As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • Right. I guess that’s similar with bridged users - you see them on bsky.app, even though they are actually located elsewhere.

    What I struggle with is seeing the decentralization in practice, when the only place I can ever see AT proto in action is when Bluesky users are bridged to the fediverse. Bluesky has a shitload of users and there are a bunch of people jumping on the technology - why is there not so much as an understandable proof of concept out there?

    On ActivityPub it’s so easy to understand. “See this post? Well, here’s the same post on some other domain, hosted by other people”.

    I don’t understand how Bluesky can be this difficult to understand, yet apparently fulfil such a fundamental need.









  • 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.





  • 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.


    • 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.