Cool. Look at that. It's the daily Bluesky post. Is it my turn tomorrow?
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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The concerns are true but if people leave Twitter for Bluesky it's still an improvement because Elon uses the algorithm to boost far-right content and he has your data.
What is actually missing from AT Proto to be usable in the way Doctorow describes? He writes:
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.
But according to the source code repo, federation features are fully available, including independent servers. There's even a guide for setting up an independent server: https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
Edit: looks like I'm probably not missing anything, and the protocol is fully capable of what Doctorow wants, it just doesn't have any other large instances yet: https://social.coop/@bnewbold/113420983888441504
Edit 2: I found a post that seems much more honest and informative about the actual limitations of AT Proto. In particular:
Relays cannot talk to Relays. If Bluesky Social, PBC decided to show ads (or do something else you don’t like), it would be very hard for you to switch to a different Relay and still be able to interact with all the other folks who stayed at the Bluesky Social, PBC Relay.
I’ve read over the documentation a few times and maybe I’ve missed it somewhere else but I’m not aware of any option to host a relay yet. As far as I know only self hosting PDS’s are an option now (which only handle your own data and authentication but still relies on a relay to serve you content from the rest of the network) and app views (which are the front ends that sort and show content)
So in a sense bluesky is distributed and portable within the ATProto network, but still centralized until other entities can host relays and interopt (or opt out of interoperability) within the network.
Here's a post on how to set up a relay: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running%20a%20Full-Network%20atproto%20Relay%20(July%202024)
Thank you for sharing, that’s exactly what I was looking for!
How many relays are there?
...how is it Bluesky's responsibility to set up an independent server? If they're the ones that set up the server, how can it be independent?
Doctorow's complaint only makes sense as a critique of Bluesky itself if he's talking about the technical aspects of AT Proto. If what he really means is just "nobody has bothered to actually deploy and maintain a fully separate relay instance", that's not a problem with Bluesky, it's an ecosystem issue that he could help by encouraging people to do that work, rather than discouraging them from learning about the platform.
I honestly don't have much stake in this fight, I'm just frustrated that, as far as I can tell, Doctorow, an intelligent person with a nontrivial following, appears to be spreading misinformation about what is or isn't possible with Bluesky.
If there aren't relays, then there is a reason there aren't relays.
If you feel strongly that you're right about this, then perhaps you should invest in standing up a public relay to prove your point.
As I mentioned above, I don't feel strongly about Bluesky winning, I just don't like misinformation. (I also have other things I care about more that take up what little free time I have for tech stuff already, so I'm not going to undertake something major just to prove a point.) If there's really a fundamental problem with AT Proto and how it can be used, Doctorow's post should have made that explicit.
I did find a (more recent) post that goes into detail about what's lacking, and I've edited my original post accordingly.
It is kind of weird thay it hasn't been done yet, but in that thread they posted it sounded like it's totally possible at the moment.
Day 2984783 of mentally substituting "enshittification" with "rot"
Enshittification is specifically how something inevitably gets worse and more anti-user due to pressures from capitalism/shareholders/profit incentive.
Rot, at least in my mind, is not that specific. It could mean the codebase is not well maintained and slowly failing, as an example.
Yes, that's true, but the word sounds bad so I'm using the more fun one. I suppose we could use a qualifier, like "corporate rot"
Cory Doctorow actually coined the term, so a decent strategy given how poorly it’s used would be to trust its use any time you read him and substitute it every other time
Corporate rot sounds better than just rot as enshittification happens on purpose due to seeking to extract maximum value from something where as rot is just a natural consequence of atrophy over time
I mean, what if “we” just stop using various social media platforms all together? I remember the days when various people never really shared their opinions and beliefs about most topics to the general public. Maybe we should get back to face to face conversations about life topics.
Humans are social creatures by nature. The goal should be to improve our social interactions instead of letting others exploit them for profit
You can’t put that tube back in the tube of toothpaste
It's unlikely it'll go back in the bottle, and that style of social media is capable of facilitating positive social change (Arab spring as one example) that may not have been possible without it.
The single example of a possible positive outcome? I remember when this happened, they made a big deal about it, however it may not have had that much of a positive effect. You know the void left to be filled with someone as bad or worse. https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/27/middleeast/egypt-how-we-got-here/index.html
Yes, it's unfortunate it didn't have a positive effect long term due to being coopted. :(
As people are going to continue to use twitter style websites until they fall out of fashion, I figure its best if that twitter-like is at least not controlled by people who can go rogue and do severe damage to society, such as what happened with twitter.
We realistically can't ban them, we can only mitigate the bad. Personally I don't use twitter style social media, only Lemmy.
what days were those? the stone age? because people have been talking remotely for thousands of years.
Agreed, I left twitter almost a year ago and haven't felt the need to sign up for any of its alternatives, federated or not. I just haven't felt like my life is missing anything by not using these platforms.
It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's leverage that enshittifies a service.
A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).
Incredibly clear article pointing out that no individuals will ever be able to resist enshittifaction pressures indefinitely.
The only way to prevent people with power from emiserating others is to structurally remove any benefit to doing so.
so, socialism?
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Sticking your neck out always has the risk of having your head lopped off. But if you never stick it out there you don't see the light
I totally get where Cory is coming from on this. He's been around long enough to have actually seen these things happen, from a perspective that's effectively unique. I believe him when he talks about this stuff. I get his point of not putting effort into building up a platform that can hold him and his audience hostage.
but here's the good part.
People bailing on Twitter to join Bluesky is reasonably easy (there are tools available to find your friends on the new system). If it's easy to bail on Twitter to join Bluesky, it will be similarly easy to bail on Bluesky to join Mastodon, if/when that becomes necessary.
Yes, because it's so easy to get people to switch to a different service!
I tried to get my friends to move from Facebook to Diaspora. How many of them did? ZERO. Not even the ones who like to talk about how much they hate Facebook.
Look what it took to peel off users from Twitter! The last straw had to be Elon getting a dictator elected. And even then, it's only a fraction of users.
The functions I use Facebook for are only valid if it's full of the majority of mankind.
Dating, and finding cheap used shit to buy in a parking lot.
That's true for any social network. It's only useful if a lot of people are using it, but a lot of people won't use it until it becomes useful. That's the catch-22 that keeps new social networks from getting off the ground.
Facebook is really nothing without people, opinions, think groups, pacs, and assholes all fighting for attention. That is Facebook.
Once you boil it down to that, it kinda makes you wonder why on earth would want to make another one to start with rather than remove the entire concept from existence.
There's a quote from Eric S. Raymond about the issue of getting people to switch to something better (in this case the OS Plan 9) if there's already something that's fulfilling the need just enough that it becomes difficult to get anyone to move.
it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.
The fear now is that people will just switch to Bluesky until it becomes like Twitter, and it's not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service that's primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.
Except it's been 2 years and most people haven't yet migrated away from Twitter to anything.
That's true from our perspective, but not from someone like Cory's.
The trap he writes about being stuck on these platforms is because he doesn't just have friends and people he follows on these platforms — he has an audience. And closing his Twitter or Facebook or whatever would mean leaving large audiences that he has built up behind.
Cory stays on those platforms as his own version of the (justifiable, but regretful) compromise he writes about companies making. Better to stay on those shitty platforms and continue to reach people than abandon both the shitty platforms and his audiences there.
That's why he doesn't want to put effort into building an audience somewhere that might force him into the same compromise again.
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