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Written by dynomight on 2025-02-04 at 15:05

Question for protocol/fediverse/API enthusiasts:

Some claim mastodon is safer from rug-pulls than bluesky—it would be harder for some future bad actor to force everyone onto some engagement-optimizing algorithm.

If that's true (is it?), to what degree is that safety technological vs. legal/social?

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Descendants

Written by Charles OuGuo on 2025-02-04 at 15:42

@dynomight cc @trwnh maybe?

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Written by infinite love ⴳ on 2025-02-04 at 16:18

@ouguoc @dynomight both? technologically there is no single point that everything must flow through. socially there is a current to ensure this by encouraging people to run their own servers. a mastodon rugpull would be harder to do because mastodon isn’t the only software in this space. if mastodon did something unpopular, it’s possible that people would just move to something else that still let you talk to the same people. bluesky on the other hand is only one service that fetches/sorts data.

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Written by infinite love ⴳ on 2025-02-04 at 16:21

@ouguoc @dynomight basically the mastodon tech is like email (move from hotmail to gmail, you can still talk to people because there is a standard for sending messages), but the bluesky tech is more like google (the websites exist independently but all the discovery/searchability happens in one service that can easily go to shit)

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Written by infinite love ⴳ on 2025-02-04 at 16:25

@ouguoc @dynomight notably you can run your own email but you cant easily run your own google. and it’s a lot less useful even if you manage to do it

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Written by Aunty on 2025-02-04 at 21:50

@trwnh @ouguoc @dynomight the concerning bit is, Gmail and Microsoft still kind of managed to centralize email DeFacto.

While you can set up your own email server, the majority of other servers will flag it as probable spam (and not for bad reason)

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Written by infinite love ⴳ on 2025-02-05 at 01:54

@AuntyRed @ouguoc @dynomight yeah it's more like bsky tech is centralized but mastodon tech is neutral/unaligned. the latter allows social resistance to rugpulls but doesn't guarantee it. the former locks you in without being able to do anything about it outside of building entirely separate architecture

with mailing, usps, fedex, ups will all deliver to an address. and you pick a house/apt/etc to live. but if the only mega-stadium in your area shuts down, then where do you go for huge events?

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Written by makeworld on 2025-02-04 at 15:59

@dynomight for an in depth analysis see https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Short version: Bluesky is centralized on a technological level even though there are "escape hatches" of a sort

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Written by dynomight on 2025-02-04 at 16:14

@makeworld This is helpful, but I feel like some further analysis is needed. (That depends on these technical details I definitely don't fully understand!)

I mean, if someone doesn't care about federation per-se, but only preveting "rug-pulls" then how does Mastodon's federation stand up against bluesky's "credible exit"? Seems to depend on lots of technical details and also maybe social factors?

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Written by makeworld on 2025-02-05 at 00:11

@dynomight definitely complex. In terms of a "rug-pull" I think of it this way. If the Bluesky corporate relay servers shut down, Bluesky would be effectively dead for all users. Mastodon has no comparable single point of failure. If mastodon.social shut down a lot of people would be unhappy, but my feed would be fine.

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