Once upon a time, we had a solid way of overcoming the problem of lock-in. We'd reverse-engineer a proprietary system and make a free, open alternative. We've been hacking fire exits into walled gardens since the Usenet days, with the creation of the alt.* hierarchy:
When the corporate owners of Unix started getting all weird about source-code access and user-modifiability, we didn't insist that Unix users were bad people for sticking with a corporate OS. We reverse-engineered Unix and set all those users free:
The answer to Microsoft's proprietary SMB network protocol wasn't a campaign to shame people for having SMB running on their LANs. It was reverse-engineering SMB and making SAMBA, which is now in every single device in your home and office, and it's gloriously free as in speech and free as in beer:
ability to import a Bluesky profile to Mastodon or the *key forks
Building an ActivityPub application (APlication?) that uses AT protocol's PDSs would be pretty interesting. Compatibility would be a nightmare, but I don't see a reason you couldn't have the sign up and data management work like it does on Bluesky (did:plc issues aside) and the server side/relay work with APub.
And you get the feeling this isn’t the solution he’d have wanted but it at least looks like some.kind of solution so he’s prepared to support it, albeit grudgingly.
It's more like the idea of adversarial interoperability he's talked about in the past, focusing on making the transition to a new platform easier by forcing compatibility between nominally incompatible platforms. The article does imply he thinks that Bluesky will enshittify, so our focus as activists of the good internet should be on tools to make the inevitable migration easier. I just don't think "Free Our Feeds" is that.
This pull request should solve this (at least from the user perspective). Need to wait for the next 0.19 release or an admin can patch it in manually if they want.
Yeah, I do think Doctorow has missed the mark here. @tante put it better than I could:
It’s trying to raise money (at least 4 Mio and up to 30 Mio USD) for ATProto (the protocol at the core of Bluesky) so “the community” can standardize the thing and “build stuff”. Plus the project wants to run a second “Relay” (which is the chokepoint that centralizes Bluesky at the moment).
Edit/Addition: The fact that just running another Relay leads to costs in the millions should make people wonder if this is the right approach for a better social media infrastructure that does not rely on big organizations.
Okay, but isn’t that what the Bluesky Public Benefit Corporation (the corporation that owns Bluesky and employs the people working on the ATproto protocol) wanted to enable/do? They already got millions in funding (some from sketchy Blockchain companies). Now some diffuse external entity collects more from random people, from “the community”. And not a bit but a lot more. What do the people donating money get for their investment? Stake in the Bluesky corporation? [Checks notes] Nope. Nothing.
The 9 custodians consist of a whole bunch of AI people, some Mozilla folks (same thing) and the director of the Social Web foundation. […]
It’s just presented in a weird way with a whole lot of “give us a lot of money and we’ll make amazing stuff happen” and in the end a bunch of AI grifters get some startups “that build upon AT proto” funded.
Also if you mess the colour filters, you still only get porn but different porn??? And on some if you select one colour, select another and go back there'll be more results, still only porn???
My question is why doesn't the PeetTube logo show up at all? If you turn safe search on, or change any of the letters to capitals ("peertube logO") it's nothing but the logo.
In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It’s therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.
Actually, the name property is explicitly plain text, it shouldn't contain any type of markup, whether that be markdown or HTML.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of this not-for-profit vs for-profit diatribe. If you mean that things like culture and structures matter more than the a project's legal status, then I agree, but unless you're going to point to particular issues you have with Mastodon's then, again, I fail to see the relevance. The things Mastodon (the company) is seeking to improve are highly technical and specialised, where people working on them need good cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience, and understandably demand a high wage.
Surprised to see you of all people question why a project needs money to pay for things.
What for?
They said what for in the previous section, improving Mastodon's "usability, discoverability, and trust & safety". They tried to fundraise for a head of trust and safety last month, but failed. My impression is this is them trying to raise general donations to the project to pay for things like this, instead of individual campaigns for individual things.
Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?
I thinks so, given the previous paragraph links to their sponsor page and says as such.
I haven't seen anyone else mention this, but it's basically become impossible to trust YouTube music compilations anymore. Like YT recommended me this and I don't understand how music can make me feel less, but it does.
flamingos-cant @ flamingos @feddit.uk Posts 78Comments 425Joined 2 yr. ago
He lists examples in the article.