Looks like there may well be a surge of users from Blacksky and the other "alternative" ATProto instances checking out the Fedi, or reactivating old accounts, given that they're now discovering that ATProto is a Potemkin Village of decentralization and...
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Not only did these folks build out a whole bunch of ATProto-compatible components but they were able to raise a run-rate of $85k p.a for their infrastructure.
Obviously, a Fedi instance costs a fraction of that, but just imagine what community contributions of that size could do - such as pay community-funded devs to build the things that are missing here - things that their community may have some really fucking useful situational awareness of.
@kittylyst
Please, please, please, let Black Twitter come from Bluesky to the Fediverse! They're so awesome! -
Not only did these folks build out a whole bunch of ATProto-compatible components but they were able to raise a run-rate of $85k p.a for their infrastructure.
Obviously, a Fedi instance costs a fraction of that, but just imagine what community contributions of that size could do - such as pay community-funded devs to build the things that are missing here - things that their community may have some really fucking useful situational awareness of.
@kittylyst As a brown person on #fedi,
Thanks for coming back, if you are. Block and Defederate liberally.
Safe(er) networks *can* be crated in fedi. They're more work, because there's no central control.
Well, be your OWN central control.
YES, it's more work, but you get to keep all the benefits yourself, and Billionaires can be kicked out, instead of taking over what you might have thought was an otherwise safe space.
I, for one, salute #blackmastodon, and hope to contribute more to it.
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Looks like there may well be a surge of users from Blacksky and the other "alternative" ATProto instances checking out the Fedi, or reactivating old accounts, given that they're now discovering that ATProto is a Potemkin Village of decentralization and that BSky still hold all the cards.
This time, can we please try not to act like assholes / the HOA while they find their feet.
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@reiver Jay permabanned a prominent Black user (who was using Blacksky as their PDS) for pointing out that choosing to start following yet another noted transphobe was perhaps not a great look this week.
People subsequently realized that as it stands right now, Blacksky has no true independent existence - a ban on BSky is a ban from all alt instances as well.
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Looks like there may well be a surge of users from Blacksky and the other "alternative" ATProto instances checking out the Fedi, or reactivating old accounts, given that they're now discovering that ATProto is a Potemkin Village of decentralization and that BSky still hold all the cards.
This time, can we please try not to act like assholes / the HOA while they find their feet.
@kittylyst
Also let’s boost the hell out of any intros we come across so that the new people find their connections more quickly. -
@reiver Jay permabanned a prominent Black user (who was using Blacksky as their PDS) for pointing out that choosing to start following yet another noted transphobe was perhaps not a great look this week.
People subsequently realized that as it stands right now, Blacksky has no true independent existence - a ban on BSky is a ban from all alt instances as well.
Do you know the technical details of this?
Or, if you don't, do you know anyone else who might?
(I would like to understand where in their system this dependency is happening.)
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Do you know the technical details of this?
Or, if you don't, do you know anyone else who might?
(I would like to understand where in their system this dependency is happening.)
It was a appview-level takedown, so the posts aren't visible to other apps using the Bluesky appview. Blacksky is working on their own appview but their app at blacksky.community is still using the Bluesky appview, so the posts aren't visible there either (although they're still on the PDS).
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It was a appview-level takedown, so the posts aren't visible to other apps using the Bluesky appview. Blacksky is working on their own appview but their app at blacksky.community is still using the Bluesky appview, so the posts aren't visible there either (although they're still on the PDS).
thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange wow, thanks for the cliff notes — that's insane.
For all the positive press I read about Blacksky, and then to hear that
all of that was for naughtthey are still vulnerable to the actions of Bluesky, is very unfortunate, but not entirely surprising. -
It's not at all for naught -- any more than the early NodeBB fedi integrations not having all the functionality you wanted means that it was for naught. It just takes a while to implement stuff, especially on a shoestring ... and people who aren't tracking things closely had a misimpression of where the value is for being on a non-Bluesky PDS.
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It's not at all for naught -- any more than the early NodeBB fedi integrations not having all the functionality you wanted means that it was for naught. It just takes a while to implement stuff, especially on a shoestring ... and people who aren't tracking things closely had a misimpression of where the value is for being on a non-Bluesky PDS.
@thenexusofprivacy @julian @reiver It remains to be seen if *any* third-party installation of an ATP AppView at scale actually works (maintainable, costs under control, etc.) Honestly, we don't even know if Bluesky is itself maintainable with costs under control over the long term. It boggles my mind to think of how many people are throwing all their social networking eggs into one very experimental basket.
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@thenexusofprivacy @julian @reiver It remains to be seen if *any* third-party installation of an ATP AppView at scale actually works (maintainable, costs under control, etc.) Honestly, we don't even know if Bluesky is itself maintainable with costs under control over the long term. It boggles my mind to think of how many people are throwing all their social networking eggs into one very experimental basket.
@jaredwhite my understanding is that the appview is the most expensive thing to operate.
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@jaredwhite my understanding is that the appview is the most expensive thing to operate.
Probably. Somebody ran a full-network appview for a while at $200/month; the biggest expense was 12TB for storage. Blacksky runs their Relay on a $66/month instance and PDS is $260 or so, and both are very overpowered for currrent usage -- Rudy estimated that the PDS could get to a few hundred thousand users before upgrading.
In any case the architecture's optimized for large all-public networks. Those costs aren't bad at all for 100,000 active users -- it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be much cheaper than running a simlarly-sized fedi instance. Then again those costs are likely to be unsustainable for a community of a few hundred people let alone anything smaller. It's still an open question if and how things will evolve on the lower end; Blacksky's architecture (with a single AppView supporting multiple communities) gets part of the way there, and there's experimentation with partial AppViews, but we'll see how it works out.
And @jaredwhite fedi is still generally at the prototype level too, so at this point the only options are something experimental or a fascist corporate social network. Today, AT Protocol is much better than ActivityPub for large flat public social networks, and that's something a lot of people are interested in. Also, the migration story there is also a lot better there than here, at least for now there are a lot fewer compatibility issues (although it's hard to know whether that will be the case); and the architecture lets new projects get up and going quickly by tapping into existing account base and initially reusing a lot of Bluesky infrastructure (which creates longer-term challenges but can still be a very sensible engineering tradeoff). As a result there's a sense that things are moving much more quickly over there than here.
Which isn't meant to diss fedi, there are exciting things happening here too -- including Bonfire, GtS, Fedify, Ghost, NodeBB etc etc etc. But it's not like any of these are polished products yet, the onboarding is still very very challenging, and fedi's existing userbase is very much a two-edged sword. The best situation would be if the two ecosystems learn from and complement each other, and that's happening to some extent -- wafrn is a great example, and Blacksky's approach to community-only posts is very much inspired by fedi's local-only posts. But doing that will require open-mindedness (in both directions) as opposed to a superiority complex, and also progress on anti-Blackness, so we'll see how widely this happens.
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Probably. Somebody ran a full-network appview for a while at $200/month; the biggest expense was 12TB for storage. Blacksky runs their Relay on a $66/month instance and PDS is $260 or so, and both are very overpowered for currrent usage -- Rudy estimated that the PDS could get to a few hundred thousand users before upgrading.
In any case the architecture's optimized for large all-public networks. Those costs aren't bad at all for 100,000 active users -- it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be much cheaper than running a simlarly-sized fedi instance. Then again those costs are likely to be unsustainable for a community of a few hundred people let alone anything smaller. It's still an open question if and how things will evolve on the lower end; Blacksky's architecture (with a single AppView supporting multiple communities) gets part of the way there, and there's experimentation with partial AppViews, but we'll see how it works out.
And @jaredwhite fedi is still generally at the prototype level too, so at this point the only options are something experimental or a fascist corporate social network. Today, AT Protocol is much better than ActivityPub for large flat public social networks, and that's something a lot of people are interested in. Also, the migration story there is also a lot better there than here, at least for now there are a lot fewer compatibility issues (although it's hard to know whether that will be the case); and the architecture lets new projects get up and going quickly by tapping into existing account base and initially reusing a lot of Bluesky infrastructure (which creates longer-term challenges but can still be a very sensible engineering tradeoff). As a result there's a sense that things are moving much more quickly over there than here.
Which isn't meant to diss fedi, there are exciting things happening here too -- including Bonfire, GtS, Fedify, Ghost, NodeBB etc etc etc. But it's not like any of these are polished products yet, the onboarding is still very very challenging, and fedi's existing userbase is very much a two-edged sword. The best situation would be if the two ecosystems learn from and complement each other, and that's happening to some extent -- wafrn is a great example, and Blacksky's approach to community-only posts is very much inspired by fedi's local-only posts. But doing that will require open-mindedness (in both directions) as opposed to a superiority complex, and also progress on anti-Blackness, so we'll see how widely this happens.
@thenexusofprivacy @stinerman @julian @reiver We're going to have to agree to strongly disagree on a number of these points. I also find it weird that there's a blog post in my mentions?
What I truly disagree with which I think is provably, factually untrue is the idea that the fediverse is some kind of prototype. I first started using Mastodon in 2018, *long* before the first big wave of refugees. Back then I might have agreed. Now I think it's pretty damn battle-hardened and vital.
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@thenexusofprivacy @stinerman @julian @reiver We're going to have to agree to strongly disagree on a number of these points. I also find it weird that there's a blog post in my mentions?
What I truly disagree with which I think is provably, factually untrue is the idea that the fediverse is some kind of prototype. I first started using Mastodon in 2018, *long* before the first big wave of refugees. Back then I might have agreed. Now I think it's pretty damn battle-hardened and vital.
@jaredwhite There's certainly been progress here since 2018 but there are still huge gaps with safety (including privacy), onboarding, equity, culture, sustainability, governance, accessibility, scalability, etc etc etc. These are all very challenging to add to a social network or ecosystem that's been designed without taking them into account.
So if it works works better for you to view it as a battle-hardened V1 (or V2 or V3 or whatever) that just hasn't addressed these areas yet, I'm certainly not going to argue with you. I personally think it's more useful to view what we currently have as a prototype at scale, but one way or another the challenge is to get to a fedi (or whatever comes next) that does take all of these things into account.
