What is hard to understand about the Feed Our Feeds BS is what Cory Doctorow @pluralistic, who normally is quite outspoken about these tech bro efforts to coopt legitimate social technology, is doing supporting it.
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@joborg @jubei @cellularmoose @mastodonmigration @cwebber
Re: as in Mastodon
So IOW recreate ActivityPub (AP) in the middle of the rest of the Bluesky stack which seems a bit silly when AP already exists and is quite successfully deployed (as Christine notes someplace in her posts).
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@joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @mastodonmigration @cwebber
If you will, though from a technical perspective ATproto is a better protocol, and more successfully deployed (in terms of user count and resource usage). ATproto already has distributed outboxes (and labellers, blocklists et c. missing here). -
@joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @mastodonmigration @cwebber What is needed for a turnkey small server is an inbox implementation (AppView in AT lingo) with a cache.
Implementing this would enforce protocol compliance/interoperability on Bsky and thus restrict their ability to harm their users, as well as enabling independent alternative providers (including "server migration"). -
@joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @mastodonmigration @cwebber I'm hopeful for this to happen, since the current Bsky team seems open to this kind of work. Of course, the question is whether that lasts long enough to get that fire escape in place...
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Joborg last edited by [email protected]
@joborg @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber
Don't understand all the technical terms you are spooling out. Experience shows that when someone is saying something is simple to do, but it hasn't been demonstrated yet, then it is good to be wary.
If Bsky really wanted this to happen, they would at least have a multiple relays operational and a convincing story about making the technology public and, lockboxing it. Short of that it is just a 'trust us' play.
more...
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by [email protected]
@joborg @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber
Which is kind of crazy because the entire rationale of the foundation is that you can't trust Bsky.
Edit: Let's say that again. The entire basis of Free Our Feeds is that the public needs to invest huge sums of money in a technology because you can't trust the developer of that technology.
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@mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber
Not having dug into the details I cannot confidently say that it's easy, but at least AT was planned for multiple implementations, service providers and applications (cf pixelfed et c.).As I understand it Bsky are actively trialling different relays. Their core technology is public and open source (on github) but not adapted to and packaged for small servers yet.
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@joborg @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber
Understand this is their pitch, but until there are multiple independent full scale independent nodes, it is still vaporware.
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@mastodonmigration @joborg @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber I think its worse than that. The rationale of FOF is to invest a bunch of money in a technology because you can’t trust its creator to be benevolent. But, the thing you’re building will only work if you can trust the company (that you don’t trust) to not hobble what you’ve built once you need it to work.
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@mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber Not quite vapour: the protocol does the things that it claims and the core Bsky implementation is there as a reference and proof of concept.
I don't think we'd want more big Bsky nodes, apart from a second big relay, but rather large numbers of smallish ones.
Then, getting Bsky to support migration is touchy and would require there to already exist well-working "servers" to migrate to and where the new migration protocol works.
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@joborg @jubei @cellularmoose @mastodonmigration @cwebber
Re: better protocol
I don't know that this is true. There's nothing Bluesky has done that a few million dollars dropped in Eugene Rochko's lap couldn't get done for Mastodon.
The primary difference is Eugene won't give up some measure of control to VCs in return for their money.
The money being raised by this effort very arguably would be much better spent on enhancing the Fediverse.
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@marcusb @mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber Yep, a surprise closing of any emergency exit that is built would be really bad. But the same goes for mastodon.social or other big fedi servers.
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@joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @mastodonmigration @cwebber Scaling by 1M users per day in November was pretty convincing to me, and it's not at all obvious that AP/Mastodon has that potential without an incompatible do-over.
I agree that there is an argument for funding Fedi improvements (which I do), but improving future conditions for 25M Bsky users (and other AT applications to come) is not negligible.
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@joborg @marcusb @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber
That is a false equillvalency. There are thousands of other Mastodon Fediverse servers to 'escape' to. Plus, mastodon.social is not owned by a bunch of VCs, that we need to invest millions of dollars to be protected from.
Starting to think you are just trolling here, and going to exit this conversation.
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@marcusb @joborg @joeinwynnewood @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber
Exactly it is a Catch 22 rationale.
Well stated.
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@joborg @mastodonmigration @jubei @cellularmoose @cwebber
There's an awful lot of work in all of that, and it all depends on the on-going good-will of Bsky to play nice.
That's not something I'm willing to trust given how they've been financing the company.
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@joborg @jubei @cellularmoose @mastodonmigration @cwebber
There's no question Mastodon can scale. The ability is fundamental to the AP protocol. No 1 server needs to scale. The load can be distributed across many dozens of servers; spinning up new ones can be done very quickly.
If people moved to Mastodon en mass, movement organizations would spin up servers using their brand and host their members, once again spreading the load.
Sure improving conditions is great, if Bsky allows it.
