deleted by creator

I have no doubt we will!

While we still doesn’t have all kinds of active niche communities over here, it is incredible how much the community has grown since I first came here. And that’s not really all that long ago.

Thanks for joining us! :)

Yeah, it’s a little ironic to say the least. I suspect the tech giants are more worried about titties than they are of literal fascism.

Ah, sorry, it’s in the context of what Elena Rossini writes about the limitations of the mobile app.

As PeerTube draws content from independent servers, it’s hard for them to comply with the content policies of Google and Apple. The PeerTube app you can find in the App Store or Google Play Store therefore only contains content from a very short list of whitelisted PeerTube instances, where Apple or Google have accepted content from these instances to be presented in their app ecosystems.

F-Droid doesn’t have such limitations, and as a result the stuff you’ll find in the F-Droid app is the same as you’ll find in https://sepiasearch.org/ .

It’s worth stressing that you can get around Google’s totalitarian restrictions by installing PeerTube from F-droid.

If you’re on Android, you should probably consider using F-droid whenever possible anyway. Personally I like Droid-ify, which is an F-droid client with a nice interface.

If you’re on iPhone, you’re out of luck. The EU might eventually come to the rescue of European users. American iPhone users will probably not be surprised to learn that they are shit out of luck.

Thanks! Maybe I’m just dumb in my own unique way, but I find the practical implications of AT proto hard to wrap my head around. :)

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.

Cool.

It’s funny how one of the main criticisms of ActivityPub is that it’s too difficult to implement, yet after all this attention the best the ATmosphere has managed to come up with is a toilet flushing repository. But I see the value of the portable identity. I think.

Okay, that’s more interesting! Thanks!

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.

But on frontpage.fyi, if you want to sign up, you have to sign up through Bluesky. They direct you to bsky.app to create your account.

I just don’t see how this is a real functional example of a portable account. Maybe it is not supposed to be - if so, is the decentralized nature of accounts demonstrated anywhere in a practical way?

I struggle to understand things I cannot see.

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.