supersquirrel

You can run your own relay, in that sense the "body" of bluesky is when considered in the abstract potentially decentralized... but when you consider the "brain" of bluesky nodes and the layer of moderation and post/commenting is still locked into a centralized system it is a bit like arguing borg drones have free will because they are physically individual beings.

Or it is like arguing an ant isn't existentially dependent upon the structure of the ant colony to survive since each ant posesses an individual body with its own six legs.

At a fundamental level the intended meaning of "federate" is that disparate communities and softwares can "connect" seamlessly, a bridge by definition is a tool used to connect things that are not connected or seamless.

A federated landscape of interconnected trails is the structural antithesis to a landscape of bridges each laboriously muscled out of the headache inducing process of connecting two disparate systems with a third system specific to that bridge and that bridge only that must be endlessly revised and rebuilt to keep everything from collapsing in a heap.

A bridge, by definition, is a composite of parts that are existentially vital to the sucessful conveyance of what passes over them, it only takes one section failing to break the entire bridge and it only takes one troll to block everything. A bridge, again by its very definition, is the most brittle architecture as every bridge is ultimately only a temporarily open door that must be continously be maintained and eventually rebuilt at the expense of great effort.

Some recommendations for lefty mastodon instances, all are vaguely tech themed, but that comes with the territory. That being said none of these instances feel like weird places to not be a techy person, the conversations and interactions on these instances occupy as diverse a range as anywhere else.

https://mas.to/about

https://elekk.xyz/about

https://tech.lgbt/about

https://eldritch.cafe/about

https://digipres.club/about

https://toad.social/about

https://hellsite.site/about

Your lemmy instance lemmy.world is under the umbrella of https://fedihosting.foundation/ which oversees both lemmy.world and the mastodon instance mastodon.world

Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?

Please do whatever helps you express your identity/identities of your self best! You can always link between accounts in the public account bios.

I will offer you a suggestion though, if you already made the account [email protected] why not make [email protected], link between them and perhaps indicate if you use one or the other account more. You might as well, people will still recognize you immediately on your mastodon account but you might find it nice to be able to interact with the fediverse through the perspective of mastodon/microblogging.

Then make another account on a different mastodon instance that looks cool too, go wild, do whatever fits your fancy, the consequences to making an account and never using it are small enough that except in edge cases (you took up a slot on a server with a limited number of registrations or something) nobody is going to care!

p.s. Notice all of these mastodon instances have thoughtful moderation policies that place an emphasis on protecting and centering vulnerable voices over valuing the "right" of socio-economically advantaged groups to spread hate speech in public. All these instances have links to the mastodon accounts of the humans who moderate those instances so you can get an idea of the human element of the moderation. How cool is that? Each place has its own slight spin on being a healthy community and you can find the place that is perfect for you!

Or Misskey!

It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.

Like seriously... that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.

I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.

Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money...to get more money.

yes, see this thread

https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474

"#BlueSky isn't decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that's all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find "networking through Relays instead of server-to-server" as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else."

There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A...

Of course it is, why would people throw millions at investing in a product and then decentralize it to the point that there weren't any bottlenecks to apply pressure and extract a profit back out of it? It makes no sense and would be a ridiculous business strategy.

What is a good business strategy is associating your product with visions of decentralization while never truly intending to get there in practice.

One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.

wtf kind of lame criticism of mastodon is this...there are constantly cute pictures of pets being posted on mastodon... and like anywhere else with humans these posts are very popular on mastodon.

I would say these posts are MORE popular on mastodon because without an algorithm cute animal photos are going to stick out as popular even more.

This is all nonsense anyways, Bluesky is considered "cooler" by techy types with a childlike awareness of history, politics and power because the tech is cooler when considered in the abstract.

Coincidently none of these technical details have the capacity to make bluesky a truly open and free place otherwise those investors would sue bluesky for purposefully and willfully not pursuing profit for shareholders. This won't stop certain types from pointing at pictures in the sand and reciting idle words thrown to the wind by the people in charge for now.

Bluesky exists as a legal instrument of profit, all else about bluesky is malleable and changeable and will eventually be bulldozed or undermined in the pursuit of profit for shareholders.

edit 2 this is a real human, and I was grumpy and while it was satisfying to point fingers it just makes me into the asshole so I removed that, but my broader point still stands

"What you think about them, they think about you"

No, this is precisely the issue. Any leftist worth their salt can't fucking stand conservatives and YET we will still protect their basic human rights and accept them into a collective society.

Conservatives on the other hand are perpetrating violence every single day against leftists and minorities they LOUDLY do not accept into a collective society. They deny abortions for women who are on the verge of death, they advocate for draconian health care policy that massively raises the suicide rates of trans kids because they hate trans kids and they believe deep down in their racism with an unshakable fervor that makes their meager spiritual practice of christianity look sad and pathetic in comparison.

It is far past the point of having a debate with rightwing conservatives, what is left is to intimidate them into shutting up, drowning out their voices and laughing at their tiny hateful visions of the universe.

The social fabric of the US is being ripped apart by conservative white men because they can't handle how scary using pronouns is and frankly the solution is to activate everybody else, not humor these people yet again with another discussion they are going to approach in a fundamentally disengenous way.

the big appeal of BlueSky is the initialization of the interface. It defaults you to "Following" rather than "Discover" and isn't jamming a ton of ads in your feed. There's basically no algorithm. Its a very basic service, rather than an engineered mess. More akin to Facebook or Twitter from back in the '00s, before monetization ruined them.

The big appeal of bluesky is that it is in the early stages of monetization that hinges on effectively enclosing a commons so that everybody chooses the product and everything else effectively dies off. The next stage will come, which is when the enshittification happens.

Do we honestly believe there won't be enshittification because the priorities of the current development in the near future is focused on benefiting users?

...or to put it another way, do you set a mouse trap with food a mouse finds miserable to eat? Do you think that first bite of cheese accurately depicts the reality about to unfold?

Here is some more food for thought, given the fact that large western social media corporations and the investors behind them have the equivalent power and cash of small nation states... why all of a sudden the interest now? If Bluesky is a genuine vision of the future why did all these prestigious, highly paid people with more power and R&D resources at their disposal than any of us could hope to ever have...show up AFTER the fediverse already did the R&D, created the vision and took the impossibly hard step of breaking ground and fighting up hill against the network effect and a generally dismissive tech press?