Bluesky does federation-washing
Why I recommend against Bluesky
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27143191
Why I recommend against Bluesky.
Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
It's just wild to watch Bluesky fans stumble over themselves to say it's part of a federated future and that it's decentralized yada yada, when it takes millions of dollars to do with it what takes me $80 for a Raspberry Pi and $15 for a domain name to do with ActivityPub.
Idk why anyone argues it. I'm on it, but only because I want to support Not Twitter®. I'm there to just be user no. 1663987 who doesn't want to be on Twitter. I post a stupid thought, some sports commentary, and scroll the feed for a minute or two. If it went away tomorrow, I'd have 0 negative effects on my life in even the most miniscule way.
Like...I like it there, and people seem to want an alternative to Twitter pretty bad, but idk if Bluesky is it. But I also don't care to join Mastodon, as this kinda format isn't something I care about or take seriously, and I'd rather get information here. If I get a Mastodon account in the future, though, I'd rather not have it tied directly back to my spite posting account lol
Bluesky is new Twitter today.
There is nothing in its design to prevent it from becoming the X of tomorrow.
If you really don't care that much just go to Mastodon and leave bluesky as there is a better decentralized place already. If everyone on bluesky went to Mastodon instead the Fediverse would get a lot more attention and get better too.
Specially seeing you in Lemmy, why did you leave reddit then (I'm assuming you did sorry if it's not the case)? For me was precisely to not give that much power to a single company and this applies to lots of things not just twitter. Centralizing power is bad and bluesky is exactly that at the end.
I want to support people that really tries to solve this issues and not just people who takes this as an opportunity to be the next Elon Musk, ups I mean twitter.
15€ is enough for three domains!
This is very recent news but there is a group of people on Bluesky that are looking at setting up their own PDS, but it feels clear to me that the system as designed is so heavily biased against third parties doing this. It's just such a completely different vibe compared to ActivityPub platforms that are built so strongly around the goal of making it easy to do in order to make it more widely distributed.
The problem isn't the PDS but the Relays. You need terabytes of storage and and some beefy hardware to run one of these. Also there are still quite some parts centralized.
I love how it isn't a requirement for a DID to be decentralised. did:plc is completely centralised.
How naive do people have to be to think bluesky is their friend? Or that this company has any other interest but market domination?
Honestly I don't think many people are naive they just went to where everyone else went en mass after musk. There's no advantage besides userbase size at the moment and arguably some fedi servers have BSky beat on features already
I will still support it to get the normies off of twitter.
Still the right thing
A decentralised Bluesky won't work. We have all heard the arguments that it's totally impossible to decide which Fediverse instance to join. Surely that problem will doom Bluesky's decentralisation efforts.
/s
Yup. Don’t trust the folks trying to equate bluesky with the fediverse. You can tell by the people who were promoting it that there was something off about it. I suspected honeypot, or maybe just trying to rival Musk to control the conversation.
So it's not federated properly or something? Is the problem having to abandon ship if everything goes the Twitter route?
Just so that I get this out while it's fresh on my mind, what's wrong with the internet right now is cyberfeudalism.
The internet is essentially an infinite world, so no matter how much the large companies gobble up, we'll always be able to go somewhere else.
That being said, it gets really fucking exhausting to move over and over again to different apps and different locations just so to talk to people without some greedy, megalithic corporation there, snooping on everything you say and ingesting your words to feed some abomination intelligence simulation or to figure out the best way to sell you a new pair of fucking socks.
All of that being said, I'm just saying it fucking sucks to continuously be a refugee, and what sucks about apps and companies and programs that end up selling out for a dollar is that if you don't emmigrate to a new platform, you become nothing.
All of that being said, I’m just saying it fucking sucks to continuously be a refugee, and what sucks about apps and companies and programs that end up selling out for a dollar is that if you don’t emmigrate to a new platform, you become nothing.
App and companies aren't the only choice. Back in our internet roots you set up your own website to share your views. If you wanted real time chat we had telnet chat and later IRC. Your same telnet client worked on every server. Your browser was able to view every page.
Idk I'm kinda used to it, maybe that's from growing up with Aol handing out disks at the supermarket to this. Being a refugee doesn't bother me. If anything the ability to tank a corpo by making something new is kinda fun.
That being said I can see a point where that becomes impossible or just too difficult financially. That other comment about it needing basically 300 m to start a new instance really got me thinking. Is it just impossible for bluesky to fix itself now? I can see why it's not a priority from a corpo perspective but is this something that the team could fix if they made it a priority now? or is the need to keep one ID simply in compatible with the fedverse?
The internet is essentially an infinite world
I think this worldview is part of the problem. Nothing is infinite, not even the Internet. The tiny pillars that maintain critical pieces will eventually move on. We used to joke that the Internet is forever, but it's not. Data decays and dies. Old web pages are lost.
Archive.org, Wikipedia, Linux, free and open-source things we take for granted could just disappear.
Even the scope of the Internet isn't infinite. Just because something is created doesn't mean that people will see it, and not everything you can think of exists on the Internet.
It's large, for sure, but it has boundaries. Boundaries we can see in macroscopic forms.
you become nothing.
You are not nothing because you're not lost in an infinite landscape. Again, the Internet has boundaries, and singular actions that nobody has seen can happen.
The problem is having to get 300 millions to open another instance https://feddit.org/post/6795570
huh
huh, is Bridgey Fed not using relays?
As far as I understand do they use Bluesky's infrastructure.
Its really just another pds.
From the article ...
Yep.
Its 'federated' as long as you ignore a single massive chokepoint controlled by one company that allows them to block/ban/censor users of any part of the system.
So functionally, their 'federation' system is actually just a false marketing/propoganda campaign that may also result in crowd sourcing some server costs.
It's psuedo-federation, along the lines of a psuedo-historian or psuedo-scientist: They pretend to be something they are not, in such a way that makes them seem trustworthy when they are in fact not.
This is why I think ActivityPub needs DIDs for identity management like Bluesky has with AT-Proto, but in a true, user owned way: https://fedid.me/
Give AP the benefits of AT, without Bluesky involved.
I still don't understand how the PDS concept matters in an interconnected network of replies. Conversations are threaded, and that "personal data" needs all parties involved in the chain to move to this new thing at the same time. It's not going to happen.