I just put together my first feed today, collecting more than 60 US protest communities into one feed: https://piefed.social/f/50501
In the drop-down menus on top I can choose between either the communities I'm subscribed to, or the feeds I subscribe to. I can subscribe to public feeds compiled by other users, including users on other PieFed instances. I can also make a private feed if I don't feel like sharing it.
The real problem begins when one has to consider how to make money from a social media platform. Selling T-shirts with sick burns written in Latin is not going to work forever.
But on frontpage.fyi, if you want to sign up, you have to sign up through Bluesky. They direct you to bsky.app to create your account.
I just don't see how this is a real functional example of a portable account. Maybe it is not supposed to be - if so, is the decentralized nature of accounts demonstrated anywhere in a practical way?
I must admit seeing Mozilla get worse and worse has also made me more cynical on behalf of Bluesky. And then there's the issue of moderation - I'm beginning to think that big ethical platforms cannot really exist, as there is no such thing as a perfect place to draw the line with regards to moderation.
Maybe Bluesky would be the most likely to succeed in operating a large online platform in a good way. I have just lost all faith in such platforms.
I don't think usability problems in Lemmy are related to the protocol. For me open source alternatives carry the promise that they will only get better, while profit-oriented alternatives will eventually have to get worse.
I don't think any of what makes Lemmy difficult to use is a necessity based on its distributed nature; its a result of the developers being more geared towards the back-end than towards the front-end. Which is not an inherent weakness - the back-end needs to be good before a nice front-end can make sense. So I'm optimistic. :)
Yeah, they will use their domains, and they can sign in with Bluesky. So it is the same account to a pretty significant degree. What I'm wondering is if the Frontpage user would break if Bsky.app disappeared, or if the user could still sign in as the identity is somehow truly decentralized.
As for domains as user names, I guess ActivityPub could achieve something by allowing users to have verified websites (mastodon style) appear as their user names. I don't really see what would have to change on a protocol level to make this possible.
I'm also a big fan of what Bridgy Fed is capable of doing towards Bluesky - it does show that there is a lot one can actually do with the protocol.
As I read the situation it's complicated. They are not inherently evil—on the contrary, I think they are trying to do good—but they are locked down by the structural chains around them. The whole thing was initiated by Jack Dorsey, and from the onset they wanted to re-create Twitter while solving what they perceived as "moderation challenges", and with the starting point that they were to create the next Twitter, not a decentralized network of services.
Hell, wasn't the original idea that Twitter itself would become part of the network?
When I see Bluesky today I see Twitter 15+ years ago. A lot of optimism and goodwill, but nevertheless a project that is doomed from the start.
There are minimum standards they'll have to abide by, but that's similar to Meta after their change of policy. It really is not enough that it should make anyone feel comfortable.
Basically big platforms can choose between making moderation expensive, minimal, or arbitrary. Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they're legal. Reddit is leaning into arbitrary, having AI banning folks on account of upvotes. Facebook used to dabble with expensive, but have made a recent shift into minimal.
Fair - you could host a copy or a link (or a sort of combination between the two, I guess), but it wouldn't transfer the ownership of the original post. I'm still not sure this is such a pressing feature that I accept it as the actual raison d'etre of AT proto, especially considering how it very much exists there only in theory at best. But it is interesting technology, and something they could maybe have worked with ActivityPub to try to achieve.
I'm glad to hear that maybe Bluesky is more decentralized than I suspect, but Bluesky engineer whose blog post you linked still links to his bluesky account on bsky.social. If running a separate instance is achievable, I would love to see people actually do it.
I guess that's fair, as a way to make users identifiable with the same user name all over the internet, no matter which platform they are on.
When people sign in using bluesky on https://frontpage.fyi/, they are still bluesky accounts? Or does the account somehow transform into something that exists between both sites?
Is there any real innovation here beyond a combination of "sign in with x service" and having your domain appear as your user name?
Nothing in ActivityPub says you can't move your content from one platform to another. It's just that Mastodon does not have this feature at the moment.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure whether Bluesky has this feature or not, but it's somewhat irrelevant considering the fact that there are no other platforms to move your content to. The only thing I've actually seen from this is that you can use an URL as your username in the front-end, though it just points towards the same DID in the backend. I struggle to see what the great achievement here is.
If this was the reasoning behind Bluesky, they could have developed a platform running on AP supporting the transfer of content between instances, and it would have been a whole lot easier than developing a whole new protocol.
The real user names (DIDs) are cryptic codes that are kept hidden most of the time, with your visible user name redirecting towards it. This gives the illusion that user names can be changed/transported, and that users are not locked down to one platform.
Content is filtered rather than censored, so that a big monopolistic actor can allow bigots on their platform but keep them out of sight of regular users. Had Bluesky been an ActivityPub hub, it could easily end up being perceived as a nazi bar. This is a benefit for Bluesky who do not want to be responsible for moderating their platform.
They want decentralized moderation on a centralized platform. That's how on Bluesky, there's an understanding that the removal of hate speech "conflicts with Bluesky’s decentralized goals". On Mastodon, the decentralized nature is how we can show bigots the door without them getting to whine about their freedom of expression. Bluesky manages to create a problem using the very same concept by which Mastodon solves it.
I guess this didn't really end up being a post about the benefits of AT. Oops.
Well, most people don't read Latin, so there's a high risk of ending up looking exactly as pretentious as the asshole one seeks to make fun of. That said, taste is individual, each for their own.
Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.
The fact that we don't see this yet, and that Bluesky has accepted the amount of money they have from actors I would not want to be associated with, makes me doubt this is possible.
Even if a non-profit wanted to operate with good intentions, the expense of running an AT proto hub would eventually prove a challenge, and the non-profit would either go under or need to start looking around for money. Meanwhile people can self-host their Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi.
Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub, I have tried and failed to understand exactly which feature is the AT proto folks so desperately wanted that they found it impossible to achieve through ActivityPub. The whole thing with having a mobile identity or whatever seems like a nothing burger to me - at the end of the day it just means that your user name is your DID number, and that web addresses can redirect towards that one. It's hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol.
As much as I hate to be that guy, it's worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It's better to leave your money elsewhere.
I just put together my first feed today, collecting more than 60 US protest communities into one feed: https://piefed.social/f/50501
In the drop-down menus on top I can choose between either the communities I'm subscribed to, or the feeds I subscribe to. I can subscribe to public feeds compiled by other users, including users on other PieFed instances. I can also make a private feed if I don't feel like sharing it.
It's pretty great. Would absolutely recommend.
There are two main instances:
https://piefed.social/ and https://feddit.online/
There's no mobile app/APK support at the moment, but it's coming soon.