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.
I swear there really are two types of people who learn latin…
Lawyers and biologists?
I was going for a specific type of nerd with fascist sympathies ans a very different specific type of nerd with antifascist sympathies. But also yes
It’s the same with the Norse, its either a Nazi or someone who wants to bury a Dænaxe into a Nazi.
Laywers and biologists. Like they said
Who got a link? I wanna buy one
https://worldwithoutcaesars.com/
edit: fyi it’s a cool $50 after shipping
Not for me, I live in Australia. USD$80 shipped. I’ll pass
To Italy I should pay 40USD more for shipping and 17 for taxes…c’mon, decentralize and sell something from Europe!
it’s a fire shirt not gonna lie
You are thinking of Nero!
Oh fuck me, HOW in like 25 years did I not get that pun?!
I was today years old too.
Maan, same 🤯
Best nerdy program name ever.
I got my copy of Nero from limewire. It only took 3 full wipes of windows to find one that wasn’t a Trojan.
The good old times 😁
touché
Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar? Why is that every time I think I’m up-to-date on the latest weirdness there’s more of it?
The reason behind his weird android haircut is that he thought it looked Caesar-esque.
I wonder why all these high profile people are so fascinated with a dictator that oversaw the transformation of a republic into an empire. Just like fascists were/are. Must be just a coincidence! Just like that Musk salute from the heart.
To be fair, that was more Augustus.
He’s not doing those roman salutes in public yet, though.
But it’s kinda funny that the oligarchs are so obsessed with Rome, famous for baking a fallen empire, while enabling the fall of the US.
Such a shame that Coppola’s movie was bad. He was onto something there.
And Nazis. Maybe, just maybe it has something to do with unchecked power?
Roman empire, like the nordic pagan BS is also a (extreme) right-wing fetish.
So glad to see our new PM celebrating his election win like this:
Lol his face… It’s like he knows this is a bad idea and he has no idea how he ended up there.
That or he’s just an idiot and his face always looks like that.
Poor thing is his son, molded by daddy.
You should see the video, he just looks scary in it. The empty look, no thoughts, just following orders.
His sister already had mental problems at a young age and got help, this one doesn’t know it yet.Oh. Great.
Which country is this?
Belgium
Which country? Looks like a swede in italy 😋
To be fair, Roman history is really cool.
True, but there is a lot of Roman history and some find it cool for the wrong reasons.
All history is cool. Roman history just has a lot to study.
Agreed. But if you’re going to fixate on one era, you could do a lot worse than Roman history.
Other cool eras to fixate on:
- Joseon Dynasty and Sejong the Great in Korea
- Chola Empire - naval empire before navies were really a thing
- Ethiopian Empire - somehow survived with strong empire neighbors
There’s a lot of really cool history, Roman history is extra cool though since you can see so much of it in Europe.
You can also hear it every day if you’re an English speaker. The Roman conquest of England greatly affected the English language.
Yes but I can’t let this chance go by to piss off the English and say they’re a German colony, the country they love to hate.
Speak a germanic language.
England, literally land of the Angle. Where are the Angle from? And who’s the other part of the Anglo-Saxons?
Ruled by…The Windsors? Doesn’t sound right.
Or did they change their Von Saxen-Gotha name for some mysterious reason in 1914?
Yeah, I can picture much of roman history in my mind and put into context. Asian history is almost like fantasy lore and no matter how much I learn about it I cannot wrap my mind around how recent tieping rebellion is even though christanity played a huge role in it.
Taiping Rebellion is a mess.
Sorry but which country is this? Can you elaborate on that photo?
Belgium.
As I said, after winning the national election.
While we have an even more extreme party (VB)he is the leader of the NVA, basically a nationalist separatist party that wants to split the country and indepence for the Flemish speaking part.
Historically they were the party that collaborated with the nazis.
While they are careful to not be associated with extremism sometimes their true nature shows.Reverse image search brings up articles for belgium referencing a nationalist party, apparently younger dude is his son?
Noted: Avoid Belgium if I ever go to Europe.
You can avoid the whole of Europe, most countries are getting closer to the 4th reich.
Almost time to send the kids to the eastern front again.No point in dunking on Muricans then if Europeans are going to do the same shit?
Oh I definitely will, always have since the other side of their uniparty is not much better for the rest of the world.
Besides those 2 factions there isn’t a significant alternative. The vast majority belongs to 1 of those 2.
The dems will eventually fall in line and collaborate, like much of the European parties did before and during WW2.
“embracing patriotism” and " banning left wing elements" as the new proposed plan for the dems is already a good step.
They have no culture of resistance, generally apathetic and pacified.
If a European country would suddenly live under the same conditions Americans do now and loong before, regardless of which side was in charge it would be in flames. I can name a few things: no social benefits, mass homelesness, authoritarian police that kill plenty people, largest percentage of people put in jail… No country would take that.
And now they want to ‘save their democracy’?
And how? By not shopping at chain X for one day or maybe change their avatar.
True warriors.
If you think thats weird you haven’t even scratched the surface on Zuck. He actually idolizes Emperor Augustus Caesar so much that he copied the guys haircut for most of his career. Behind the Bastards does a good job of highlighting it. If you want a quick readable version, here’s the first non paywalled article I could find. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9
All of this is literally unbelievable for me. I don’t even have words to express how unexpectedly odd reading comments in this thread has been.
So… Zuck stans the guy who ended the Republic and turned it into a monarchy that pretended to still be a republic?
Well, that’s not concerning at all.
Thanks for the correction, it’s Augustus Cesar. Still, what an odd connection. Good article btw.
I didn’t realize Ed Zitron had another podcast
At Meta’s annual Connect event in Menlo Park, Calif., Zuckerberg wore a custom T-shirt with the Latin phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” or “all Zuck or all nothing,” as he revealed the first working prototype of Meta’s augmented-reality glasses.
The phrase was a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “either a Caesar or nothing,” or more simply “all or nothing.”
Zuckerberg has long been interested in the Roman Empire. He spent his honeymoon in Rome and two of his children, August and Aurelia, are named after emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.
Incidentally, fascists tend to have a hard-on for ancient Rome, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
I’m not racist. I’m just really into 1940’s German artillery. For the engineering, you know. /s
Zuck puts out this weird “pick me” or “me too” energy lately, trying to fashion himself as one compatible with Trump’s world. His interest in Rome may precede Trump’s ascension to power, but his coming out is not a coincidence in my view. And yes, a fascination with Rome started as so many other things as an “innocent” meme and became a fascist dog-whistle.
I think fascists idolizing the Roman Empire goes back as far as Mussolini. The fasces, after which fascism is named, was a Roman symbol.
This is my kind of monetization.
Feels way better than getting features pulled and put behind an increasingly higher paywall.
Give it time.
of course the android wears a shirt with latin phrases.
So is lemmy or mastodon selling shirts yet? if not, why not?
Mastodon has merch, but it sells out near-instantly.
The Mastodon project put a lot of energy into a high quality plushy.
That must have been frustrating when the user base responded “but I already got my Blåhaj”
But Plushtodon is fren for Blahaj
I was on Reddit for 12 years with nearly a million Karma, and I got permabanned soon after the Inauguration for repeating an anti-MAGA opinion I had posted numerous times before he was elected.
I came over to Lemmy, and discovered that I was only one victim of a bloodbath, demonstrating that Reddit had decided to forego their free speech mission, and grovel for their new masters. Pathetic punk ass corporation.
I never wore a Reddit shirt, but I’d happily wear a Lemmy shirt.
They just go where the money is, and if that means going to a dictator, that’s what they’ll do.
I had an 11-year old Reddit account permabanned and they didn’t even give me a reason. Feels bad man
Feel you. my 8 yr old alt (my only account left) mysteriously has had a total karma of zero.
Since shortly after election strangely enough. Wonder what happened there /s.
Don’t feel bad, Reddit has been sliding for a long time. Lately, every thread started with dozens of bad puns, followed by Russian bots.
I used to visit certain subs just to out the Russian Karma Farmers. I got so good at finding them that finding them became almost a game. When I identified them, I would address them directly, I would identify them for everyone else in the thread, and make fun of their lame propaganda.
Then I would address their supervisor, and tell them that this guy was terrible at his job, that I clocked him within a few hours of his registration, and hed be better off at the beet processing factory. They would disappear almost immediately, with no pushback, confirmation they were frauds.
Lemmy has fewer people, but so far all we’re really missing is the worst of Reddit.
Yeah I think I just naively didn’t notice until recently. I hate that the departure feels so political, because I mostly followed really chill subreddits. I don’t see as much active discussion here on Lemmy yet, but I love the fediverse concept and am here for seeing this place flourish.
At ease soldier! Thanks for fighting the good fight. Are bots not so much a problem on Lemmy?
It’s really refreshing to see all these new accounts on Lemmy. I came here during the first mass exodus of Reddit almost 2 years ago. So I can tell you lemmy has come along way since then. It’s exciting to see its recent growth.
I habent seen anything like the bot action on Reddit.
I miss some great subreddits, especially a lot of cool guitar subs. I still look at them, but it does bother me that Im not able to give advice to new guitarists, or even tell luthiers how beautiful I think their guitars are.
Poor blue maga, while anyone with a consciense was permabanned from Reddit loooong ago by Jessica Ashoosh, now their slightly more right wing sister party has done it to them.
You had so much free speech as long as it was the US regime narrative.
Says more about you people than Reddit.
I imagine selling t-shirts would be against the Marxist/Leninist ideology of Lenny’s devs?
But given the volume of non-tankie instances now up and running, I’m sure some enterprising admins would be willing to give it a go.
…and as long as they’re ethically sourced (no sweatshops), high quality (materials and GSM), and reasonably priced (accounting for the other two factors) - I’m all for it!
If they are ethically made by union labor, there is nothing anti marxist about selling a shirts. 😁
Agreed. In fact seeming merch is pretty grass roots tbh. It’s how many musicians make a living
No one’s taken my lunch money in awhile wearing Linux t-shirts. I need to up my game - I’d buy a Lemmy shirt.
well, because everyone has the right to sell one, basically
Where’s Brutus when you need him?
This is so fetch
Stop trying to make fetch happen
What does this mean? Am I old?
Its actually a pretty well aged reference, of legal drinking age in the US.
Are you still attempting to influence that adage becoming well-understood by the common man? I dare say that I don’t believe that will come to pass.
cease your attempts at causing “retrieve” to transpire.
Will it not come to fruition?
probably not old enough
more likely young
Last i heard he was in New York
Every Caesar should have his own Brutus. We can’t rely upon a single Brutus!
If Brutus ain’t around, we can count on Luigi
That’s cool but I’ll check back in to see which fascist technocrat is running bluesky in 8 years
In theory, Bluesky is supposed to be immune to that due to it being open source. In practice, I don’t know what that would look like. The architecture seems to be much less decentralized than ActivityPub (which is what Mastodon uses).
In 8 years, anyone not mainlining Truth Social through their compulsory Neuralink will captured and euthanized.
Yeah, it’s kinda sad but that will probably happen.
deleted by creator
Zuckerberg doesn’t seem like he has the charisma for that.
I can’t really remember hearing him speak at all tbh
He’s not a charismatic speaker, but he is an effective speaker. In the same way text to speech is. Basically, in a world were Elons exist and public speak, he’s very easy to listen to and understand.
I do, when he was talking about rolling back facebooks moderation. His voice still sounds robotic, those hair implants ain’t fooling anyone.
I feel like if anybody knows anything about history that’s the thing they know.
And who killed hitler
Ofcourse they ain’t making shit from custom domains. Anyone who is interested in connecting a domain to their Bsky account and has the skills or patience to learn how to probably already has a domain bought at another registrar to connect to.
No, its because they don’t advertise it at all. The page for buying them has the date 2023 on it.
Also they only make referral fees because they’re not a registrar themselves
Also most people won’t care anyway. Even big businesses are unlikely to really be that bothered.
For years everyone’s been fine with Twitter and that never had custom domains.
But up until recently, Twitter used the blue checks to verify identity. Bluesky (as far as I know) doesn’t verify anyone’s identity. Instead, your domain name is your verification.
Yeah, business are pretty much the most consistent in verifying via domain. They get shouted at for it as soon as they join. Now most brands know to do it ass a measure of, idk, good faith in the platform and its norms.
What about “Tu quoque, Brute”?
Would be cool to pretend stab this guy in the metaverse to remind him what happens to Caesars.
I mean why is this surprising? Custom domains are a very niche thing; the majority of people don’t know or don’t care.
Their custom domain business can’t be big, I am assuming they merely get some referral commission from sending business to a registrar, that can’t be a lot of money.
Or am I missing something?
True, but they also just don’t fucking advertise it at all, and its on a forgotten subdomain only linked to in a blogpost, and the date on the page still says 2023 at the bottom.
As much as I hate to be that guy, it’s worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It’s better to leave your money elsewhere.
ActivityPub is just as susceptible to centralization as people claim Bluesky is with the only difference being that at least Bluesky has made some sort of mechanism for credible exit. It’s old news that its expensive to run the perceived expensive parts, if fact you could do without it as many devs in the community are doing. ActivityPub is literally the easiest one to monetize because it can lead to moat building and user capture. It’s why Meta is more than willing to become the biggest node in the Fediverse with Threads.
I obviously support ActivityPub or I wouldn’t be posting this here but one of the AtProtocol developers bought a Raspberry Pi with 8GB ram and added an NVME drive. He’s trying to prove (or possibly make) this point wrong. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team
So far, it seems like it’s “working” but he’s found some things that are way too slow and needs to be fixed for it to run on a Raspberry Pi. But that gives me some confidence that the developers, at least, aren’t trying to make it so only people with deep pockets can run an instance. (I don’t know what the investors want but the developers aren’t scheming assholes.)
It’s probably going to ultimately be a situation where anyone with a high end PC (by today’s standards) can run their own instance. It’s definitely not an A.I. situation where you have to reopen Three Mile Island and piss away more water than Nestle to self-host.
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. :)
Because of how Bluesky is designed, to meaningfully federate, your server needs to ingest all data from everywhere, and every new message needs to be sent to every single other federated server.
This means that Bluesky just isn’t set up for federation currently: it scales quadratically.
Self-hosting a PDS is not the same.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
I’m glad to see someone attempting to run their own index but the protocol is not meant to scale that way, and it gets worse the more indexes there are.
Yeah nope. At least not so far and i dont see why it would change. The current situation is that you can host stuff yourself, but you wont be able to connect and federate with any other servers or users without bluesky’s permission. Its not a level playing field and it never will be.
Lemmy (and similarly any other federated system) is only NOT enshittified because people successfully grew lots of competing servers and therefore prevented a monopoly power. If lemmy.world hosted 90% of lemmy users, i guarantee that it would have quickly turned to shit.
Even if bluesky was using proper federation and people started setting up other AT Protocol instances, bluesky would still hold 99.9999% of all users. They have literally zero reason to change this situation and changing it would cost them millions in advertisement for other completely independent instances.
It is waaay too late for bluesky to change in any meaningful way.
Their federation doesn’t work the same as Lemmy & Mastodon there’s no federation to individual servers.
If Bluesky introduced ads to their app, you can take all Bluesky data from the relay and host your own app without ads. This is working today and easy to do.
If they started charging for access to the relay you can host your own relay and it will parse all users data for you to use. This is also working today but it’s a little expensive.
Something would have to SIGNIFICANTLY change with the protocol for Bluesky to change how the relay interacts with the PDS, that would require such a large infrastructure change there’s no reason even questioning further.
The reason you don’t see anyone doing it right now is because there’s not much incentive to. On Lemmy we’re each on our own little “community” but Bluesky is just here’s everyones data no matter what when hosting a relay.
I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. The IT world is full of people developing their own thing because they think they can do better, and sometimes they succeed and make something nice. Who knows, maybe they’ll turn out alright?
Then they took crypto bro venture capital and my charitable optimism went out the window.
Still a cool shirt tho.
Well, most people don’t read Latin, so there’s a high risk of ending up looking exactly as pretentious as the asshole one seeks to make fun of. That said, taste is individual, each for their own.
he probably wore it when visiting latin america.
That’s a fair point. If you’re concerned about people judging you, you probably wouldn’t want to be seen as a Fuckerburg fanboy.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible.
Traditionally, that’s what new major version numbers are for. IF (and I stress the “if” because I have no clue about protocol design) it turns out that AT has useful features, a merger of ideas of both ActivityPub and AT could lead to ActivityPub 2.0.
That would be somewhat similar to AMD’s proprietary Mantle leading to Vulkan (which was originally intended to launch as OpenGL 5.0).
AP is flexible enough that you can do most AT stuff within AP.
only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists
Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible.
Because AT protocol has features that are incompatible with ActivityPub, and those features are important to some users.
Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.
The fact that we don’t see this yet, and that Bluesky has accepted the amount of money they have from actors I would not want to be associated with, makes me doubt this is possible.
Even if a non-profit wanted to operate with good intentions, the expense of running an AT proto hub would eventually prove a challenge, and the non-profit would either go under or need to start looking around for money. Meanwhile people can self-host their Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi.
Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub, I have tried and failed to understand exactly which feature is the AT proto folks so desperately wanted that they found it impossible to achieve through ActivityPub. The whole thing with having a mobile identity or whatever seems like a nothing burger to me - at the end of the day it just means that your user name is your DID number, and that web addresses can redirect towards that one. It’s hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol.
It can be done on the fediverse anyway.
It’s hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol
My one complaint about fediverse is I have half a dozen baronvonj@<service> accounts in order to get the features and UI experience of each. They are all separate, with the data for each spread out, and we all have to redundantly follow on each. If I could have one fediverse identity with all my data self-hosted, that would be the awesomesauce. But I can’t with fedi and I can with AT.
I guess that’s fair, as a way to make users identifiable with the same user name all over the internet, no matter which platform they are on.
When people sign in using bluesky on https://frontpage.fyi/, they are still bluesky accounts? Or does the account somehow transform into something that exists between both sites?
Is there any real innovation here beyond a combination of “sign in with x service” and having your domain appear as your user name?
frontpage will store its data on your user server.
I’m not sure if it’s good window dressing on top of SAML/OAUTH but I see the same username on both. Not this is not me, I just scrolled frontpage.fyi and picked a poster at random then searched the same username on bsky.app.
https://bsky.app/profile/tonybark.com https://frontpage.fyi/profile/tonybark.com
Yeah, they will use their domains, and they can sign in with Bluesky. So it is the same account to a pretty significant degree. What I’m wondering is if the Frontpage user would break if Bsky.app disappeared, or if the user could still sign in as the identity is somehow truly decentralized.
As for domains as user names, I guess ActivityPub could achieve something by allowing users to have verified websites (mastodon style) appear as their user names. I don’t really see what would have to change on a protocol level to make this possible.
Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub
There are significant differences in account portability. ActivityPub allows you to transfer your followers to a new server, but not your content.
Nothing in ActivityPub says you can’t move your content from one platform to another. It’s just that Mastodon does not have this feature at the moment.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure whether Bluesky has this feature or not, but it’s somewhat irrelevant considering the fact that there are no other platforms to move your content to. The only thing I’ve actually seen from this is that you can use an URL as your username in the front-end, though it just points towards the same DID in the backend. I struggle to see what the great achievement here is.
If this was the reasoning behind Bluesky, they could have developed a platform running on AP supporting the transfer of content between instances, and it would have been a whole lot easier than developing a whole new protocol.
Nothing in ActivityPub says you can’t move your content from one platform to another.
Your content in ActivityPub is linked to the home instance. So for example I can’t move this post from lemmy.world to another server. I could copy/paste the content into a new post on another server, but it would be a broken piece of our conversation with no context or replies.
Also, hosting a ATProto self-instance is not as expensive as you suggest. This person did it for $150/month.
Fair - you could host a copy or a link (or a sort of combination between the two, I guess), but it wouldn’t transfer the ownership of the original post. I’m still not sure this is such a pressing feature that I accept it as the actual raison d’etre of AT proto, especially considering how it very much exists there only in theory at best. But it is interesting technology, and something they could maybe have worked with ActivityPub to try to achieve.
I’m glad to hear that maybe Bluesky is more decentralized than I suspect, but Bluesky engineer whose blog post you linked still links to his bluesky account on bsky.social. If running a separate instance is achievable, I would love to see people actually do it.
Which benefits does AT have in comparison to Activity pub? Except currently single point of entry/failure?
- The real user names (DIDs) are cryptic codes that are kept hidden most of the time, with your visible user name redirecting towards it. This gives the illusion that user names can be changed/transported, and that users are not locked down to one platform.
- Content is filtered rather than censored, so that a big monopolistic actor can allow bigots on their platform but keep them out of sight of regular users. Had Bluesky been an ActivityPub hub, it could easily end up being perceived as a nazi bar. This is a benefit for Bluesky who do not want to be responsible for moderating their platform.
They want decentralized moderation on a centralized platform. That’s how on Bluesky, there’s an understanding that the removal of hate speech “conflicts with Bluesky’s decentralized goals”. On Mastodon, the decentralized nature is how we can show bigots the door without them getting to whine about their freedom of expression. Bluesky manages to create a problem using the very same concept by which Mastodon solves it.
I guess this didn’t really end up being a post about the benefits of AT. Oops.
This is a benefit for Bluesky who do not want to be responsible for moderating their platform.
At least in Germany there is a mandatory German filter list that seems to be maintained by Bluesky themselves. They couldn’t legally operate here if they allowed holocaust denial and such.
There are minimum standards they’ll have to abide by, but that’s similar to Meta after their change of policy. It really is not enough that it should make anyone feel comfortable.
Basically big platforms can choose between making moderation expensive, minimal, or arbitrary. Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they’re legal. Reddit is leaning into arbitrary, having AI banning folks on account of upvotes. Facebook used to dabble with expensive, but have made a recent shift into minimal.
Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they’re legal.
This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.
I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this
I don’t mind people setting up for-profit businesses. After all it’s what you’re supposed to do in a capitalist society, but the issue with it is when company start putting profit before people. As long as they don’t do that I’m not bothered that they make business-minded decisions.
The real problem begins when one has to consider how to make money from a social media platform. Selling T-shirts with sick burns written in Latin is not going to work forever.
Right… isn’t the obvious response to this “holy shit, they really don’t have a business model even remotely figured out here???” which immediately leads you to the realization that everything they promise (no matter how genuine the employee making the promises is) is subject to being sacrificed at the alter of “sorry we had to monetize and make difficult decisions”.
This isn’t difficult, it is just exhausting.
What this says is that Bluesky has no idea how to make a profit off of social media ethically and they would be better off spending their time selling smart political and funny t-shirts than distracting people with a false vision of the future that is going to end up just making everybody even more cynical in the end when it inveitably enshittifies the same exact way every other for-profit social media venture has…
Nah I am good, I will put my energy into helping the fediverse grow because I know how this story goes and I can’t stand the rising headache I get from seeing it repeat endlessly. I want a different future and so I am here.
