this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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[–] [email protected] 144 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I want to join a federated network!

*federation happens*

No, not like that

[–] [email protected] 103 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

We believe in open protocols and hate walled gardens!

Except our walled garden!

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 8 months ago (16 children)

I don’t understand the frustration.

It’s legal to scrape websites and this is doing it in a way that activity pub is designed to support. You can’t be mad another instance is reading your data, that’s what the fediverse is.

I think people will end up finding bridgy annoying frankly, but it seems like a useful tool that takes federated content and lets websites build things that used to be only available by adding Facebook pixel and Twitter links to your site.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 8 months ago (9 children)

Going out on a limb, but the for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset. I personally would block such a service as I don't see these for-profit corporations as part of the fediverse, but as leeches out to Extend, Embrace, Extinguish.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (2 children)

but open data is an objectively good thing. This means anyone can suck up the data and build something instead of just Meta and X and people who pay millions of dollars to access that. Let everyone suck!

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago (6 children)

This argument makes no sense. Everything you post is already public.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (5 children)

I can absolutely understand that sentiment, but that's not quite how the bridge works.

I've chosen to put my content on mastodon, and my friend prefers bluesky. The bridge just shares content across so now we can interact.

I think that's better than mastodon and bluesky each cutting off their bosses to spite their own faces. Fragmenting the between is why X didn't die a much deserved death after Elon Musk bought it.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

profit corporation being able to suck up your posts

anyone can spin up a server and federate, anyone can suck up your data, corporations, governments or unknowns

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

If we're allowed to - and happily do - copy over content from for-profit websites with bots, it feels a bit weird to then get angry about that happening in reverse, no?

Plus, oh no, interoperability. We get to just interact with people instead of everyone sitting in their respective walled gardens.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

Plenty of for-profit companies use open protocols and don't harm them in the slightest.

Almost any website you visit, for example.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?

It seems to me that anything that's being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don't want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don't post publicly.

I guess I just assume that everything I'm posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there's no way to ensure it's not. It's ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there's a conflict between the protocol and the culture.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 8 months ago (4 children)

joins decentralized social network

complains about posts being decentralized and shared around the network

[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Bro some instances block other instances because those other instances don't block all the instances the first instance is blocking

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Bluesky just had to go and make their own federation protocol when ActivityPub was standardized years ago for federation.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

i mean they literally used at proto because it did things that activitypub didn't do and refused to do.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

Remember even large corporations standardising on truly open protocols can be reversed after whatever the situation leading up to it is resolved.

I just remember Jabber/XMPP federation which included Google. Once Google decided they got big enough, they abandoned it. Of course nothing happened to the protocol itself, it is well and alive both on Fortune 500 and selected as official choice for presence protocol on internet2.edu

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I am from Mastodon / ActivityPub bubble. Can someone explain me the benefits of Bluesky / AT protocol?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (6 children)

From their website:

Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.

Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).

https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub

Sounds fair to me, although I am also not using either Mastodon or Bluesky.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

rn not much. In the future there'll be properly portable accounts using cryptographic keys and once federation kicks in lighter servers making it probably more distributed.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So nothing to keep an eye on considering an overwhelming amount of cons of Bluesky.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

It's not even a fight. Bluesky lost a long long time ago when they launched an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX and have done absolutely nothing to address this other than add curated feeds which barely work in the first place. Bluesky is so far behind that calling it a fight is just silly.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 8 months ago (2 children)

“Lost”. its still growing, gaining more features, and more users. Its a growing protocol thats in its infancy while activitypub is 6+ years old. Theres such a weird elitism coming from mastodon/activitypub people like can we chill and improve activitypub instead of constantly trying to shit on the atProtocol?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Hmm atprotocol has 1 server and 1 product. How is it competing with other decentralized protocols by not having anything to show? All I'm saying that it's not a real competition yet especially since Bluesky is literally just the worst parts of Twitter without anything done to address the same toxic shit that came out of the original.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Didn't it just open for public registration too?

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Bluesky lost? I'm all for corporate social media losing, but I think Bluesky has a bigger chance than Mastodon to become as big as Twitter at its peak, because of the money behind it. At least for the short/medium term. Long term, when Bluesky inevitably also falls due to enshittification or what not, Mastodon might win, unless it has splintered into a bunch of defederated clusters of drama at that point.

Personally I'll never join another corporate social media platform ever again. But I'm in a miniscule minority.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I‘m in this minuscule minority with you. Fuck corpos.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

Yeah I was about to say, I could see an argument for Mastodon having lost (it's momentum, which is the only thing it truly has going for it), but Bluesky? ~every podcaster I follow now advertises they're on bluesky instead of twitter, and most youtubers link to their bluesky, too. At least in the US it seems to have gotten decently popular tbh.

OTOH, we have the BBC and Flipboard being all-in on Mastodon, granted. Which is going to be fun when people get around to defederating them considering how it went for Threads.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (7 children)

an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX

And yet, they have the one thing that matters: the users.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don't like bluesky because I don't like it's owner. I don't like the owner because he thinks everyone is dumb and forgot the fact that nobody pointed a gun on his face to sell Twitter to some Arab dictators.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Jack Dorsey doesn't "own" Blusky, he just gave them grant money in the beginning to kick things off, and is one of the board members.

"Prior to the seed round, Bluesky's website described the company as a Public Benefit LLC owned by CEO Jay Graber and other Bluesky employees. Post-seed round, the company describes itself as a public-benefit C Corp."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(social_network)#Company_history

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (13 children)

Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

  • Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
  • On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
  • On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can't stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated "public squares" according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn't blocked you).
  • On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it's not, so this doesn't happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it's clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
  • Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.

Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

pretty sure those are the noisy minority. afterall more content drives more people. artificial walls wont benefit anyone...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

People care about Bluesky? Like at all? Interesting.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

If this dev won't do it, another will in a proprietary fashion. These people have too much time on their hands.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.

Barrett planned to make the bridge opt-out by default, meaning that public Mastodon posts could show up on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa.

In what one Bluesky user called “the funniest github issue page i have ever seen,” there was a heated debate over the opt-out default, which — like any good internet argument — included unfounded legal threats and devolved into bizarre personal attacks.

As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it’s not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy.

The ideological issues around Bridgy Fed are likely to continue stoking tension across these federated social networks as they increase their connection points.

“I am thinking and feeling deeply that however content moderation works on either side of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa,” Barrett said.


The original article contains 1,176 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

I think not wanting to federate/bridge with Bluesky is a very bad idea. The entire idea is that we should get a Fediverse that is as connected as possible, not split up into many tiny subsets of users.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

I'm in mastodon but I wouldn't mind trying Bluesky when there are third party servers.

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