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Written by evacide on 2025-01-13 at 20:10

I am cautiously optimistic about the ongoing movement to decentralize social media: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/13/free-our-feeds-campaign-aims-to-billionaire-proof-blueskys-tech/

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Descendants

Written by Konstantin Weddige on 2025-01-13 at 20:15

@evacide the direction is good, but I believe the 30 million, that they want to raise, would be better invested in the Fediverse.

But if they keep Bluesky from going the way of X and Meta, I won't complain about that. So... cautiously optimistic it is.

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Written by Louis on 2025-01-13 at 20:27

@weddige @evacide Mastodon's goal is to raise €5 millions for 2025 : https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/

I don't understand why everyone is going for Bluesky where everything they're looking for already exists in Mastodon.

I suspect it's the decentralization that makes it hard for people to grasp, yet they're all aware of its importance. Maybe I'm missing something, anyway I agree that a growing number of people are becoming aware of the danger of toxic platforms and the need for alternatives.

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Written by Konstantin Weddige on 2025-01-13 at 20:55

@louischance @evacide I thought about it today (thanks @heilrath for the impulse) and came to the following conclusion:

People clearly want a better social media that is not under the control of profit-hungry corporations and power-hungry individuals. But that does not automatically translate into the realization that they themselves have to do something for it.

1/2

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Written by Konstantin Weddige on 2025-01-13 at 20:56

@louischance @evacide @heilrath Bluesky promises to be something better, something new and potentially decentralized. And it doesn't ask for much in return: register on a new platform and everything else will be more or less the same.

The Fediverse, on the other hand, gives its users everything they asked for and says: here is your freedom, but be aware that with freedom comes a moderate amount of responsibility.

2/2

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Written by naught101 on 2025-01-13 at 23:06

@weddige @louischance @evacide @heilrath

I think you're both looking at the wrong end of the equation. It's not so much what users want, it's what service providers want. Fedi doesn't look profitable to VC capital, so it's never had any big cash injections, because there will be no ROI. Bluesky is promising to them precisely because it is NOT federated. It promises to replace what twitter was 5 years ago, and allows them control.

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Written by Konstantin Weddige on 2025-01-13 at 23:37

@naught101 @louischance @evacide @heilrath I thought that's the obvious part; I'm more interested in the question, how to bring people, that are obviously fed up with VC funded social media, to actually use non-VC funded social media.

That's a bit like with climate change: most people want that someone is doing something against ist, but they don't want to do the necessary steps themselves.

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Written by naught101 on 2025-01-14 at 00:43

@weddige @louischance @evacide @heilrath

I dunno, that seems like a bit of an oversimplification and individualisation of the problem. Most people have very little agency when it comes to e.g. energy sources in the national grid, or the availability of transport infrastructure, or even food and goods with low air miles. 1/2

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Written by Émilio Gonzalez on 2025-01-13 at 23:05

@louischance @weddige @evacide I think Bluesky simply has the superior product. Moderation lists, quote-posts with the possibility to unquote your post, algorithmic feeds that anyone can make are all things I wish mastodon had but "the community" doesn't want, or not enough dev resources available to implement.

There seems to be an aversion for any kind of algorithm in the fediverse (possible because people felt they went too far with trad social media) and I feel this is holding fediverse back.

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Written by Ceremus on 2025-01-14 at 01:39

@louischance @weddige @evacide From a purely technical standpoint, AT Protocol is better than ActivityPub in terms of data portability. ATproto's decentralized design was engineered for this exact purpose, as an escape hatch so users could take their entire Personal Data Store and move to a new central relay if the ones owned by BlueSky go toxic due to investors and VC money.

For data portability on Mastodon's side, if your server disappears so does your data. If your admin decides they don't like you and bans your new account, you lose your data. If everything works exactly as intended, you still lose all of your posts. Meanwhile you can take every single post you've ever made to Twitter and import them to your BlueSky account, organized and back dated.

These are just technical details, without even going into Trust & Safety issues. Bsky has had growing pains and user conflicts with moderation, but they at least have full time moderators and robust safety tooling in the product. Mastodon is so far behind in both safety features and T&S governance that if it ever faced the threats that bsky currently deals with, it would probably collapse entirely.

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Written by Konstantin Weddige on 2025-01-14 at 05:34

@ceremus @louischance @evacide I think Bluesky and Mastodon have a fundamentally different understanding of freedom:

With Bluesky you decide who owns your data, with Mastodon you decide who controls it.

If you run your own PDS and own a domain, nobody (except for your holster and registrar) can take your data from you. But Bluesky still decides who will see it.

With Mastodon, you can choose who runs your instance or even run your own.

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Written by Konstantin Weddige on 2025-01-14 at 05:43

@ceremus @louischance @evacide ...

Within your local community, nobody can interfere from the outside. And regarding your visibility in the Fediverse, you can always choose an instance, that fits your needs.

Regarding moderation, Bluesky has some really neat features, that I would love to see here. But in the end, Bluesky will always control key aspects of how this works, even with decentralised moderation. And I don't think Bluesky has more moderation manpower than the Fediverse.

...

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Written by Konstantin Weddige on 2025-01-14 at 05:50

@ceremus @louischance @evacide ...

Mastodon would just need a way to source the moderation decisions from other instances, and I'm convinced that it could have a very capable moderation, that is up to the challenges.

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Written by Ceremus on 2025-01-15 at 01:28

@weddige @louischance

So, moderation comes down to a lot more than headcount (although that's certainly a factor). Successful Trust & Safety depends quite a lot on governance, on standards and practices, on processes and institutional knowledge. They are things that have to be built and things that require specialized knowledge. Because willing moderators are good to have, but if they lack the experience of intersectional moderation practices then you end up with community division, which has led multiple times in the fedi to infighting within instances, harassment, fighting across instances, and defederations. See: https://privacy.thenexus.today/unsafe-by-design-and-unsafe-by-default/

There's a reason I picked hachyderm as my new instance after the admin of my original first pick had a meltdown. You can go on their organization's website, view their full moderation guidelines and practices, and even view the infrastructure they use for moderation issues in real time. They set up an entire foundation dedicated to the T&S practices of their org, and that's basically the minimum energy you need to protect your users on any sort of moderate-traffic user-content network.

Most other instances do not have anything approaching this level of governance, which was a willful decision of Mastodon GmbH. Of saying "Anyone can run their own instance!" while never informing people of the legal risks and safety responsibilities involved in running a user-content server. Because most anyone would have enormous second thoughts about doing so if they looked at the realities of those risks and responsibilities.

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Written by Louis on 2025-01-15 at 06:39

@ceremus @weddige very interesting article that raises a lot of good points. I can make the parallel in some ways with WordPress. Anyone can launch a website in minutes with this free and OpenSource solution, but people tend to forget the legal obligations they have to respect as soon as they start collecting users data. I think with the growing popularity of the Fediverse it will become necessary to further develop security and moderation tools, and more importantly to ensure our instances are financially viable.

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Written by irelephant@calckey.world on 2025-01-13 at 21:26

@weddige@gruene.social @evacide@hachyderm.io While i personally would prefer to have everyone on the fediverse myself, bluesky is far better than any centralised social media. I think the ATprotocol will be needed to stay at bluesky levels of relevance.

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Written by May is Beige. on 2025-01-13 at 20:20

@evacide Same. They do have the right groups of people involved to get that funding, and that makes me feel a bit more assured.

The end goal is interoperability, and with the numbers that Bluesky is seeing, I think this is healthy.

https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/01/13/free-our-feeds-and-algorithmic-pluralism/

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Written by Vickie Gray on 2025-01-13 at 21:10

@evacide “billionaire-proof” will be the phrase of 2025.

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Written by Bleistifterin on 2025-01-13 at 22:18

@evacide

Hmm. Some say something is off https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/113822909756877628

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Written by Merc on 2025-01-14 at 18:59

@evacide I'm just disappointed that the momentum seems to be behind BlueSky.

Their system architecture is, theoretically, decentralizeable. Unfortunately, the cost to run a relay are eye-watering. A relay has to store and forward every single bluesky post, costing hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars per month.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

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Written by fanf42 on 2025-01-15 at 08:23

@evacide well, let's the wealthy spend their money as they please, it's better here than in pro-afd cagnotte.

Still, for me it just look like raising money for investing on VC-backed Silicon Valley startups, so more like a con work for the advertised goal. If the goal was what they brag about, they would better invest in the Fediverse, @openprivacy, etc.

But since it's near impossible raising 30M for the Fediverse happens at current maturity level on the topic by people willing to invest in that, let see a new iteration of 5 to 7 years of "oh it almost works, crap the capitalistic foundation spoils everything, let find a better model", and at that point Fediverse will have won.

But hey! I, too, feel cautiously hopeful.

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