Allot of people have a social media account rather than a website and allot of people use gmail rather than host their own mail. Decentralized means do it yourself, but most people just want something with batteries included that works well and don't really care about centralization.
Naw, decentralized means not having everyone on one platform. ActivityPub-enabled sites (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) can be run by just about anyone, and can serve multiple users.
So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.
We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
Why would decentralized technology be easy to use?
Limewire was installed on over one-third of computers world wide in 2007 [1]. That's because even grandma could press next->next->next on a window setup file and it just worked. There is no technical reason hosting your email isn't as easy as that.
Look at roof top solar panel. Literally hundreds of millions of households have roof top solar to generate decentralized power. The fundamental complexity in email hosting is hundred times less, but the software engineering community choose to not make it possible.
I get as much out of bluesky as I ever did from twitter. It may be honeymoon phase but since I mostly just follow experts, journalists and the like I see as much as I ever did. There's less silliness on there but definitely some and I expect that's due to the times we're in and not the users.
Hrm, this is actually a frustration of Bluesky for me; I find it relatively sluggish, particularly compared to a decent Mastodon server. I also remember Twitter as being faster, but I haven't had an account for a couple of years, and it _was_ getting slower before I nuked my account, so maybe it's worse now.
Incidentally the size of sockets and screws (including the Allen wrench) is very much a technology. William Sellers pushed standards in the mid 1800s specifically to benefit American industry through interoperability. Standards we still use today.
And the gauges are just as important. Obligatory ref to Brad Cox seminal 1990 paper, Planning the Software Industrial Revolution, and it's compelling analogy with Eli Whitney.
It's fairly specifically _not_ a fork; they've re-implemented atproto (in, what else, Rust). This is important, as there are now two real in-production-use AT Protocol impls (plus a bunch of toy ones).
Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear. Seems like a ton of work to manage the separate server. (a similar refrain from fediverse/mastodon things) But if they're happy sure.
A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.
It's worth noting that they are using bluesky feeds and moderation services/labellers. They just have written their own rust implementations for the tools/services and their frontend (which is largely a fork of bluesky-social upstream) changes the default experience/settings.
So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse.
TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.
Unstated, but: they don't fully trust the Bluesky admins and especially their moderators. While not wanting to, er, segregate themselves from the wider "Bluesky" community.
> Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear.
Assuming you absolutely trust Bluesky-the-company to behave itself now and in the future, it probably isn't necessary. If you don't, then this sort of step towards real decentralisation is important.
This largely makes Bluesky-the-broader-network immune to the Elon Musk factor, tho; even if some idiot buys and breaks Bluesky-the-company, you'd expect more Blacksky-like thing to bud off.
I like bluesky like...a lot but too busy recently to post there and of course, lack of engagement from my part = lack of people to actually give a f@@@ about me.
I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
The structure of the atproto gives us the ability to ditch her and bluesky while keeping our data and connections. If your users aren't captive, why become the villain? They'll just leave.
Is it just me but I feel "social" would imply centralization. After all, if I want to socialize I will want to go where other people go, using a tool/client/channel that works for most people --- this inevitably leads to centralization.
I don’t agree — I can socialize with my neighbor and I can also socialize in a centralized hub, like a club.
What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users.
I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
This is why I miss RSS so much. It is such a great way to keep up with people over a wide variety of platforms with your own powerful user agent.
I still use a self hosted FreshRSS heavily and fortunately many sites still accidentally support it, but it could be so much easier for non tech people.
‘Black folks have always been huge culture drivers on social media platforms and other tech products. Systemically excluded from access to capital and distribution, Black folks leverage creativity to make social media platforms their “own” without ever having true ownership.’
I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.
There were a few dust-ups of this sort that I saw on Twitter back before Gamergate started (and during Gamergate) where there were accusations that people were brigading visible black users on Twitter to push them off the site or get them banned with report spam. I don't recall whether it ever got to the point that it was covered in the news - and I can't find any articles about it - but it wouldn't surprise me if things like that have continued to this day.
So at the very least, I recall hearing about it happening. It doesn't surprise me if people are claiming to have experienced it firsthand.
He means they don't own the social media companies, not that they're excluded from using them. But of course that's still silly because almost nobody of any race owns a social media company, at least not enough to have any control over it.
Not "digital spaces", but "capital and distribution".
It's basically saying that the black population does have an impact on culture although there are no black CEOs of social media companies, just in a vaguely victimist black pride sort of way.
I really want to make a decentralizable streaming video platform
Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams"
Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such
Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers
Haven't checked it out, but supposedly stream.place [1] is "the Twitch of Bluesky" (according to the HN comment I heard about it from), doing livestreaming using the AT Protocol.
PeerTube is a project that already exists and fits some of those qualifications. Not certain if it quite meets all of your specifications, as I don't believe it has direct integration for payment processing. Most streamers, however, take third-party payment anyway, like Streamlabs, that give a much larger percentage to the creator compared to Twitch or YouTube. I am also not certain how easy it is to set up PeerTube.
It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.
I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.
All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
"Decentralized" and "real money payment system": pick one. You could make it work with cryptocurrency and I'm sure someone's already done that for the 1% of users.
The central services take a cut, but they also provide an audience through the recommendation systems. Which is why everyone tries to game the thumbnails, Shorts algorithm, etc.
I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.
There is a depressing irony about a story on an effort to decentralize social media being published on a centralized social media platform. It feels like decentralized blogging will never come back, even though we have Ghost (not to mention Wordpress) right there.
With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.
I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. Then Threads added federation. What am I supposed to do with each account? They have different posting histories, they can’t be merged, but if I post the same thing to both of them, I’ll be repeating myself. Am I supposed to discontinue using one of them? If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. It’s a mess.
I might just be projecting from a certain phase of my life but if I had to bet on what social media will look like:
TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience
Twitter+offline meetups for everything else.
Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.
I definitely don’t think this is the next evolution. Decentralized just means you have to do work to find places to post to and no one is doing that. The only decentralized social media is going to be stuff that is too gruesome, illegal and hateful to post in regular spaces.
A lot of decentralized projects focus on the philosophy, but most people just want something that works smoothly. Platforms like Blacksky probably grew not because of cutting-edge tech, but because they made it feel easy to use without overthinking.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 77.2 ms ] threadSo, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.
We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.
We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
Limewire was installed on over one-third of computers world wide in 2007 [1]. That's because even grandma could press next->next->next on a window setup file and it just worked. There is no technical reason hosting your email isn't as easy as that.
Look at roof top solar panel. Literally hundreds of millions of households have roof top solar to generate decentralized power. The fundamental complexity in email hosting is hundred times less, but the software engineering community choose to not make it possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire
Lemmy is a bit more hit/miss on loads but the content posted seems so much more wholesome than other socials
We do racial segregation offline all the time. Why wouldn't we do it online?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sellers
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3102001
[0] https://youtu.be/8GQrVgHh6EU
Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky, so running on the AT Protocol that has its own infrastructure, mod team etc.
A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.
So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse.
TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.
Assuming you absolutely trust Bluesky-the-company to behave itself now and in the future, it probably isn't necessary. If you don't, then this sort of step towards real decentralisation is important.
This largely makes Bluesky-the-broader-network immune to the Elon Musk factor, tho; even if some idiot buys and breaks Bluesky-the-company, you'd expect more Blacksky-like thing to bud off.
I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users.
I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
I still use a self hosted FreshRSS heavily and fortunately many sites still accidentally support it, but it could be so much easier for non tech people.
I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.
So at the very least, I recall hearing about it happening. It doesn't surprise me if people are claiming to have experienced it firsthand.
It's basically saying that the black population does have an impact on culture although there are no black CEOs of social media companies, just in a vaguely victimist black pride sort of way.
Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams"
Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such
Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/stream.place
It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.
I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.
All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
The central services take a cut, but they also provide an audience through the recommendation systems. Which is why everyone tries to game the thumbnails, Shorts algorithm, etc.
I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.
With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.
TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience
Twitter+offline meetups for everything else.
Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.