> However, I disagree with some of the analysis, and have a couple specific points to correct.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
In other words, the public god's-eye-view allows for a pantheon, but not a civilization. You can only have so many gods who see all.
An important characteristic of a decentralized system is scoping what you *don't* need to know.
This wasn't in the design goals of ATProto, and it has effects.
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Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥋☣️replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
To me the *ideal* is for *everyone* who uses social media to either self host or to be hosted by someone they know and trust personally. Even a tiny fraction of this would be far, far more than a million users!
Will we get there? Who knows? Few would have predicted that we would even get to where we are now, and numbers are only growing...
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
I may be coming across as some academic computer science nerd. It's actually the opposite. I'm a humanities nerd who cares about the agency of users so much I've twisted myself into a shape where I can do a computer science thing.
But architecture matters. It affects the worlds we can have.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
This is what I say when I say that Bluesky's goals of "credible exit" may be reasonable, but it's not decentralized. There is no getting around the fact that the system, as designed, is designed for a few large players. Small players can play on the *periphery*, but they can't play the big game.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Now, you might think, maybe ATProto could fix this!
And it can.
And the solution, ultimately, will end up looking... a lot like ActivityPub.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by [email protected]
The point is that nearly everyone knows at this point that "sure, Bluesky is centralized today, in practice!" But a lot of the responses I see are "but decentralization is just around the corner thanks to ATProto!"
So that's why I'm writing this out.
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flaeky pancakoreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber one thing I am surprised no one has mentioned.. the very philosophy of a gods eye view is inherently a centralizing one ?
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Well, that's it. We've reached as far as we're going tonight.
There's still a bit left, a bit of reframing about what I am and am not concerned about with decentralized identity, and then a bigger topic about Bluesky's design goals vs community expectations. Then we'll talk talk about values.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Those last two, expectations and values, are really important to me. And I think they'll maybe be the most thoughtful part of all of this.
Of course, they're probably not what most people care about from me, about this. Probably what I've said is all many care to hear from me and that's fine.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
For those who care about such things, tune in tomorrow, where hopefully we'll wrap this up. For those who were just hoping to hear the decentralization analysis, hope you found it useful.
Regardless, I wish you a very happy
=== REST OF TODAY BREAK ===
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Gert V 🇵🇸replied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber We need symmetry and Big Tech will never ever give it to us even if they promise.
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@darius would one answer be to point out that on that perspective humans in real life would only ever ‘meaningfully participate’ in exceptional circumstances (i.e., when there is a wholly closed conversation for which all participants are present)
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@semitones right. Seems intractable
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@Semitones @Darius Kazemi @Christine Lemmer-Webber
If the issue were simply wanting to be able to see every *reply*, one viable approach for decentralized social media would be to give the OP ownership of replies, and then people (who are given permission by the OP to reply) decide whether or not to reply based on how they feel about the OP's moderation policies. I do not know how technically challenging that is or isn't in ActivityPub in particular, but there are certainly solutions that don't require Bluesky's centralized approach.
On the other hand, if people insist that they ought to be able to see every *message* on the network, then, yeah, that is indeed (as Darius says) intractable. -
@dynamic @cwebber @semitones right. I meant all messages period, not all replies to a post you're looking at
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Jens Finkhäuserreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber My only significant comment on this part is that there's a third option that few people seem to consider, but that @librecast is built around and @interpeer as well, albeit at a slightly different level:
What you call message passing would be unicast in a packet switching protocol like IP. One sender, one recipient.
What you call shared heap would be more like broadcast. One sender, all recipients.
There's also multicast. One sender, interested recipients *only*.
The fun part is...
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Well hello.
So yesterday I stepped onto a crumbled piece of sidewalk, twisted and sprained my ankle, and fucked up my wrist. That, and I think I've said the most important things and this is day *three* of summarizing things from my blogpost, so I will be brief.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
It was nice to be prompted about @spritely's values and it lead to a good conversation internally, and we did capture those in my blogpost, but I think that should be covered again from a more official organizational side, separate from this.
