And that's why I say, TLDR:

- I am legitimately excited about the work being done by Blacksky Algorithms! I am using their frontend and happy with it.

- Northsky is an interesting development to watch

- If you're on a Bluesky PDS, I recommend migrating off with one of these tools https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ii5jchdzlmcojjw4dqczcgkh/post/3lyt6t6qfa22u

- Everything Sucks. A LOT of things would have to change at a social level for *any* entity other than Bluesky to have power or independence in the ATP ecosystem. I still don't trust Bluesky.

@mcc For my own understanding: while the server architecture is different, the same thing could happen on the Fediverse, right? (Except portability is worse.) The only thing saving it is that mastodon.social is only the plurality of users, maybe a majority, but not the overwhelming majority?

@mcc "tried to adopt Fediverse first and basically got harassed off."

what does this mean, exactly? you don't have to interact with any other instance on the whole stack if you don't want to. what I'm guessing is this actually means people tried to signup for mastodon.social which is a shithole and then that got conflated with the whole fediverse

@msh @swetland @mcc @gbargoud I think it is good to keep looking at fediverse's decentralisation too but of course there's a huge difference between the degrees to which these two are controlled by a single entity.

Why do you say this was a significant factor in driving communities away from the fediverse? It sounds surprising to me.

@ikuturso it is talked about in this thread @mcc started but I will reiterate and add my take.

The fediverse is way more diverse in terms of operation to be sure, but it has been greatly dominated by a single *platform* (Mastodon) and application (micro blogging). As such the founder and his organisation have outsized influence on what functionality is deployed. For example quote toots were delayed for many years entirely because Gargron, and many victims of brigading in queer and neurodivergent communities, very strongly opposed implementing them. But BIPOC folk often used the feature in a supportive fashion, and even when suggested protections were offered they were shut down.

Anyways the dominance of one application and platform and the early adopters' community and culture here were off putting and occasionally hostile to BIPOC people especially who arrived in later waves. And it wasn't just with devs it was also in larger community initiatives like fediblock...

@swetland @gbargoud

@mcc what exactly is the benefit of migrating to a non bluesky PDS? I understand being on an entirely different vertical stack like Blacksky or Northsky but what does being on a PDS give you? Aren't you still (almost) entirely at bluesky's mercy?

@mcc

So what I understand from this is that it would be relatively possible for BlackSky or NorthSky to add ActivityPub as a secondary protocol in ways that would likely be unfeasible to do the other way (ActivityPub instance using ATProto as a secondary protocol)

@ikuturso

...this is just a surface level commentary on what happened, but if you were BIPOC or followed prominent BIPOC folk here you could eventually see a pattern in the interactions.

I know Bluesky is definitely not a panacea in this regard either (otherwise why the tremendous effort out into blacksky?), but they did address the wants and needs of nonwhite people better at least initially, at the app level.

Anyways what I am seeing is that both ecosystems here are making similar mistakes and facing similar challenges, and it is to do with some aspects of insufficient diversity both technically and socially.

@mcc @swetland @gbargoud

@msh @ikuturso @mcc @swetland @gbargoud arguably bluesky could address those needs better because they maintain control over the full vertical and can apply advisory policies that don't have any real security backing. you can use a different appview or just browse the data directly and *not* apply blocks, gates, etc... this horrifies most people who learn about it and horrifies them further that there's nothing they can do about it. all the policies only apply if you're using the official apps.

@eniko @mcc If I understand correctly (and it is possible and likely that I don't), if you host your own PDS, you can use the rest of the stack from Bluesky, get banned, and migrate to Blacksky without losing your post history. And theoretically your social graph, though in practice Bluesky will be blocking almost everyone in it.

I've no interest in it either way, given that Bluesky is the toxic liberalism site in the same way that X the Everything App is the toxic reactionary site.

@esoteric_programmer @alter_kaker @mcc as I understand it the cost of a relay has gone down because you can run it without keeping full account of the message history for all time and instead restrict what you have to a time-window.

Raises the question of whether that's good enough if we want real alternatives to the official company infra though.

@jrose @mcc Even the portability being better is somewhat theoretical right now because if your identity is using did:plc then you are unable to move away from did:plc and Bluesky PBC has custody of your keys... And also like people have noticed hosting your own data in a PDS does not really make you independent from their actions so the point of doing it is somewhat unclear.

@ikuturso @jrose @mcc yeah, unfortunately bluesky has zero interest in supporting did migrations. they only support changing your dns handle

EDIT: source https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3lchpwc2hws2r

@trwnh @ikuturso @jrose if someone develops a better did method, surely you could just have two DIDs point to the same repo? Use Good DID with non-bluesky systems and Bad DID with bluesky systems. Maybe they could even have the same "key" (the Z in did:Y:Z)

@nullpotential @mcc people on Bluesky who have soured on fedi often complain about having been lectured about using alt text and CWs for what it's worth.

@mcc @trwnh @ikuturso @jrose But the problem is that did:plc by definition always points to Bluesky’s DID repo.

@mcc @trwnh @ikuturso @jrose But the problem is that did:plc by definition always points to Bluesky’s DID repo.

@erincandescent @ikuturso @trwnh @jrose I am proposing engineering a situation where did:plc:eepire and did:kad:eepire point to the same resource.

@mcc @erincandescent @ikuturso @jrose this would depend entirely on how did:plc and did:kad are defined as did methods. the "eepire" part of plc is cryptographically generated from the did creation request: https://web.plc.directory/spec/v0.1/did-plc

you sign the operation then hash it then truncate to first 24 characters

thus any did method that generates the same 24 character id is just an exact clone of plc

@mcc @erincandescent @ikuturso @jrose this would depend entirely on how did:plc and did:kad are defined as did methods. the "eepire" part of plc is cryptographically generated from the did creation request: https://web.plc.directory/spec/v0.1/did-plc

you sign the operation then hash it then truncate to first 24 characters

thus any did method that generates the same 24 character id is just an exact clone of plc