My read on #bluesky is that they are effectively sucking the air out of the decentralization balloon, whether they intend to or not. On the tech side, the #ATprotocol will prevent much decentralization from ever happening and divert the focus that was on #ActivityPub development. On the culture side, they deter a critical mass from developing here, which we need to overwhelm the influence of our most annoying users and lure in the people most people want to follow and interact with. #fediverse

@wjmaggos what about ATProtocol prevents decentralization?

From what I’ve read it promotes it better than the protocols here.

@volkris

my understanding is you don't get server to server interaction, but there's an intermediary. it's supposedly designed to make things easier at the edge of the network, but my skepticism leads me to think they will just end up being choke points.

it's hard to get people to care about decentralization. it basically has to be forced on us, or most of us will use Amazon etc. I worry about mastodon dot social for this reason too, but here it's almost like setting up WP. not with BS.

I like how everything is supposed to end-to-end authenticated/verified, unlike fedi

@Hyolobrika @volkris

I guess that would be good but isn't most of what we do on social media targeted towards the public? being able to tag people almost unavoidably creates confusion over who can see a post. I'd rather we somehow tie in another service and never try anything like a DM on fedi.

@wjmaggos

It’s a really important point that different people use social media differently and expect different things out of social media.

The reason I think this point is so important is because too often users will think the system works one way and expect it to work that way when in reality it’s working a different way.

That applies here. You bring up the idea that most of what we do on social media is targeted toward the public, and platforms like Twitter and Mastodon seem very focused on that mode, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

However, a user that expects more privacy and less targeting toward the public might find themself surprised if their content is much more public than they were expecting.

So that’s why I grind that ax pretty regularly.

@Hyolobrika

>The reason I think this point is so important is because too often users will think the system works one way and expect it to work that way when in reality it’s working a different way.
That certainly is an axe you grind very regularly on here. Particularly w.r.t. the US political system.
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@Hyolobrika Definitely.

And so I’m really transfixed on the idea that we need to educate people better in pretty much all walks of life, whether it’s how to engage with government or how to engage with technology.

Knowledge is power! 🙂

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