- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@kbin.social
Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.
AP does push the data load onto volunteers (the operators of servers) but those volunteers gain some autonomy in doing so. The important part of that quoted segment is that bluesky has distributed the costs but not the authority, in other words taxation without representation.
It’s not exactly clear to me, however, how important this second layer controlled by BlueSky is. Anyone could likewise build an indexing and searching layer on top of ActivityPub (I’m sure someone already has).
If BlueSky’s first layer is truly decentralized like ActivityPub, instances have at least some comparable amount of control, no?
At this stage we can’t really know what the future of it will be. My take away is that the early indicators for bluesky are not promising (ie; venture funded, leadership with bad track record, invite only, launched with the decentralization not actually implemented yet) while the AP alternatives of mastodon, plemora, calckey etc are already a living example of a decentralized network.
Bluesky so far to me sounds more like a strategic concession to give up the minimum amount of control to users in order to maintain the overall pyramid of social media. Facebook won the competition but people have started to question the privacy implications. If bluesky is successful in convincing the masses that it resolves the privacy question then the competition is reset to which tech giant can dominate that second layer, which of course is currently operating in a manner as to give themselves the first mover advantage.
I am far more optimistic that AP will continue to grow and improve than I am that some kind of benevolent floss implementation will succeed on that second layer of bluesky (if one ever gets the chance to compete at all).
This is answered in the blogpost:
(…)
You might be interested in reading it, might answer other questions you perhaps have.
Hm. I should probably read the spec, but I’m having a hard time getting motivated.
I’ve been quite disappointed with AP, and especially the Mastodon, community. Nostr content is slightly better, if you can avoid the worst of the Bitcoin spam brigade, but the protocol is vastly more interesting.
Given the overwhelming dominance of AT by Bluesky, I think I’ll wait until it’s evident they have no more influence than anyone else, before I invest any effort into it. I feel as if it’s otherwise going to end up like AP, with the 900lb gorilla calling the shots and everyone else trying to play catch-up.
https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01GZEBDK1JGTNJZ8SCPXA274RY