Blog post by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-editor of ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.

  • Turret3857@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I mean Ive been working on figuring out how to use this: https://github.com/itaru2622/bluesky-selfhost-env

    Ive gotten pretty close, just a few small issues now I’m trying to figure out. I mean as long as its FOSS and self host able idgaf if its corporate. The CIA made SELinux and its one of the tools I use daily. FUTO makes GrayJay and its another tool that I use daily.

    I hate corpos, don’t get me wrong, but if theyre actually giving you Something for free (free as in freedom, not as in free beer) I dont see the problem.

    • Shatur@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Yes, you can self-host it, but the problem is the cost. The blog explains it very clearly.

      • irelephant [he/him]🍭@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        You can self-host everything, but it doesn’t scale well, and you will likely go bankrupt between 3 - 4 business days.

        Of course, partial network relays/appviews are possible to host.

      • Turret3857@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Coming back to give you that update, I got so close but I’m stuck with trying to figure out the feed generator and I think I might be about to give up and just host the PDS. I’m sure its possible but my knowledge isnt great enough to finish this I dont think.

  • Glasgow@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    No reason it has to be one cooperation. Could be multiple different appviews ran by trusted entities.

    • WhoLooksHere@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      And if my grandma had wheels she’d be a bicycle.

      If it’s disadvantageous to the money in control of it, it won’t happen.

      • Glasgow@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        It is happening though. There’s workgroups trying to get their own AppView up, the https://freeourfeeds.com/ initiative announced yesterday, and then moving the register to an ICANN-like consortium.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    0·
    2 months ago

    I mean… ok.

    People assume that you need to “fix” social media.

    Social media is bad by definition. Yes, including Fedi and Masto.

    You’re making it momentarily less crappy in a small region so that’s where you are for a bit until it gets messy again and you have to move on.

    Twitter is tobacco, Bluesky is weed, Fedi is vaping. The free information utopia of the 90s wasn’t hijacked by corporations, it was wrong in the first place.

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      That’s like saying food is bad. Most of society might be eating trash fast food with zero nutritional value, but that doesn’t mean a healthy diet isn’t possible.

      I would posit that the fact I can converse with anyone anywhere at any time, makes the world a more connected and potentially peaceful place.

      In fact I’d go so far as to argue, that thanks to the internet and social media, we are closer to global consensus as a species than ever before, in history.

      Yeah, mostly because for a lot of human existence, we straight up didn’t know what was happening even a couple hundred miles away.

      But now we do. THAT IS GOOD. And that applies to any thought, event, or experience, be it a natural disaster or the latest chapter of a furry fanfic.

      It used to be that people only formed communities where geographic proximity allowed for it. Social media has the potential to remove that limitation.

      Does that come with downsides? Yes, but only if we let it. And I wouldn’t even say that the immediately obvius downsides are the most pressing ones, not right now.

      The most pressing issue with mainstream social media, is the fact it needs to make money, without its actual users being the customers. Instead of connecting people that wouldn’t otherwise have crossed paths, or maintaining connections that would have otherwise broken, commercial social media maximizes engagement, which coincides with maximizing critical apathy, radicalization, and moral outrage.

      Algorithms impose artificial forces that act on human social behaviour. A really big one is that people are a lot less likely to form communities online with people they don’t already agree with about most things.

      That has never been true in reality. People absolutely do come together and overcome differences. Reality often requires it. People who live or work together used to HAVE to figure it out, or go mad. Social media could be imposing that requirement globally.

      Instead, because the effort required is a turn-off, commercial social media platforms are designed to not just let people avoid it, but to encourage them to do so.

      We may be closer to global consensus than we have ever been before, but some of the systems we have built to supposedly facilitate communication, are actively taking us further away from it. But that’s not inherent in how social media works. It’s because of how it’s been designed.

      Engaging with society for real, takes effort, and a lot of it. Every piece of difference between how you personally view the world, and how everyone else does, tires you. You have to constantly do mental and emotional work, in order to comprehend the people you are engaging with. When actually doing that, no one can spend all day online. It tires you out, even as you enjoy the exchange of thought.

      But since that doesn’t make maximum money, who cares about connecting people across the world and facilitating mutual understanding!? Here’s a post that confirms what you already think about that other political party, that other state, and that other country, and those other people! Here’s two dozen more! Here’s content you didn’t even know about, and that is really a nothingburger, but which our algorithm has determined will flame up your feelings like a second coming of Hitler!!!

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        0·
        2 months ago

        Bit of a wall of text, there and skimming the technooptimist take is dead on arrival with me there, so I’m not particularly interested in disecting it.

        I’ll say that comparing social media to food is maybe the most depressing thing I’ve seen all week, and there is quite a bit of competition.

        • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          You can also just compare it to communication in general. Maybe you can go your whole life never asking what other people think, but I can’t, nor do I want to.

          And I can not only find out what the person next to me is thinking, I can essentially sample people any place on earth on their thoughts and feelings. I think that is beautiful beyond words.

          But I’m hardly an optimist. I am fully aware that we have utterly missed the train on climate change. Food production will crash. Millions will starve.

          If you take the time to actually read what I’m saying, I’m not discounting the issues social media has, but I simply do not agree with your assessment that social media and its problems are one and the same.

          Now, if you want to discuss whether we’ll actually pull off solving them in time to not go extinct, that is a coinflip I wouldnt bet on.

          But do you honestly believe that your comment, and mine, being possible, is a bad thing? Are the groups organizing relief efforts through social media after the LA fires, a bad thing?

          I’m not sure how you define “social media” but to me it’s an extremely wide term. To say it’s all bad, is mad. You might say the good things can be done in other ways, but what are those other ways, that don’t fit the definition of social media?

          We are a species of sentient social individuals, currently transitioning from national scale thinking into planetary scale thinking.

          If the internet and social media can’t be molded into the tools we need to boot-strap pseudo-hivemind-thinking onto humanity, I don’t know what can.

          Say what you will, but for us to take care of this planet, the individuals most in need, and overall just make better decisions on a global scale, we need that, badly.

  • atro_city@fedia.io
    0·
    2 months ago

    People fleeing twitter to bluesky are like frogs jumping out of one boiling pan into another pan that’s slowly starting to heat up.

    • ahornsirup@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      So give me a Fediverse Twitter alternative that’s actually a drop-in replacement for Twitter the way Bluesky is and that is (and this is by far the most important factor) as easy to sign up for as Bluesky is. People aren’t leaving Twitter because it’s “corporate” or “enshittified”, they’re leaving because it’s the proverbial Nazi bar and they want to jump through as few hoops as possible to get where they want to go. Which is Twitter, minus the Nazi in charge and his followers.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Bingo, people don’t join Lemmy because it’s a pain in the ass to figure out how it works and if you’re unlucky your experience is shit because you joined an instance that isn’t federated with some of the major ones.

        I’ve been saying it for a while now, make the decentralization happen in the background and make the front-end appear like any other website and then you’ve got an alternative that makes sense.

      • atro_city@fedia.io
        0·
        2 months ago

        Dude, the reason twitter is a shitty place to be is because of how it works. If you just move to another platform that does exactly the same, it will devolve into the same shithole twitter was is.

        Quote-tweets (or whatever they are called) were resisted for so long in mastodon because it leads to toxic “omg, look at this person, let’s make fun of them” posts. It’s entirely too easy.

        Add to it a tiny character limit and the majority of thing people can post is flickers of thoughts and incomplete works. Forcing people to reduce their expression directly leads to information being lost and for confusion or misunderstandings to be more common.

        It is insane to repeat the same thing and expect a different outcome. Bluesky might be nice right now, but when twitter falls, the same people will just move to the Bluesky and nothing will have changed.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Quote-tweets (or whatever they are called) were resisted for so long in mastodon because it leads to toxic “omg, look at this person, let’s make fun of them” posts. It’s entirely too easy.

          Bluesky allows you to block quote-tweets of your posts. That’s already a good mitigating measure for this kind of harassment.

          Another thing that Bluesky does well is blocklists. We should probably consider something similar here on Lemmy/Mbin, that would help to crowdsource moderation and reduce the workload on mods/admins.