- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27143191
Why I recommend against Bluesky.
Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
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It’s just wild to watch Bluesky fans stumble over themselves to say it’s part of a federated future and that it’s decentralized yada yada, when it takes millions of dollars to do with it what takes me $80 for a Raspberry Pi and $15 for a domain name to do with ActivityPub.
Idk why anyone argues it. I’m on it, but only because I want to support Not Twitter®. I’m there to just be user no. 1663987 who doesn’t want to be on Twitter. I post a stupid thought, some sports commentary, and scroll the feed for a minute or two. If it went away tomorrow, I’d have 0 negative effects on my life in even the most miniscule way.
Like…I like it there, and people seem to want an alternative to Twitter pretty bad, but idk if Bluesky is it. But I also don’t care to join Mastodon, as this kinda format isn’t something I care about or take seriously, and I’d rather get information here. If I get a Mastodon account in the future, though, I’d rather not have it tied directly back to my spite posting account lol
Bluesky is new Twitter today.
There is nothing in its design to prevent it from becoming the X of tomorrow.
Sure. My goal isn’t to be on the next Twitter, or Mastodon, or anything on short format social media. It’s too make Twitter look worse by inflating Bluesky account numbers.
Those are steep prices for a pi and a domain
Canadian $
Those are good prices for a pi and a domain
From the article …
This effectively means that, if you get banned by the Bluesky company, you’re out. Sure, you could still host your own Personal Data Server, wait for a non-existent independent Relay to fetch your data and interact with users of third-party Bluesky applications. But you won’t: you’re effectively at the mercy of the Bluesky company.
Point two, and more importantly: this approach provides an “exit strategy” in the event that Bluesky “goes evil”. Right now, that’s false: parts of the social network are still centralized and it’s impossible to avoid that. But even if we limit ourselves to PDSs and Relay, the current situation is that federation is only achievable in theory and no one has done it in practice yet.
I still don’t understand how the PDS concept matters in an interconnected network of replies. Conversations are threaded, and that “personal data” needs all parties involved in the chain to move to this new thing at the same time. It’s not going to happen.
Yep.
Its ‘federated’ as long as you ignore a single massive chokepoint controlled by one company that allows them to block/ban/censor users of any part of the system.
So functionally, their ‘federation’ system is actually just a false marketing/propoganda campaign that may also result in crowd sourcing some server costs.
It’s psuedo-federation, along the lines of a psuedo-historian or psuedo-scientist: They pretend to be something they are not, in such a way that makes them seem trustworthy when they are in fact not.
How naive do people have to be to think bluesky is their friend? Or that this company has any other interest but market domination?
Honestly I don’t think many people are naive they just went to where everyone else went en mass after musk. There’s no advantage besides userbase size at the moment and arguably some fedi servers have BSky beat on features already
This is very recent news but there is a group of people on Bluesky that are looking at setting up their own PDS, but it feels clear to me that the system as designed is so heavily biased against third parties doing this. It’s just such a completely different vibe compared to ActivityPub platforms that are built so strongly around the goal of making it easy to do in order to make it more widely distributed.
The problem isn’t the PDS but the Relays. You need terabytes of storage and and some beefy hardware to run one of these. Also there are still quite some parts centralized.
So it’s not federated properly or something? Is the problem having to abandon ship if everything goes the Twitter route?
What most people in this thread don’t realize is that what you’re seeing right here is the problem with federated services in this day and age.
Federation protocols and systems just are not mature enough to scale.
Yes you will essentially always have to abandon ship anytime any federated service scales up it’s user base. It will always be entirely unaffordable and unobtainable for randoms to host their own servers because the compute storage and networking requirements will far exceed what most can’t afford.
As an aggregate federated services are always more expensive to host then centralized services. And that cost scales less efficiently than centralized services. Meaning that with linear user growth you get exponential cost growth, and the barrier for entry follows.
Which means that all federated services have to have centralization in order to scale. In their current form.
This is a really tough problem to solve and is going to take a lot of time and money to build good solutions for. Time and money that… You guessed it, is largely funded by profits not donations.
And now we have looped back around.
That seemed to be what I was understanding about the issue. Does that mean that the technology isn’t there yet, in terms of affordability? If that’s the case it would be longer to fully get something like this as the concept is the opposite of what people with money want
Just so that I get this out while it’s fresh on my mind, what’s wrong with the internet right now is cyberfeudalism.
The internet is essentially an infinite world, so no matter how much the large companies gobble up, we’ll always be able to go somewhere else.
That being said, it gets really fucking exhausting to move over and over again to different apps and different locations just so to talk to people without some greedy, megalithic corporation there, snooping on everything you say and ingesting your words to feed some abomination intelligence simulation or to figure out the best way to sell you a new pair of fucking socks.
All of that being said, I’m just saying it fucking sucks to continuously be a refugee, and what sucks about apps and companies and programs that end up selling out for a dollar is that if you don’t emmigrate to a new platform, you become nothing.
The internet is essentially an infinite world
I think this worldview is part of the problem. Nothing is infinite, not even the Internet. The tiny pillars that maintain critical pieces will eventually move on. We used to joke that the Internet is forever, but it’s not. Data decays and dies. Old web pages are lost.
Archive.org, Wikipedia, Linux, free and open-source things we take for granted could just disappear.
Even the scope of the Internet isn’t infinite. Just because something is created doesn’t mean that people will see it, and not everything you can think of exists on the Internet.
It’s large, for sure, but it has boundaries. Boundaries we can see in macroscopic forms.
you become nothing.
You are not nothing because you’re not lost in an infinite landscape. Again, the Internet has boundaries, and singular actions that nobody has seen can happen.
The Internet is just a bunch of servers my dude.
Someone has to pay for them, and all the other infrastructure around them. And with a large part of the world being on the internet a significant portion of their day the costs for even the most efficient centralized services running “at scale” (see: hundreds of millions MAU) are astronomical. In the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of $ annually, just an infrastructure, never mind human resources.
Almost none of these companies survive off of donations. Wikipedia stands out as one that does mainly because they host static content, which is incredibly cost efficient to serve up., and even then their costs are pretty astronomical (there are some debates around their costs of course).
Federated services have an asymmetric scaling problem. A linear growth in users results in a exponential growth in infrastructure costs. While centralized services tend to be almost the entire opposite of that and usually see logarithmic infrastructure costs against linear user growth. Where infrastructure costs are more efficient as their user base grows.
Federated services don’t benefit from running at scale, the more they scale up the less benefit there is to scaling. It’s a really shit situation to be in.
This is why the internet is largely just cyber feudalism. Because the only ones that can afford to host large scaled services for their users are the ones that are making money off of it. And that’s for centralized services, never mind decentralized services which are unbelievably more expensive to host.
I’m coming at this from the standpoint of an engineer, I don’t have answers or solutions, but the first thing we have to do in order to start figuring out solutions is to recognize the problem.
All of that being said, I’m just saying it fucking sucks to continuously be a refugee, and what sucks about apps and companies and programs that end up selling out for a dollar is that if you don’t emmigrate to a new platform, you become nothing.
App and companies aren’t the only choice. Back in our internet roots you set up your own website to share your views. If you wanted real time chat we had telnet chat and later IRC. Your same telnet client worked on every server. Your browser was able to view every page.
IRC has always been kinda clunky. I’ve never been able to get into using it and it’s always a pain when I find myself having to. Thankfully chat infrastructure is advancing but it’s been a step by step process. Making E2EE work right is still not smooth or a guaranteed feature
If I want to scream into the void, I can do that anywhere and anytime, and I do not need a web server to do it.
To quote Ariel, I want to be where the people are.
This is true. I like being able to talk to people on the internet down hopefully make a friend somewhere along the way. The fact that this is still hard is something we really need to work on. I’ve just never really felt the need for a personal website, I’m not into blogging or I can probably already have one. I just don’t write enough of that level of substance to build myself a Blog of any sort and I’m not really interested in the attention that publishing seems to imply. I like things a bit more casual.
Thats why you join a web ring with your website.
And to paraphrase Michael Bolton from Office Space, why should we be the ones who have to move? The corporations are the ones who suck!
Idk I’m kinda used to it, maybe that’s from growing up with Aol handing out disks at the supermarket to this. Being a refugee doesn’t bother me. If anything the ability to tank a corpo by making something new is kinda fun.
That being said I can see a point where that becomes impossible or just too difficult financially. That other comment about it needing basically 300 m to start a new instance really got me thinking. Is it just impossible for bluesky to fix itself now? I can see why it’s not a priority from a corpo perspective but is this something that the team could fix if they made it a priority now? or is the need to keep one ID simply in compatible with the fedverse?
Why would they want to “fix” it?
I want Twitter to fail for how it’s turned, but until shown otherwise, bluesky is another closed system. It’s better than Twitter and I hope they prove me wrong.
Because they don’t want to be twitter clone 7 in 5 years? I personally don’t care because I never used Twitter, but I use Bluesky to yell at senators in between emails and phone calls. So I am fine with abandoning the platform when it’s no longer useful for that.
The digital refugee system will continue as projects start and either collapse or thrive long enough to become corpo garbage.
Bluesky is in a position to really change that as more and more people ditch twitter. Users don’t even have to understand the fedverse or decentralization to use it. They should want to not become the next MySpace or worse.
The problem is having to get 300 millions to open another instance https://feddit.org/post/6795570
huh
deleted by creator
huh, is Bridgey Fed not using relays?
As far as I understand do they use Bluesky’s infrastructure.
