I want to join a federated network!
*federation happens*
No, not like that
We want an open Federation!
But no Ferengi allowed.
I don’t understand the frustration.
It’s legal to scrape websites and this is doing it in a way that activity pub is designed to support. You can’t be mad another instance is reading your data, that’s what the fediverse is.
I think people will end up finding bridgy annoying frankly, but it seems like a useful tool that takes federated content and lets websites build things that used to be only available by adding Facebook pixel and Twitter links to your site.
The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?
It seems to me that anything that’s being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don’t want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don’t post publicly.
I guess I just assume that everything I’m posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there’s no way to ensure it’s not. It’s ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there’s a conflict between the protocol and the culture.
I think it’s about usage rights. People are fine with their post being on their chosen end of the fediverse forever but don’t want corporations and news sites to generate a profit by using the posts. That is independent of federation, federation just makes it easier.
The other thing, that I see even more people upset about, is that the bridge requires you to Opt-Out, rather than Opt-In for being included.
It’s totally fine if you want to be included, especially if you have friends on BlueSky. But, it’s just a shitty practice that is all too prevalent in new tech. AI companies are doing the same thing - if you’re an artist, you’re supposed to magically know all of these new, obscure AI startups and somehow find how to opt-out of being included in their training data set. It’s ridiculous.
Same concept here, I would have had no idea this was a thing, if not for people speaking up about it. Some people make a conscious choice to join Fediverse communities because they want nothing to do with big tech and want more control of their data and privacy and who has access to it. Why is such a big deal to respect that?
The bridge is nothing more than another Activitypub instance. You can block it in the same ways that you can block existing Mastodon or Lemmy instances. If users want to opt in to federate with it, they should also have to opt in manually to federate with every single Lemmy instance.
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Saying that the bridge is nothing more than another ActivityPub instance is very disingenuous.
While it may be built upon the ActivityPub protocol, but its main purpose is to act as a bridge to non-federated platforms, which is unique to that instance. When signing up for a fediverse instance, it should be known to the user that their data will be shared within the fediverse network. But, no permission is given to share on any platforms outside the fediverse network, using non-ActivityPub protocols.
So, no, opt-in should not be necessary for all instances, but in the case of the bridge, it is, because it’s enabling a feature that users haven’t explicitly agreed too and isn’t a core part of the ActivityPub protocol. And since the bridge is being made open-source, should users also be expected to track down any other instances that pick up and use it and manually block and opt-out of those?
This asks zero sense as there’s n disclosure on hardly any instance. Also, there’s several non ActivityPub protocols and bridges that have long since been used and peoples content shared
The situation is not truly comparable, tbh.
Artists very much retain legal rights to the art they create. Hence the current lawsuits against various AI companies. Meanwhile it depends on jurisdiction whether a comment/thought you write on a public-facing website can be considered your legal production for a civil lawsuit. It’d be trivial if it were a closed site with a very selective admission process with some easily evaluated barrier (say, only people who study at university XYZ are allowing on the otherwise private forum of that university), but public-facing it’s more ambiguous.
You can still try to sue someone who taking that content, but it’s not as clearcut that someone violates your rights as with artists and their art. Meaning that there’s less basis for someone wanting this to always have to be explicitly opt-in and get explicit permission. At least right now. This might very well all change as a result of AI lawsuits.
Tbh, I wasn’t talking about the legalities of AI or copyright law. I was using that as an example of why opt-out is a shitty business practice that makes people frustrated and upset. Because people commenting on this post and defending the bridge don’t seem to understand that.
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If they’re afraid of that, they joined the Fedi with a fundamental misunderstanding of how its supposed to work.
Yeah I was about to say, sure this isn’t ActivityPub, but the specific implementation of the federation should be an impolementation detail the user should never care about. You joined a federated system. Your content gets federated. Period. Whether said federation happens through ActivityPub, AT, some bridge system or the Binford Content Disperser 5000XL+, that’s really not the point of any discussions so long as the content does get federated.
I have no idea what any of those words you just type meant…
It’s not confusing. People just have different ideas about what the experience should be
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No they’re not confused. I’ve seen a lot of these discussions on Mastodon. They don’t misunderstand the tech, they’re actively trying to curate a community.
Exactly. There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent (the multiple battles about consent-based search), but relatively few people are confused about whether bad actors will use it without consent.
Yeah the people throwing up their hands about ppl not understanding the tech are raging at a strawman. It’s also a BS argument that acceptable behaviour is only what the tech allows.
There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent
Wouldn’t this better be served by implementing per-post licensing, rather than mixing federation into it? After all, most of the real issue is people not accepting the fact that, regardless of federation, bad actors can do bad things with their content. Federation is not gonna change that, but at least licensing posts would allow you a legal avenue to pursue, which currently doesn’t seem to exist.
This post licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.
joins decentralized social network
complains about posts being decentralized and shared around the network
Bro some instances block other instances because those other instances don’t block all the instances the first instance is blocking
I joined a network run by nerdy trans girls not Jack fucking Dorsey
my timeline on bsky is like entirely trans girls and it’s great :3
Bluesky just had to go and make their own federation protocol when ActivityPub was standardized years ago for federation.
i mean they literally used at proto because it did things that activitypub didn’t do and refused to do.
Remember even large corporations standardising on truly open protocols can be reversed after whatever the situation leading up to it is resolved.
I just remember Jabber/XMPP federation which included Google. Once Google decided they got big enough, they abandoned it. Of course nothing happened to the protocol itself, it is well and alive both on Fortune 500 and selected as official choice for presence protocol on internet2.edu
I am from Mastodon / ActivityPub bubble. Can someone explain me the benefits of Bluesky / AT protocol?
From their website:
Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user’s previous data.
Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).
https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub
Sounds fair to me, although I am also not using either Mastodon or Bluesky.
Yes these are certainly words
ELI5:
In the Fediverse your account and identity is linked to a domain (e.g. you are @someone@domain.com), and you can’t move that account somewhere else. You can’t even change the domain of a server, because all the accounts on that server would be known by a different domain and be treated as separate new identifies. In Bluesky your identity is basically a random number, it’s shown in the URL of a profile page for example. You can link that to a domain temporarily and get a nice user handle, but you can always move to another domain later. That means you can migrate between servers and keep all your friends and followers, something that’s currently not possible in the Fediverse.
The thing about schemas is a technical detail, not really any consequences for users. Then there is a different format for user handles, so the Bluesky people don’t like the double @ signs for those.
The last thing is about how you don’t just pick one server/instance in Bluesky, instead you can pick different servers for different things. One server hosts your account, but a few others can fill and sort your news feed, block spam for you or let you search through content. It’s supposed to create an open ecosystem for these services, and allow you to keep your account on a server that offers none of these by itself, e.g. a small home server. Of course there is nothing like that in the Fediverse, you pick a service and a server, and that’s it.
I have to say Bluesky looks extremely interesting from a technical perspective, there’s just the fact that it’s completely dominated by the official server right now. People can create their own servers though, so we’ll have to see how it evolves.
I think I would be very interested in this version of doing things. Would it be feasible to build a link aggregator on that protocol? I don’t like the microblogging UX.
Yes, that’s basically what those schemas are about. You can create different schemas for different kinds of posts and content structures, so something like Lemmy should be possible. The Fediverse has something similar as well, but the way you introduce new schemas is different between the two as far as I understand it. In the former you’ll have to adapt some features of the underlying ActivityPub protocol to your new usecase, or work with others towards extending the protocol. The later allows you to just declare and describe your new structure in a machine-readable way, and others can then choose to support it. So Bluesky is more flexible and open in that regard, but could also end up more fragmented.
you can’t move that account somewhere else.
That means you can migrate between servers and keep all your friends and followers, something that’s currently not possible in the Fediverse.
It absolutely is possible to move accounts between instances on the fediverse. I’ve done it multiple times.
It does have some quirks tho. Posts aren’t migrated to your new account. (Some fedi software lets you migrate posts, but from what I hear it’s kinda jank).
It’s not seamless, but the option is there, and you won’t lose any friends or followers (unless they’re defederated or something)
Bluesky accounts seem like they’ll be more portable than fediverse accounts but I don’t know much about it
rn not much. In the future there’ll be properly portable accounts using cryptographic keys and once federation kicks in lighter servers making it probably more distributed.
So nothing to keep an eye on considering an overwhelming amount of cons of Bluesky.
It’s not even a fight. Bluesky lost a long long time ago when they launched an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX and have done absolutely nothing to address this other than add curated feeds which barely work in the first place. Bluesky is so far behind that calling it a fight is just silly.
Bluesky lost? I’m all for corporate social media losing, but I think Bluesky has a bigger chance than Mastodon to become as big as Twitter at its peak, because of the money behind it. At least for the short/medium term. Long term, when Bluesky inevitably also falls due to enshittification or what not, Mastodon might win, unless it has splintered into a bunch of defederated clusters of drama at that point.
Personally I’ll never join another corporate social media platform ever again. But I’m in a miniscule minority.
Yeah I was about to say, I could see an argument for Mastodon having lost (it’s momentum, which is the only thing it truly has going for it), but Bluesky? ~every podcaster I follow now advertises they’re on bluesky instead of twitter, and most youtubers link to their bluesky, too. At least in the US it seems to have gotten decently popular tbh.
OTOH, we have the BBC and Flipboard being all-in on Mastodon, granted. Which is going to be fun when people get around to defederating them considering how it went for Threads.
When Twitter was bought by Musk I rushed to create myself a Mastodon. My hope was that most of the interesting, thoughtful people I followed on Twitter would eventually end up on Mastodon as Musk slowly ruined the platform. I kept my Twitter up just to keep tabs on them and grab their Mastodon handles as they shared them.
In the end, around half of them created Mastodon accounts that I follow to this day. All of them are inactive now.
At the same time I noticed more and more of them creating BS accounts. I think around 80% of them ended up in it. They’re still quite active in BS to this day.
I open Mastodon and BS once daily. Former rarely has new posts, latter always has.
I really wanted all of them on Mastodon. I don’t trust a corpo like BS. But the particular type of crowd I followed on Twitter (progressive essayists/humanities people, game journalists, artists, non-dev hobbyists, etc) seems to have mostly gone to BS, stayed on Twitter, gone to Cohost or back to Tumblr, or abandoned social media. I did find some interesting people active on Mastodon, mostly accesibility advocates, a couple of devs of games I loved and a few non brainrotten IT people. But the level of activity from my spheres of interest seems much higher on BS right now sadly.
I feel like its completely the opposite. Bluesky is just whining and screaming into the void while Mastodon feels like real stuff is actually happening. There are actually working feeds and a news section.
Bluesky has no hashtags or discovery mechanism other than the broken feeds that nobody knows how they work while on mastodon you can literally subscribe to hashtags like you’d subscribe to a community on lemmy. It’s not even remotely close.
Mastodon only got bad rap because it started of decentralized and people are just too dumb for that apparently.
I don’t like bluesky because I don’t like it’s owner. I don’t like the owner because he thinks everyone is dumb and forgot the fact that nobody pointed a gun on his face to sell Twitter to some Arab dictators.
Jack Dorsey doesn’t “own” Blusky, he just gave them grant money in the beginning to kick things off, and is one of the board members.
“Prior to the seed round, Bluesky’s website described the company as a Public Benefit LLC owned by CEO Jay Graber and other Bluesky employees. Post-seed round, the company describes itself as a public-benefit C Corp.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(social_network)#Company_history
This is what so called open ai does. It isn’t open even in the sense of open group Unix. I just feel pity for American tax payers as elections are near. Both of these people have significant say in US/World politics.
Ah, he doesn’t own it, he just decides what it does.
he literally has no leadership stake in it… but considering it’s open source, literally anyone can make a pull request if they want to, even dorsey
literally
Next.
Dismissing an entire comment over the usage of a single word is closed minded. Language evolves over time, get used to it.
I don’t see how that’s accurate if it’s jointly owned by its employees.
pretty sure those are the noisy minority. afterall more content drives more people. artificial walls wont benefit anyone…
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
- On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
- On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can’t stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated “public squares” according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn’t blocked you).
- On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it’s not, so this doesn’t happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it’s clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
- Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.
Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
Have they by now come up with a way to moderate things?
Read the first bullet point:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
Ok, but can they also delete it once its through? Either all incoming messages are checked beforehand and are filtered by the admin, which is even worse of the bad censorship in the Fediverse nostr fans keep crying about, or its passed through and the user has to deal with toxic content. I’m not sure how that should work. The moderation has to happen somewhere, it sounds like nostr is heaving that onto the user.
Usually, if people say “its the best from both worlds” actually means “there is a tradeoff, but I like this adjustment of the tradeoff more”. If you want less “censorship”, which is ok, you use nostr, but have to live with a worse moderation situation.
A relay admin controls what goes through their relay. A user controls who they follow and who follows them. If you want, you can just auto-ignore all DMs directed to you by people who aren’t in your follow list. Also remember that your DMs have to come through a relay, presumably you are connected to relays you trust the moderation policy of, so toxic users can’t use those relays to DM you.
Then if its filtered - why is it better against cencorship?
Because you can choose which relays to connect to and you typically connect to multiple relays. This is all seamless. On Mastodon/fedi, an instance controls your entire view of the fediverse unless you make a separate account elsewhere and check it separately. You can’t follow or be followed by users or instances they block even if you want to. They also control your identity, since it’s tied to a relay/instance. If your relay shuts down or your account gets banned, you have to make a new account elsewhere, re-follow everybody, get everybody to re-follow you, etc. It’s a mess.
On nostr, instance/relay admins only control that goes through their specific relay. Relay admins can, of course, share common blocklists if they want for anti-spam or anti-abuse purposes. If you want to follow somebody blocked by a relay, you are connected to other relays and the signal can flow through there. You don’t need to check multiple relays separately. If your relay closes, you don’t lose your account/identity.
Ok, now I get it. It’s an interesting concept. However, I think usability is a trade-off here and that means limited scalability. The average user wants to join a server and that’s it. I continue to place my bet on the federated concept ;)
Literally backed by Jack Dorsey and crypto bullshit. Fuck off.
The concept is nice, problem is there are too many cryptobros.
I think not wanting to federate/bridge with Bluesky is a very bad idea. The entire idea is that we should get a Fediverse that is as connected as possible, not split up into many tiny subsets of users.
People care about Bluesky? Like at all? Interesting.
I’m in mastodon but I wouldn’t mind trying Bluesky when there are third party servers.
If this dev won’t do it, another will in a proprietary fashion. These people have too much time on their hands.
I for one, welcome the presence of bluesky.
