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> To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? I

> To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful? Mastodon has many MANY MANY issues. The first is that instance operators regularly abuse their users as hostages in personal petty fights. I don't care too much about drama, but there has been a lot of it regarding Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia and instances defederating from each other as a result of said drama. The second one is instances can go down for whatever reason - the admins just being unable/unwilling to cope with moderation, running out of money, getting into trouble with the legal system, ... - and users can't move their post, DM and media history to another instance. And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.

shafyy 2y ago
> And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself. Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.
- acjohnson55 2y ago
  Bluesky also has but a handful of engineers
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    But was initially started internally by Twitter with millions of dollars of funding and since being split out has taken several million dollars in outside funding from VCs. Which does help grease the wheels somewhat, no?
    - acjohnson55 2y ago
      Yeah, probably.
  - shafyy 2y ago
    I don't know how many engineers work at Bluesky, but my guess is that their yearly budget is at least 10 times of Mastodon.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me Put another way, they were structured in a way that doesn't allow them to compete.
api 2y ago
The tying of identity to one’s home instance is IMHO a fatal flaw. Absolutely fundamental error in a decentralized system, making it effectively not decentralized. It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today. I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Nostr sadly doesn't scale. IMO it's a better system for decentralized account identity lookup but not great for content delivery. It needs something else for the content part. ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".
  - api 2y ago
    Hmmm... if Bluesky owns identity then it's just another centralized SaaS play which I guess is to be expected. There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or both). I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a client-server system with a network of servers. Making all traffic go through it that way is going to cause scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth. IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower experience because you have to relay.
    - 2y ago
grepfru_it 2y ago
so... it's IRC all over again. I wonder why we need a new protocol for that

shafyy 2y ago

> And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself. Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.

acjohnson55 2y ago
Bluesky also has but a handful of engineers
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  But was initially started internally by Twitter with millions of dollars of funding and since being split out has taken several million dollars in outside funding from VCs. Which does help grease the wheels somewhat, no?
  - acjohnson55 2y ago
    Yeah, probably.
- shafyy 2y ago
  I don't know how many engineers work at Bluesky, but my guess is that their yearly budget is at least 10 times of Mastodon.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me Put another way, they were structured in a way that doesn't allow them to compete.

api 2y ago

The tying of identity to one’s home instance is IMHO a fatal flaw. Absolutely fundamental error in a decentralized system, making it effectively not decentralized. It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today. I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.

numpad0 2y ago
Nostr sadly doesn't scale. IMO it's a better system for decentralized account identity lookup but not great for content delivery. It needs something else for the content part. ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".
- api 2y ago
  Hmmm... if Bluesky owns identity then it's just another centralized SaaS play which I guess is to be expected. There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or both). I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a client-server system with a network of servers. Making all traffic go through it that way is going to cause scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth. IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower experience because you have to relay.
  - 2y ago

grepfru_it 2y ago

so... it's IRC all over again. I wonder why we need a new protocol for that