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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Good points, but what's the alternative at this point?

Because of network effects, more users is generally more interesting. Blue Sky has "enough" at this point for me to be happy there. Programmers like antirez, my bike racing people like inrng, my city's mayor and one of our city councilors, and also a bunch of urbanists.

Edit: you lose some connections moving around, but I've also had friends I've known since the days of IRC. I think I'm mostly resigned to picking whatever works best in the moment and being willing to move (like abandoning Twitter) when it's not working.

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https://indieweb.org/POSSE

which is not opposed to you being on Bluesky or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever.

That's just not practical for most people (the publishing part). And in relation to microblogging, are you going to publish every 140-character, out-of-context thought on your personal website?

There's other syndication models, although POSSE gets talked about most.

If you don't want to get your own domain and run a server (not practical for most people) you can still protect yourself from being stuck in a single silo by broadcasting to many social media sites.

https://indieweb.org/PESETAS

There's an ATProto project the main blog sites are working together on around distribution and syndication. It also has places for the off-protocol sites people post or publish.

https://standard.site/

And the atproto is pesetas right? You publish to bluesky or whatever and the content is replicated to your pds. I recognize the minor difference, but if you have the energy and wherewithal to orchestrate pesetas across silos, surely you can setup a pds elsewhere.

I think of PESETAS as more defensive than what a single protocol can handle. Imagine posting to Bluesky and using automation to syndicate the post to Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Threads, and more. If Bluesky goes evil, or you otherwise decide to ditch it, you've mitigated the network effect as you have followers on other platforms already. People can still find you and your content isn't lost.

Imagine if Bluesky decides to ban you, and continues to ban accounts you create elsewhere. Atproto ensures non-Bluesky PDS can see you, but you've lost 99% of the userbase.

Ok yea that makes sense.

Then we should develop ways to make it practical.

Isn't Mastodon an alternative?

Not in terms of having a critical mass of users for many topics or being very accessible for a lot of people.

I can’t comment on the “critical mass”, since I haven’t got the numbers. But what exactly does “accessibility” mean in this context? What are the challenges of opening an account in mastodon.social?

It's the same challenge as picking an email server, which is why no one does that.

...

Seriously, joining Mastodon is not particularly difficult; people just freaked out a few years ago at being asked to pick a server to join. The joinmastodon.org website has gotten a lot better at explaining what that means and just directing people to mastodon.social if they don't want to pick something more specific, but the "oooh, this extra step makes Mastodon super super scary, if you pick wrong YOU ARE DAMNED FOREVERRRRRRRR" vibe persists.

The first challenge most people have when starting AP / Mastodon is that they are presented with a choice "pick a server" before anything else. That's what I hear most often anyway.

The other challenge that AP has as an ecosystem is that they have been hostile to anyone wanting to build an index or business. People need to eat and they turned off a lot of developers who'd love to make their living building social media tech outside of the corporate oligarchy.

ATProto welcomes all, even if there is the occasional drama or hostility.

If you're concerned about critical mass, Bluesky is also a dead end.

I mean, I explained in my original comment exactly why it is not a dead end for me. It has 'enough' of the things I'm interested in to make it worthwhile.

But mastodon too in my case so I guess it is just a totally subjective YMMV thing.

Nostr - it has none of the problems mentioned in the article.

But does it have a critical mass of people?

The Wikipedia page says "Nostr is primarily popular with cryptocurrency users, primarily Bitcoin users."

That's not my crowd.

I hear you but if you think about it who else has an incentive and skills to create something like Nostr? Who are the people interested in free speech, signatures and decentralization and with the skills to pull it up?

And since you mentioned primarily Bitcoin users those are the crypto folks that seem to be very against the idea of tokenizing everything.

From what I understand by posting something on Nostr you are posting signed events to a list of dumb relays. These events can be of many types and include hints of discoverability. There is no blockchain and no token and the thing they call zap is just a link to a lightning address that is up to the client to show.

Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of a power tripping administrator.

It seems like the perfect nesting ground for non corporate user content and pocket islands of communities. Nothing prevents someone from implementing a relay or community that bans any talk about Bitcoin or crypto. I for one would love to see closed content focused relays in Nostr.

> Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of a power tripping administrator.

But you are right back to the same UX issue that prevented crypto mass adoption, i.e. lose your keys, lose everything

Very few want to own that risk.

> Very few want to own that risk.

But they are all willing to own the risk of getting their hotmail/google/apple/meta account being disabled on a whim without explanation.

What risk? Billions of people use these services. Is your perspective on the risks really warranted, in those people's minds? I can tell you it's not in mine, I'm just not worried at all about losing my Google account, despite the stories that go around

You are a well behaved and compliant citizen that don't need something like a censorship resistant network. Just make sure to avoid using your accounts in a way these tech giants would disapprove of.

Google protects my data from my government more than most right now.

Last I looked its how to sign on page said "first create a keypair". That's certainly a good way to avoid the problems of success ...

Go outside

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