I'd like to see what the metrics for the Fediverse would look like if it included federated Threads users.
Yeah, but bluesky has users.
I'm pretty happy with engagement in the Fediverse.
Me too I love the hate bots.
So does Reddit but you presumably see some value in federated platforms yea?
Oh yeah sure. I'm here after all, jumped ship from Reddit a year or so ago and I actually prefer Lemmy.
I jumped ship from twitter to mastodon around the same time. And while I like the idea of mastodon and I like the interface, fact is that Reddit / lemmy is a different sort of usage from twitter / bluesky / mastodon. Twitter I mostly used to keep up with my favourite content creators, and occasionally shout at clouds. Those content creators just aren't on mastodon, they've mostly moved to bluesky. Those are the users that are the foundation of a platform like that. So yeah, I use lemmy and bluesky now.
TBH I'm not sure mastodon could scale up big anyway - it would be a nightmare trying to regulate bad content and comply with local laws etc.
Are you me?
So does Twitter.
I'm always shocked by the number of of BlueSky fans that show up on Lemmy. If they don't care about centralization why are they here and not on Reddit?
Because they've been told it's federated and don't understand that it really isn't. My bluesky profile reads "Created a profile until you all figure out Bluesky is another Twitter."
All I use it for is to read post from people not on mastodon and to reshare my bridged posts from mastodon.
Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about "not Reddit" and "not Twitter." I'm one of those users personally (not that I don't care about the idea, it's good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.
If I didn't dislike the Twitter format as much, I'd probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I'd probably be on Tumblr still if I didn't only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn't have such a horrible app.
People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn't care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by "newest posts first" went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.
The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you're into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants' company towns.
Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there's a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?
ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀
It's a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.
otoh, atproto's PLC DID method is also not really decentralized... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).
portable identity
So like when bluesky starts having to pay back their investors I can portable my identity to.... one of the other equally populated blueskies out there?
... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
In the blog post you linked, neither the author or myself came to your conclusion:
However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.
The blog post also says this:
There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its "credible exit" (Bluesky's own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.
My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more "decentralized architecturally" I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.
Okay yes this makes sense. Although, honestly i think I'd prefer the AP method of doing it because BlueSky sends ALL content to all nodes, so it's MUCH less cost effective to join with a private server.
I run my own lemmy instance, so i know the data volume since 2023 has been probably like a terabyte or so. But, with BlueSky I'd have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes (a guess based almost entirely on nothing).
So it really boils down to yes I agree that AP has problems with data accessibility, but I'd prefer that over unnecessary data redundancy
with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes
I think this is a common misconception based on some critics' incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) "A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month" for some numbers.
If I understand correctly, to run a "full nework relay" does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren't interested in for any long period of time.
Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people's relays.
Disclaimer: I'm not an atproto expert, and I haven't set any of this up myself.
You can design an appview that crawls PDSes directly, no relay needed.
AppViewLite does that
Capitalists love interoperability when they can use it to disrupt other capitalists. When they get in a dominant position they hate it.
It's basic enshittification theory.
For those who enjoy in-depth write-ups, Christine Webber has looked at how decentralized BlueSky is really, before: https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698
Fediverse
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