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Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains (fortune.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I thought this was slightly funny.

Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.

Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.

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[–] 4 points 1 year ago* (32 children)

only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists

Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.

ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible.

Because AT protocol has features that are incompatible with ActivityPub, and those features are important to some users.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (26 children)

    Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.

    The fact that we don't see this yet, and that Bluesky has accepted the amount of money they have from actors I would not want to be associated with, makes me doubt this is possible.

    Even if a non-profit wanted to operate with good intentions, the expense of running an AT proto hub would eventually prove a challenge, and the non-profit would either go under or need to start looking around for money. Meanwhile people can self-host their Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi.

    Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub, I have tried and failed to understand exactly which feature is the AT proto folks so desperately wanted that they found it impossible to achieve through ActivityPub. The whole thing with having a mobile identity or whatever seems like a nothing burger to me - at the end of the day it just means that your user name is your DID number, and that web addresses can redirect towards that one. It's hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    It's hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol

    My one complaint about fediverse is I have half a dozen baronvonj@ accounts in order to get the features and UI experience of each. They are all separate, with the data for each spread out, and we all have to redundantly follow on each. If I could have one fediverse identity with all my data self-hosted, that would be the awesomesauce. But I can't with fedi and I can with AT.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (14 children)

    I guess that's fair, as a way to make users identifiable with the same user name all over the internet, no matter which platform they are on.

    When people sign in using bluesky on https://frontpage.fyi/, they are still bluesky accounts? Or does the account somehow transform into something that exists between both sites?

    Is there any real innovation here beyond a combination of "sign in with x service" and having your domain appear as your user name?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (12 children)

    I'm not sure if it's good window dressing on top of SAML/OAUTH but I see the same username on both. Not this is not me, I just scrolled frontpage.fyi and picked a poster at random then searched the same username on bsky.app.

    https://bsky.app/profile/tonybark.com https://frontpage.fyi/profile/tonybark.com

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Yeah, they will use their domains, and they can sign in with Bluesky. So it is the same account to a pretty significant degree. What I'm wondering is if the Frontpage user would break if Bsky.app disappeared, or if the user could still sign in as the identity is somehow truly decentralized.

    As for domains as user names, I guess ActivityPub could achieve something by allowing users to have verified websites (mastodon style) appear as their user names. I don't really see what would have to change on a protocol level to make this possible.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (10 children)

    Identity is decentralized through the protocol so they'd be fine. Bluesky at the end of the day is just app view that sits on top of the protocol so it can disappear and everything will continue operating as long as there's a relay online.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    But on frontpage.fyi, if you want to sign up, you have to sign up through Bluesky. They direct you to bsky.app to create your account.

    I just don't see how this is a real functional example of a portable account. Maybe it is not supposed to be - if so, is the decentralized nature of accounts demonstrated anywhere in a practical way?

    I struggle to understand things I cannot see.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah I would say they likely just aren't using the protocol properly, that being said I'm not sure I know of an example who is.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Why are we acting like this is a detail.

    Why did I have to burrow all the way down to this spot to see this?

    The conversation should begin, or very nearly begin with this as it puts EVERYTHING ELSE around bluesky hype into question, it transmutes the castles you are describing into constructions of sand that might topple any moment to forces of money, greed and effective (even if not explicit) centralized control.

    sigh I don't mean to attack you personally, but this conversation feels so warped sometimes.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I know this convo was 2 weeks ago, but they published a great article that includes how Identify is handled that answers our questions.

    https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-ethos

    Effectively identify is as the PDS level. So if Bluesky goes down and your account were through Bluesky you'd lose your identity ?*

    If your account is held through another platform like Spark or your own self hosted PDS your identity would remain live.

    *My question that sparked from this is if Bluesky went down and you're already logged into a second platform, when you log into that second platform does it duplicate your DID? I'm assuming not and you'd still lose it because logins are through OIDC and the keys still exist on Bluesky.

    Regardless the true path to decentralization should be everyone hosting their own identity on their own PDS w/ identity but that might be a longshot. The path to decentralization is effectively allowed but will people take advantage of it?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    You can login with any pds (personal data server) on frontpage, i can self host my own one, and login with it on frontpage.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Okay, that's more interesting! Thanks!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Its still not really decentralised, because all the pds's need to be crawled by a relay, but its still a pretty cool technology. Someone made flushes.app which I think is a good demonstration of how it can be used.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Cool.

    It's funny how one of the main criticisms of ActivityPub is that it's too difficult to implement, yet after all this attention the best the ATmosphere has managed to come up with is a toilet flushing repository. But I see the value of the portable identity. I think.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Well, its easy to build an app on atproto, but lord forbid you want to do anything with a pds. The activitypub spec is so much easier to read and understand than the pds spec.

    Also, portable identity is possible on activitypub as well, its just not implemented in many projects.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    That's because its new. ActivityPub has been around for 7 years now, and I'd argue its totally stagnated on Mastodon to the point that the fediverse is mastodon to most people, and the norms of message passing are ruled by mastodon. Whereas atproto has been around for 2 years, one of which was in a very small and restricted alpha stage to get the core blocks stable. Now we see so many projects getting off the ground, some of the ones I mentioned being the most mature. With that said they are all earlydays, as is the protocol.

    If we really want to talk about massive leaps, and a vibrant dev community thats actively build and expanding the protocol even faster than atproto, than its Nostr. Problem with them is the community building it 😅

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub

    There are significant differences in account portability. ActivityPub allows you to transfer your followers to a new server, but not your content.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Nothing in ActivityPub says you can't move your content from one platform to another. It's just that Mastodon does not have this feature at the moment.

    Meanwhile, I'm not sure whether Bluesky has this feature or not, but it's somewhat irrelevant considering the fact that there are no other platforms to move your content to. The only thing I've actually seen from this is that you can use an URL as your username in the front-end, though it just points towards the same DID in the backend. I struggle to see what the great achievement here is.

    If this was the reasoning behind Bluesky, they could have developed a platform running on AP supporting the transfer of content between instances, and it would have been a whole lot easier than developing a whole new protocol.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    Nothing in ActivityPub says you can't move your content from one platform to another.

    Your content in ActivityPub is linked to the home instance. So for example I can't move this post from lemmy.world to another server. I could copy/paste the content into a new post on another server, but it would be a broken piece of our conversation with no context or replies.

    Also, hosting a ATProto self-instance is not as expensive as you suggest. This person did it for $150/month.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Fair - you could host a copy or a link (or a sort of combination between the two, I guess), but it wouldn't transfer the ownership of the original post. I'm still not sure this is such a pressing feature that I accept it as the actual raison d'etre of AT proto, especially considering how it very much exists there only in theory at best. But it is interesting technology, and something they could maybe have worked with ActivityPub to try to achieve.

    I'm glad to hear that maybe Bluesky is more decentralized than I suspect, but Bluesky engineer whose blog post you linked still links to his bluesky account on bsky.social. If running a separate instance is achievable, I would love to see people actually do it.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    My understanding is that running most of BlueSky is possible on small to moderate hardware. However, running all of BlueSky requires basically cloning 100% of all the content on BlueSky (which, as of Nov 2024, was ~5 TB).

    So, like, yes, one can run part of BlueSky or a clone of BlueSky which has none of the main instance's user's content without much trouble, but actually running an entire BlueSky stack is eventually going to become cost prohibitive.

    I found this write-up to be enlightening on the subject.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    You full on misunderstand the protocol. The .bsky.social subdomain does not denote what "instance" you are on. There are no instances on atproto. That user could be self hosting all there data and still use that subdomain. It's not mutually exclusive. Atproto is far more atomic than AP.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Right. I guess that's similar with bridged users - you see them on bsky.app, even though they are actually located elsewhere.

    What I struggle with is seeing the decentralization in practice, when the only place I can ever see AT proto in action is when Bluesky users are bridged to the fediverse. Bluesky has a shitload of users and there are a bunch of people jumping on the technology - why is there not so much as an understandable proof of concept out there?

    On ActivityPub it's so easy to understand. "See this post? Well, here's the same post on some other domain, hosted by other people".

    I don't understand how Bluesky can be this difficult to understand, yet apparently fulfil such a fundamental need.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's fairly easy to understand but you won't really see it and that by design. The point is to make the underpinning so seamless that it feels like a centralized app. The proof of concept is Bluesky, but if you would like to see other services that are completely unaffiliated with Bluesky PBC than check out:

    • whtwnd.com (Whitewind)
      • A longform blogging platform that has its own Lexicon and AppView
    • pinksea.art (Pinksea)
      • An oekaki BBS with its own lexicon and CDN implementation
    • tangled.sh (Tangled)
      • A git forge integrated with atproto, they even have made some additions with regards to knots.

    All of these and many more are being built along with infrasstucture plays from the like of Blacksky, Northsky, and Free our Feeds.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Which benefits does AT have in comparison to Activity pub? Except currently single point of entry/failure?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)
    • The real user names (DIDs) are cryptic codes that are kept hidden most of the time, with your visible user name redirecting towards it. This gives the illusion that user names can be changed/transported, and that users are not locked down to one platform.
    • Content is filtered rather than censored, so that a big monopolistic actor can allow bigots on their platform but keep them out of sight of regular users. Had Bluesky been an ActivityPub hub, it could easily end up being perceived as a nazi bar. This is a benefit for Bluesky who do not want to be responsible for moderating their platform.

    They want decentralized moderation on a centralized platform. That's how on Bluesky, there's an understanding that the removal of hate speech "conflicts with Bluesky’s decentralized goals". On Mastodon, the decentralized nature is how we can show bigots the door without them getting to whine about their freedom of expression. Bluesky manages to create a problem using the very same concept by which Mastodon solves it.

    I guess this didn't really end up being a post about the benefits of AT. Oops.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    This is a benefit for Bluesky who do not want to be responsible for moderating their platform.

    At least in Germany there is a mandatory German filter list that seems to be maintained by Bluesky themselves. They couldn't legally operate here if they allowed holocaust denial and such.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    There are minimum standards they'll have to abide by, but that's similar to Meta after their change of policy. It really is not enough that it should make anyone feel comfortable.

    Basically big platforms can choose between making moderation expensive, minimal, or arbitrary. Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they're legal. Reddit is leaning into arbitrary, having AI banning folks on account of upvotes. Facebook used to dabble with expensive, but have made a recent shift into minimal.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they're legal.

    This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.

    I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this

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