Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 2

Okay so blogs are decentralized, and the web is decentralized, but is Google decentralized? I'm really flummoxed by the choice to self-describe as being architecturally closer to a search engine and especially Google, that seems like a heck of a self-condemnation

How many major search engines of the web are used, in practice? 2: Bing and Google

This isn't very reassuring if you care about decentralization?

@Claire @eramdam the DID stuff I would like to piece apart but that is a thread of its own

I was involved in early DID standardization work. I ultimately don't think this approach to DIDs solves what it thinks it's solving, but that's for later

> Data in the Atmosphere is stored on users' personal repos. It's almost like each user has their own website. Our goal is to aggregate data from the users into our SQLite DB.
>
> Think of our app like a Google.

https://atproto.com/guides/applications

@foo @shadowfacts Bitcoin isn't as decentralized as people think but seems to be a lot more decentralized than ATproto

@Claire @eramdam The argument feels a bit like "Bluesky is decentralized the way that the web and websites are decentralized", which okay! It's like blogs

But then all the articles talking about how the "federation" works sell themselves as talking about... well a search engine.

@Claire @eramdam Well I mean, Bluesky's ATproto recently has made the rounds as the "more decentralized" protocol over ActivityPub, and clearly a lot of people on my Bluesky feed right now seem to think it's more decentralized, and it does have one major improvement which is that it uses content-addressed posts (I don't think the DID methods currently actually do their job though the goal is good, I can expand on that at a future time)

Which is what's leading me to look more into it, in which ways is it more decentralized in practice? Is it even particularly decentralized in practice? I'm trying to gain a technical understanding.

@Claire The article I pointed to was about fully self hosting your own atoproto infrastructure, including relay, and people seem to be getting excited about it on bluesky as being feasible, and I'm feeling uncertain it is

@adriano oh no I do not like this

NO MORE SHITPOSTS

they're banned now, only pissposts

Say what you will about saying what you will, but people are going to say it, god willing

@mcc next time I'm going to Japan DM me the address. I think we can make each other happy

@heluecht @dneary Yeah that post gets a lot wrong though

@dneary lol no

@vv haha

Well I've never actually used Bluesky before, have just read the specs, so I thought I ought to try it, here's my Hello World over there ;p https://bsky.app/profile/dustyweb.bsky.social/post/3laf6a5r77h2m

I was at a conference and I hanging out with someone who seemed pretty smart and aware of things, but she was like "I'm really shocked by how fast climate change seems to be happening, aren't you?"

I'm not, because I've been reading the reports of where things are going, and that information is out there and easily available, and all this was known

"Resist!" I hear you saying, and yeah

But like, the people calling the shots have a lot of power and this is a case where "destroying infrastructure" isn't gonna get us there I think, we really need "building infrastructure", and I'm nervous that we're losing the last of our last shots to do that on the scale we need to

I guess it's climate doomerism but like, it really felt like we don't have time for a rollback to "drill baby drill" and I'm not sure how we're going to survive that :\

weh

Right now, the answer is yes.

My org @fight GLAAD, Color of Change, and 20+ other major civil society and racial justice orgs called it almost a year ago, right here: https://www.battleforlibraries.com/congress/

Close this thread if you don't stop and read that letter now.