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Bluesky federation goes live
(bsky.social)
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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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So... "federation" without control? What's the point?
They stress that a difference between their federation and ActivityPub is that on ActivityPub "your “instance”, or server, determines your community, so your experience depends on which server you join" while for them "On Bluesky, your experience is based on what feeds and accounts you follow, and you can always participate in the global conversation (e.g. breaking news, viral posts, and algorithmic feeds)." and "Moderation on Bluesky is not tied to your server, like it is on Mastodon. Defederation, a way of addressing moderation issues in Mastodon by disconnecting servers, is not as relevant on Bluesky because there are other layers to the system."
The big difference is that I can't choose an instance that blocks/does not interact with the servers loaded with Nazis, terrorists, and/or child abusers? Why the hell is it of such paramount importance to Jack Dorsey that the rest of us are forced to interact with Nazis?
Yea I really don't understand why they list this is a benefit. But they don't really explain it fully in the post it seems.
Is the benefit not obvious? Your account / followers / identity is not tied to whichever instance you initially sign up for.
Not having to interact with Nazis is tied to which instance I signed up on? I'm confused by this argument.
Tbf from the short time I've been on bluesky it seems like their algorithms are very good, I have followed the people I'm interested in and seen 0 nazi posts so far
This highlights an interesting point:
IF a platform hosts terrorism { white-supremacism, islamist supremacism, male-supremacism with its beloved domestic-violence "enforcement", communist-party machiavellianism, fascist machiavellianism, moneyarchist machiavellianism, etc. }...
and is able to hide that from the "majority"..
THEN they're doing good for the world, aren't they?
Hiding one's evils isn't what "doing good" means.
Not enforcing evil, is what doing good means.
Humankind'll walk, willingly, into its own slaughterhouse, for sake of the lollipops humankind's fed by the manipulators of the world.
That has been going-on for centuries.
Nothing's magically changing, surprise, surprise.
_ /\ _
Not sure what you're trying to say either, but fascist speech using lies is fascist recruitment. That is why autonomous anti-fascism is right to disrupt fascist recruitment events in universities. Because the state or moderates care more about maintaining order. So you have to disrupt the recruiting by any means.
So if your argument is that "sunlight is the best disinfectant" then no, it definitely isn't. There is historical evidence.
I'm not sure I understand your post fully, but yes, judgement of the majority is a bad criterion.
Not sure BlueSky offers a better system, still optimistic for Locutus.
I mean, if the server is running in a host you control, you can do whatever with it, no? You can just modify the software to just not do what other servers say, no?
? You can block the entire nazi server and you will essentially be defederates from it without relying on your servers admins to do it. This makes it easier to block nazis?
So every new user needs to block all the nazi servers themselves before they get a non-nazi feed?
The whole point of joining a server that defederates nasty stuff for you is that you delegate that responsibility to someone you trust to handle moderation for you. Just like you trust community mods or the admins of your instance on Lemmy.
To be fair, Bluesky does have "blocklists" maintained by other users that you can opt into, and quite a few popular ones exist with active maintainers who take and act on reports pretty quickly. So you still can delegate moderation responsibilities. One advantage to this is that you can opt into a few blocklists based on what you personally want to block - separate lists exist for hateful bigots, crypto pushers, and so on. I gave it a shot out of curiosity and haven't run into any issues yet, but that's just me.
I still prefer Mastodon for broader AP integration, and I think blocklists aren't discoverable enough outside of word of mouth, but I am curious to see how that turns out for Bluesky. Certainly an improvement over Xitter imo.
That still requires the user to do something actively to get a moderated feed. Most users don't want to deal with that.
But on Mastodon the user has to dig through a bunch of instances to find one that filters out what they don't want to see, and figure out if it's an instance worth joining for other reasons. I'd argue there's probably more work to join Mastodon than to join Bluesky and filter your feed. But I don't use Bluesky so I don't know.
This is pretty standard online though - even regular Google has settings like "Safe Search:On" that you can toggle to moderate your search results.
It really just depends on what the default settings are when you arrive at a service before you start using it, and how obvious and discoverable you make those settings controls.
Sure, but that's an easily addressable problem
Servers will likely be able to have recommended block lists and default block lists you can opt out of. Federation was literally just announced i think its fair to give it time for them to improve it. I think users having the option is better look at cases like mastodon.art that defederates from servers constantly and none of the users ever know who or why theyre defederating
Most users don't want to care about moderation like that. Users may care to block stuff they're not interested in like "I'm not interested in soccer so I'll block the soccer server/community". Most users don't want to even think about seeing the kind of content most reasonable ActivityPub servers defederate from. There's also often a legal risk if you don't defederate as what constitute legal content depends on a servers location.
If users don't like servers that indiscriminately defederates from others, they are free to go to other servers. This is not a bug, this is a feature.
Idk what to tell you. If you prefer how it is on activitypub then use activitypub. I barely ever use bluesky and mainly use lemmy snd mastodon. I think having no say in who you’re defedersted from sucks. Its why lemmy lets users block a server now even though mastodon doesnt. This is good.
Lol “just leave the art server” is terrible for artists and also 90% of people have no idea what defederating is and wont ever know theyre defederated from X server. I think its way better for servers to set their default blocklists that block the server they dont like and users to be able to choose to opt out of them, add more blocklists, etc.
As someone who had to switch away from mastodon.art because my pool of federated instances was getting so small it felt pointless to be on a federated platform... I'm SO glad Lemmy takes this approach. I don't mind my instance having some control over who they federate with (I have zero interest in seeing actual nazi comment or CP for example) but if my instance blocked lemmy.world or another similarly large one I'd definitely be a bit screwed (mastodon.art defederated mastodon.social for a time!)
But I want to rely on my server admins for that. To me that's a feature, not a bug.
We had a thing a while back on Lemmy where a bunch of semi-popular instances (including lemmy.world, though they seem to have rolled that back) all defederated from instances that mentioned piracy. I don't have a problem with piracy. I want to talk about piracy.
If Lemmy ran on a system like Bluesky's, I wouldn't have needed to consider making a new account on another instance just because me and the admins disagree on what we want to see on Lemmy.
I get your point, I just think It's a matter of preference, at the end of the day.
To me, that is a feature, too. The admin team made a decision, and the community engaged, the topic was discussed, and the decision was changed. To me that's a very healthy process. The only thing I would've changed would be LW engaging the community before defederating, but they were understandably worried about legal implications.
Even if LW didn't reverse this decision, you can change instances. Lemmy 0.19 makes this easier with import/export, but I would argue it should be even easier. Ultimately though this is a lemmy implementation detail, and not an activitypub problem.
Your ignoring the thrust of their point:
If you disagree with your instance or want to leave it for whatever reason, you have to wipe your identity and create a new one.
That is in no way a feature, just a hindrance.
you don't have to lose your social graph to move instances though. mastodon has had account migration for years, now.
Lemmy doesn't, since it's not part of the protocol, and in both situations you still lose your actual id.
In general, there's technical reasons why ids and instances are associated on Lemmy / Mastodon, but not UX reasons.
99% of users just want a username, i.e. @bigCommieMouth, they don't necessarily want their identity tied together with the server they use to interact with the network, i.e. @bigCommieMouth@kolektiva.social, and if they did really love a specific server and wanted their identity tied to it, they could always just make @bigCommieMouth_kolektiva_social.
>there’s technical reasons why ids and instances are associated on Lemmy / Mastodon, but not UX reasons.
...right...
>99% of users just want a username,
literally 100% of users have used this system regardless of the fact that identities are tied to services.
So? 100% of users never used the fediverse before it existed. Bluesky / ATProtocol is now offering an alternative where usernames are not tied to instances, and that sounds like a better UX.
so go there
bye
If you don't want to discuss the relative merits of Bluesky, don't participate in a thread on Bluesky.
bye
i thought this thread was about me correcting misunderstandings about activitypub software. i have no interest in bluesky until/unless they either aferro gpl their code or implement activitypub federation. there are no merits to their network that i can see unless one or both of those come to pass.
I don't see a title saying "self post: let me correct you about the activitypub protocol", I see a link to Bluesky launching federated storage.
Then don't engage in a discussion about their identity system, just post a blanket comment saying "they suck cause they're not open enough" and leave the thread. The rest of us are here discussing the relative merits of one protocol vs another.
That's true, but it's not an inherent limitation of ActivityPub.
Isn't it?
Your ID, along with the canonical data associated with it, is tied to your instance. That's how the protocol works. There's no mechanism for decoupling all that.
Mastodon has a half-hearted migration feature.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md
Good to see there's at least a proposal though.
Any service can implement this today, with activitypub. Being an enhancement proposal is just an attempt to standardize extensions to ActivityPub, lots of the time that services have already implemented.
But it is an inherent feature of ATProtocol
https://xkcd.com/927/
I think about this often, but I wouldn't consider ActivityPub a settled on standard just yet...
Can you block entire servers, though? Do you have the ability to even tell content apart based on server of origin? It's not clear that you can and the implication seems to be that the only thing you get out of hosting your own server is hosting your own data; it doesn't seem to offer you any sort of control over federation.
You can make and share custom feeds based on XYZ parameters and you can make and share block lists so I think its fair to assume you can make and share a blocklist that is “block everyone from X server”. Federation was literally just announced so i think its fair all of the features havent been completed
users can do that already on fediverse..? Additionally admins have power to block servers they wish, that gives much control and is a lot better, dont see the advantage bluesky is pretending to have.
Users have to maintain public blocklists to deal with poor moderation from BSky HQ. For the most part, it works, but if you get on the bad side of anyone running a list you're basically at the mercy of them not using their lists for personal vendettas. When that does happen, all it does is dilute the usefulness of said blocklists and in turn lets the bad actors back into the mix as people unsubscribe.
I guess it's an immature system and maybe people will create services to maintain lists with proper accountability, appeals, etc. but that's just trying to skirt around the main issue which is that Bluesky LLC is not interested in federating the backend service.
As for their "you can't interact with viral posts" claim, that's only a Mastodon problem - IMO they designed their feed system really shitty for a service trying to imitate Twitter. On Lemmy, I can easily see active posts across dozens of instances without having to subscribe to them, and the communities of those instances have a right to decide who does and doesn't federate. We've successfully sectioned off troublesome communities, without turning the entire network into a fragmented map of isolation.
I would like activitypub to better support instances that do nothing but host personal data without having to also technically be a full platform (ie. those tiny masto/lemmy instances for people who dont wanna make accounts on someone else's server). But for the regular user the current AP system is way better than what BSKY offers.
That being said, I like Bluesky and its community, I just dont think it deserves to be "fediverse".
You're talking about "Nazis" so much it looks like you travelled straight from 1942 to now just a few moments ago and do not yet grasp the fact that Bluesky would obviously ban them since it's like a big monolithic Mastodon instance
"obviously"
As if this hasn't been a defining problem or the past decade on every monolithic social media site...