[stub for offtopicness]
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ATProto is designed around accounts that are independent of data host, application, and moderation, all in the name of giving users individual control over these things. It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server, but without the overhead
No, it's like every Mastodon user used the same server, and all the coordination is done by one server that nobody can replicate.
Bluesky accepted VC money. For a social platform that means its death certificate has already been signed.
What you're ignoring with that framing is that we can use social media that operates outside the VC startup pipeline and doesn't have enshittification baked in from the start.
This is nothing like having a single server for every user. Perhaps you are confusing Bluesky (one app) with ATProtocol the shared network? There are already independent servers and apps operating separate from Bluesky
I don't see how ATProto is doing noticeably better than the scenario where a large ActivityPub instance blocks your external account.
It's really not that hard to find enriching content from all walks of life on Bluesky -- if somebody can't find it, they just suck at the internet.
To be clear, I do have grievances with Bluesky, and I do not have high hopes for its future -- but that's because I personally believe that social media in general is both fatally flawed from the start and detrimental to society, and will never not devolve into ad-riddled or otherwise enshittified services. I am not a Bluesky shill, I'm just here to call out the silly false equivalence with Truthsocial, etc.
Two points of note
1. You can participate in Bluesky without the Bluesky app, so you can remove this requirement by using an alternative app
2. The most blocked account is blocked by around 0.25% of the full network (https://clearsky.app/)
This second point does not account for users banned from Bluesky by Bluesky for breaking the ToS or PDS abuse.
If you instead claim that users can always choose to use other 3P relays, then you immediately lose all the nice things that Bluesky is able to do well today (search, discoverability, a “discover” algorithm). Indeed, you fall back to the same old problems that every other decentralized social network has.
Bluesky is just a shittier version of Nostr, except that the people over at Nostr don’t pretend.
Tell me, concretely, how people can choose to continue following me, even though I am banned.
Profile: immibis.bsky.social
yes, the right is full of infighting too as shown by the recent H1B debate, that doesn't contradict my point.
> any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your sentiments
bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing. There is literally no one else to follow, at least for now. X still has non-political content, I mainly follow AI, technology and cryptocurrency, and I couldn't find similar content on bluesky.
Not op, but chiming in. There's a lot of content regarding aquatics and home automation (separate topics). I avoid the politics stuff entirely, and much of the crypto stuff on X tends to be promoting scams and rug-pulls.
I'm not seeing that handle resolve in the normal places. Do you have the DID? You should use a custom domain so that you can control the the reference and lookup.
You can run your own PDS and manage complete account lifecycle
You said it was different from Mastodon, but how is this different from Mastodon?
A big contributor to this feeling is their default "Discover" feed being very mediocre. "Less of this" and "more of this" do not seem to impact what it gives you, neither do what you like, respond to, follow, or who you block. Some days it's entirely cat pictures, other days it's entirely politics (my suggested accounts to follow are 100% of the time in this category). Finding the good content is very difficult, and the handful of accounts I follow are largely accounts I had to manually search for or was given a direct link to somewhere else, which would never have come up naturally. And to try to fix it, I took the advice to use the block feature, er, liberally, and I think it made the problem worse.
I even wouldn't mind the politics being in the feed if it didn't show me the exact same things repeated again and again. I get that determining if two posts are too similar is difficult, but it could at least not show me the same image again and again and again...
I've found https://bsky.app/profile/skyfeed.xyz/feed/discover to be a slightly better version of the Discover feed, but it's a lot less dynamic.
Then you are missing the point. I am asking how much censorship power the largest node in the network has.
If being blocked by the largest provider means 95% of users can't see me anymore then the situation is strictly worse than Mastodon vs ActivityPub-at-large.
ATProto is young compared to the alternatives, give the network time to build out an ecosystem and the resilience we need.
When you use a *.bsky.social handle, you have not made yourself independent and resilient to arbitrary decision by the org that manages that service
To answer your misleading and irrelevant question, I have never been banned by Bluesky. What did you do to get banned on Mastodon? Do you understand that "moderation" and "banned for violating the ToS" are one and the same?
ATProto is not any better than ActivityPub (ie Mastodon) regarding the impact of network effects on moderation. The "big few" retain their outsized influence with both protocols, at least as far as I am aware. If there is a technical misunderstanding about this on my part then do please point it out.
Moreover, the current situation is significantly worse on ATProto because the vast majority of the network currently relies on a single provider.
To be clear, I am not opposed to ATProto. I am only opposed to inaccurate technical comparisons.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ATProto moderation is technically and fundamentally different from ActivityPub: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
Frankly, if I get 16 years out of Bluesky before having to move onto the next one, I can live with that. Social networks _die_; it has always been so. USENET, livejournal, Tumblr, twitter... nothing lasts forever.
You can try using other algo feeds from here: https://bsky.app/feeds and remove the discover feed, or of course you could just use the chronological one.
However as you have rightly noticed, the person you are responding to here is being disingenuous. Controlling the account doesn't fix the fundamental issue caused by network effects. An account that can't interact with a large portion of the network is no different than Mastoson in practice.
The Mastodon equivalent would be running your own single user instance which gets defederated by one of the big players.
I am well aware that ATProto makes improvements to both account migration and end user moderation. Those are of course good things in my view. As previously stated I have noting against ATProto.
This entire subthread started because I responded to your claim that "It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server". That is highly misleading at best, outright wrong at worst. It is only equivalent to that scenario if every ATProto user manages their own account as well as every single other required service, at which point you might as well just have run your own Mastodon instance as it likely would have been both simpler and less resource intensive.
The reality is that this is never expected to happen. ATProto is expected to be like Mastodon, with the improvements that you can share a single account between multiple servers and there are tools to apply additional filtering so that you don't have to see (as much of) things you don't like. Those are certainly welcome improvements but they do nothing to address the outsized effects on censorship that large nodes have in federated networks.
Purely in theory, you could simultaneously use a single account with a full set of politically correct ATProto services (such as Bluesky) and a competing set of politically incorrect ones operated by someone else. However, if history is anything to go off of then this will quickly get you banned by either one or both of the operators. Merely interacting with those guilty of wrongthink has always been an easy way to get kicked off of a surprisingly large number of Mastodon servers.
Even supposing that the above doesn't happen to get you banned by either node, the potential still remains that it could. Whether or not a large node chooses to exercise its outsized influence doesn't change the fact that it possesses it. ATProto doesn't fix that.