Notices by Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net), page 13

The fediverse is not one thing. It's not synonymous with mastodon or ActivityPub. What defines the fediverse is having both tools and norms around compatibility and interoperability. You have your servers that you control, I have my servers that I control. But we can still choose to communicate with each other without entirely giving up that control.

I use the word "intent", because I think that's actually what matters. It's not just the tech. The important thing is that the bluesky company promises to interoperate with other servers that they don't own. That's the core of decentralized federation. When you don't have full control, but you still agree to interoperate with other entities in the ecosystem.

By contrast, with twitter or Facebook, you can't run your own servers. And if you did, it wouldn't work. Because centralized services will not interoperate with servers they don't control. They also have protections that say you can't run a server that pretends to be compatible. If you're speaking their language, it's because you are under their control. Otherwise you're not invited.

Another really important thing to understand is that the fediverse does not mean "no companies allowed". I think many people have been giving that impression. Corporate entities are entirely capable of running their servers that interoperate with the fediverse. Many are doing so right now. Nobody can stop them. Just like they can't stop you from running yours. That's sort of the point.

Once bluesky's at protocol becomes more viable, people will try to run their own instances. Then Bluesky the corporate entity will have policies about who they talk to and don't talk to. The only difference is that I don't think many people will choose to be part of that ecosystem. It will be a part of the fediverse. Just not a popular part. The fediverse is already littered projects that never gained widespread traction. Including attempts by corporate entities.

What we can do is give ourselves the tools to *decide* who we want to interoperate with. And it's not a permanent decision. If we don't like talking to another instance, we can stop talking to them. Our stuff doesn't stop working. Their stuff doesn't stop working. We just don't have to stay connected to them if we don't want to.

It sounds like a lot of mastodon people want to post in public but also have everybody leave them alone as if it's not public. As far as I can see, their current strategy for achieving this is yelling very loudly in public posts hoping everyone else will see it and then shift everything around in order to accommodate them.

It's a bold strategy. I look forward to finding out if it works.

As I was puzzling through that, I landed on what I think is a core issue. People do not feel that the tools necessary to protect themselves *are in their hands*. They're still operating as if they have to ask other people to do the right thing. (Or yell at them as the case may be). Is that a failure of the way mastodon is set up? Have we not gone far enough with "you get to decide how your presence on the internet works"?

Somehow found myself arguing with someone who talks about "the fediverse" like it is a) a singular thing and b) a separate thing from bluesky. It helped remind me of a fundamental truth about talking to people who are mad on the internet. What they're mad about is entirely uncorrelated with how well they understand the issues. Anger is an *emotion*. So is fear.

In my commentary about mastodon and bluesky today, I didn't say all that much about my thoughts on the core issues of privacy and consent. That's what most people actually want to fight about. For people who are worried about that, anybody who isn't immediately on their side is the enemy. I'm used to that specific internet dynamic, so I'm not that bothered by it.

What I'm realizing is that I don't wanna talk about that though. Not because I don't care. I do. But there are much smarter people who have spent way more time on those issues. It's a deep and gnarly topic. So I don't have anything to say about it that is smarter than what is already being said by people who are actually *working* on the issues.

Instead, my musings from the peanut gallery are driven by something else that is bothering me as I observe people's evolving relationship with The Fediverse™.

To me, one of the fundamental things to understand about the concept of decentralization and federation is that nobody is "in charge". There's no central authority to appeal to.

In short, who are you yelling at? Who do you expect to "fix" things for you? Right now people are coming down on the guy who is building the bridge to bluesky. That specific guy. They're yelling at him and telling him to make different decisions to protect their personal privacy. Is that what people think they signed up for with the fediverse? Fighting with other individual humans and trying to force them to do what you want?

I keep feeling like I'm missing something. But it seems clear to me that fighting with every other individual in the whole world until you carve out the specific level of visibility that you are comfortable with is a solution that doesn't scale very well.

More importantly though. I thought the whole point of the fediverse as a concept was that each of us can chose a platform that gives us the tools we want so that we're *not* beholden to the choices that other people make.

What's wild about the bluesky bridge thing is that it seems to be trying to follow all of the rules. It's using the same ActivityPub protocol as everyone else. It has a name and the author is trying to make sure it respects everybody else's moderation settings. You can block it or defederate from it. But very few people who I've seen talking about it seem to be placated by that. They're still mad for some reason.

For web developers who aren't great at design/UX. Do you use a wireframing tool to explore UI for your projects? I'm open to recommendations. If it costs money, please say a little about why you think it's worth paying for. If you don't use a tool, tell me what you do instead.

The other problem that bsky has is more subtle. They took a bet on creating their own protocol. And I think that was a mistake. I don't think it will gain adoption, and I don't think they're going to succeed at becoming a truly distributed system.

I've spent significant time on Bluesky and Mastodon for the last few months. They're very different experiences, and I like them both for different reasons. But I think they are headed in different directions. They're going to continue to diverge in terms of what they offer.

I can't entirely back this up, but here's what I'm feeling. Bluesky could grow to be a close approximation of what Twitter was. That will be cool for those who miss the golden age of Twitter. But mastodon has the potential to be something new and different. It's not constrained by what came before.

When you have to make money, that means you're gonna start doing things that your users don't want so that you can make money. I don't know exactly what it'll look like. But it's inevitable. There's no other option.