Arthur Besse @ cypherpunks @lemmy.ml

cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Reading through it, I’m not seeing much in favor of ATP

See the "BlueSky's strengths" section, particularly the last paragraph of it. Content addressability is absolutely essential for building something that will last, and BlueSky gets that right. Decoupling the many responsibilities which an ActivityPub instance operator has (especially for identity) is also essential, i think, and while BlueSky's identity solution is less than ideal it's much better than ActivityPub and I expect it to improve.

If you're interested in the topic you probably want to also read the followup post from the same author (after reading the linked reply from someone on the BlueSky team).

Christine's analysis is by far the best I've read on the topic, but I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that people will actually build things using ATP in a manner more like ActivityPub (where there doesn't need to be a global view). It's also possible/likely that ActivityPub will eventually evolve to adopt content addressability (Christine actually built a proof-of-concept of doing that years ago, linked in her blog post, but there doesn't appear to be any recent progress in that direction), and decouple identity from responsibility for data availability, and adopt something like BlueSky's composable moderation.

Given their respective advantages over the other, i'm pretty sure that both ATP and AP will make changes which make them more like the other in the coming years.

why bother opening a pathway in the first place

i've never had an IG account myself, but i think your mistake is in assuming that someone accepting your follow request on a restricted IG account is an indicator of desire for chatting with strangers. accepting your follow request might just mean they glanced at your profile and assessed that you aren't a spammer or bot, not that they want to chat with you.

perhaps just need to find out somewhere in the real world where I could bond more easily with real people?

for sure that is a good idea 😂

but there are also many places online where it is much more reasonable to assume people are interested in chatting with strangers.

In my opinion, yes, the why does in fact matter. This blog post i've linked in other comments in this thread is by one of the authors of the ActivityPub spec. If you care enough to comment about it i recommend reading her analysis of what AT Proto gets right and wrong in comparison with ActivityPub.

but you have to question why they’re choosing to reinvent the wheel

you don't have to wonder why if you take the time to read about why; see the links in my other comments in this thread if you're curious.

Is there any instance other than Bluesky where people can register?

There aren't "instances" in the ActivityPub sense, where "instance" means single point of failure you're married to (its name is literally part of your identity) which is simultaneously responsible for keeping your data available and curating your view of the rest of the network; AT Protocol decomposes these responsibilities so that they can be delegated independently to different operators.

See https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture and https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ for details.

There are many people running their own Personal Data Servers, AppViews, Labelers, and Feed Generators, but I'm not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on). I'm also not sure if you can actually create a did:plc using a self-hosted AppView or if maybe you need to use did:web to create a new identity without using their AppView currently.

They mention ActivityPub in a few places, such as this blog post.

But I'd recommend https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ instead, which is the best discussion I've seen so far of the pros and cons of each of the two approaches.

have you read about why they didn't?

Any confirmation this is real? The donate button goes to GoFundMe.

• Audrey Tang confirms https://bsky.app/profile/audreyt.org/post/3lfn56wzdf22n
• Bill S. Preston Esq confirms https://bsky.app/profile/alexwinter.com/post/3lfmzjpszsc25
• Vox Media confirms https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342799/free-our-feeds-social-media-ecosystem-at-protocol-bluesky

username checks out

Having some distrust in Wikipedia is healthy; you certainly shouldn't take it as the final word about facts you're depending on the accuracy of. But, it is very often a good starting point for learning about a new subject.

Spending a minute or two reading that "source code" article (or another version of it which is likely available in your first language) would give you a much better understanding of the concept of source code (which is a prerequisite for understanding what "closed source" means) than any of the answers in this thread so far.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

As a leftist myself (communist), I generally enjoy the content and discussions on Lemmy.

some of the privacy messengers here (like Briar) have blogging/forum features

many people incorrectly assume briar aims to provide some sort of anonymity, because it uses tor onion services and is a self-described "secure messenger". however, that is not the case:

https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#does-briar-provide-anonymity (answer: no)

tldr: briar contacts, even when only actually using onions, exchange their bluetoooth MAC addresses and their most recent IPv6 link-local address and last five IPv4 addresses briar has seen bound to their wlan interfaces, just in case you're ever physically near a contact and want to automatically connect to them locally.

CuriousMarc:

Videos documenting restorations of exceptional vintage electronics and early computers, space hardware and the odd mechanical calculator or Teletype. It often showcases my Hewlett-Packard test equipment collection and, from time to time, my R2-D2 robot build. Things rarely work when I start, but almost always do when I end. A nerdy place for your inner engineer, to celebrate engineering exploits of our predecessors, and learn a lot from it.

The campaign hasn't made any progress since 2011 when Wolfram Alpha added support for it, a year after Google did. Google's calculator still does support it, though, so you can write queries like like "1Zbit/s * 1 year in hellabytes" (3.9 hellabytes), or "mass of the earth in hellagrams" (5.9 hellagrams).

I asked this question the other day if I could somehow input my handwritten notes into programs like Trilium (or logseq whatever) and memos. OCR/HCR seems to far behind still so I am unsure.

I just left this comment on your post.

Via the pine64 blog update about their e-ink tablet TIL about inkput (using OnlineHTR) which appears to be a step in the right direction.

there is no provider on the planet that can freeze state of RAM in a way that would be useful for this

You are very mistaken, this is a well-supported feature in most modern virtualization environments.

Here are XenServer docs for it. And here is VMWare's "high-frequency" snapshots page.

Sometimes, law enforcement authorities only need to contact cloud provider A when they have a warrant for (or, perhaps, no warrant but a mere request for) data about some user C who is indirectly using A via some cloud-hosted online service B.

A(mazon) will dutifully deliver to the authorities snapshots of all of B's VMs, and then it is up to them if they limit themselves to looking for data about C... while the staff of company B can honestly say they have not received any requests from law enforcement. (sorry my best source on this at the moment is sadly trust me bro; I've heard from an AWS employee that the above scenario really actually does happen.)

fun fact: Phoenix was the original name of the browser we now know as Firefox