Delusions of a Protocol (azhdarchid.com)

submitted 1 week ago by flamingos@feddit.uk to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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So, if you're online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user.

[…]
Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. Bluesky was never really packaged as something that was relatively easy for someone to spin up on their own servers; the network has been historically extremely centralized, and only small minorities of users have broken off.

AT Proto decentralization doesn't exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won't be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky's end.

Bluesky inc isn't really making 'a protocol', they're making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.

I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don't run a social media platform.

This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.

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[-] General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

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

[-] Skavau@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I feel like many people who went to Bluesky were desperate for it to work and grow, rather than necessarily believing it would work and grow and in some cases - weren't even people who the Twitter style even appealed to. They just went there to try and do a bit of damage to Twitter. This is likely why its now slowly losing activity.

I signed up to Bluesky not too long after it surged. And I made a few comments, but quickly just... didn't have anything say. It's just a "shout into the ether" site like Twitter - but smaller, and no nazis. That's a good thing in itself, but in an ideal world I would never really use it.

[-] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 1 points 1 week ago

They recommend people other american centralized social media as an alternative to Bluesky in response to this, yet again. When are they going to learn?

[-] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Bluesky is of course just another American social media company. If they are not shit now, they will be once they get bigger. The American model has reached a dead end and it's not suitable for good products, competition and real innovation.

Side note, it's been a while since I've lived in the US, so my knowledge of local "culture wars" is from online sources, but the article is incorrect in claiming that Jesse Singal is a transphobe. I say this as someone who often disagrees with him.

I will add that many of the commentators in his substack are unhinged and likely transphobes.

[-] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 0 points 1 week ago

Anyone who doesn't toe the line is a "transphobe"

[-] MxRemy@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago

Yes, he is absolutely a transphobe, by the very wiki article you linked?

[-] verdi@feddit.org 0 points 1 week ago

Legal scholar John Inazu characterized the backlash as "widespread outrage from progressive commentators" and that in some criticisms, "ad hominem attacks far outpaced their substantive critiques".[13]

US americans are largely the same, be it trumpers or self styled liberals, they always have to be "better than" or "the best" of something. This leads to dangerous orthodoxies that don't allow debate or discussion which furter leads to stances that are nothing but distilled anti-intellectualism. The trumpers call everything woke, the liberals call everything phobe. Meanwhile the overton window has moved so far to the right, the country elected a pedophile scam artist as president because they know him from TV and the rest of the world is left holding the bag.

[-] DomeGuy@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

There is a bunch of normalized transphobia in America. That certain views are shared by elected politicians doesn't make them not transphobic.

"Trans allies aren't even bothering to debate this white guy, they're just calling him names" isn't proof of anything more than the frustration of said allies. It's essentially the same thing as "Trump derangement syndrome".

If we want to argue that someone is or isn't transphobic, it would be a better use of everyone's time to focus on what they actually said and what justifications their critics give for applying that label.

[-] verdi@feddit.org 0 points 1 week ago

IMHO, the US has bigger fish to fry than transphobia, it's ridiculous it has so much air time in the anglosphere in the face of the much more relevant inequality and destruction of association rights. The neonazis set up the bait and the idiots gobble it up, hook line and sinker.

[-] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago

IMHO, the US has bigger fish to fry than transphobia

Yes. That's why the politicians keep talking about trans people. They are explicitly stirring up transphopbia as a simultaneous distraction and unification tool

he liberals call everything phobe.

Literally the only reason you're even talking about this yourself is because of the neonazis. You're literally doing their work, whilst somehow thinking you're immune to it...

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 week ago

The transphobes are getting ready to take away my healthcare, I think I have to be very worried about that.

If I can't get my medicine I will die.

[-] verdi@feddit.org 0 points 1 week ago

One of the beauties of socialized healthcare is transphobes can't take it away from anyone.

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 week ago

And they use the threat of trans people getting government healthcare as a way to stop socialized medicine. They also use racism this way, and sexism, and homophobia, and xenophobia, and other reactionary ideologies. These things are directly connected, we can't really ignore one to focus on the other.

Besides, we need to form a mass movement, and you can't form a mass movement by telling minorities to shut up and wait their turn.

Also I might lose my healthcare in the next few months. It's kind of fucking urgent?

[-] verdi@feddit.org 0 points 1 week ago

Move to a civilised country and seek asylum because you're persecuted in your country of origin.

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

This is complicated by the fact that the English speaking world isn't safe, or won't be for long. The UK is having its own wave of transphobic reaction which has spread to Ireland, Canada is being threatened with a trade war and being the 51st state, Australia got couped that one time by the CIA, and New Zealand is a hard place to get into since it's basically the bunker nation for billionaires since COVID.

I might apply for asylum outside the English speaking world but that's extremely challenging in lots of other ways. I'm cramming language lessons atm to give myself a chance if I am forced to flee, but it's dire.

[-] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I can see how the AT protocol is designed to scale. ActivityPub works fine now because the community is fairly small, but it will reach its limits as it is currently designed. Its basically an event driven model vs a push and pull model. Sure a docker image can more or less jusy be deployed, but that simplicity is a ticking time bomb.

Running a relay is way more powerful than the author states though. You could do stuff like selectivly intercept and reject events before they make it into or out of the firehose.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 week ago

This depends on what you think the purpose of ActivityPub is and subsequently the type of scale. ActivityPub is designed for horizontal scale in a "social network". If you have lots of participating entities with a more or less similar number of interconnected subscriptions ActivityPub scales extremely well, unlike ATProto, which needs to more or less ingest the entire network in its firehose.

But you are right that ATProto is better designed for "social media", meaning that most subscriptions are one sided affairs with highly visible "influencers" being the main point around which the network operates. Obviously this is what most commercial networks are more interested in as it allows profitable advertisement and other forms of social influence.

I see these two types as entirely different forms of social interaction, and couldn't care less about the latter. So I am not worried at all about scaling issues of ActivityPub, as it scales extremely well in the "social network" type of interaction.

[-] naught101@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

I like this take, but I wonder if there's eventually a combinatoric problem with having hundreds of thousands of small instances, each with thousands of connection to other instances? I have no idea how that relates to the network/computational constraints..

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 week ago

Modern webservers don't have a problem serving thousands of requests as long as they are spaced out a bit timewise. And since each AP instance only sees and interacts with a small part of the overall network it should not become an issue to expand the network horizontally. It is anyways probably better to think of interconected archipelagos and not of a singular network in the case of ActivityPub.

[-] naught101@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

Is that really true though? Say we end up with 10k servers with 100-1000 users each, even if only 10% of those users have a connection to a server that no one rose on their server is connected to, that's still a highly connected network.

Then add boosts from other servers (that incentivise cross-network follows)...

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 week ago

Mastodon already has those numbers you mention and there are no performance issues in the overall network.

[-] naught101@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I don't believe that's true.. It currently has around 9k servers, but I think the vast majority of those will have less than 10 users.

Anyway, there's currently about 1m active users, so the real question is will it scale by 3 orders of magnitude? And my point being that I'd expect the network to become more connected as it scales (at least for the main archipelago, which is probably always going to house a majority of users).

[-] INeedMana@piefed.zip 0 points 1 week ago

ActivityPub works fine now because the community is fairly small, but it will reach its limits as it is currently designed. Its basically an event driven model vs a push and pull model. Sure a docker image can more or less jusy be deployed, but that simplicity is a ticking time bomb.

You mean that when there's more traffic, the instances will start to DDOS each other?

[-] wisdomchicken@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago

i ddos my wordpress-activitypub-enabled website every time i boost a post made from there to my 10k followers. tried every single caching plugin for it as well.

activitypub scaling is a very real issue

[-] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

Cloudflare caching can solve this. Cache based on the user agent.

[-] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.

Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.

[-] General_Effort@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

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?

[-] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

If you're the kind of person who wants a particular person banned, you probably want to be on the kind of instance that would ban them, and then from your perspective, they'd be banned, so you'd never have to see their posts. It still being possible to interact with them from other instances isn't any more of a big deal than it being possible to interact with them on an entirely different website after they're banned from regular social media - no one can ban someone from the whole Internet.