@silverpill@icedquinn@fish@sampler@p@strypey@light The will surely love that decision. Bsky users already hate bsky leadership and Fedi is too complicated to them in their own words. Mastodon thinks they aren't decentralized and doesn't like the bsky leadership. Now they can hate both.
@strypey >But this kind of architecture has its place, for those who want to use it.
I agree and bsky is that place in my opinion. There is one large difference between what ATProto users want and what AP users (at least those than been here for a few years) want. AP leans a lot on user-level moderation where the user has almost absolute control over what their view of the network is. There is only one exception and that is the instance administrator who can force moderation on users of that instance. And even then a user can simply make their own instance and put the administrator out of the equation. ATProto is very different in that regard and uses almost centralized content labelers to first filter content, then allows users to subscribe to blocklists not managed by the user (a dumb idea that Mastodon will likely copy soon) and only after that allows user-level moderation. And users of the respective networks expect and want this difference. AP user mostly wants to moderate their own view with small exceptions done by the admnistrator, meanwhile ATProto users expect the moderation to be mostly done for them. That is the incompatibility in how they operate I talked about; you can interoperate between the two networks, just like Nostr, but the expected way of moderation is the polar opposite.
>The fediverse is for facilitating connections between any 2 people who want to interact, regardless of where they choose to host their accounts. Like email.
I agree and adding bsky-esque moderation centralization into AP throws a wrench into this mostly working system. At that point it no longer is about facilitating connections between users, but facilitating connections between users only if an overseer and some amount of instance administrators all agree. It is no longer email.
>This has been the pitch since Evan and the Identi.ca folks launched Status.Net to encourage community-hosting.
And I agree with that pitch, but Evan either lost his plot in the last few years, got paid to loose his plot or simply doesn't understand yet what the consequences of what he wants are. He may have create Status.Net, created OStatus(2), co-created GS and co-authored ActivityPub, but what he wants now removed a lot of the credibility he accumulated over the years at least for me.
>I don't think we want protocol engineers and software devs to be making decisions about who "should" be able to talk to each other. For reasons explained in some detail here; >https://disintermedia.net.nz/ethical-technology-and-political/
Since I contribute to Pleroma and also am a Fediverse user for more than 5 years now, I have two hats that I wear depending on what the topic and context in question is. I agree with what you wrote in that article, mostly, which was a good read. Software should stay apolitical and impartial to who uses it and that is my stance and has been for a very long time. And that's the mentality I will always put ActivityPub to, I'm in no place to dictate who should use the Fediverse or who is allowed to use Pleroma. Neither do I want to have that power, I'm not interested in it. My stance on gatekeeping bsky users away isn't a stance on the software dev or protocol engineer side, but on the user side as a long time user of the Fediverse. I've seen the effects of similar users joining in en masse and don't want it to happen again.
>But we absolutely need to enable people to control what they see at account *and* instance level. To control spam, if nothing else.
My stance is, users should control almost all of this and administrators should only get involved in controlling spam or getting rid of illegal content from their server and making sure it doesn't come again from the same source. That is what instance-level moderation should be used for in my opinion. Software devs and protocol engineers shouldn't have control over who uses the Fediverse, nor should administrators have intrusive control over what users of an instance see unless its for the above.
I don't think we want protocol engineers and software devs to be making decisions about who "should" be able to talk to each other. For reasons explained in some detail here;
But we absolutely need to enable people to control what they see at account *and* instance level. To control spam, if nothing else.
I think it's reasonable to file instances full of people posting slurs to get attention as 'spam'. But even if I didn't, it's not up to me, nor should it be.
I'm all for finding ways to make ATProto and Nostr accounts fediverse-native, for the same reasons I'm against the Anti-Fedi Meta Pact. The fediverse is for facilitating connections between any 2 people who want to interact, regardless of where they choose to host their accounts. Like email. This has been the pitch since Evan and the Identi.ca folks launched Status.Net to encourage community-hosting. Discriminating against hosts is an account/instance-level concern, not protocol-level.
@phnt > it is only decentralized to the smallest extent it can be
I agree. But this kind of architecture has its place, for those who want to use it. Plus there are plenty of experiments going on with how to use PDS data without a Relay firehose, which is kind of like reinventing Solid. Again, we could be looking at a future convergence here.
@strypey ATProto is fundamentally different in how it works, it is only decentralized to the smallest extent it can be. Moderation is purposefully more or less centralized with labelers. Which in no doubt is what IFTAS and Mastodon want to effectively build with FIRES and FASPs, it being more decentralized is just a side-effect of AP not being centralized by design. Blocking the central bsky labeler earns you a ban on bsky. These two networks are incompatible in how they operate and want to operate.
Now to the second part, this idea of replacing the status quo with Fediverse is a good idea on paper. Over the years I've watched the Fediverse get worse and worse in both its userbase and the content the userbase puts on the network because of this mentality. First it was years of Twitter refugees going to Mastodon and promoting heavy-handed moderation, breaking federation on purpose, creating fediblock and now IFTAS/FIRES/FASPs. All of these are the result of Fediverse's desire to replace the status quo with itself and it is a death sentence given enough time. Now imagine what bsky refugees will make of this place when they are even more opinionated in their views than the majority of Mastodon users. If Mastodon is what is left of the Twitter left leaving since ~2021, then Bsky is those that didn't leave Twitter because Mastodon was too much of wild west and Mastodon refugees. Opinionated extremists of the already opinionated.
Call it gatekeeping, because that's what it is, but these people should have their own walled of garden they can play in and not bother anyone else. The irony of being part of development of a network that lets anyone say anything they want, where users have no control over other users, while promoting gatekeeping users is not lost on me, but bsky users are a net negative to this network, just like the majority of Mastodon users are.
I don't really care about Nostr since they are just Bitcoin maxis high on $current_llm_model (+ CP), but they are mostly harmless. That said, my timelines were dramatically improved since Gleason went there.
ATProto is in the process of being standardised at IETF. Even if BS is killed tomorrow, and broken up and sold for scrap by its Venture Capitalist owners, ATProto is not going away. Any more than Nostr is.
The AP fediverse came about as a merger of OStatus, Diaspora and DFRN/Zot networks. It seems logical to me that in 10 years time we could be looking back at the AP, ATProto and Nostr networks the same way. From within a fediverse that somehow transcends and includes them all.
@silverpill > Nothing a couple of joint events couldn't fix
Sounds good to me. Although we might need to supply the Mastodon Homeowners Association and the Public Not Public folks with some entheogens stronger than ganja, before they can get out of their own heads and gain the ability to question their own assumptions ; }
The fediverse emerged from an understanding that no *one* ethical platform can replace the network effects of the megafauna (as CoHost quickly learned). Forcing Ryan to make BF opt-in - after years of causing no problems whatsoever as an opt-out bridge to the IndieWeb - was a ludicrous self-punch by the Mastodon HOA. If we can fully integrated ATProto stuff into the fediverse, so much the better.
Just want to point out the Nazi Bar allegory is bunk. Fascists operate by courting wealth, then buying the bar and turning it into a Nazi bar; they are the bartender, and they fool you into thinking they're just "tolerating" the Nazis who come in and bully people out.
Invaders don't arrive as a guest. They come in force. Hostile takeovers of communities by refugees fleeing disaster has n e v e r happened. If there's no army, there's no invasion. Invasion won't work without some military operations.
So yeah you can get kicked out of a pub for being disruptive. If your community's so weak it can't welcome outsiders though, that's not a problem with the outsiders.
>A pub stops being what it is if the social centre of gravity shifts. But that just means it becomes something else, and that's OK too.
I disagree with this, instances are communities and those that try to shift the culture of the community unnaturally should be expelled from it and find another community. This is how hostile takeovers of communities happen and has been called invading or being a disruptive guest in forums for a reason. You will get kicked out of a pub for being disruptive as well.
Instances are like pubs. People like to hang out in different kinds of pubs, and that's OK. A pub stops being what it is if the social centre of gravity shifts. But that just means it becomes something else, and that's OK too.
As long as our city has space for many different kinds of pubs, everyone can find 1 or more they enjoy.
Mastodon offers them nothing, Twitter offers a lot of the same social media breaking features like reply disabling along with the chance you might get your post in someone's For You feed and the advantage to them of being on the same site.
It's a literal meme that there are Twitter artists with I'M LEAVING THE SITE FOR BLUESKY GUYS posts followed up by a few months later with new posts like nothing happened.
The system designed by people that want to broadcast their demands to the public has trouble finding members of the public that will come get harangued. Womp, womp.
> Bluesky has the Will Stancils
I have no idea who is a Will Stancil but I do know what type of person is on Busky.
@strypey@PurpCat@icedquinn@fish@sampler@p@silverpill@light Lol, someone domain squatted his name on .com, but yes that is the guy. He's been source of cheap laughs for many over the years. All I know about him is that he really doesn't like ICE and almost everyone that makes fun of him is a Nazi to him. Which lead to others editing him into WW2 Germany uniforms, and such.
@PurpCat > Twitter is hostile too ofc but Bluesky has the Will Stancils of the world
"At the heart of the Stancilwaffen lies an unshakeable conviction: Will Stancil holds a divine mandate to Repair America Practically Everywhere—or to RAPE at his leisure. He is our visionary vanguard, divinely inspired to mend the rips in America's fabric."
@p@icedquinn@fish@phnt@sampler@strypey@silverpill@light That's why Bluesky and similar sites fail. When the alternative to dumb zoomers spamming you with speed gifs and reactions and dumb shit for making them feel weird bro is people fighting...it's easy to see why it failed.
@PurpCat@icedquinn@fish@phnt@sampler@p@strypey@silverpill@light I think Stancil was actually ran out from there. Average Bluesky user is more like one of those Misskey fork trannies with signed fetches and "it" pronouns, just with either less technical knowledge to be on fedi or finding it not "secure" enough.