ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared
nate.mecca1.net
nate.mecca1.net
From the stats of people who ran their own PDS for their own accounts, it used an less than 1mb of data transfer a day and insignificant amounts of CPU/RAM (less than a 20% spike). But, it will depend on how big your account is, how many followers you have, number of posts you make, etc etc.
In native Bluesky with a default account, they have decentralized the servers so there are maybe around 20-30 servers all on the East Coast of the US. There's currently not much incentive to run your own. The PDS software is fairly new and unless you just wanted to have a non-US host for privacy reasons, you could do so and get away with running it on a RPi or standard VPS no problem. No one has yet started any major instances to rival the primary ones yet, however.
First I’m hearing of it!
That's not right. Most AP servers operate a shared inbox. So you only need to send one message - no matter how many followers you have on that server.
One of the nicer centrist instances is Beehaw and they defederated a lot of stuff just to keep the atmosphere alright.
I used to think it was a bad thing when instances defederated each other but since I saw the above happening I agree with it.
"This is just for a brief period during polishing/debugging since this is the first time third-party PDS hosts have been added to the network. The goal is just to help PDS operators join the network and make sure that if there's a problem we have a channel of communication open."
Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and accessibility, but they're the only ones developing and implementing AT protocol.
Social media should be more P2P and learn from the 2000's era before the platform giants stole away the dream. Bittorrent, RSS, Atom, semantic web (FOAF, microformats) were the way to complete digital freedom.
People are only people so fierce moderation will happen. With smaller instances "blast radius" is smaller and it shouldn't be problematic like in centralized social media.
I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of view.
If you're not welcome in a community, join one that would hear you. Why would that be against your "freedom"?
With something like nostr, you are free as a relay operator to block whatever makes you feel uncomfortable, while users can just get that content from some other relay without having to create a new account and move their entire social graph over.
To elaborate, I prefer that the barrier is greater.
If some feel they have a compelling reason to straddle both, they still can, so it denies them nothing, but sometimes even small extra barriers helps set a tone for communities.
We're better than this.
I grew up with [x views, y political party], but because the early internet was open and accepting and not at all like this, I was able to see the broader world and wholly new perspectives. Now the bias is to shit on, shame, and block everyone. That's not going to build a better society.
The internet pioneers would be aghast at all of the "happy little" censorship happening today.
I've been banned from several subreddits for leaving comments in subreddits the moderators dislike. Removed completely by automation. They don't even realize my comments weren't in support of their favorite issue to hate on.
Censorship is wrong. Put blinders on your own feed all day long if you so choose, but stop trying to put cages on other people's minds and voices.
But they do not have a right to unfettered access to me.
I'm free to choose to set standards, and the standard of requiring them to have a second account if they both want access to me and to content I find deplorable is a really low barrier.
And others are free to choose to commune with me in the spaces I want to spend time in, and communities are free to set their standards.
I've not argued for censorship. I've argued for my right to shield myself very mildly from people I want nothing to do with, and for others to choose to do so with me.
You're free to say what you want on your instance or those of people who believe as you do or are fine with your speech.
Nobody is stopping your speech, just your ability to impose it on those of us who does not want it near us.
I got banned from my city's subreddit because I said something once about crime the mods disagreed with. Now I can't enjoy a platform about the city I live in. I can't ask about restaurants, talk about concerts. It's frankly troubling.
I posted something to /r/conservative once that asked them to be more inclusive of trans people. They banned me on sight, which figures. From that moment, I've been auto-banned from several trans and liberal spaces for posting in /r/conservative. I'm LGBT and my partner is trans.
This authoritarian censorship is toxic and pervasive. It's just not right. Stopping the flow of ideas is how the pressure valves stop working. It's how polarization deepens and is how our democracy ends and authoritarians arise.
> But they do not have a right to unfettered access to me.
You can block me all you want. You can subscribe to a list of HN contrarians to filter forever. But you have no right to filter me from other people that don't willfully subscribe to your banlist.
Lock yourself in your house all you want. You can't keep me from enjoying the outside public [1], from meeting people in the public, or from me seeing and meeting other people you've locked out of your house. Or even going as far as to say you can't lock people inside your house without their consent or knowledge.
You do what you want in your house. But don't desire to make your house rules the default for all humanity.
[1] "the public" is an allusion to a P2P, non-federated, user-first social media protocol. Something like email.
Nobody has argued for the power to keep you from enjoying the public. But my instances are not public space, neither are subreddits.
If you want to run an uncensored space for your city, you can. If you want an uncensored place for conservatives, you can have that too. And so on. The reality is that no such places stay functioning if they are uncensored, and so the question tends to be if they are open enough that you don't notice.
I'll note we're having this discussion on one of the more heavily moderated forums available.
Someone blocks you? Fine you can still access in incognito/private mode anyway. This is true on twitter, activitypub, AT too.
If you really want barriers, you should use networks that work on encrypted private groups.
That someone has to use icognito/private mode is a barrier.
Sometimes it's an insufficient barrier, but in practice what we see is that often minor little limitations like that are the right tradeoff between restricting access in ways that starts to cause problems vs. adding enough friction to deter a whole lot of unwanted behaviour when your goal is to keep the system as open as possible.
Going to encrypted private groups when just throwing up a minor limitation is enough to achieve the desired effect for most people would be wildly excessive. E.g. I don't care if people I block can see my posts - I care that I don't have to host their stuff on my instance. Others do care if people they block can see their posts.
As it is, Mastodon instances, and other parts of the fediverse, operate with multiple levels of privacy, from fully open, to somewhat selective blocks, to authorized fetch + limited federation (whitelisted federation only, w/only logged in users or whitelisted servers able to access posts at all), to at least one group with a dual-level instance setup where the "inner" instance only federates with the "outer" instance and outsiders have no direct access to the inner instance at all.
That we can pick and choose on a sliding scale how closed off we want to be rather than pick a binary is a feature (and nothing prevents anyone from adding encryption to posts using ActivityPub if they want to; in fact I have a side-project that probably will add the option of encrypted content).
I still hear about their awfulness, I just don't have to see it in my microblog timeline.
I'm not missing anything, make much better connections with people, have respectful disagreements.
Ain't nobody being censored. I'm just no longer wasting oxygen on the outrage mongers.
Oh and being banned from a bunch of subreddits says more about you, than about moderation.
Pretty sure I'm happy to have a feed that doesn't include you in it.
While it is tempting to conclude that, and my initial reaction was similar, anyone would be banned from a lot of subreddits if they were to seek out controversy by going into spaces they disagree with and state their opinions. It can say a lot about someone, but doesn't have to.
I agree with you overall, though. There are outright Nazi instances - nobody is being censored. But they have no right to force their way into communities that do not want to interact with them, and on Mastodon we have the power to enforce that, or we can choose to delegate it to people we trust.
Then some instances defederate otherwise innocent instances that don’t have sufficient agreement on all those points, regardless of actual content.
It is kind of tiring and honestly hard to recommend.
But there aren’t schisms over alt text or content warnings for food on Threads.
It's social networking. Of course there are going to be cliques. That's what happens when you put a non-trivial number of humans in one space (be it virtual or physical).
You're using words like toxic to describe me and you don't even know me. This goes to show the incredibly rotten and highly polarized the status quo has become. Systems that behave the way you're describing are the current norm, and they're broken.
You can choose for yourself to ignore me. You can advertise to the world that you ignore me and people can opt into that if they choose. But you shouldn't ever have the right to unilaterally make that call for everyone. Nobody should have that power.
Imagine if [opposite viewpoint] could technologically shut you down for everyone else? The systems we design today could enable that tomorrow. Just because you're in a comfortable spot today doesn't mean that eroding rights and freedoms won't ensnare you tomorrow or that the zeitgeist won't change.
> If you're not welcome in a community
This is also frankly a disturbing trend. Creating little fiefdoms of unacceptance. Who makes you the judge of that? You don't even know what my views and values are, and you're seeking to shun me already.
We're all the same. We just sample the world differently. We all need to be more accepting and loving and stop playing petty team sports.
In the meantime, you're free to keep on tooting. Nobody is taking Mastodon away from you. It's just not a system I want to spend time or energy advocating for.
In this hypothetical I'm only making the call for the people of my instance, not for everyone. Like I said, you'd be free to join other instances where people are willing to entertain your point of view.
The audacity of assuming that the server that I pay and care for should be a vehicle for content that I don't agree with is baffling to me. It's my house, my rules, simple as.
I just want spaces for me and others where this isn't the default imposed upon everyone. I don't want to subscribe to [x filtering] unless I choose.
House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the default for the public commons.
The legislators are going to make rules that enforce these technological straddles, and the defaults will slowly change in directions you neither anticipate nor enjoy.
We shouldn't accept ActivityPub as the end state solution to these problems. If anything, large instances (and thus their owners) will win out, and this just entrenches the status quo of tiny cabals in power censoring things that displease them.
I can't understand how you can think that fediverse instances are "public commons". Each of them is run under the rules of the people that keep them running and not everyone can be moot to be able to suffer everything on their servers.
The public commons part of the fediverse is formed of the many software that you can just pick up and run yourself.
Instance owners can block anyone based on manual or automated rules. It's just an extension of the status quo. This is fantastic for building insular communities, but it doesn't get us into a better place with respect to individual user freedom. There are still power dynamics and the end users are not powerful.
My concern is that we stop here and this becomes "distributed social networking". What we need more than anything -- more than Mastodon and ActivityPub -- are protocols that enable peer to peer communication where no node can impose its will upon others and the barrier to participation in the broad community doesn't demand fielty to powerful moderators.
If that's what you want, I'm sure you can already find it somewhere. But I think you're in the minority, and it certainly isn't what's needed "more than anything."
Gab attracted its group because it was the anti-Reddit. People banned from Reddit went there. Of course it was filled with anarchy and racism.
I don't want all of our protocols and platforms to have a higher class of user with God mode. That's inequitable, and that's what Masto is today. And Reddit. And HN. And every other centralized platform.
I'm a moderate centrist and I get censored by everybody. The right, the left. People want to shut you up unless you agree with them. And often times it's not about silencing harm, but rather power tripping. People get off on that.
More than anything, I'm deeply afraid of censorship. It's a real and very slippery slope. You might think you're the one getting to pick and choose the topics today, but very quickly that will escape you.
Public parks have rules, and police. Every forum on the old web had administrators and moderators, which you seem to be against. You said you wanted a system where "no node can impose its will upon others." In other words with no hierarchy, and that's definitionally anarchist.
Which again, is fine if that's what you want, but not everyone does. And I believe any platform run that way will inevitably devolve into a cesspool. Show me an example to the contrary.
>I don't want all of our protocols and platforms to have a higher class of user with God mode.
Different platforms and instances are owned by different people and operate under different rules, but there is nothing in the protocols of either the web or any federated system that imposes any specific political or ideological view on anyone. If you don't like Hacker News, you can make your own Hacker News with blackjack and hookers if you want. You just can't force everyone to care. But then, you don't have the right to force anyone to care.
>I'm a moderate centrist and I get censored by everybody. The right, the left. People want to shut you up unless you agree with them.
Please... you're acting like you're trapped in a dystopian nightmare, being censored like some radical political dissident. But scrolling through some your comment history I see the vast majority of your comments are untouched, or have at worst a couple of downvotes. And even in those, you seem capable of having conversations. You don't seem to be the victim of egregious censorship, so much as having opinions that some people disagree with slightly.
>You might think you're the one getting to pick and choose the topics today, but very quickly that will escape you.
I doubt anyone is going to come after me or my gamedev Mastodon instance anytime soon but if they do I'll say you told me so. And then just spin up another one.
That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your preferences, there's an ActivityPub instance with moderation you'll like. Want to be in a liberal thought bubble? It's there. Want nothing but all Trump, all the time? They have that. Only the good things about astrology? Yep. Aggressive blocking of anti-science woo? Sure.
Moderation decisions are made at the instance level, not the network level. There are instances that take a laissez-faire approach. Others are quite heavy handed. Most are somewhere in the middle. Users can pick which sounds best to them and find servers that align with their wishes.
I run my own, and have seen no trace of this being "presumed evil" you speak of.
What if I want to be on both? Well you need two accounts.
Also you could always host your own instance and be your own admin. I started doing that a couple of weeks ago. It's easy to find a host plan, if you don't want to do all of the work yourself. But you could still do that if you wanted to.
That schism is inevitable. To pick an extreme case, imagine a server for LGBTQ people and another for self-declared neo-Nazis. The people on the 1st might have very strong feelings that they want no contact whatsoever with people on the 2nd. There’s no world where it’s reasonable to say they have to keep their servers connected.
Now suppose you want to follow people on the 2nd server for journalism purposes. It’s unreasonable to have an account on the 1st server and then complain that they’re not talking to the 2nd. Even if you have legitimate purposes that aren’t creepy, they’re not going to go along with it. So instead, you get another account to follow the 2nd server and everyone’s happy.
The Mastodon server I own turned 7 years old today. We’ve blocked probably a couple dozen servers over the years. In every case I can tell you exactly why we blocked that instance. Most of them involve, literally, their users sending mine swastika imagery, death threats, or other utterly indefensible content, and the moderators of those instances being OK with it. My users stick around because they trust my explanations for the moderation actions I take. They don’t want to manually filter actual Nazi content from their timelines. Those that do can pick any number of servers that wouldn’t block that content.
I highly recommend reading the actual protocol docs if you’re interested in learning about it and it’s scalability.
In a centralized system, you trust the central authority to show the correct number of likes a post got and the correct info who liked a post. Same for number of followers and who follows whom.
Do any of these 3 protocols have an approach to do the same in a decentralized world?
It's a central part of social media, even here on HN.
Look at the front page. Each post shows 6 pieces of information:
Title, Domain, Points, Author, Time, Comments
Likes and follows are probably two of the main reasons that centralized social media sites have displaced websites, rss, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups etc.
And, hell, while "author" is the most trivial feature of all to get right as it simply can't be forged in a signature-based system, it is incredible to me how many people on Hacker News actively try to ignore who wrote a comment (not me! the first thing I look at is your name as I think it is actively asocial to dehumanize the people you are communicating with).
I honestly think you will be surprised at how usable the Hacker News feed would still be if you remove everything except the URL itself, and had your client generate a URL preview, and encourage you to try hiding some of these fields for a while using a local browser extension / script / stylesheet.
The real magic of Hacker News -- both of the feed and of the comment thread -- is the algorithmic sorting that makes sense of the cacophony of submissions, not the silly indicators (which are likely serving more as distractions than as beacons) it is bothering to surface to you: those are merely serving the purpose of making its decisions seem credible (and if you go hunting you will realize there are many posts you likely didn't see for many reasons despite having gotten many likes or even comments).
The question then is really: "how can I algorithmically rank content on a decentralized network", and I think that phrasing of the issue unlocks tons of doors that myopically insisting on a scant handful of specific statistics that are merely one of many many inputs to the current system that actually rules your usage of the website uses precludes.
Sometimes, information the user might actively be using to argue with the recommendations is even best hidden from the user: TikTok notably will happily recommend a post from years ago and hides the timestamp from you as people doing manual mental filtering incorrectly deweight the value of old content and/or find it awkward to interact with.
Now, is sorting and filtering in a decentralized system for sure solvable? I don't know... I think it is, and have tons of ideas for how to do it! Yet, I would not be shocked to try really hard and fail, or even to discover some "trivial" (in retrospect) proof that it is impossible. But, either way, one thing I am very confident of is that likes and comments isn't it, as real world systems -- including Facebook and TikTok -- manage to surface tons of interesting content to me that have low numbers of likes: the world simply isn't best sorted by thumbs up.
An interesting thing would be if you could write your own ranking algorithm and then apply it to your followers' content or if you could at least tweak the algorithm e.g. "I want 70% of content to be from let's say cybersecurity and 30% from gaming) or (I want 70% of content to be from my friends and family and 30% of content from "Internet people" that I follow).
Edit: Custom ranking algorithm would be hard to design and implement but not unfeasible.
Participating in something and trying to discuss how it could be improved when you disagree with it is normal human behavior.
Begin with "this take is so tired" if you want, but then I want to hear actual reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
Also, a common requirement is authenticated reads and fine-grained access control of pull-based content. E.g. I want to share my vacation photos with a different subset of friends/followers vs my tech blogging, only some of which should be public.
## manyverse/sbb https://www.manyver.se/ (SBB)
## farcaster https://www.farcaster.xyz/ (Ethereum)
## a social app based on peers (formerly known as hypercore) https://twitter.com/Pears_p2p https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960
Nope. This is most likely a bad idea. And we've already essentially proven this because the overwhelmingly most important method of internet communication DOESN'T centralize like this and has no need to. Email works fine, probably better, WITHOUT this strong centralization.
So while I agree with all the current short term clique-related critcisms of ActivityPub/Mastodon, it's still the smartest model.