Notices by Tom Walker (tomw@mastodon.social)

As briefly as possible:

If you read the spec, Relays jump out. There's a reason why there's only one and it's under the control of Bluesky.

did:plc (the usernames directory) jumps out. There's only one and it's under the control of Bluesky.

Appviews jump out. There's only one and... you get the idea.

*Lots* of people are looking at all this right now. If it were possible to run these things themselves, they'd be doing it for fun/interest. But it isn't.

@jamesh Yeah, the design has quite a lot of blockchain-inspired-looking elements but then tends to short circuit them ultimately

@jamesh Yes, and their early language about this being a "placeholder" has shifted. They have no particular plan to replace it

@jamesh I noticed this warning the other day:

"Handle history could potentially de-anonymize account holders if they switch handles between a known identity and an anonymous or pseudonymous identity."

Of course this is buried on a page where hardly anyone will ever see it...

https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc

@moh_kohn A lot of more-technical people are validating the "decentralisation" thing though – treating an (at best) vague aspiration as if it's fact, or giving a bit of a shrug and "no one's figured this out perfectly, seems like they're trying?" Which does play a role in offering people (false) reassurance.

The thing with Bluesky is that people want to believe.

You can go blue in the face pointing out that the decentralisation simply doesn't exist, and people say "hmm, well, benefit of the doubt, seems like they're working on it..."

You can give lengthy chapter and verse about how this is not a workable design for a decentralised system and it just doesn't get much response.

That's because people want to believe it, and so they do.

Decentralised social media site Bluesky has gone down under the load of new users.

Not to worry, I'll just use one of the other decentralised instances. One of the many wonders of decentralisation.

... What do you mean, there aren't any?

... If a central server goes down, I can't get onto this oh-so-decentralised network?

I guess this must just be how decentralisation works!

If your analysis of US voter trends doesn't include the absolutely incredible amount of voter suppression in US elections then it is a bad analysis

@mmasnick So is it a protocol, or a company?

@mmasnick Why do you think venture capitalists would put $15 million into a 'decentralised protocol'? Or to use your analogy, surely this is:

1. Invest $15m in decentralised protocol
2. ???
3. Profit

Number 2 surely needs to involve some kind of value extraction – value that is a multiple of what they put in.

Liiiitle bit worried that we created a central point of failure for internet archiving – and all sorts of other historically important data – and it has been down for multiple days

@freediverx @frumble @stcwhite @sarahjamielewis Are there any web browsers available from companies that you do trust? I can't think of any. (But also I don't trust companies.)

@remoquete Unfortunately this is much like putting up a "no foxes allowed" sign to try to keep away foxes

@yala I don't like the name "pineapple", shall we rename those too?

@yala So we're supposed to rename something that already has a name because of some unspecified objection?

Mastodon is the world's biggest community of people who deeply love computers and also think that the world would probably be better off without computers

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@tokyo_0 I can understand it on some level but it seems to escalate to increasingly furious screeds about how no one should ever reply to them. A bit mystifying

Do you need a database, or could you make do with 3,000 ~1KB json files filled with regexes?

(The database probably would have been easier but this is definitely cheaper to host.)