On Discourse and Decentralisation
The Community Group for #ActivityPub is drafting an open letter calling for respect and collaboration between the people working on the different protocols in the open social web.
I’m signing the letter, and with it, I have some thoughts regarding discourse, decentralisation and why I think this space matters.
In a post where she signs the open letter, ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber summarises the changing world well:
“This is actually a really important time for that message to come across, because our communities do both face major threats which I believe we are ideologically aligned in wanting to face:
We are facing a large number of laws which appear well-intentioned and aimed to try to take on tech gatekeepers, but unintentionally build regulatory moats that allow only gatekeepers to participate, and which threaten user freedom at large.
The rise of techno-fascism and omnisurveillance affects all users. Neither ATProto nor ActivityPub, at present, are built in such a way that they can provide the levels of protections necessary to respond to the needs of activists and community members against nation-state level threats.
These are our existential threats, not each other. And we need to figure out how to work together.”
I’m reading this as “be nice to the Bluesky guys, because we have a bigger problem to deal with.”
That’s fine, I’m not inclined to be mentally ill at strangers on the internet.
But I’m also not going to call it decentralized when it’s meaningfully not, and I’m going to keep an eye on where their money comes from.
We have a common enemy in government control.
But if you’re going to be my friend, I need you to not lie to my face.
Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of misdirection and reframing of the situation here. Should we be “cool” and “respectful”, yes, absolutely. Should we all agree ATP is a good idea and worth adopting? Absolutely not. It should be rejected until they figure out how to properly decentralize. As of now the protocol itself seems to fundamentally require so many resources that it disqualifies it from any sort of meaningful discussion. I hope to be wrong. Maybe as they inevitably grow to become excessively shittier, some other hosts will step in.I was wrong.
As of now the protocol itself seems to fundamentally require so many resources that it disqualifies it from any sort of meaningful discussion.
Cannot that be done for 40$ per month? https://whtwnd.nat.vg/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Edit: for an example on how to create an account: https://feddit.org/post/18642154/8860187
By the way, Whitewind requires you to accept their privacy policy just to read a blog post.
This is what it looks like.
You can use this website to bypass it.
You could paste the link into pdsls.dev as well to see the record :P
https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:44ybard66vv44zksje25o7dz/com.whtwnd.blog.entry/3lo7a2a4qxg2lI didn’t know you could do this.
Amazing lol
I cant even see this text without agreeing to a ToS and I’m simply not doing that.
I’m not at all an expert on the subject, but I would ask: if it’s so easy and cheap, why aren’t more people hosting them? As far as I can tell there are only a handful in existence.
Edited the link to https://whtwnd.nat.vg/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l thanks to @[email protected] comment above
Piefed is cheap to host too, but only a few people host instances.
I just learned about Blacksky which is independent from Bluesky but uses ATProto
PieFed is much newer, has many many MANY fewer users, and seems to already have many more instances.
https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping/
Piefed has fewer instances, really.It’s a bit surprising as it seems you already provided that link recently: https://feddit.org/post/18498447/8800070
All of these links just lead to blank pages.
Piefed also has different features than Lemmy, which incites people to start instances.
About the number of ATProto PDS and relays, didn’t you already got a much larger list in this comment? https://feddit.org/post/18498447/8800070
If you actually click those links there’s nothing there.
All this rests on the implied assertion that ATProto is part of the open social web.
I don’t know the answer to that and I don’t really care to find out.
I’d say it is, since atproto is, at the very least, open.
Comment explaining how to create an account without any of the Bluesky infra:
Example of independent ATProto platform: https://blackskyweb.xyz/
Is it “open” sure, but not in any meaningful way as long as 99.99% of users are hosted by the same server.
open social web is used here as a descriptive term, to mean the collection of networks that includes activitypub, atproto, nostr (and potentially more like matrix and farcaster, depending on your inclination).
whether open social web is the correct term or not does not really matter, because if it was not than i would simply have to replace it with another term that describes the exact same thing
The discourse around decentralisation has elevated a form of network architecture that facilitates and contributes to a healthier social internet into a goal into itself.
Big agree with this.
