Jack Dorsey skipped ActivityPub, built AtProto, lost Twitter, funded Bluesky, watched it become a company with VCs and a board, said it was "repeating all the mistakes," left, and now funds Nostr.
-
@laurenshof eh, you can certainly speculate but then maybe you need to start thinking of the fact that estimating fediverse MAU is far less exact and likely to underreport because you have to make decisions about querying tens of thousands of servers and a significant chunk don't even report active users. Do you also apply this there?
@ikuturso yeah, theres really only one server where them not reporting mau makes a meaningful difference, and thats misskey.social. i had a post from summer 2024 i think where i estimated them at 250k mau at that point based on total post count, but havent done the analysis since
-
@ikuturso yeah, theres really only one server where them not reporting mau makes a meaningful difference, and thats misskey.social. i had a post from summer 2024 i think where i estimated them at 250k mau at that point based on total post count, but havent done the analysis since
@laurenshof well that's the easy one to point to where it makes a huge difference but that doesn't mean the rest don't make a difference in aggregate.
There are also some large instances that are widely (but not universally) defederated and usually not counted in the stats you can get from places like fedidb. That's in addition to the ones they simply miss.
-
@laurenshof well that's the easy one to point to where it makes a huge difference but that doesn't mean the rest don't make a difference in aggregate.
There are also some large instances that are widely (but not universally) defederated and usually not counted in the stats you can get from places like fedidb. That's in addition to the ones they simply miss.
@ikuturso i run my own tracker set for this, which does include the Bad Places in the count. it does not make a meaningful difference in aggregate
-
@ikuturso i run my own tracker set for this, which does include the Bad Places in the count. it does not make a meaningful difference in aggregate
@laurenshof so do you have some kind of a methodology for applying a multiplier accounting for how much your tracker misses?
-
@laurenshof so do you have some kind of a methodology for applying a multiplier accounting for how much your tracker misses?
@ikuturso i used to be a data analyst in previous jobs, what youre doing is asking the same type of questions PMs would ask me if the reporting gave results they didnt like
trying to tweak the methology wont magically make an uncomfortable number more comfortable -
@ikuturso yeah, theres really only one server where them not reporting mau makes a meaningful difference, and thats misskey.social. i had a post from summer 2024 i think where i estimated them at 250k mau at that point based on total post count, but havent done the analysis since
@laurenshof I assume you mean misskey.io here but I wonder why you think only that instance can matter when most of them do not report it and the rest do make up for like 450k users compared to misskey.io's 750k.
-
@ikuturso i used to be a data analyst in previous jobs, what youre doing is asking the same type of questions PMs would ask me if the reporting gave results they didnt like
trying to tweak the methology wont magically make an uncomfortable number more comfortable@laurenshof no what I'm doing is pointing out that you should have one standard. Now you seem to be taking a social media post and coming up with a random multiplier in one case.
You also have not made a very good case for why there cannot be a significant difference. "I used to be a data analyst" isn't really doing it for me, sorry.
-
@evan @dansup The number of developers and communities who've been pushed out of the Fedi because of this elitist mentality should be alarming to any builder in this space. Are we ever going to learn to do better, or are we going to continue pushing more people away?
The vibes aren't good, Evan, and I really hope you're aware of that, because vibes make or break a community.
@quillmatiq @evan @dansup the vibes don't seem to be very great from the Bluesky side either. I do think it seems like gaslighting when there's this constant drumbeat of people who have clearly taken that side coming to blame it all on the AP people.
Maybe it wasn't always this way and the Bluesky vibes have shifted because the project doesn't seem to be doing all that well unfortunately. Whatever we think about Threads, it has clearly emerged as the main beneficiary of the Twitter takeover at this point.
-
@evan @dansup @quillmatiq Evan, perhaps spend some time introspecting why ActivityPub didn't get more adoption and why developers love AT Protocol.
@thisismissem @evan @dansup @quillmatiq What developers love is not a great metric as becomes apparent if you follow the tech industry for a while.
-
@thisismissem @evan @dansup @quillmatiq What developers love is not a great metric as becomes apparent if you follow the tech industry for a while.
@ikuturso @evan @dansup @quillmatiq well, you need developers to want to build great social experiences on protocols for any given protocol to succeed. They need to be productive to deliver the features regular people want, if the protocol prevents that, or doesn't provide what developers want, they'll do something else.
So yes, people first if we're looking at it from a product perspective; but if we're looking at it from a technological perspective, then yeah, it's developers you need to keep happy, so they can keep end-users of their software happy.
-
@renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup rich people who believe in the vision and want to see the future you're promising. They might not expect a 10x return, but let's not kid ourselves, they're putting in because there's something in it for them and they get a nice tax write-off.
If your donors stop donating because they no longer believe in the vision/team/etc, then that'll limit the project. You need these wealthy donors to stay happy, as much as Bluesky PBC needs their investors to stay happy.
Wealthy people with money to give/invest in support of a future you've sold them.
@thisismissem @renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup you do still agree there is a massive difference between a donation and an investment right?
-
@thisismissem @renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup you do still agree there is a massive difference between a donation and an investment right?
@ikuturso @renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup it's really not that massive. It's still money from a billionaire.
-
@ikuturso @renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup it's really not that massive. It's still money from a billionaire.
@thisismissem @renchap @evan @quillmatiq @dansup If all billionaire money is equally bad, then the incentive structure doesn’t matter. That’s a strange position for anyone worried about the power of money.
Donors can express priorities, sure. That's soft influence. But it’s voluntary and reversible. Investments hard-code priorities into ownership, control, and profit-extraction rights.
-
@mastodonmigration @baralheia @cwebber in Christine's article (and I've just spoken with her about it), it assumes a network topology that does not exist in the real world.
It assumes that every user is on a different pds, and every user runs a full network relay. The reality is that multiple users are usually on a single PDS, and there's only like 12 relays.
- 2 from bluesky (+ 1 deprecated)
- 2 from hose.cam
- 1 from blacksky
- 1 from upcloud
- 3 from firehose.networkplus a few more from various people.
In the ActivityPub ecosystem for every user to message every other user, you need connections between 30,000 servers.
For the same in AT Protocol, you need connections between N PDS to one or more relays (most use the bluesky relay, which others get their list of PDSes from).
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia My analysis assumes a network architecture in which each node is a major participant in the functionality of the network, because as I argue in the piece, from a power distribution perspective of decentralization, it is important. What I describe in the piece is that if you want more than a pantheon of gods-eye view participants, then not having addressed delivery means that the system can't scale down.
And this is true: you can run a gotosocial node that isn't *dependent* on other major players in the network, and it scales down great.
The question is whether or not that matters and is important to people. Maybe it doesn't, I don't know. It matters to me, though.
-
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia My analysis assumes a network architecture in which each node is a major participant in the functionality of the network, because as I argue in the piece, from a power distribution perspective of decentralization, it is important. What I describe in the piece is that if you want more than a pantheon of gods-eye view participants, then not having addressed delivery means that the system can't scale down.
And this is true: you can run a gotosocial node that isn't *dependent* on other major players in the network, and it scales down great.
The question is whether or not that matters and is important to people. Maybe it doesn't, I don't know. It matters to me, though.
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia I also think that the ATmosphere and the fediverse could both learn a lot from each other. ATproto could adopt directed messaging, and the fediverse could adopt content addressing and portable identity, both of which I believe are important. This isn't a pivot, I have been saying these things *since 2017*, before ActivityPub became a recommendation, and before ATproto even came on the scene, including even in my co-proposal with Jay Graeber about what Bluesky could be, and including in the articles referenced previously.
Unfortunately, I think there is a real risk that the fediverse is going to learn the *wrong* lessons from the ATmosphere, and adopt some of its "shared centralization" components, rather than the decentralization components that ATproto has that the fediverse doesn't yet.
![😕](https://forum.wedistribute.org/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f615.png?v=8eaae6ed46b ":\")
-
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia I also think that the ATmosphere and the fediverse could both learn a lot from each other. ATproto could adopt directed messaging, and the fediverse could adopt content addressing and portable identity, both of which I believe are important. This isn't a pivot, I have been saying these things *since 2017*, before ActivityPub became a recommendation, and before ATproto even came on the scene, including even in my co-proposal with Jay Graeber about what Bluesky could be, and including in the articles referenced previously.
Unfortunately, I think there is a real risk that the fediverse is going to learn the *wrong* lessons from the ATmosphere, and adopt some of its "shared centralization" components, rather than the decentralization components that ATproto has that the fediverse doesn't yet.
@cwebber
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia Content addressing and portable identity is so important and hurts so much everytime a server closes or (like me) had to switch domain name. -
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @quillmatiq @dansup @evan I appreciate this information, but my main interest in modern decentralized social media protocols is for social media (microblogging, as well as picture & video sharing), and I am not a developer - just a nerd. My primary concern in all of this is I simply don't trust Bluesky PBLLC. That's why complete and total independence from their infrastructure from a microblogging standpoint is important to me before I would ever consider using an ATproto-based service as my primary social media platform. While I'm okay using community resources for now, I *want* the ability to host my own completely independent full stack so I would never need to rely on a company or community to stand up a relay or AppView or something. I can do that easily and *cheaply* today with Mastodon or WAFRN (the ActivityPub side of it, anyway) or Pixelfed or Loops - it's not a big lift because these platforms were already designed with the full stack as a single deployment. This makes the network highly resistant to adversarial takeover, especially as things exist *right now*. It's a far, far, far bigger lift to stand up a similarly independent full stack of Bluesky (for example), and far far far easier for the majority of the network to be compromised if all statuses must be funneled through corporate or community chokepoints.
Tl;dr if I can't easily host a full stack that can run completely on it's own (while still being able to federate with others), that's not independence. *Every* service built on top of ActivityPub can give me that independence *by design*. It's the difference between human-scale networking and corporate-scale networking.
If there's an easy, lightweight, fully independent way for me to participate in Bluesky-compatible microblogging on ATproto with an experience that is comparable to what I'd get from using Bluesky directly, I'm interested to learn more - because I'm not currently aware of anything like that. I can get that from multiple platforms on AP *today*.
A cool project you may like is appviewlite: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite
You can run an appview entirely locally--i was even able to run this on my phone.
Its possible to directly crawl PDSes, meaning there's no reliance on a relay.
There's also https://reddwarf.app, which runs entirely in your browser, without an appview or relay.
And there's wafrn (which I'm using right now), which natively supports atproto and activitypub. It has its own appview, but it currently uses an external appview for notifications and fetching possible missing posts iirc.
-
@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia I also think that the ATmosphere and the fediverse could both learn a lot from each other. ATproto could adopt directed messaging, and the fediverse could adopt content addressing and portable identity, both of which I believe are important. This isn't a pivot, I have been saying these things *since 2017*, before ActivityPub became a recommendation, and before ATproto even came on the scene, including even in my co-proposal with Jay Graeber about what Bluesky could be, and including in the articles referenced previously.
Unfortunately, I think there is a real risk that the fediverse is going to learn the *wrong* lessons from the ATmosphere, and adopt some of its "shared centralization" components, rather than the decentralization components that ATproto has that the fediverse doesn't yet.
Goodness, yes - it puzzles me greatly that portable identity isn't a part of the ActivityPub standard. It's an obvious gap, in hindsight.
-
@quillmatiq @dansup I do know how toxic the response was to Bridgy Fed when Ryan first announced the Bluesky bridge, and I think his ability to weather that storm will go down as one of the most heroic efforts in the history of the social web.
To be fair, most of what I saw against Bridgy Fed wasn't against _bridging_. It was against (a) the initial decision to make it opt-out, (b) the justification "if we make it opt-in, people might not opt in, so making it opt-out will make it more useful". After Ryan listened to people explaining what's wrong with that, and switched to opt-in (respect to him for listening), I don't remember seeing further opposition, though of course there could've been some I didn't see.
-
@thisismissem @stefan the reason for doing this multiplier is not so much for getting MAU right in absolute terms, but because mastodon/fedi MAU data also includes lurkers in their data. So you need it to get a fair comparison between fedi and the atmosphere
@laurenshof So your estimate is based on one "skeet" from a CTO of a company with a multi-million dollar VC "loan" that *needs* their numbers to look good?
Fair enough!
