

orwin 2y ago
> You have two choices: privately owned or government run Or worker owned, or shared ownership (basically 1/3 capital, 1/3 workers and 1/3 local council, ratios are not usually that, it is often 60% for the capital owners, but you see the point)

briandear 2y ago

[flagged]

mikegreenberg 2y ago

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds. Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/)

pier25 2y ago
So in theory one could publish into the ATP network (or whatever it's called) and a bunch of ATP clients could receive it? And Bluesky is a publisher and a client?
- mikegreenberg 2y ago
  Correct. Bluesky is dogfooding AT Protocol. https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applications https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applica...

kccqzy 2y ago

Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide educational value, not just empty rhetoric).

TylerE 2y ago
Yes. And it was a bloated sloppy mess I ran from screaming. It SUCKED, and STILL sucks.
fragmede 2y ago
Have you ever tried to stand one up?
- kccqzy 2y ago
  Why would I need to? That's like saying before you can blog you must first write a static site generator.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    The bloated sloppy mess is on the backend so if you've not set one up it means you haven't looked in the places a bloated sloppy mess would be in. For consumers that just want to write posts and get comments, there are many platforms out there. http://threads.net http://threads.net is an example of one.
    - kccqzy 2y ago
      Why would I need to know that? Do you know that the Threads backend isn't also a bloated sloppy mess? Again as I have already said, it's like requiring a blogger to write an elegant static site generator. Who cares that the Wordpress backend is messy and bloated? Only on HN will you find this fetish about an elegant backend when you are merely a user.
      - 2y ago

krisoft 2y ago

> That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.

pseudalopex 2y ago
Twitter is a place where they can reach some people. Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.
- krisoft 2y ago
  > Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not. That I can agree with. Usually what I have seen, at least where i live, is that no public body used it exclusively. They still had a website, they still talked with journalist, talked with radios, used flyers, whatever was appropriate in each situation. (Or at least they tried, not saying everyone was getting it always right.)
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Twitter almost literally started as a place to get updates on celebrities, designed closely to UI's seen in tickerboard updates. So the metaphor is more apt than you'd think.
asah 2y ago
Twitter was never a majority of Americans let alone 80-90+% share that justifies being a single outlet for a taxpayer funded agency.
- krapp 2y ago
  An account costs nothing. You get an intern or someone to post on it now and then. It isn't exactly a deep commitment.

madeofpalk 2y ago

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds. To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple syndication.

mulderc 2y ago

I thought you could subscribe to an RSS feed for basically anyone on mastodon?

nikodunk 2y ago

For those who find Mastodon's default client a little bloated, please check out https://phanpy.social https://phanpy.social. It is one of the most thoughtful PWAs and websites I have ever used, and made Mastodon a daily for me now. It's feels like Threads but with deeper functionality. It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc

gfc67 2y ago

It will never make sense cause Claude Shannon already told us why. When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further. When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free. Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously. Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.

shombaboor 2y ago

folks should just go to wholly owned websites like back in the day. on the other hand most major websites are absolutely unreadable with the ads/autoplay videos.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

What is the commons then? I think it's the internet at large, email, RSS, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

chaxor 2y ago

What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess? It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more. The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.

mschuster91 2y ago
> What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess? Have you tried running a server? Even a single user instance is a resource hogger.

ahnick 2y ago

It's federation that is the problem. Federation leads to fragmentation, which ultimately is a headwind to adoption. IMHO you need a single network that allows people to choose the "channels" that you can view/join and then people that join that channel start hosting and replicating the content. Also, great filtering controls are critical to the success of such a platform. Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.

snowwrestler 2y ago

Your local TV channels and newspapers aren’t commons either; they’re as privately owned as Twitter or Bluesky. Yet local governments make good use of them too, and have for many decades. Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be useful to society.

tshaddox 2y ago
Hmm, that makes me think that maybe it would be a good idea to have non-commercial public-access television.

rakoo 2y ago

The ironic bit is that conceptually Bluesky is RSS with WebSub <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub> - PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher - Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host - App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after - PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI. A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed 1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats. 2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)> 3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

> that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own. Having seen this process of creation sustaining & decaying happen again and again, I totally get why you would feel this. And I forgive you for applying the thinning broadly like this, casting insidious doubt widely like this. But that's not what Bluesky is doing. Some links; first their o.g. app-lead (is that still right?), > The network should outlast the company. Imagine if the Web died when Netscape or Yahoo did! It's strange to even think that. The same should apply to social networks. https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g (Or see 18 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757) And ((new) board member) Mike Masnick & (founder) Jay Graber on protocols not platforms, 9 months ago (pre Mike on the board), https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6bd24 https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6... Steve Klabnik has a post, How Bluesky Works, that talks about what Bluesky is. Yes, right now a variety of the layers of At Protocol are run by BlueSky alone. But the data can retain its integrity even if they fail, the network & data is by design open & transparent to all & transferable, and it's all based on protocols. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work This hypothesis that everyone else has been rug pulled & so BlueSky will too defies a ton of very hard careful work that Jay began when she very specifically worked to make sure BlueSky could be independent, to make it based on protocols.

verdverm 2y ago

You can get an RSS feed for any user on Bluesky https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 | https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds My opinion is that their ATProto is better than ActivityPub b/c account migration and global search among other things

ineedaj0b 2y ago

no. i like twitter and think this is good.