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Comment by mbStavola | Hacker News Reader

I'm not 100% sold on ATProto, but the fact that my identity and content can live separately from an instance is an insanely huge advantage over ActivityPub. I do not want to run my own Mastodon server (though I do) but I also don't want to use someone else's server and put my account at the mercy of the operator. It's maddening to think about how I could build a following or amass a ton of quality posts, only for the server to shut down or pull a Twitter. I simply can't stand the thought of it.

If ActivityPub wants to keep riding the wave it has now they should start investigating ways to support this. I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data.

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> I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data.

Given the meteoric rise of TikTok, I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble. At least, not as a percentage (that is, the growth in the number of people who are fed up with centralized platforms is dwarfed by the growth in the number of people who are fine with centralized platforms / not owning their data).

'More and more people' can still be just minority. But niche is there.

Well we may learn the hard way. Lots and lots of good old regular people have quit Facebook and stay off Twitter and many other engagement-optimized platforms. These companies have a poor reputation, for good reason. It’s just not 2010 anymore, and the cracks are starting to show. If a new platform such as bluesky, activitypub or Nostr becomes dominant, people will certainly point to this era in particular as a precursor.

Network effects are real, but appear insignificant until they’re in our faces. The fact that it’s currently a minority is expected, that’s just how network effects work. It was just a minority on Reddit when Digg was the place to be as well.

Obviously I don’t have any magical predictive abilities. But the “vocal minority” argument has bitten a lot of people before. Including those that have stake in the game and are paranoid about competitors.

But seeing as it is no longer 2010, what is the public's appetite for yet another twitter-like app?

There is still a large appetite, but people won't use their real names anymore.

And they shouldn't. Part of being a kid is exploring interactions and learning from mistakes. Can you imagine growing up in a society where your account follows you from elementary school and anyone can review it? Even if you are the utmost in social propriety, but have a hobby that you enjoy, someone is going to disapprove of it or your fandom and penalize you accordingly. Post too much? Penalized. Post too little? Penalized.

The world is not a fair or equitable place, and so, we should not design systems that enable bullies.

Right, I probably won’t use bluesky as I never used Twitter. The format was always fomo- and hot-take oriented to me, so I stayed away. I don’t understand why people are desperate to remake that particular product.

People, largely, aren't staying off Twitter and Facebook because they're fed up with engagement-optimized platforms or because those companies have poor reputations or because they want decentralization. They left (or never joined) because their peer group left (or never joined). Take a casual poll of the teenagers and early-twentysomethings in your orbit, if you can: they're all probably on certain platforms and not on others. If you asked them why they aren't on Facebook they'd probably look confused and tell you that none of their friends are.

I never said that. But it’s an important point nonetheless, which I believe you are right about. If a transition happens, it will be in the layers where these things matter.

For instance, a fire department may switch from Twitter because it’s rate limited. A community for visually impaired may move from Reddit because it’s dragging its feet with accessibility. Journalists and media houses may switch because they get censored by a billionaire who’s on a quid pro quo relationship with entities they investigate. Regular “content creators” may switch when they get copyright strikes or demonetized by an automated system. In all of these cases, the small minority of “providers” take a large amount of “consumers” with them. Cumulative resentment looks just like apathy, until suddenly it doesn’t.

Most people are followers. Other liberties like freedom of the press are inapplicable to most people, directly. But the indirect effects, usually shepherded by “vocal minorities” has been shown again and again to add up and transform society rapidly, in something like S-shaped curves. If you accept the rapid growth phase of network effects you need to also acknowledging the rapid death phase on the other side of things.

There are still dozens of us who refuse put their face on the internet. Never mind using our actual face and voice.

The younger Snapchat generations have normalised having their face plastered on every random "hello" message daily.

Completely agree. Privacy is discussed a lot in HN and other techy places, but out there the average joe/jane couldn’t care less about tracking, cookies and all that stuff.

> I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble.

This is another advantage for Bluesky. Because as of now, a user of BlueSky would have no clue that it is "decentralized" at all. In comparison, Nostr shoves it in your face that it is totally unlike anything you're used to.

Bluesky just appears as a Twitter alternative. And I think that is very smart of them. Because realistically, only very serious people/companies should consider running alternative relay servers. Relays come and go on Nostr because people underestimate the amount of work / money involved in running them.

I think there are two sides to this. One one hand I agree with you that this isn't an issue for the "general" public. On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised to see centralized platforms like TikTok getting banned, or perhaps simply unprofitable, within the next decade as legislation slowly grinds its way into limit the impact of these platforms. Because aside from anyone wanting to take more control over their own content, the political and social elites (at least in Europe) are currently very aware and focused on the negative impacts digitalisation has had on our society.

In Denmark we're in the process of banning devices like iPads and smartphones from schools and other institutions. We're also likely going to see an age limit on Social Media like TikTok that's around the same age as buying Alcohol (yes, that's a good combination) and a range of other things. In the wider EU, you have privacy and competition stepping in, both banning and taxing these platforms in ways that might make it hard to operate a profitable platform if you're allowed to have one.

It's still a little too uncertain to say anything concrete, but it's certainly not looking like the explosive growth of centralized "free-to-use" platforms will face the same profitable and non-regulated market the coming 20 years that they did the previous.

Someone is going to be well positioned to take advantage of this as people move on from the previous generation of social media platforms.

Why is Denmark looking to ban tablets and smartphones? Is this a ban on use of personal devices in the school, or a ban of the use of them as educational tools?

They are disruptive. Basically they draw too much attention and it impacts student learning. Or at least that's the argument. I'm not sure why students were ever allowed to use iPhones during school for anything that wasn't educational, but that's probably because I'm old.

It becomes true the second one expresses something that someone else does not wish to be seen/disagree with, and they not only remove it, but they also ban the account (and do this anonymously). At that point one realizes the downside of centralized platforms and dictators-for-life.

There are some activitypub apps that support nomadic identity like HubZilla and Streams: https://codeberg.org/streams/streams

Another non-activitypub alternative is nostr, where your identity is a public/private key pair: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

You still depend on someone to run another server in the event your PDS (Personal Data Server) goes away. It's just a different, bigger server (Big Graph Service) where the people who run it are even less knowable than those who run your PDS.

Moving data only works in this case if you've thought to attach your DID to a domain you control, and the server you move to connects to the BGS server your data lives on. It's still very unclear how this will work. I suspect it will be like Usenet where most BGS indexers have expiry rules and won't hold on to every post.

This is more complicated than AP and Mastodon where you know exactly where you stand when your server goes down. So many people are going to be burned because they heard it's all portable, but didn't actually understand how it worked, and find they can't migrate their identity or their posts because it all rested under [handle].somehugecentralizedserver.tld.

People who struggle with instances on Mastodon (and eventually, Bluesky) are not going to have an easier time figuring out domains and DNS to make their identity portable. This remains a huge unaddressed issue and should concern people who think Bluesky is easier just because it's unfinished.

We could compare with git. Sure, you could publish a git repo anywhere, but most people will choose Github, Gitlab, or another large git hosting service. The reliability of these services matters and we’re fortunate that they’ve been quite good so far. People don’t usually use custom domain names when publishing git repos, though I suppose you could?

With Mastodon you can download your data any time, but you can’t actually upload it anywhere else. There is forwarding, but only for follower subscriptions, with the cooperation of both servers. It’s quite limited. There are brownouts from servers getting overloaded and also due to fairly frequent policy disputes. It does let you do more things without making them public, though, and that’s important to many people.

The blogging model where you have actually independent websites, links, and RSS feeds seems better from a decentralization standpoint, but it’s not popular due to the difficulty of getting people to subscribe to your blog.

That’s why we comment here, right? You could post a comment to your blog, but who would read it? Replies are important.

Is it possible to replicate bluesky by just having a mastodon server of one? As in a solo server with just you that you federate to the other servers? No issue with losing a following or not controlling the platform

Yes, Mastodon has a single-user mode just for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15515759

The problem is that a mastodon server isn't the simplest of things to setup - even if you're just doing it for you, a lot of the dependencies are predicated on other people being involved at some point.

I've got a server[1] of one (real person - there's a bunch of my bots too) which federates quite happily.

[1] Technically three - I've got Akkoma, GotoSocial, and a Honk but I only really use the Akkoma one for "real life".

Setting up gotosocial for just me was straightforward (but not straightforward enough for someone who doesn't manage their own private little fleet of linux servers, sigh). However it doesn't work well: none of the more social elements work properly, hashtags, threads across servers etc etc. You get just the basics.

I concur.

I do think software like gotosocial is the future of ActivityPub, it certainly isn't there yet, indeed.

Mastodon, I'm afraid, has tainted ActivityPub¹. Maybe even beyond fixing. Mastodon is architectured and developed for large servers. It's performance is terrible (It's Rails) for a one-man-show, but optimized and pretty good, for a server (or fleet) for (tens)of thousands of people. There's no incentive to change this. If a choice has to be made between "ease or operation for a single person instance" over a "ease of operation for a thousands-people instance" the latter will always win. Same for performance, security and features.

Gotosocial, OTOH, has the incentives reversed. I'm convinced it will only become easier to host for your personal instance. Only gain more features for such an instance and prioritize fixing issues so self-hosters benefit, rather than community-admins.

¹Edit: AP isn't designed around large federated servers. The protocol, albeit convoluted, is perfectly fine for a situation in which each user is her own server. It's mastodon that has turned AP into a de-facto "one-server-thousands-users" model. Without Mastodon, AP wouldn't exist, I'm not trying to make Mastodon look bad, I like the project.

The only people who want to run their own servers are those who haven't yet experienced the myriad of issues and risks associated with them.

Not only do you have to keep it running at your expense but you need to invest significant time in moderating the content. Lest you allow illegal content e.g. CP to be hosted for which you will be legally responsible.

I think the original comment meant running a server for themselves, not necessarily allowing anyone else to create accounts on their servers.

That way you don’t need to moderate.

That's a risk for people running servers for others, not just for themselves which is what parent is talking about.

I'd love a combination of the two. My identity would be my domain, but I could host the identity on any server I want and I could easily migrate my data within the network to any instance using the domain as proof of identity.

That is exactly what Bluesky lets you do

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