[danpalmer]

Bluesky has been asymptotically approaching full decentralisation. A few years ago the gap was everything except a decentralised design, then it was AppViews, now it's "tooling and documentation" for the bit of the PKI that only 50 entities have done.

Meanwhile I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once, couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance, lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on, all classic signs of centralisation.

[bramhaag]

  > all classic signs of centralisation.

No, these are classic signs of decentralization.

  >  I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once

Your posts still exist on every server that federated with you, there's just no central authority to coordinate reclaiming them.

  > couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance

Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization.

  > lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on

That's just how paying for services works. You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access.

On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely. On Bluesky, the author deleted an empty test account and is now blacklisted network-wide until Bluesky support decides to help. That is a classic sign of centralization.

[danpalmer]

Being beholden to a particular server I have no control over sounds like what happened with Twitter/X.

The posts might exist, but they aren't associated with me. Why not? Because I was locked into somewhere and unable to vote with my feet and go elsewhere.

Maybe I stopped paying because the instance owner enforced sanctions against my country? Why should I lose my identity because of that?

> Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization.

Compatibility issues means lock-in to instances under individual control. Shared protocols means lock-in to a protocol, but ultimately freedom to move. We know that open protocols trumps opt-in collaboration by private entities for freedom.

> You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access.

See also: instances not federating with other instances that are too small. You technically can, but in practice it goes nowhere.

> On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely.

Bluesky is not perfect, but where it's approaching full decentralisation quickly on a solid foundation, ActivityPub has become the Mastodon show, and is less a decentralised social network, and more a federated set of centralised services with little accountability to users. You can't move, you can't control the content you see, you can't even search. It's a reversion to the days of 14 year olds drunk on power as a mod on a phpbb forum, or the Reddit mods of today.

[direwolf20]

I've realised that social networks are real–time feeds, not archives. Some archival features can be useful but they are not the main focus of the product. Archival needs are very different from real–time needs and combining them in the same product doesn't work out well.

Consider something simple like Slack: the selling point is that you can send messages to people. Being able to scroll back to last week is useful. Being able to scroll back 3 years is a nonessential bonus.

[direwolf20]

They are at 0.1% decentralisation, how can you extrapolate asymptotic decentralisation from that?

[direwolf20]

I honestly can't tell if this comment is trolling.

[danpalmer]

I'll admit it's a bit charged, but I'm frustrated with bad faith takedowns of ATProto/Bluesky, while Mastodon (and it is Mastodon, not ActivityPub) solves almost none of the actual problems. I tried implementing my own ActivityPub server and the spec is so hilariously lacking that it's understandable that everyone just uses the Mastodon API instead.

[direwolf20]

ActivityPub isn't actually the spec of Mastodon. Treat claims of "Mastodon is ActivityPub" the same as you treat claims of "Bluesky is decentralised."

Just expose the same interface Mastodon does and you'll be fine. Noting that almost nothing cares about the exact URLs you use, except for webfinger, but does care about the domain being the same as the right side of the @ sign.

[danpalmer]

> Treat claims of "Mastodon is ActivityPub" the same as you treat claims of "Bluesky is decentralised."

Not sure if you meant this in the way I read it, but I believe that Bluesky is pretty much decentralised and tidying up the last bits of that, and I also believe that Mastodon is functionally ActivityPub and probably mopping up the last bits where the open spec meant anything.

The problem with ActivityPub is that it was missing at least half of what would be necessary to do anything with it, maybe more. You certainly can't create clients with it, it doesn't define anything about writing, etc. It's good that it's an open spec, but I see it as closer to Open Graph tags on web pages than it is to a social network foundation. That's fine... but we treat "Mastodon" as open because of ActivityPub, when in reality almost the entire system is defined by a Rails API implementation and its idiosyncrasies. I see it as a problem that you can't participate in the network without implementing an API with one implementation, rather than by implementing to a spec.

[direwolf20]

> Bluesky is pretty much decentralised

????? what data could possibly lead to this conclusion?

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

[lmm]

> Mastodon (and it is Mastodon, not ActivityPub) solves almost none of the actual problems. I tried implementing my own ActivityPub server and the spec is so hilariously lacking that it's understandable that everyone just uses the Mastodon API instead.

Misskey is an independent implementation, and actually what the biggest server instance runs (or at least was a few years ago).