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Maybe Bluesky has "won"

(anderegg.ca)
461 points GavinAnderegg | 1 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 1.593s | source
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llm_nerd ◴[15 Nov 24 20:33 UTC] No.42150659[source]▶
Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

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1. rakoo ◴[15 Nov 24 22:52 UTC] No.42152192[source]▶
The ironic bit is that conceptually Bluesky is RSS with WebSub <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub>

- PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher

- Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host

- App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after

- PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI.

A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed

1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats.

2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>

3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build

All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders