I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says “a world without Caesars” in Latin.
That’s cool!
I’m also a big fan of what Bridgy Fed is capable of doing towards Bluesky - it does show that there is a lot one can actually do with the protocol.
As I read the situation it’s complicated. They are not inherently evil—on the contrary, I think they are trying to do good—but they are locked down by the structural chains around them. The whole thing was initiated by Jack Dorsey, and from the onset they wanted to re-create Twitter while solving what they perceived as “moderation challenges”, and with the starting point that they were to create the next Twitter, not a decentralized network of services.
Hell, wasn’t the original idea that Twitter itself would become part of the network?
When I see Bluesky today I see Twitter 15+ years ago. A lot of optimism and goodwill, but nevertheless a project that is doomed from the start.
Yeah, I have more faith in the Fediverse long term. But we’ve all been through multiple enshittification cycles where everyone abandons a platform and settles on a new one. At least BlueSky is currently open source.
I don’t want to make too much of this but BlueSky is registered as a B-Corps and not a C-corps. For those unfamiliar with US corporate setups, a C-corps is a typical corporation where maximizing shareholder value is the goal. People can disagree on what that means — long term value or short term value, for instance — but ultimately, C-suite executives serve shareholders and only shareholders.
A B-corps (in the U.S.) is a “Public Benefit Corporation” and executives have a duty to serve all stakeholder in the company, from shareholders, to customers, to employees. So, theoretically, BlueSky doesn’t have to be evil.
That being said, it’s not something to rely on. We just saw it with OpenAI, which started as a project at a non-profit and is now a regular ass company that the old non-profit happens to have shares in. A few corporate lawyers can fuck up a good thing very quickly.
I must admit seeing Mozilla get worse and worse has also made me more cynical on behalf of Bluesky. And then there’s the issue of moderation - I’m beginning to think that big ethical platforms cannot really exist, as there is no such thing as a perfect place to draw the line with regards to moderation.
Maybe Bluesky would be the most likely to succeed in operating a large online platform in a good way. I have just lost all faith in such platforms.
One good thing about BlueSky’s moderation over Mastodon’s is that it’s (partially) chosen by users. Mastodon/Lemmy instance hosts almost all do an admirable and often thankless job by defederating and booting people but in the end, you’re relying on your instance host and your own one-off blocks.
BlueSky currently does have centralized moderators who kick people off all the time. But if the law changes in any country, BlueSky has the fallback of relying on user-created blocklists and user-created algorithmic feeds. In the U.S., Section 230 is apparently hated by Congress and, while I agree it could be updated and reformed, I’m not confident our corrupt gerontocracy will strike the right balance.
I’d love it if the future of ActivityPub-based platforms uses that approach. Even Instance moderators would probably be thrilled.
That was something I liked about ZeroNet; in addition to it being incredibly easy to universally block a specific user, there were also block lists anyone could create or subscribe to.
(Although IIRC ZeroNet blocks would only mean you didn’t see blocked users; others could still see that person’s comments etc on your content.)
I actually view it the opposite. Lemmy isn’t necessarily doomed from the start but we will not reach mass adoption because we are too clunky to use for most users because of its distributed nature.
Bluesky has enabled tons of non tech users to immediately reap the rewards without having to worry about instances or who can see their posts, while maintaining decentralization (albeit with a high cost).
The true path forward will probably be a world like Bluesky but instead of running your own relay, you’re contributing compute power to a Kubernetes cluster. Instances and having to worry about federation is far too clunky for most users, it’s the reason mastodon never saw mass adoption while Bluesky almost immediately did.
I think the difficulty to use ActivityPub as a user is a side effect of what makes it resilient. It does not grow quickly amongst the masses, but it also can’t be taken out with one company changing. I think in the long run, more and more people will see it as a legitimate social network and it will grow over time.
I don’t think usability problems in Lemmy are related to the protocol. For me open source alternatives carry the promise that they will only get better, while profit-oriented alternatives will eventually have to get worse.
I don’t think any of what makes Lemmy difficult to use is a necessity based on its distributed nature; its a result of the developers being more geared towards the back-end than towards the front-end. Which is not an inherent weakness - the back-end needs to be good before a nice front-end can make sense. So I’m optimistic. :)
Exactly. If I want to subscribe to a group (sublemmy?) that isn’t on my home instance, then I have to search for it from my home instance and then click the “Subscribe” button. This is a somewhat painstaking process, but there’s no reason that I can see why that couldn’t be streamlined.