With ActivityPub, you can make the decentralized version of Twitter, or the decentralized version of YouTube, or the decentralized version of BlueSky

Christine Lemmer-Webber

Christine Lemmer-Webber

basically I am pretty skeptical the relay design is gonna be able to support many independent instances

ActivityPub as-deployed has many challenges, if you've read enough of my writing you'll certainly hear that (and some of how to improve the situation) but at least it started under a foundation of a lot of nodes participating on the network

Christine Lemmer-Webber

BTW re: "content which survives AP nodes going down", I made a demo of how to do that in an AP-spec compatible way a few years ago, and it even had encryption so not everyone hosting the content needed to know what it was https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org

Stefan Bohacek

@cwebber Is there anything at all that the AT protocol does legitimately better and that would be pretty much impossible to achieve with ActivityPub?

I'm just having a really hard time not believing that this is all about AP not (yet) supporting ads and ad-related data surveillance.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

Also I spent some time reviewing Bluesky's DID stuff enough to be fairly convinced that it won't, in a useful way to users, really survive nodes going down in the ways users believe (that's on top of did:plc being centralized, which is well known, and did:web being completely superfluous, which seems obvious but I'm surprised I don't see advocated as often). I have a lot of analysis on this stuff, but I'm hesitant to post some of this because I just sound like I'm being grouchy.

But really, I'm worried about users being sold on the idea of decentralization and it falling out from under their feet and losing faith in it, when there's architectural challenges there from the get-go. That's why this really bugs me.

Maybe they can be addressed, and that's one reason to post the critique, but I suspect it'll just make people mad at me, I dunno

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@stefan AP currently does not survive nodes going down well. That's addressable, and I have written out part of the answer of how to address it, but it's true that it doesn't do that presently and I'm not sure there's community interest to fix it.

I actually think that the people working at Bluesky do believe in decentralization, and they have a lot of good people there. If there are ways to collaborate which are fruitful, I'd rather not burn a bridge, which is partly why I keep my mouth shut. But there are serious, serious structural problems for achieving decentralization and I don't think the financial model will prioritize fixing them, and in the meanwhile many users mistakenly believe they *are* on a decentralized system.

Stefan Bohacek

@cwebber Right, but so far it sounds like the answer to my question is: not really?

I will admit that I don't have a very in-depth understanding of either of the protocols, but from what I've observed, and as you are explaining (thank you for that!), while Bluesky/ATproto does a few interesting things, there's not much stopping the fediverse from adopting these features, other than funding and perhaps, as you're saying, enough interest.

blaine

@stefan @cwebber imho, <<they're the same picture>>.

I very much agree with @pluralistic's concerns that bsky need to *actually ship* meaningful, non-reversible federation (but also trust the folks involved to do that. There will be a *lot* of side-eyeing and loss of faith in progressive movements if they don't ).

blaine

@stefan @cwebber @pluralistic *but* I came to the conclusion a long time ago that the actual underlying technology matters very little. If whatever design has struggles, it'll evolve until those issues go away.

It used to be consensus that the thing notionally AP-before-it-was-AP couldn't work because HTTP couldn't support this sort of constant flow of data. There were good reasons! Also clearly the consensus was wrong.

blaine

@stefan @cwebber @pluralistic but there was a ton of stuff that happened to make HTTP a viable transport for AP. And that's just the base layer; lots of other tech may or may not have been "optimal."

The biggest challenges AP overcame were social, and that's down to the hard work of the AP standards crew, Eugen, and loads of others who pushed things forward. Same with Jay & co. (Assuming they ship federation )

Kudos all around!

blaine

@stefan @cwebber @pluralistic maybe I'm naive but I honestly can't see how atproto isn't AP compatible with a user-invisible translation layer. It might not be *pretty*, but ultimately it's about the social aspects, right? The only reason it *wouldn't* work is if people make a decision to moderate/block content based on its source technology. Right?

Brian Swetland

@cwebber I just remain mildly annoyed at the touting of ATproto/Bluesky as "decentralized" while there's really only one viable implementation people use that's run by a VC backed corporate entity.

Similar to the "there is no portable software, only ported software" outlook on things, until there are fully-stood-up independent instances that average non-technical users can successfully migrate to, it's all theoretical at best.

Laurens Hof

@cwebber @stefan

Out of curiosity: what are your criteria for when you feel comfortable saying that Bluesky has achieved decentralisation?

diego

https://bsky.social/about/support/privacy-policy

6. C

If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, bankruptcy, receivership, purchase or sale of assets, transition of service to another provider, or other similar corporate transaction, your personal information may be sold or transferred as part of such a transaction.

Stefan Bohacek

@diego @laurenshof Good find!

damon

@cwebber Are you able to link to your previous works that addresses some of the points you make in this thread? Also, I’d be very shocked if your fair and valid criticisms burned bridges. You come across as fair, honest and open not looking to harm. It’s not harsh like some of the ATProto team have found many of Evan’s remakes to be. Thus, I’d think they’d take your criticisms in good faith and be open to collaborating which only benefits the open social web. Your thread and approach is what’s needed in terms of how to handle these situations.

Oblomov

@swetland @cwebber

I'm more than mildly annoyed by that so I wrote a long rant about it

A credible threat to (and from) commercial social network silos/2

The Fediverse, especially through Mastodon, has been acknowledged by the major players as a threat —to be eliminated.

wok (wok.oblomov.eu)

Ironically (but unsurprisingly), the only thing that has put the BS claims of decentralization to test in any way has been … the Fediverse bridge.

Oblomov

@cwebber I would really like to read such an analysis, FWIW.

Concerning the efforts to since the technical challenges, I recently found out that there's also an ongoing effort to merge some of Zot's feature into AP (https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/) and it's interesting to see how different this is from your approach.

Ultimately my hope is that BS looming will help prioritize these challenges, in whichever way they get solved.

bryan newbold

@cwebber @stefan
for what it is worth, have always found your writing and critique on all this very insightful and productive!

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@bnewbold @stefan

I've wanted to write up a "critique document" of both "present day ActivityPub" and ATproto but wasn't sure how they'd be received. I think knowing you'd be interested makes me feel pretty positive about it

I do think that @blaine is right in that there's shall we say a "fixed point of convergence" if things were to work right, and so maybe that's the right way to frame things around