In a post where she signs the open letter, ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber summarises the changing world well:

“This is actually a really important time for that message to come across, because our communities do both face major threats which I believe we are ideologically aligned in wanting to face:

We are facing a large number of laws which appear well-intentioned and aimed to try to take on tech gatekeepers, but unintentionally build regulatory moats that allow only gatekeepers to participate, and which threaten user freedom at large.

The rise of techno-fascism and omnisurveillance affects all users. Neither ATProto nor ActivityPub, at present, are built in such a way that they can provide the levels of protections necessary to respond to the needs of activists and community members against nation-state level threats.

These are our existential threats, not each other. And we need to figure out how to work together.”

I’m reading this as “be nice to the Bluesky guys, because we have a bigger problem to deal with.”

That’s fine, I’m not inclined to be mentally ill at strangers on the internet.

But I’m also not going to call it decentralized when it’s meaningfully not, and I’m going to keep an eye on where their money comes from.

We have a common enemy in government control.

But if you’re going to be my friend, I need you to not lie to my face.

Came looking for this comment and was not disappointed.

I don’t understand the purpose of the letter.

Bluesky is, in practice, not decentralized.

It has the potential to decentralize, but if the community stops calling bullshit when Bluesky claims to already be decentralized, it would lose the one incentive it has to actually follow through.

Technically, nothing.

In practice, who do you know that’s using it and doesn’t run Arch, by the way?

My point isn’t that IRC/XMPP aren’t technically capable.

It’s that they’re not designed for non-technical users.

I want corporate social media to die. Mastodon and Piefed are far from killing the beast, but they’ve made the more progress than most projects have seen in a long time.

I want corporate messaging to die. Matrix is far from killing the beast, but for a little while, at least it was trying.

I wouldn’t mind going back to IRC roots if it could be made more user friendly and integrate voice and video chat.

Good UX/UI goes a long way to make it so non-technical people can join and strengthen the network.

Damn. That sucks. (Edit: Referring to the comments saying Matrix is dead and dying.)

I get that IRC and XMPP are more stable and built around federation from the ground up, but… they’re not Discord replacements.

That was IMHO, the point of Matrix/Element.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but a significant part of a network’s resilience is the number of nodes and users.

Without a glowup or some kind of repackaging, IRC/XMPP are doomed to stay niche.

I don’t mind “TikTok-like”. I just think it’d be a silly reason for the project to shutdown.

Makes sense. It was in pre-alpha.

Now that it’s in alpha, you’ll have 13.

Once it hits beta, it’ll skyrocket to an even 20.

Question: can they get sued for putting TikTok-like in the description, or does that only apply when you’re making money?

IMO, setting it up at home is not the bar for decentralization.

That’s exactly where I set the bar.

It works okay for audiobooks, but if you want it to save your place and track chapters, audiobookshelf is better.

This could unironically be an okay prompt, depending on what kind of users you want to gatekeep.

The bots will hallucinate statistics and travel brochure copy.

The real ones will say nothing beats a jet2 holiday.

The good news here is that Bluesky has made enormous progress in true federation. The cost of operating a full Bluesky stack has fallen from tens of millions of dollars per year to tens of dollars per month.

That sounds great. I’ll believe it when I see normies posting on Bluesky from at @itsmenormie@whatever.com.

[T]he reason why people care so much about Twitter and finding a good replacement is not because of total user numbers: Twitter was always the smallest of the Big Tech platforms after all. Twitter and X matter because of its unparalleled ability to generate culture and shape politics. Twitter and X are the places where elite consensus is formed. It is the dominant platform for shaping our collective understanding of the world. That’s why control over X’s algorithm (and chatbot) is so valuable: it is not about telling individuals what is correct, but it is about influencing what people think about what other people think.

So Twitter/X is where people higher in the hierarchy go to publicly perform their opinions, while people lower in the hierarchy sort themselves into their teams.

That sounds like the classical Greek democracy I remember from school.

But hearing it laid out like this (“elite consensus”) sounds instinctively gross.

You can sell me on Piefed without trying to cancel Lemmy out of nowhere.

How does it compare to mbin as a Lemmy alternative?

I use Caesium for image compression.

Not shilling, since both seem to be free and open-source image compressors.

How’s MAZANOKE different?

Testing testing…

It works when I use the direct link (https://postimg.cc/RN0r6qp8).

When I use the regular link (https://i.postimg.cc/15GydqG9/Image-20250602-145924.jpg), it says failed to load in Voyager.

Patreon dropped them.

Also, not necessarily on the verge anymore.

I support content creators being able to make a living in the fediverse (without enshittifying it).

So… good luck. I hope you find a healthy way to go about it.