Some interesting thoughts - and questions - here. Seems you posted them in the wrong place, given the paltry response. Or possibly at the wrong time (i.e. 6 hours after the herd had moved on, a perennial problem with social media).

It isn’t based in XML, and modern devs don’t want to use XML. As I’m not a coder, I cant say how big an influence this has, but from what I have seen it seems to be a substantial factor. Can anyone explain why?

XML is space-inefficient with lots of redundancy, and therefore considered to be ugly. Coders tend to have tidy minds so these things take on an importance that they don’t really merit. It’s also just fashion: markup, like XML and HTML, is a thing of the 90s, so using them is the coder equivalent of wearing MC Hammer pants.

This kind of purity policing is deeply offputting IMO. And certainly won’t help build federated social media.

A nuanced take in response to casually lobbed accusations of Nazism? How come you haven’t been banned?

Perhaps it depends on community but my experience has been pretty uniform: brigading, comment removal, bans, for expressing ideas that (according to opinion polls) are shared by literally most of the population. At first I was a bit shocked, now I know just to avoid politics, it’s not worth the trouble. If you’ve had a difference experience then good for you.

Try expressing a centrist or - heaven forbid (I haven’t actually tried this one) moderate conservative - position on a hot-button subject and see if you still feel that way.

Just don’t try to debate politics unless you already subscribe to the prevailing groupthink. In fairness, that’s true of any social-media forum, and the corporate ones have other problems on top.

Pretty convincing arguments. Thanx.

Tells you that you can take your social media back from big tech then casually recommends Bluesky. Gimme a break.

I generally agree but I still feel it’s important to keep some perspective. Bluesky is not the solution but it’s definitely progress compared to existing corporate platforms (because it has real fundamental differences - several articles posted here went into detail about this).

IMO the best argument against Bluesky is that it will suck up the oxygen for other, better, solutions. That’s a fair theory but it seems to me that there’s plenty of market share to go round right now. Everyone is still on the evil corporate platforms.

RSS still exists and it’s still beautiful.

Agree, I use it every day.

Yes, good parallel, didn’t think of that. Perhaps there’s just a limit on how much you can decentralize without things breaking down for either social or technical reasons.

Very interesting, thanks.

Atproto scales quadratically, […] harms performance AP scales horizontally

Clearly true. But this suggests to me that ATProto might still work well with, say, 5 or 15 "PDS"s. That is still enough IMO to guarantee a high level of pluralism.

In a commercial market, let’s say for telephony or cars or web browsers, we readily accept that there are only a handful of players. Indeed, there’s generally an optimal number, high enough to guarantee competition but low enough that we can keep track of the brands and trust that they won’t go out of business tomorrow.

And nothing is stopping at least one of those few brands from being a “good guy”, akin to Mozilla’s historic role in the web-browser market. It could be run by say, Wikimedia, for example. At least we would know that it would not disappear tomorrow, which is more than can be said for most Lemmy instances.

I agree that there should be enough space for both ATProto and AP to thrive.

Very useful, thanks.

As I see it, Bluesky is fundamentally different from Xitter and it is a major step in the right direction. It is short-sighted to reject it because of some technical imperfections.

The fundamental question IMO is whether there is enough mindshare (i.e. users and attention) to allow ATSocial (AKA partial federation) and ActivityPub (AKA total federation) to both be successful. I’m thinking there is. After all, the vast majority of people are still on ad-fuelled corporate social media, with all its internal contradictions.

Bubble-dwelling can indeed be a kind of sickness.

It this was subtle parody then hat’s off, nicely done.

This seems less a technical problem than a human one. Specifically, the need to avoid dispersal and fragmentation. If there are 5 different knitting communities, then the real problem is that there are 3 or 4 too many knitting communities and they should merge.

Fair enough. But whether this is a technical problem or a human problem, it is a problem. Silly for people to be denying that IMO.

If servers are going to come and go every 3 months at the whim of individuals, then - IMO - maybe there are are too many servers. Anecdotally, I picked my particular one for this very reason. Seems I anticipated well.

Completely. This feels like a major communications fail. It’s a basic technique of fundraising and mobilization: put a big ticking clock on your campaign and people will step up in time.

This is the correct but boring (but correct) answer.

So, a bookmarks list basically.

Prediction: you’ll never actually read most of what ends up on this to-read list.

Yep. Pathetic and embarrassing.