Christine Lemmer-Webber
The incredibly wonderful @bnewbold, who encouraged me to write up my "How decentralized is Bluesky, really?" blogpost, wrote up his response: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t
I'm reading it now. I'll spend some time mulling it over before I make my "reply-reply" but maybe you should read it too!
Proto Himbo European
@shiri @bnewbold @cwebber Just a note: I was influenced by something @pluralistic (Cory Doctorow) wrote: I'm less concerned about power outages than capture. I've started to evaluate services by how easily they could be captured by someone I don't like. I think Bluesky can be captured easily, so it makes me uncomfortable. That isn't the same as saying it can't be useful or "good" (I'm not the one to evaluate that) but it's not what I want.
Proto Himbo European
@bnewbold @cwebber OK, that metaphor I understand, at least. Is this not possible with a network-of-networks like the fediverse?
shiri
@guyjantic @bnewbold @cwebber I think they acknowledge that a few places in their article that AP might be able to have it, they just don't think it's built for it.
Personally, my gripe with Bluesky in general is that I'm in the crew that only think it's decentralized when there are no major pillars. In AP the only server outage that matters to my connectivity is my own... but Bluesky has big backbones that can't be casually run... and they wouldn't be bad if they weren't mandatory.
Like I'd be much more welcoming of Bluesky if the environment was set up in a way that you could still use it without that big relay in the middle... because I think that big relay is the problem, it's too much control.
Mentioning things like Google it's like if the web relied on Google search to run, Google goes down and 90% of your bookmarks stop working. (Which is more fucked up because that's what happens for a lot of people when Amazon goes down...)
Likewise i think doing a big search feature like that for AP would probably be more of a companion or subset protocol rather than working within AP proper (ie. you'd have the option to use it and to submit your profile/posts to it, but it wouldn't be required functionality for your server to be usable)
Proto Himbo European
@cwebber @bnewbold I am absolutely not techy enough to understand most of what is going on here, but this paragraph smells fishy.
Note that I could be very, very wrong about this...
it feels like the message is "this is inevitable so we might as well do it." I know the person is implying "do it well" and "do it mindfully," but when these arguments are put forth in any domain I immediately wonder how inevitable the thing actually is.
Are huge public networks inevitable? And if they are, is the sorta-implication accurate that smaller networks are unable to do the "important" things the big public ones do? Is it inevitable that large, public, (centralized?) networks will do all the tasks better than smaller, decentralized ones?
I am probably not asking the right questions, and maybe the answer to these (and those I should be asking) is "yes." I just have a deep distrust of arguments in favor of some action when a major premise of that action is "it's inevitable, anyway." Maybe it's true sometimes? IDK, but there's a lot of very bad history with this kind of argument.
bryan newbold
@guyjantic @cwebber
I think trying to have a social web without full indices is like having scholarship without research libraries (or WorldCat/OCLC, or Library of Congress). you can do a lot of good work without those things! but the utility of indices for discovery is pretty large.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Regarding @bnewbold's blogpost, I enjoyed it! I read it and have given it a bunch of thought, and I will make one last, final blogpost on the matter soon, and then I think I will be blogged out on the matter ;)
bryan newbold
@cwebber thanks!
I agree don't want to go around forever on atproto / ActivityPub specifically. Hope we (and broader community) can get to some deeper writing on other systems, like Spritely, OCAPs, Willow/Leaf, etc.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
@bnewbold Agreed. There's a bit I want to reply to here in the discourse, including your blogpost, since and then I wanna move on
We've got beautiful futures to build!
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