So, if you're online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user.

[…]
Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. Bluesky was never really packaged as something that was relatively easy for someone to spin up on their own servers; the network has been historically extremely centralized, and only small minorities of users have broken off.

AT Proto decentralization doesn't exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won't be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky's end.

Bluesky inc isn't really making 'a protocol', they're making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.

I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don't run a social media platform.

This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.

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[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

This does raise a question relevant to the Fediverse. Some Bluesky users are lobbying to have Jesse Singal banned, whoever that is. Of course, a hallmark of a decentralized network is that there is no central authority that could actually do that. Implicitly, this demand is a rejection of the very concept of decentralization.

Once people find out what decentralization means, are they even willing to tolerate it?

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

If you're the kind of person who wants a particular person banned, you probably want to be on the kind of instance that would ban them, and then from your perspective, they'd be banned, so you'd never have to see their posts. It still being possible to interact with them from other instances isn't any more of a big deal than it being possible to interact with them on an entirely different website after they're banned from regular social media - no one can ban someone from the whole Internet.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

Yes. On Bluesky, they could be individually muted or blocked. You can make and share blocklists, make your own custom feeds that exclude such posters, or even create your own moderation service that removes (or blurs, ...) posts for your subscribers. Obviously, that is not satisfactory for some people.

[–] whereyaaat@lemmings.world -5 points 7 hours ago

Bluesky is a platform for scammers and morons.

If you're not the one scamming, that only leaves one other option.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago

Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.

Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I feel like many people who went to Bluesky were desperate for it to work and grow, rather than necessarily believing it would work and grow and in some cases - weren't even people who the Twitter style even appealed to. They just went there to try and do a bit of damage to Twitter. This is likely why its now slowly losing activity.

I signed up to Bluesky not too long after it surged. And I made a few comments, but quickly just... didn't have anything say. It's just a "shout into the ether" site like Twitter - but smaller, and no nazis. That's a good thing in itself, but in an ideal world I would never really use it.

[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 1 points 7 hours ago

similar story here

I just wanted any alternative to shitter for public accounts

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Bluesky is of course just another American social media company. If they are not shit now, they will be once they get bigger. The American model has reached a dead end and it's not suitable for good products, competition and real innovation.

Side note, it's been a while since I've lived in the US, so my knowledge of local "culture wars" is from online sources, but the article is incorrect in claiming that Jesse Singal is a transphobe. I say this as someone who often disagrees with him.

I will add that many of the commentators in his substack are unhinged and likely transphobes.

[–] MxRemy@piefed.social 20 points 1 day ago (20 children)

Yes, he is absolutely a transphobe, by the very wiki article you linked?

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[–] Twoafros@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

This sucks. Hopefully this will push ppl to sign up to mastadon or to other atproto instances and move away from the main bluesky acct.

For anybody looking for mastadon instance i recommend mas.to and for an atproto alternative, I've been on blacksky.community instance for a few weeks now and I rly enjoy it

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

Bad rant. Wrong on technical aspects and self-contradictory. Anyway, off-topic here.

[–] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I can see how the AT protocol is designed to scale. ActivityPub works fine now because the community is fairly small, but it will reach its limits as it is currently designed. Its basically an event driven model vs a push and pull model. Sure a docker image can more or less jusy be deployed, but that simplicity is a ticking time bomb.

Running a relay is way more powerful than the author states though. You could do stuff like selectivly intercept and reject events before they make it into or out of the firehose.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 10 points 1 day ago (8 children)

This depends on what you think the purpose of ActivityPub is and subsequently the type of scale. ActivityPub is designed for horizontal scale in a "social network". If you have lots of participating entities with a more or less similar number of interconnected subscriptions ActivityPub scales extremely well, unlike ATProto, which needs to more or less ingest the entire network in its firehose.

But you are right that ATProto is better designed for "social media", meaning that most subscriptions are one sided affairs with highly visible "influencers" being the main point around which the network operates. Obviously this is what most commercial networks are more interested in as it allows profitable advertisement and other forms of social influence.

I see these two types as entirely different forms of social interaction, and couldn't care less about the latter. So I am not worried at all about scaling issues of ActivityPub, as it scales extremely well in the "social network" type of interaction.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

Yes. It's only a problem if you expect or want the Fediverse to be the future of social media, which it isn't.

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[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

ActivityPub works fine now because the community is fairly small, but it will reach its limits as it is currently designed. Its basically an event driven model vs a push and pull model. Sure a docker image can more or less jusy be deployed, but that simplicity is a ticking time bomb.

You mean that when there's more traffic, the instances will start to DDOS each other?

[–] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

i ddos my wordpress-activitypub-enabled website every time i boost a post made from there to my 10k followers. tried every single caching plugin for it as well.

activitypub scaling is a very real issue

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 14 hours ago

Cloudflare caching can solve this. Cache based on the user agent.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

ActivityPub is designed to scale well for millions of users with a low number of subscribers each (Dunbars number and so on). It is not designed as a mass media publishing tool where a few have tens of thousands or even millions of followers.

I consider this a feature, but feel free to disagree.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It gets DDOSed because after the boost, all the subscribers' instances are calling it to retrieve the content?

Do you think a load balancer might help?

[–] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

OP would have to have their wordpress site running on multiple instances to leverage that. It would work, but now they are paying for more infrastructure.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, but those could be just "read instances" spinned up by a peak in requests at load balancer. Not running all the time

[–] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Fair point

[–] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Yeah i guess you could look at it that way. Each instance would have to scale horizontally to handle the load, which is waste.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that ActivityPub is just a rest api contract that one can implement in order to communicate with the rest of the "network". Its simple, but its such massive overhead to do this all via http. Pushing all your instances events to a dedicated stream and letting the other instnaces read it can be more performant and handle the load better. The downside though is who controls the streams?

IRC is the OG of federation, i am sure we could learn something from it and have federated networks that are in turn federated with eachother. I dunno, just thinking out loud here.

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[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They recommend people other american centralized social media as an alternative to Bluesky in response to this, yet again. When are they going to learn?

[–] whereyaaat@lemmings.world 2 points 7 hours ago

When are they going to learn?

Probably never.

Dipshits like this are going to be stupid for the rest of their lives.

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