Mastodon to me feels like it was built with the explicit goal to keep out anybody non-technical, and for technical people, only the type that wants to corner you at a party and discuss the deep philosophical and moral choices of your Linux desktop environment.
No, Mastodon was not designed to keep out anybody non-technical. In any given social circle, there is almost undoubtedly at least ONE person who can fire up a server and administrate it. You only need one sysadmin for your whole community - the rest can be moderators, and members can chip in some coin here and there to keep things running. That's about the simplest and most sustainable model I can possibly picture. If you don't know of someone in your social circles who runs a community, that's fine: start out on a public/larger one in the meantime to get things started, and you can move over later! If this is still too hard for someone, that's fine, there are countless centralized services they can remain on, like Facebook, iMessage, WhatsApp, SMS, etc.
Poor and uneducated people exist.
it isn't? I'm not aware of any relay servers being run but the AT protocol makes affordances for this functionality. Are those features a lie? I read the protocol specification only a few weeks ago, perhaps this is new?
You're correct that the grandparent's PDS isn't the same as a Mastodon homeserver but that's probably a good thing; the network functions much differently than the ActivityPub federation
> A world of full self-hosting is not possible with Bluesky. In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
> The cost of running a full-network, fully archiving relay has increased over time. After recent growth, our out-of-box relay implementation (bigsky) requires on the order of 16 TBytes of fast NVMe disk, and that will grow proportional to content in the network.
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t
> The fediverse currently hosts around 27,000 servers (many more users, but let's focus on servers). Adding just 5 more servers would be a blip in terms of the affect on the network. Adding 5 more servers to an ATProto ecosystem with that many fully participating nodes would be an exhausting number of additional messages sent on the network. ATProto does not scale wide: it's a liability to add more fully participating nodes onto the network. Meaningfully self-hosting ATProto is a risk to the ATProto network, there is active reason to disincentivize it for those already participating.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
[plus more]
https://mathewingram.com/work/2024/11/28/is-bluesky-really-d...
https://en.futuroprossimo.it/2024/11/anatomia-di-bluesky-e-d...
Anyone can host their own data.
Bluesky has said they have zero intention on opening advertising because the platform isn’t built for that paradigm.
No investor or potential buyer would get ROI from an open network. If they tried, anyone could open a new public good atproto network and users could easily migrate their data.
The very thing that gave Twitter value was it owned all its data. Bluesky does not own anyone’s data. They just host it.
Bluesky has a new crypto investor with a board seat, but there are no signs the investor has made any demands.
I think Bluesky will beat the odds.
Easy is seldom truly free.
Moaning that federation is not decentralisation without even considering running their own instance, and when you suggest that, they turn around and say 'oh it's too hard'...
Oh how I miss the times of interest-based forums with ACTUAL moderation, large IRC channels where assholes got kicked and none of this amorphous mass of people and bots producing unmoderated brainrot that then gets turned into AI slop-based timelines optimised for the sole purpose of stimulating people's dopamine receptors until they burn out...