Why isn't Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?

Similarly, if a relay decides to nullroute you, you are functionally up on shitcreek, which because it's all handled by the relay is way worse than getting a Mastodon instance filtered.

If we use a torrent analogy, it's not possible to use Bluesky/ATproto with DHT/peer discovery, you're required to connect to a tracker who then decides who you can peer with.

(Relatedly, AcitivityPub also supports the use of relays for discovery, but doesn't require them. It's just not often used because they tend to be a moderation firehose.)

[0]: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

And how is that a sustainable business?

Or do we have a good reason to believe the active user counts posted by Elon and others are fake?

I think the core issue is that despite how stupid and shitty it's become and seems intent on continuing to become, Twitter is still Twitter and Twitter users don't want BlueSky or Threads, they want Twitter which is still Twitter despite Elon and co's best efforts.

Also the ability for users to fact-check ads is still hilarious and entertaining which almost offsets the amount of ads.

it doesn't help that Threads through their action already kinda made it clear that their compatibility with mastodon and co. falls in the "embrace extend extinguish" category

and just by the fact that Threads is from Meta it can't be Twitter 2.0, to many people refuse to use meta products of any kind as much as possible as they fundamentally do not trust Meta at all

You see this in the way high-ish follower count folks are constantly pruning their follows to signal some kind of ratio. I guess that signal produces some outcome.

HN’s staying power as just about the best forum of remotely general interest might have a lot to do with there not being followers (along with a crack team of elite mods and other things). You can rack up karma but it’s a side quest, join date matters a bit on a boundary condition, but mostly there’s not really any raw fame factor outside a few hyper-famous folks.

I wonder if there’s any scalability past HN size on that.

BlueSky was founded October 2021, while Mastadon exists since 2016. The latter thus had lot more time to get traction. :-)

I feel like this is a recognizable genre of comment. I consider myself a big time Mastodon supporter and am proud to be an evangelist for it. One thing you would see in HN comment threads were these first time users claiming all the content was X where X was something very unusual, extreme, and the claims regarding what that extreme thing was would be completely all over the map. They would also be subjective, hard to prove or disprove, but also way out of line with my personal experience and the experience of others who had used Mastodon for anything beyond a trial period.

It looks like we're getting the same version of this type of comment now, except it's for Blue Sky. I've used the app on my phone and computer, followed a few people, followed a handful of discovery feeds. I can't really prove anything here, but I think whether it's Mastodon, whether it's Blue Sky, whether it's Lemmy, I feel like the most outrageous and unreliable comments have tended to be the genre of "skeptical new user sharing their first impression" style comments, which make broad brush claims as to what "most" of the content is on a given platform.

I'm not even a fan of Blue Sky for numerous reasons I won't get into here, but I've had an account for, perhaps a few months now, but, as I often find myself saying when it comes to new platforms, it is not at all my experience that I'm seeing furry porn and rage bait. If there's any one thing noticeably unique in my experience so far, it's the general lowered temperature you feel in your feed compared to Twitter.

Which is why OID withered away in favor of just implementing the biggest social media login used by your audience (Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and if your audience includes gamers, Steam) and relying on that instead.

Nobody remembers domain names either, that's what we have search engines for. The point of public keys is that they give the user something they own completely themselves and that their peers can verify. All the human-readable stuff can be implemented on top of that, e.g. if you wanna use domain names, put the public key into your DNS record. But you aren't forced to use domain names, you can send your keys around by mail if you prefer or put them in your Instgram bio.

The most important part here is that this works towards a "Web as data structure". Everything that is based around domain names will fall apart in a few months or years when those domain names expire, links go dead constantly. Everything that is build around crypto can last forever, as the storage location becomes irrelevant.

We already saw the benefits of this approach back with Usenet, where large parts of it could be reconstructed from random backup tapes, since everything was held together by globally unique message ids. Usenet didn't use crypto for this, but just depended on users behaving nicely, so that approach wouldn't work today, but it could be replicated with public key crypto in a very similar and more robust way.

What definitely does is that the major European server providers tend to be located in one of those two countries (like OVH or Hetzner). Note that server location != user location, users could be anywhere in Europe without a noticeable latency.

Doesn't make any sense for me to pay for a server located in my country when I can find one in Germany with an order of magnitude better performance for the price.

They lead many tech stats per capita. Another example is the amount of French and German wikipedia pages, patents, research, internet penetration, renewable energy …

A shame that the focus on car manufacturing for so long cannibalised the software business. I think it could have been a software powerhouse, but was/is not focussing at all on it outside of some shining outliers.

That's only an "edge case" if you don't actually gaf about maintaining your account URI/content/social graph/etc. over time. "The Fediverse" is a bad joke.

For others reading this, numpad0 means pedophilic anime content.

If you've never used the fediverse before, you don't really know that, do you? I've heard of the "move your account" functionality before, but I don't really think until today I had anyone say to me, "Look, don't worry too much about which server you choose to start out with -- just pick one, because it's super-easy to switch later if you want to try a different one."

> What could federated services do that would make the obvious choice not feel lame?

I admit this is an inconsistency on my part, and probably only limited to people a lot like me: on the one hand, the whole promise of federation is that you can avoid massive centralization; so joining the One Biggest Instance seems kind of pointless. On the other hand, I don't want to join a random small instance which may not be well-maintained; and I don't want to join an instance which is going to pigeon-hole me ("A mastodon instance for developers!" "A mastodon instance for Christians!").

There are different parts of my brain that all want different things, each of which vetoes any particular decision. But this is very much what the "paradox of choice" is about: in many cases, having more options makes you less happy.

I do think it was good that Mastodon embraced this in a way that earlier federated options didn't (e.g., I believe at some point diaspora stopped new sign-ups to their main instance to "encourage federation"; from my perspecitve it encouraged was people to go elsewhere.)

So "what could federated services do better" to solve the paradox of choice? Nothing as far as I can tell -- if you want more choice, you're going to have the paradox of choice; Mastodon at least has already done the only thing I can think of which mitigates it somewhat.

Everyone loves free speech until somebody says something they don't like. Basic human behaviour.

The decentralization community has never been unified in its views, and a fair number of people have worked on these projects together with different personal motives. What tends to be the common denominator is a concern about unchecked power.

My perspective is that it's it's unavoidable to assign authority -- systems that claim to remove authority actually just obscure it -- and that it's more important to ensure the system has constrain power, creates transparency, and maintains the ability to reassign authority when the current operators lose trust. Ideally, this helps build trust in the people who do run a given system, while they're the ones with the job.

Social graphs can offer a similar discoverability without search. You see what those you follow post, comment on, like, share, etc. Following tags just like you follow a person also works well. Before assuming we must have to have massive indexing and searching services, ask yourself whether you really need to be able to discover anything that anyone around the world posts, regardless of whether you have any sort of connection to that person, their context, their society, or their culture.