this was thread was actually the one I was meaning to share before.
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@liaizon @jonny good thread! The atproto folks are great, and Jack's origin narrative is "a bit frustrating" to say the least, but one point I've always differed on, that I think Jonny calls out really well, is that _data_ portability doesn't matter, and has been a red herring for technologists in the space forever.
e.g., I have zero desire to back-port all my Flickr posts into my Pixelfed account. No more than I want the posters I had on my walls when I was 15 up on my walls today.
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@liaizon @jonny our "accounts", or more specifically individual "feeds" are situated – the data in them makes sense only in the context of the community (e.g. "followers") and wider conversation the social objects were posted in. We might want to back it up for archival purposes, and that's great and should be possible, but not an intrinsic property of decentralized networks. i.e., I have "takeout" backups of my twitter feeds and google data, but I don't need that data *here*; it's not relevant.
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@liaizon @jonny The key thing imho that any decentralized social network should provide is that you should be able to move to a new context without having to convince everyone you know to do the same. Creating a new online persona likely means the cast of folks you interact with is going to be different, and *that's a good thing*! I'd love to see us optimize for diversity, privacy, and discovery, rather than building catalogues of people-we-know.
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@liaizon @jonny (to bring it back to bluesky, I think Jonny's reflections are really important – flexible identity and networks are certainly *possible* with atproto, but the question of whether the "social architecture" in practice tends towards surveillance, advertising, or de-facto centralization is an excellent one.)
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@blaine @jonny the defacto centralization issue pops up everywhere we try to have decentralization, I really value people who are able to articulate this problem. Like the issues we have here with such a huge majority of fedi users on mastodon.social and what happens when a small instance gets cut off of that federation is a problem that continues to be hand-waved away by alot of people here.
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@liaizon @jonny
I'm definitely guilty of hand-waving on that. I'd love to see more nuanced forms of moderation because instance-level blocking is the nuclear option.e.g. As much as I despise Facebook, I recognize what a challenge it is to overcome something like Threads. We need tools that give flexible control, or as you say we end up with a fragmented network (and, by default, one that's centralizing for most, silencing for a few, which is both good and bad).
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@liaizon @jonny hopefully we can find good solutions! The challenges are very lightly technical, rather almost entirely social and political.
On the plus side, the conversation is happening! By contrast, very few people run alternative phone infrastructures that refuse to peer with monopolistic behemoths like T-Mobile or AT&T, or email servers that wholesale block gmail.com.
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@blaine @jonny @mesh really really love to see you here engaging in these conversations regardless. I feel very lucky to get to be part of the scene of folks who are building all these things. There are really good smart people working on all these projects (bluesky/fedi/nostr/indieweb/etc) and there is an amazing momentum right now for serious change in the status quo of world communications
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@liaizon @jonny @mesh it's so great to see, I love having these conversations! There was a long time while virtually all the commentary out there were breathlessly following how Facebook Appification was going to be The One True Future and it was just depressing as hell. It's so inspiring to see how many folks are both really thoughtful but also, critically, building and experimenting with really amazing alternatives. (ps did you see Erin Kissane's XOXO talk? https://erinkissane.com/xoxo
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@liaizon @blaine @jonny nitpicking- so probably not all that important of a distinction- but I'd argue the bigger centralization issue here isn't so much that a significant chunk of fedi is on mastodon.social, but that most of fedi is on Mastodon software in general which often means issues solved in other fedi software just don't work because mastodon doesn't support it.
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@blaine @liaizon @jonny you might know this, but the goal with atproto account portability is more akin to phone number portability than platform data "takeouts".
when an atproto account migrates, it isn't really apparent or visible. basically all the context and situation comes along. infra hosting is intentionally abstracted away: it is just a utility or less-visible infra, not a nucleation point for community+affiliation
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@blaine @liaizon @jonny I think it is very fair and reasonable for folks to care about decentralization in material terms. eg, just a network/system by how large the largest node is: if any node is more than 50%, or 20%, or 5%, it isn't "really" decentralized.
that hasn't ever really been a goal or metric for atproto. our biggest concern is how much leverage hosts (service providers, admins, etc) have to exploit the system, which usually comes down to lock-in and ability to exclude alternatives
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@blaine @liaizon @jonny when we think about "what makes it easy to exploit and control", a lot of it comes down to difficulty of coordinating collective action, and network effects.
making it easy for people to "exit" individual hosts, while staying in the overall network (while retaining context, and staying "situated" socially) makes it much harder to do exploitation.
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@blaine @liaizon @jonny the way AP/mastodon has played out is very different! I can't honestly say which strategy will have better outcomes in the long run. I am concerned that hosts like Facebook (Threads) will be able to exploit their users, and build network effects, and it will be hard for Threads users to "exit" that relationship w/o losing social context, and that means collective action, and it might never happen.
