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Doomed from the start. It took me a while to figure this out, but ATProto is generally a bad idea; maybe even worse than Twitter. Which is to say, it provides
by jrm4 7mo ago
Doomed from the start. It took me a while to figure this out, but ATProto is generally a bad idea; maybe even worse than Twitter.
Which is to say, it provides a more robust model for your (true) information and data to be exploited by others than even the Twitter model.
The Mastodon-slash-email model that relies on individual servers is better because decentralization is safer -- Those models bear more genuine "ability to delete" and more "plausible deniability."
- fritzo 7mo agoThe community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy
- ghaff 7mo agoAs someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well).
- lich_king 7mo agoBluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.
- ghaff 7mo agoWithout researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts.
- verdverm 7mo agoMore IRL time with other people hopefully.
- rekmarks 7mo agoNo they’re not? https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
- lich_king 7mo agoYes they are? E.g., https://api.backlinko.com/app/uploads/2025/11/bluesky-website-monthly-visits-1280x973.webp https://api.backlinko.com/app/uploads/2025/11/bluesky-websit... This is also visible in your stats if you extend the time window. They had a peak in 2024 and are pretty much declining month to month ever since.
- haunter 7mo agoAre we seeing the same? All the stats are steadily going down https://i.imgur.com/QJakG56.png https://i.imgur.com/QJakG56.png
- PaulHoule 7mo agoI’d describe that last six months as ‘sideways’ —- what was that surge near the end of last year?
- verdverm 7mo agoMy understanding was the end of year time off / holidays, as compared to the dip around thanksgiving.
- ajsalminen 7mo agoI believe that surge was Elon announcing AI image editing on X and a bunch of Japanese artists and their followers trying out Bluesky.
- verdverm 7mo agoJaz's stats are sus, use this instead: https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/index.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/index.html
- rakovsky89 7mo ago[dead]
- ghaff 7mo agoWe may have different interests and networks. Pretty much everyone I know has moved on. I don't even look at it any longer.
- lukev 7mo agoBluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible.
- PaulHoule 7mo agoThere is a lot of weirdness around Mastodon, particularly some people can’t seem to make up their minds if they want the stuff they post to be visible or not.
- jrm4 7mo agoExactly. And I'm willing to be that Bluesky folk might be somewhat similar because they haven't figured it out yet. Except that the design of Bluesky severely increases the possibility of your data getting out of your control. And I can hear the immediate responses of "oh if you didn't want it public, don't post it," but as should be frightfully obvious -- not everyone thinks like that.
- tensor 7mo agoMastodon doesn’t give you any real privacy. If I’m posting on something twitter like I want as much reach as possible. Sorry bud, we’re not actually all dumb naive people who haven’t seen the light.
- jrm4 7mo agoUnfair characterization. You can make informed prediction about these 2nd order effects without thinking they are dumb. I don't think people who send nudes with Snapchat behaving as if they will be definitely deleted are dumb either because, you know, the heart wants what it wants. That doesn't mean that there is no danger of people having "buyer's" regret later, or more importantly that there are issues beyond the individuals.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- archagon 7mo agoIf a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
- alterom 7mo ago>You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy The entire point of a platform like Twitter / Bluesky is reach, not privacy. Posts and discussions there are meant to be public, and highly visible. It's not that people don't care. It's that this is not what the platform is for. What's important for a platform like that is not even anonymity, but functional pseudonymity. And that thing is on its way to the effectively outlawed with the push for "age verification". People do notice it and leave [1], but at some point, there might be no place to go to. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rmlzhy/welp_goodbye_bluesky/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rmlzhy/welp_goodb...
- jrm4 7mo agoI 100% agree, I always thought that even Private Messages were a bad idea. But no, we're way past "if you don't want it public don't post it." and then wiping our hands and being done. We need to think in a policy kind of way on this. And again, things are already dangerous -- but ATProto makes them more dangerous. It's something like a chain-of-custody thing. I think the world is collectively safer where the gathering of data like this is less reliable and less verifiable. ATProto's model makes the building of the proverbial evil Big Brother panopticon thing a LOT easier.
- ajsalminen 7mo agoI'd rather say Twitter and Threads are the current winners if we're talking about userbase. Bluesky is basically in the same league with Mastodon while those two are so far above that you can't even see them without a telescope.
- jrm4 7mo agoI mostly don't like this take because it presumes a precise definition of privacy that we all agree on. And it's not even remotely close to that, which is why I think the Bluesky model is perhaps insidious.
- fritzo 7mo agoGood point. For sake of argument, how about this stratification of privacy levels: twitter/x/bluesky - a big tech company owns your data mastodon - a grassroots community organization owns your data zulip - someone you've met personally owns the data your blog - you own the data (and yes these are a bit of a category error, but to achieve privacy maybe we should broaden the category and sacrifice reach)
- jrm4 7mo agoWell, the problem is, now the word "owns" isn't really helpful either? Because you have "possesses" (which can be anyone) vs. "controls?" Twitter - single point of big company external control Mastodon - One or multiple unverifiable fallible likely grassroots, points of external control Bluesky - Once out, merely the illusion of control, because your data is out there, verifiable?.
- lukev 7mo agoYou can care a lot about plausible deniability and the ability to delete your own data, but it seems a bit weird to denounce a whole ecosystem as "generally a bad idea" on those grounds, when that is a deliberate anti-goal of the system design. Don't use it if you don't like it. Some of us like the strong identity and content verification.
- jrm4 7mo ago"Don't use it if you don't like it" is not a sufficient response here, because the gathering and verifying of personal data is NOT PURELY AN INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM. You might post about me. Etc. Proverbial Big Brother ALSO likes "strong identity and content verification."
- lukev 7mo ago"People should not be allowed to post publicly on the internet" is definitely a hot take.
- jrm4 7mo agoNo clue what that refers to, it's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is -- we can observe that "don't post what you don't want posted" is an insufficient response to our current internet in terms of safety and publicity. I'm also putting forth the idea that the ATProto thing for social media makes us marginally less safe, due to its technical "centralization via confirmation" of the data it "broadcasts."
- Zak 7mo agoThe Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever. The only reasonable understanding is that these protocols are for for publishing to the public. It is not possible to reliably retract anything published to thousands of other peoples' computers. We used to try to teach people that the internet is forever, and that's even more true with federated protocols. That doesn't make them a bad idea.
- NoahZuniga 7mo agoBut at proto is equally open? You can also just save all of at proto.
- Zak 7mo agoYou can save all of anything someone makes public with ATProto, ActivityPub, or RSS. You can do that with anything someone puts on a web page too, but those protocols simplify automation. I understand why people want to be able to delete things from the internet, but it doesn't work that way. It has never worked that way. It can't work that way unless every computer is locked down to running remotely attested government-approved software, and that's obviously worse.
- ghaff 7mo agoOnce you hit publish, it's public and anyone and everyone can save a copy and distribute it. If you don't like that, don't hit publish.
- verdverm 7mo agoATProto won't be this way for much longer. Permissioned data is coming and will not be broadcast or accessible without grants. This will sit next to the public data, but separate.
- AlienRobot 7mo agoWhat? You don't even need to understand how Mastodon works in depth to realize that sending a post to 500 different servers owned by completely different people in completely different jurisdictions is going to make it harder to delete later.
- jrm4 7mo agoSure -- but it also makes it harder to verify. That's my issue with Bluesky, perhaps I'm thinking like a lawyer. ATProto's most touted feature is also its biggest danger. A post on 2 servers thats hashed/verified (and perhaps admissible in court) might be more dangerous than many more rando Mastodon servers.
- johnecheck 7mo agoSeems like the solution is to either not incriminate yourself online or get plausible deniability with a pseudonym.
- jrm4 7mo agoAGAIN, we are way past SIMPLE SOLUTIONS like this. We have enough data and information to be able to see the potential for harm that we can mitigate through smart policy without falling back on this simple argument.
- AlienRobot 7mo agoNot being able to trust the integrity of the data on the Mastodon network to the point it's not admissible in court is not a good thing for Mastodon. If this is really true, I'd say it's a completely failure of the most fundamental concepts of information technology.
- muyuu 7mo agodeleting published stuff in any sort of decentralised network is always going to be limited at best there is just no way to police what happens to data that is broadcast, which doesn't remove control away from the reader it's annoying because in the abstract it's something everybody has the potential to need and need badly, but if you're afraid to put something out there to your name/pseudonym you really shouldn't