> However, I disagree with some of the analysis, and have a couple specific points to correct.
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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.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
I also clarified a bit: the parts I'm concerned about with the did:plc stuff aren't as much the governance, and I think Bluesky is taking some good steps there by planning a certificate transparency log. That's good. Glad to see it.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
I do think Bluesky is heading in a tough direction though in terms of community expectations vs the ATProto philosophy that replication and indexing of a firehose are the primary way things work.
It's a tough situation but Bluesky is speedrunning Twitter so fast it practically is Twitter.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
People want Bluesky's devs to prevent their content from being replicated and indexed by people they don't like, well, I think it really is that: a *conflict*.
People were encouraged to join a Twitter replacement, they are expecting Twitter-like solutions. Can't blame 'em.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Given that "anyone can replicate and index!" is literally the *entire* design philosophy of ATProto, it's not going to be something easy to solve. I don't have an answer, but hey, I'm working on fairly fundamentally different designs, so it's not my problem to solve.
That said...
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Like the present-day fediverse, Bluesky was majorly popularized by a bunch of queer people early on. As a trans person I watched a bunch of my friend join and felt so safe they posted things they never would have in today's environment when the community was small.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
The decision about whether or not to boot horrible, well known transphobic people (protip: answer is yes) from the platform seems clear enough to me. I'm not sure the "speech vs reach" approach is working.
And it seems to me people are finding they don't have tools in their hands to do anything.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
For all its faults, and there are *many* and I have *railed* against the instance-oriented approach to moderation on the fediverse and have been writing about and working towards alternatives for a while, instance moderation empowers better here.
I think this will be a real test for Bluesky.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
But more broadly I think *neither* the present-day fediverse nor Bluesky meet the needs of the future.
The "global town square" is a social media concept invented by centralized social media in the early web 2.0 era.
Social media by millenials, for millenials. What's the future?
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
So to some degree, I don't have a lot of interest in trying to figure out what the solution to this is, because I think these are the wrong designs. I don't like the context-collapse firehose much at all, I'm interested in "contextual communication", "secure collaboration", and "healthy communities"
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
That's the kind of direction we're trying to build towards with @spritely, but as said, I'm dropping the values discussion here, that's something we'll talk about later in the week. I would like to talk about that independently, focusing there on what to build, not on a critique.
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Luis Villareplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
@cwebber I agree with this as first-principles, but I do note that every contextual/healthy/secure community that I'm a part of spends a pretty solid amount of time sharing and discussing stuff from the context-collapse firehoses (for many appropriate contextual reasons - laughter, learning, safety, etc.) I am not sure how we square those facts.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
But I do think there's a big collision course ahead, and I don't know how it'll resolve. Investors and users who want quick resolution to real concerns on one side, a vision for public, highly replicated and indexed by anyone content on the other side.
It'll be a challenge.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
There's opportunities for collaboration maybe. I've asserted pretty strongly that Bluesky isn't decentralized and as a system, it isn't. You can't tear the power dynamics out of the analysis. Otherwise what's the point?
But Bluesky uses decentralization techniques, there may be collab space there.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
I'm not trying to be a mean, horrible person to Bluesky's devs. I'm really not. I actually think that they've provided something much *better* than X-Twitter to a lot of people.
But Bluesky has speedrun this whole thing so fast, Bluesky is already no longer the underdog. It's Twitter TNG.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
And that means we can't pretend that decentralization is something that's some future possibility or goal, that it's gonna happen some day we promise.
I'd love to be proven wrong on everything I laid out.
Though I think the only way to do that without being worse than AP is serious rearchitecting.
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Christine Lemmer-Webberreplied to Christine Lemmer-Webber last edited by
Who's empowered and who has agency and how we can increase the agency of everyone is indeed, all I care about. It's what "decentralization" means to me and matters to me as a goal. You can't drop the power dynamics. It *is* about the power dynamics.
I want us to build a better future. A real one.