I agree with everything. The thing is, I’ve been thinking about the psychology behind this lately.

When Fedi-Fans complain about Bluesky, it is usually based on the misunderstanding that it also is instance based. It really doesn’t seem to occur to many that things might be done differently. But I think it may go a little deeper.

A common complaint is that it’s too expensive to run a full relay. People want to self-host it all. They want to feel that they are in control and don’t need anyone. It’s not particularly rational but people do lots of silly things chasing that feeling. The rational start would be to move somewhere remote and grow your own food. Instead, people buy a pick-up truck or degoogle their phone.

That architecture also appeals to a more tribal mindset. An instance is “our” place. We just pull up the drawbridge when bad people come and we are safe here in “our” castle.

I think to some people that is more appealing than the more open design of atproto.

On Bluesky, there is all this waffle about some people trying to get someone banned. They might find such tribal architecture more appealing.

I’d argue that the modular design is a more radical approach to decentralization.

Yes, but only if you can do without instances. Instances seem to be important to many in the Fediverse.

I realize my title has little to do with the post

I was going to say. Red dwarf is the name of a ship and Constellation is a class of ship. In any case, you can’t have a proper ship without a bridge.

Yes, but that doesn’t seem sufficient for some. Conservatives certainly would like to remove trans people from the public completely. Aside: It’s foolish for trans people to copy these tactics, assuming this comes organically from the trans community. These people are certainly acting like the heels in some right-wing propaganda play.

Bluesky offers several ways in which users can remove unwanted content from their experience. Easiest is for users to block Singal; banning him from their personal part of the network. Blocklists can be shared easily. Users can also spin up their own moderation service.

I probably shouldn’t go into the details of what Bluesky can do on a technical level. Incidentally, that blog post contains errors.

In short: On a technical level, the Bluesky company can greatly reduce the visibility of someone. But they would likely run into legal problems if they used that on Singal. The EU regulates what can be done quite strictly. Maybe they could benefit from some industry friendly “loopholes”. I’d have to look that up.

That needs a longer explanation.

An instance does not interact with all other instances. It only syncs with other instances when users follow someone there, join a community, …

But that’s also a problem. It means you can’t search the entire Fediverse from a particular instance and find new and interesting discussions and people. There is no discovery feed. For that, you need something like Bluesky’s relay. That relay actually does keep up with what everyone is posting and archives it.

But that’s one aspect of Bluesky that draws a lot of criticism by Fedi people. A full relay is expensive to run and not something anyone can self-host. Pruned down versions are doable, though. If everyone actually did run their own relay, then one would get you the combinatorial problem.

In practice, large instances are the Fediverse solution to the discovery problem. You can see what the many users on that instance post. Also, the many users subscribe to many things and so a large instance will cache much content from elsewhere. That architecture encourages centralization.

There’s other difficult issues. So you have a little server that serves your content to a few followers. Some celebrity with millions of followers would have to rent an entire server rack. But what if little old you interacts with a celeb and now all their followers try to fetch your content from your little server? Common problem. You just need caching. EG the celebrity rack also serves your content to their followers and takes the load off your server. But now whoever is doing the caching can also filter replies. There’s no simply solution there.

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.

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

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?

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

Many things are fundamentally feasible. I see 2 things you argue for.

One is changing the caching strategy. I don’t think that’s wise in terms of load sharing, but certainly feasible on a small scale. In certain circumstances, it may be preferred.

The other thing is using older protocols and standards. The practical reason to do this would be to use existing tooling, libraries, code. I’m not seeing such opportunities. I’m not that familiar with these, but it seems like they would have to be extended anyway. So I don’t really see the point.

At a minimum this is adding the number of instances that federate a given content streams to the multiple of storage needed to host the content, even if that storage is ephemeral. Not so big a problem at 100,000 users, but at 100,000,000 users this is a lot of storage cost we are talking about. Unless somehow the user/client doesnt cache the content they pull from an instance locally on their device when they view it?

Worry more about the bandwidth. Your instance would have to serve your content to all these 100M users. The way it is, much of the load goes to the instance where a user is registered. That means that an instance can control hosting costs by closing registrations.

My point was this isn’t an issue when all content is self-hosted, because the author as the host can edit, delete, or migrate all they want and maintain full direct control over the source of that content the client interacts with whenever a pull request comes in. Yes the user Caches the content when they read it, but there is no intermediary copy.

There’s the fundamental problem. What you think of as “your” data, other people think of as “their” data. That can’t be resolved. What’s worse is that controlling “your” data requires controlling other people’s computers and devices, as with DRM.

Toronto cash seems to avoid the “not incentivice illegal usage”, and after a quick check it seems to be almost it’s sole reason to be, please correct me if I’m mistaken here.

I’m not familiar with the details. The point is simply, don’t expect to get away with playing games.

Seems like the EU Safe Harbor Provisions, you basically must not incentivice illegal hosting, accept takedown requests, but also have some sort of procedure for the takedown requests. Which all seem quite easy to follow and adhere to and would function perfectly for Tenfingers IMO.

Yes, but there is more. The DSA is written in a very convoluted way, with the exceptions for smaller platforms scattered here and there. I don’t remember what exactly applies here. You may also have obligations under the DMA, CRA, and quite probably the GDPR.

Depends on the jurisdiction. This is a conflict between freedom of speech and the reputation of the brand (which has financial value). Countries with a more recent monarchical past tend to value reputation over free speech, eg Japan but also Europe. The US has been a republic for a quarter millennium. Since MS is a US company, I think they wouldn’t even pursue this in the first place.

Generally, service providers are exempt for liability for such things if they follow certain rules of conduct. EG the US DMCA says that you are not liable for copyright infringement, if you comply with takedown notices. I’m not sure how that works for trademarks in the US.

Generally, though, you should expect to be held responsible for any infringing content on your service, once you learn/are notified about it. You will be treated as if you had created the content yourself. That means that you will have to make the argument in court that the use of the trademark was legal. And if you lose, you will pay the damages.

Questions?

Maybe look up the story behind Tornado Cash.

EU law has liability exemption for hosters if they remove illegal content once notified (DSA Article 6). I think we still have to wait for more case law to know how that works with encryption. National law may still cause problems.

You have full control over a server on which you chose to run certain Software. But you feel you don’t have to comply with takedown requests because that’s just how the software works? That may work on indulgent parents but not in court. If you’re too technically inept to know how to comply, then you’re just not complying. End of story.

Holy shit. I can’t believe that 65 people upvoted this. Do you really believe that’s how the world works? Are you actually adults?

It was signed by a number of people, including OG ActivityPub contributors. I guess you’d have to know what goes on in the mailing list.

Looking around here, there’s a lot of ignorant hostility. I am always surprised by how tech-illiterate fediverse fans are. People who feel that that’s their peer group probably have a hard time ignoring that background toxicity.

The statement has been… uh… updated. The URL now reads:

A statement was originally published here, however, we have since received an objections to its publication citing that proper processes were not followed, and therefore it has been taken down and republished on Emelia’s website instead, whilst we seek community group consensus. When Emelia merged the pull request, she had been granted permission to do so by the co-chair of the Social Web CG, and given the number of signatories with various significant contributions to ActivityPub and ActivityStreams, Emelia believed that there was enough agreement to publish.

I assume it proves that there is a public key associated with each vote.

It doesn’t sound like cryptography is able to add anything worthwhile. You have to trust the instance to police itself. Self-hosted instances still don’t vote anonymously.

A group of users has to cooperate to hide their votes from others and each other. Only the tally is known, but you have to trust the group. On the Fediverse, such a group will be the users of an instance. The more users the instance has, the more anonymous the individual becomes.

You have to trust the instance admins to weed out bots and sock puppets, which is extra hard when they don’t see the votes either. Presumably, compensating by collecting and keeping other data, such as IPs, for longer is undesirable. You have to believe that admins, volunteers all, are willing to do the extra work and that they don’t actually favor manipulation for ideological reasons.

The only way to uncover untrustworthy instances is to look at aggregated data. I guess you’d have to get/scrape data for some community and then analyze by instance if the number of posters is out of whack with the number of voters. I wonder if anyone’s ever done such a thing. It’s certainly more challenging than looking at oddities among voters who brigade some topic.

Admins of large instances could get away with having many sock voters among the real users, if they wanted to manipulate discussions for, say, ideological reasons.