Yeah, I know. Still, we can make it clear what we think about that. 😉

😞

Now do the same with snaps.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I don’t think you’re missing anything. Lemmy just does not have UI plumbing for that, I believe.

I don’t think so. Lemmy communities are a form of a group, and Lemmy posts are in effect boosts by the community. It seems to me in theory it should be possible for a regular fedi post to be boosted by a community group, but I don’t think Lemmy has a way of doing it right now?

This.

I will add one more thing to this, to make it maybe a bit more clear: the question is who has agency over what.

In Fediverse, communities large and small can set up their instances and have full agency over moderation decisions, registrations, blocking, defederation. They can build and maintain their garden while allowing people in and out as they choose.

In BlueSky, that kind of agency is gone. The storage/hosting layer is irrelevant — the idea is that you can move your account and content anywhere else with exactly same access to everything else retained, so that’s not where moderation decisions can happen.

The “search and discoverability” layer, on the other hand, is where “providers” reign supreme. And they are incentivised to slurp as much data as possible to “offer a better service”, and are not as closely connected to specific communities or people. The power dynamics are completely different.

This de-coupling of storage/hosting and search/discoverability is billed as a great advantage, but it’s not an advantage for the users — it’s an advantage for the providers.

In fedi there is no single entity that can have full visibility into the whole network. In BlueSky, that kind of visibility for “search and discoverability” providers is the basic assumption the protocol is built on.

And let’s not even start delving into the question of consent here… 🙄

@rysiek first of all I don’t see any problems in Twitter technically. It worked well for long time and only now with Musk as CEO we see that not only architecture matters but people supporting it also.

Check out Mudge’s whistleblowing report:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/13/twitter-whistleblower-mudge-congress/

I read the whole 200+ pages, here are some excerpts that I found the most damning:
https://rys.io/static/TwitterWhistleblowerRevelationsExcerpts.html

Regarding BS: just take a look at how centralized fediverse is in reality. Eugene just happened to be always talking about mastodon instead of fediverse, everyone is trying to register on mastodon.social when they herd of it first time. I mean they whole fediverse for people right now is only what a man with a German company did.

And yet when somebody forks Mastodon (like GlitchSoc or Hometown), they are not beholden to Eugene. Moving between instances works. Moving between forks works. Yes, Mastodon has an outsized presence in fedi, but it has nowhere near as much control as Google Search has over website traffic, or as the biggest BS’s “search and discoverability layer” provider will have over BlueSky’s users.

Fedi is simply a different architecture on a very basic level, built in a way that is not as supportive of economies of scale and “winner-takes-all” model, as BlueSky is.

Would I want fedi to be more diverse in instance software offerings? Totally. Is it fair to compare this to secondary centralization that BlueSky will support by design? Absolutely not.

Once again it’s not technicality but also people who support it matters. We can take at-protocol and do many integrations by our own to create own high level crystallization. Or we can give up on current AP and move on to the next one some time. The more ideas you give to the world the more it gives back.

Differences in protocol design define what will happen in a network run on it. Differences in design between BlueSky’s protocol and ActivityPub mean that secondary centralization will be way, way easier in BlueSky than it is on fedi — to a point that it seems this is by design.

If they are to make their own evil corp then you and I are allowed not to be it’s customers.

How’s that working for us all regarding Google Search? We’re not even paying Google for search and yet we cannot escape it. I use DuckDuckGo daily, and yet I still am sometimes forced to use Google Search. Websites that want any real traffic need to optimize for Google Search.

“Voting with your feet” is a naïve myth unless the underlying system actually empowers people to do it effectively. Fedi does. BlueSky very definitely does not in the layer that matters.

Decentralization is about community and people

Totally. No wonder, then, that BlueSky’s design carves out a space for secondary centralization exactly where communities and people can be found: search and discoverability.

I’m sure they did not b0rk their implementation and it will not turn out that for some weird reason BlueSky can only work with some very specific DIDs. That would be unheard of, even though it would be clearly in their best financial interest. 🤣

On a more serious note, BlueSky seems to me to be designed in a way that allows its creators to claim decentralization while at the same time have similar secondary centralization characteristics as, say, cryptocurrencies. The separation into “layers” means it doesn’t matter which node you happen to use for storage of your data, the important, user-locking-in stuff happens in a higher layer.

The higher layers provide search and discoverability. It just so happens that in case of these, scale matters. The bigger the provider, the “better” the service. Look at Google Search. Web is open and decentralized, but search got all-but monopolized because of economies of scale and because of the intrinsic way being Big in search is an advantage.

BlueSky is trying to replicate that, it seems to me. “Here, have your decentralized and irrelevant storage layer and be merry, and we’ll just build the biggest search/discoverability provider and own the game anyway”.

Look how different this is from the Fediverse. Fediverse is not layered. It is decentralized from instance to instance, and it seems that scale is not that much of a benefit — or might even be a hinderance. This promotes loads of smaller instances, with no single entity controlling any important facet of the network.

This is completely different from how BlueSky is designed. Again, to me, BlueSky’s (BS, I like that acronym) design is made specifically so that scale is a benefit and the winner takes all — in the search and discoverability layer.

It’s a trojan horse, from people who brought you Twitter.

That currently they are using the DID Placeholder, which seems to be centralized. They can use other DIDs, but they don’t. And once you build a system on something it’s really difficult to replace it.

Bluesky is based on the principle of allowing users to build a shared and open social media platform.

Bollocks. They are using a centralized “DID Placeholder” thingamajig, claiming they want to “replace it later”:

We introduced DID Placeholder because we weren’t totally satisfied with any of the existing DID methods. We wanted a strongly consistent, highly available, recoverable, and cryptographically secure method with cheap and fast propagation of updates.

We cheekily titled the method “Placeholder”, because we don’t want it to stick around. We’re actively hoping to replace it with something less centralized. We expect a method to emerge that fits the bill within the next few years, likely a permissioned DID consortium.

This assumes the level of competence never before seen in any government, ever. In other words, classic conspiracy theory, aka bullshit.

Link? Thanks for adding the link! Neat!

However:

The principal of creating deep pictures is registered for patent in Germany and Japan, where all major camera industry is settled.

Fuck patents.

If a cafe wants to enforce a “no phones” rule, they can do so relatively effectively. If a website wants to enforce a “no robots” rule (especially if they also want to not require any login to view the content on the site) they can ultimately only pretend to be able to do that effectively.

But you’re again conflating the issue of consent and enforcement. There are things we are able to do but we know to ask first before we do them. The fact that something is possible doesn’t mean that it’s allowed. The fact that something is not easy to enforce against does not make it okay to do it anyway.

What about public parks? Is it okay to walk around you while you’re having a conversation and record you, and then post that conversation on-line? Is it okay to use directional microphones to record you in such a setting? Doesn’t the whole recording-in-the-park thing from the Conversation give you the creeps?

Are you saying that the fact that something is difficult to enforce against makes it okay to do, even if the person you do this to does not want it done?

But unlisted toots are still technically public. If you scrape my profile, you will get them. And the point is: the fact that they are public in the technical sense does not mean I consented to them being scraped etc.

Just as wearing a short skirt is not blanket consent to sexual advances.

You technically can, and if you get caught the cafe can (and should, imo) kick you out for doing so.

Right, so we agree here. But you did not respond to the second question: are cafés public or private spaces?

I’m a big proponent of enforcing privacy in online and offline spaces with technology, policy, and social norms. I’m also opposed to magical thinking. Telling people that they can semi-publish, to have some of the benefits of publishing without some of the consequences, is misleading to the point of being dishonest.

Nobody is saying that. Nowhere in the thread I linked is that being said. Nowhere in my comments did I say that. It’s not about telling people they can or cannot “semi-publish”, it’s about telling people creating systems and products that they need to ask these people for permission to do certain things.

Or in other words: it’s not about telling café patrons they can or can’t have perfectly private conversations in the café, it’s about telling anyone who might want to potentially record conversations in that café “you have to ask and receive permission for this first”. That’s a pretty crucial difference.

Are cafés public, or private spaces? Can I just sit at the table next to yours and stream and record your conversation with your friends?

I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith. In fact, reading your comment again, I am pretty sure you are arguing in bad faith. And I have better things to do than engaging with that.

If anyone wants to engage in an honest conversation, those who follow me on fedi or have seen my comments around here know I’m totally game for that. But “and yet you engage in society! curious!”-level discussion is not worth anyone’s time, frankly. 🙂

Great job at working hard to miss the point entirely. 🤷‍♀️

I am one of those technology educators, and today I would still warn people that “Internet does not forget”, and that they need to be careful what they put out there.

That doesn’t mean we should not demand explanation from people who make it so, and that we should not demand them to ask for consent and respect our refusal to give it. I really appreciate how fedi culturally puts this front-and-center. I hope it continues to do so, and that this way of thinking spreads farther!

I agree that consent should not be a controversial topic. Regardless of how much it inconveniences techbros trying to “disrupt” yet another area of human endeavor.

I think search engines indexing plain old websites (blogs etc) are an importantly different case.

The nature of the medium in blogs/news websites/etc is way more public and way less intimate (in general…) than social media. Social media blur the line between private and public conversations, for better or worse.

Social media is like having a conversation in a public cafe; websites/blogs is more like publishing a newspaper or standing on the corner of a street shouting your message at strangers.

Making a public archive of newspapers or recording a person shouting at strangers is one thing. Recording semi-private conversations in a cafe is a whole different thing. Does that make sense?

Or exposure to harassment, including offline. Or context collapse. Or…

In the end, adding search would change the space dramatically, especially any privacy-related expectations. And there are about 2mln people who are using fedi with current set of expectations. There are hundreds of thousands who had been using it with this set of expectations for years. Waltzing in and bulldozing these expectations is just not a good idea.

So yeah, don’t do search on fedi unless you do some deep research about consent.

I don’t have to defend my right to decide how stuff I put out there can be used. Whoever wants to scrape my toots has to explain why they want to do so, and get my consent first.

And “well it’s publicly available so it’s fair game” is not enough of an argument. Just as “she was wearing a short skirt” is not consent to sexual advances.

Ah I might have misunderstood, sorry.

Fediverse is like e-mail
Therefore it needs a search engine

What.

The bigger issue is consent. People on fediverse feel very strongly about consent, and search engines tend to just ignore it. Better do some serious research into consent to search on fedi before embarking on designing a search engine for fedi.

Yes. And neo-colonialism.

It is important to remember that disappearing messages (in any application) are only helpful for people who you trust currently. (And until the messages are deleted.)

Sure, no question about it. Still, how the feature is designed matters, and I feel a design requiring both parties to consent to disappearing messages before they are enabled is bad design in this case.

One of the reasons why is: you might want to send some sensitive messages to someone while they are away/offline/unavailable. Being able to enable disappearing messages and then send what you need to send is quite important.

disappearing messages (with mutual agreement)!

Not entirely sure “mutual agreement” makes sense? I would need to read more about it, but my feeling is that it is reasonable to have the sender of the message set the terms here.

live messages – they update for all recipients as you type them.

Why would anyone want that? Is there a way to disable that?

This story again: some ISPs are shit at implementing IPv6.

I don’t know. But I’ll try to listen to BIPOC folk when they talk about it.

Dunno… I admit that as a white person I cannot fully grasp the “inherent whiteness” of the Fediverse in its full extend

That, to me, is the crux of it, so I will trust the BIPOC folk when they tell me we need to improve.

This seems very on-topic and in-depth: https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/

There was quite a bit of meta-drama on fedi around BIPOC people being told to CW racism. But that’s a far, far cry from “levels of racist abuse unseen on commercial platforms”.

Before anyone construes this into a MaStOdOn WiLl NeVeR wOrK hot take, here’s the crux of Nolan’s blog post:

In my five years on Mastodon, I’ve found that there is a lot it does better than Twitter, but there is also a lot that is just endemic to social media. To the endless scroll. To the status games, the quest for adulation, the human urge to shame and shun and one-up and manipulate. I’m sure this goes back to Usenet – Jaron Lanier called it “chaotic human weather”.

There is a better way to foster kind, thoughtful, generous, joyful conversation on the internet. I’m not convinced that Mastodon has found the magic formula, but it is a step in the right direction.

My initial claim was:

Aren’t you the person who went around fedi a few weeks ago and threatened fedi admins with legal action?

You said:

I can’t see any threat of legal actions

I provided the proof.

And because of your report about CP to mstdn.social

Still waiting for any kind of proof of that. Hint: there isn’t one, because I have never reported anyone for that kind of material.

And then you want to tell me, who has been in the Fediverse since ostatus

My ancient identi.ca account is here, if we want to talk OStatus. Care to share yours?

that you have so much more experience in administration and moderation?

I never claimed that I do. I said that fedi admins do. And provided a link to back that up.

And that you’re mentioned in that toot is only, because the Mastodon client added you autmatically.

Well if someone is throwing around legal threats, perhaps they could go the extra mile to be clear in who they are meant for? “Sorry, Your Honor, this account was mentioned accidentally” is not a great strategy here. And since I have no way of knowing what’s in the head of a person writing something like this, I can only base my reading of sich a threat on what is actually, you know, written there. 🤷‍♀️

But for you, everything is about you anyway, and you also refer to everything directly as an attack on you. 🤦 My gosh, your ego must have suffered.

Indeed, I am completely broken by the revelation that a legal threat by some rando on the Internet is not, in fact, directed at me. Hartbreaking.

Very thankful that there are people around reasonable enough to react to a fediblock by threatening legal action to fedi admins (btw, thanks for letting me know Stux is also targeted, I had no clear proof there are multiple fedi admins targeted, now I do!). People who totally aren’t making this “about themselves”. Internet truly is a wondrous place!

I have never once reported a profile for “child pornography”, as I have so far been fortunate enough to never have bumped into that on fedi. But sure, whatever. 😄

EDIT: I can’t see any threat of legal actions. But you don’t care, because you interpret what you want into what was written 🤦

Well, the OP is actually talking about “requests” being “forwarded” to their lawyer right in their post, so there’s that. But if you need a more clear proof, here you are. Directed at me and at a specific fediadmin.

I eagerly await any proof of your claims about my “reporting profiles because of child pornography” now. I’m sure you have them, you wouldn’t be making such strong claims otherwise, now would you?

Wait, I remembered something. Aren’t you the person who went around fedi a few weeks ago and threatened fedi admins with legal action? And then threatened me with legal action too just because I boosted one fedadmin’s toot that was not even directly mentioning you?

Yes. Yes indeed you are!

I really do wonder why people are inclined to block you and your instance. Truly a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an enigma.

Very good piece, I must say.