Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)

Christine Lemmer-Webber, ActivityPub co-editor and founder of @spritely, recently answered the rhetorical question, 'How decentralized is Bluesky really?'

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Christine has the soul of a diplomat and the technical chops of a master, so her nuanced take is worth the read.

TL;DR

"Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either. However, this is not to say that Bluesky is not achieving something useful"

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#BlueSky #ATProto #Spritely

You may worry that Christine's judgement, like @evan Prodromou's, is biased by her intimate involvement in AP. But @rabble says similar things about BS. He was happy to jump ship from Scuttlebutt (Planetary.social) to Nostr (Nos.social) because he thinks it's technically better as a protocol. If ATProto was better, he would have pivoted to that instead.

The most generous, true thing we can say about BS right now is that theoretically, it could become decentralised in the future. But ...

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But at least @Gargron did *not* do what BlueSky have done, and implement a totally centralised system where every DM runs through mastodon.social. He made Mastodon Direct posts decentralised, like any other kind of post.

After a few teething problems (eg devs of other fediverse software not realising they existed and displaying them as public message), we ended up with a system Chistine describes as

"about as private as [unencrypted] email."

This is already streets ahead of BS DMs.

(3/3)

Coda:

One way I've seen people describe the blockchain that BitCoin runs on is 'physically distributed, but logically centralised'. Think of the Borg in Star Trek, or the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica; many bodies (apps, wallets, miners, etc), one overmind (the public ledger).

The net, at its deepest level, is the opposite; physically centralised (the fibre "backbone") but logically distributed (many independent servers and clients).

BlueSky is like BitCoin, ActivityPub is like the net.

Note: I was referring to public posts.

"But you may notice! Bluesky provides direct messages! So surely not all information is publicly available, because otherwise else direct messages would simply not work! So how do direct messages work in Bluesky?

The answer, if you guessed it, is centralization. All direct messages, no matter what your Personal Data Store is, no matter what your relay is, go through #Bluesky, the company."

#ChristineLemmerWebber, Nov 2024

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

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"Why would Bluesky roll out a direct message system that they have acknowledged is not the long term direct message system they would like long term?"

Exactly the same reason Mastodon added DMs (now called Specific People posts) in response to an earlier mass exodus from Titter;

"... Bluesky wanted to provide a feature-complete platform from the perspective of a user who is looking for an exit from Twitter now."

#ChristineLemmerWebber, Nov 2024

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

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More quotes from #ChristineLemmerWebber, Nov 2024

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

"I find it surprising and alarming that reusing the same key per user was ever the case."

Indeed.

"It feels like this flies in the face of the fundamental goals one would have around building a DID system and it is difficult for me to fathom how such a decision could ever have been made."

Easy; "move fast and break stuff". Instead of building slowly and carefully from spore to mycelium network, as fediverse devs do.

"The truth of the matter is: Bluesky controls users' keys, and therefore even if users "move away" they must trust Bluesky to perform this move on their behalf. And even if Bluesky delegates authority to that user to control their identity information in the future, there is still a problem in that Bluesky will always have control over that user's key, and thus their identity future.

#ChristineLemmerWebber, Nov 2024

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

#BlueSky #ATProto

@JNogueira
> When she talks about user keys is she talking about Bluesky's hosted PDSes at bsky.social or is she talking about self-hosted PDSes?

Can you clarify @cwebber?

> Because Self-hosted PDSes have their own keys and don't depend on bsky.social

How sure are you about this?

"Blaine Cook said that the correct version of ActivityPub and the correct version of ATProto are "the same picture" at one point. This is true insofar as I believe addressing the serious issues of both converges on a shared direction"

#ChristineLemmerWebber, Nov 2024

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Hmm. Intriguing. Christine goes on to explain some ways each one could evolve, and how that would make them more similar.

It seems very much RSS and Atom all over again.

#ActivityPub #BlueSky #ATProto

You know how people say things like, 'that's an hour I'll never get back'? How do you say exactly the opposite of that?

I got massive informational value for the time I gave to reading Christine's article, as well as getting to bask in some refreshing self-awareness and emotional intelligence along the way.

Great stuff, would go again : P

@cwebber

There's this weird dogma among BSD partisans, which says that more "permissive" licenses make software companies more likely to support Free Code development, and pass on the benefits they receive from that license to their "end users". 25 years of contradictory evidence, that what they actually do is parasitically build proprietary software around the ongoing work of Open Source communities, has done nothing to dispel this myth.

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@lain
> when she give you that look

The way Russians look, white but vaguely Asian, made way more sense when I learned that Russians are the descendants of *Mongol* Rus. Not European Rus.

I was idly wondering what the social media equivalent of software freedom would be. Then it hit me, with the weight of revelation;

Social freedom.

It encapsulates the human rights amd civil liberties that decentralised networks are structurally better at protecting. As well as the software freedom ideas that translate those rights and liberties into technical terms.

Anyone keen to help start a formal coordination and lobbying body called something like Social Freedom Network?

#SocialFreedom

@smallcircles
I tend to find how much engagement I get on my posts is directly proportional to the effort I put into my discussions with the people who comment on them. Normally I try to read all comments and reply to most of them, or at least favourite them.

If I get overwhelmed (as I am at the moment), I can stop replying for a while and number go down. Which works quite well for me ; )

@cstross
Thanks for the pointer to Fyodorov. I'll have a read.

Thanks also for the First Monday link, I think I've read this? Or at least skimmed it. I used to see @timnitGebru around the place before Eternal November began. May also have seen it linked from BetterWithout.ai, or somewhere else in David Chapman's work.

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@cstross
> The religious angle goes back to the 19th century Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorov

Oh yes, Cosmism. Afriend who studies International Relations and occult history put me onto this.

I was thinking you could trace the religious origins of "AI" even further back, to the Jewish stories about the golem. A being made of clay (often containing silica), animated by having names of god (software?) inscribed on them, or put in their mouths.

@timnitGebru

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@thenexusofprivacy
> So given all that ... how much of a priority should starter packs be?

I just want to note that this question kind of sneaks in an assumption of a unified fediverse strategy and set of priorities, and a single method for getting things done; deploy Human Resources (TM).

You'll consider it as obvious as I do that's not our situation. But I think it's worth flagging, because this assumption often lurks beneath peoples thinking about "social media platforms".

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Thanks for curating these polls @thenexusofprivacy. This is all valuable feedback. Not only for people working on Starter Packs, but any fediverse initiative that raises similar privacy and consent issues.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but consider people running their own little server, mainly for reading and occasionally replying. Anyone who follows them increases their bandwidth use. So if they're added to a Starter Pack without their consent, it can literally cost them money.

@wjmaggos
> Marc Andreessen claims

Andreeson is an antihumanist ("transhumanist") cult leader and I highly recommend assuming that every word that comes out of his mouth is a con.

> there's been rampant de-banking of his startup founders for political reasons

Translation: his founders are being held accountable for using banks for various kinds of fraud, and in his twisted mind, prosecuting actual fraud is "political".