this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24751597

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390

screenshot of bluesky post with text:  It’s time to reclaim social media. Billionaires & venture capital shouldn’t control our digital lives. #FreeOurFeeds is raising $4M to build a public-interest alternative. Chip in today to make it happen. January 13, 2025 at 2:04 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v

tldr, it's a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’

Mark Ruffalo, Actor

Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker

Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan

Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’

Brian Eno, Musician

Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist

Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist

Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian

Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep

Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords

Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA

...

Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

In my opinion, yes, the why does in fact matter. This blog post i've linked in other comments in this thread is by one of the authors of the ActivityPub spec. If you care enough to comment about it i recommend reading her analysis of what AT Proto gets right and wrong in comparison with ActivityPub.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Reading through it, I'm not seeing much in favor of ATP. It basically says ATP will never be decentralised. What exactly are the points you're trying to make here?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Reading through it, I’m not seeing much in favor of ATP

See the "BlueSky's strengths" section, particularly the last paragraph of it. Content addressability is absolutely essential for building something that will last, and BlueSky gets that right. Decoupling the many responsibilities which an ActivityPub instance operator has (especially for identity) is also essential, i think, and while BlueSky's identity solution is less than ideal it's much better than ActivityPub and I expect it to improve.

If you're interested in the topic you probably want to also read the followup post from the same author (after reading the linked reply from someone on the BlueSky team).

Christine's analysis is by far the best I've read on the topic, but I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that people will actually build things using ATP in a manner more like ActivityPub (where there doesn't need to be a global view). It's also possible/likely that ActivityPub will eventually evolve to adopt content addressability (Christine actually built a proof-of-concept of doing that years ago, linked in her blog post, but there doesn't appear to be any recent progress in that direction), and decouple identity from responsibility for data availability, and adopt something like BlueSky's composable moderation.

Given their respective advantages over the other, i'm pretty sure that both ATP and AP will make changes which make them more like the other in the coming years.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky's purposes, but on the economics alone it's going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

We're still left with multiple competing standards that then need maintainers for the bridges. IMO if we want to truly break from the walled gardens of yore a single federation standard would be more helpful towards that goal. Its cool they want to build Twitter 2. Thats not what most of us on the fediverse are looking forward to tho.