In the same way that 99.99% of standard mastodon users are on mastodon.social, yes.
No, the million of users sharing porn on entirely isolated mastodon instances that absolutely nobody wants to federate with because you'd be exposed to pictures of minors within 5 minutes do not count.
yes, mastodon.social is big but there is more plurality. There is about 250k users on mastodon.social while whole fediverse is about 10 milion
On the other hand while tere is roughly 35 milion bluesky users there is only ~50k on non-blusky PDSes (https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses) so there's that…
Your diagram at the top of that explainer doesn't include the various Mastodon (not sure if instance<->reader is ActivityPub) client apps, but does include ATProto/Bluesky client apps. Without that, it seems rather incomplete and I don't feel like so can take away much from it?
Are you going to write it below my every comment? I've already replied to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933050. Also, I don't think either claim in my reply is dependent on who wrote it. You can trivially verify them yourself.
I'll try to mention it once per discussion page in the future. Also, I have not been working at Bluesky for over a year. While I was there, I was working on the client app and not the protocol. In fact, initially I thought the protocol stuff was a bunch of nonsense.
In this case? Social Network protocol scene but generally the open source world (and every other niche interest in existence) has it's own bouts with scene drama.
This is part of the reason why I stopped heavily engaging with ActivityPub. It's not everyone because I know the team of folks who make apps for the space but it's engagement like this who convinced me to write https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2024/one-over-other/ and had me just step away from ActivityPub (at least until I can see https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-api drop and I'll reengage).
This is a non-sequitur? ATProto was explicitly designed to not be compatible with ActivityPub. They shot first. So why are you focused on tone-policing ActivityPub?
What do you mean by “explicitly designed to not be compatible with ActivityPub”? What proof do you have for that other than “it doesn’t use ActivityPub”?
And you can’t tone police a standard. That’s very weird.
The single point of failure is always the biggest instances or communities, which impose their rules on everyone else under threat of refusing to communicate with them.
This has happened with every single federated platform, and it can’t be solved with technology because it’s fundamentally not a technology problem. People want to be where other people are, so once the community reaches a critical mass it inevitably degrades into the same sump of mediocrities and their rules as everything else.
I think you will find that a lot of people find that to be a feature of the federated networks. It's how society works outside of social networks. You aren't likely to see football fans of different teams sharing pubs here in Europe. You wouldn't see judgemental people be allowed in accepting roleplaying communities and so on. Why would a network of community controlled servers be any different than this? IRC was like this, Discord is like this. When you give people control they are going to kick out the opinions and people they don't want around.
If you find yourself on the outside, it might just be that you're the village idiot. Before SoMe platforms like twitter, facebook and other places without local moderation the village idiot didn't have much of a voice either.
Email and Usenet are both decentralized systems that in theory aren't affected by instance admin bitchfights anywhere near to the level of drama in the fediverse. Yes: many providers didn't mirror the binary groups due to piracy, and in email, deliverability is a constant issue thanks to spammers.
But the fediverse? Can't count how many times I've seen instance admins hold their users hostage in bitchfights over the Israel/Palestine stance of other instance admins.
Usenet was(is?) moderated similar, to IRC, Discord and so on with some newsgroups needing moderator approval for every single post. Also, there was a lot of drama on Usenet. I don't think it's that different from the fediverse. I guess you could debate whether moving your "personality" from one fediverse server to another when is worse than having to use a new email to access groups that banned you. With the fediverse you can certainly be punished for the actions of other people on your instance much easier compared to other platforms.
Email is probably the closest to anarchy. If you could get people to use it for group communications, every user could decide who they include in their "reply all", which would probably lead to absolute chaos.
The village idiot analogy is misguided and unnecessarily accusatory.
However, I do feel internet communities were better when they were smaller due to being special interest driven and self-policing. People wore different hats according to the community they were engaging with.
You're right, landsbytosse doesn't not translate well. To be fair the literal translation is village fool, which isn't much better. It's meaning would be more along the lines of village eccentric, which could be the village idiot, but not always.
There was a very steep curve to access the Internet back then (both economically and technically), and that was a very big filter (although it let through many smart assholes anyway).
Look at how ActivityPub works before saying it's single vendor controlled.
Really basically: Everyone can have their data (posts, media attachments) on whatever server they want or control, easily self hosted.
And at the same time, people can also host "apps" like Bluesky that read said data and interpret conventions in naming to show it in a meaningfull way like as posts.
you can self host your data.
you can self host a bluesky view.
It actually kind of reminds me of openstreetmap, where it's actually only a database of keys and values, but apps interpret their meanings based on conventions
ActivityPub solves a completely different (arguably, smaller) set of problems. This is like saying "Cool people use email instead of web".
I have a few diagrams here that may help see just how different they are: https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/#so...
>Single vendor owned & controlled standards always turn out badly, just a question when.
Yeah, which is why atproto is going to IETF: https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group. You can join the mailing list to participate in the discussions: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/atp/?gbt=1&index=.