@Chris Trottier It would be great though to see the #fediverse improve in (1) and (2). There's quite some room for improvement here...
@Fediverse News

@z428 @fediversenews Agreed. I would like to see improvements in those areas.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews I'm not sure how they'll beat moderation, whe I can choose between 22,000 moderation styles.

@mike Jay believes that the answer is algorithms.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews I’m honestly perplexed why Bluesky is even remotely interesting at the moment. It doesn’t offer any transformative improvement and… it’s a closed software. So whatever coolness it may offer down the road, it will manifest in the form of a walled garden (even one that “federates”). In other words, a social network built to be antisocial.

@atomicpoet It might be. But you know my thoughts on that. The fediverse is open source, open API, therefore anything, including algorithmic curation, can be done in the client.

@konstantin @fediversenews Actually, AT protocol is open source:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-ecosystem

From my perspective, though, I feel that they’re way behind in development, and they’re facing lots of skepticism from developers—for good reason.

On the other hand, there’s lots of people who believe Bluesky is “easier”—but part of that is because it’s only operating on one node.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews

the main goal for them is to make money somehow

I am done with that 😂

@atomicpoet @konstantin @fediversenews doesn’t one node mean they haven’t brought either 1 or 2 yet? If there is nowhere else to take your account to, then you certainly don’t have portability. Although I guess if you are a universe of one you can claim to have global discovery.

@Archnemysis @konstantin @fediversenews 😅

@atomicpoet yeah it’s technically open source, but can one just clone and run a blue sky server? Bluesky is effectively a “reference implementation” of AT and that isn’t open. It’s hard to trust an effort like this when the only reason we know about it is because of Dorsey’s fame and previous social venture.

@fredbrooker @atomicpoet @fediversenews Exactly this.

Account portability? Seeing is believing. Moderation "better"? Never, if money and engagement drives the decisions. Same thing with curation. It's just Twitter but decentralized.

For the time being? B O R I N G.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews
What looked interesting is "a market place for algorithms." Similar to my suggestion to have "user algorithms" on the fediverse. Where you pick one or more algorithms created by enthusiasts or you yourself, to share.

@fredbrooker @atomicpoet @fediversenews Exactly this.

Account portability? Seeing is believing. Moderation "better"? Never, if money and engagement drives the decisions. Same thing with curation. It's just Twitter but decentralized.

They're cannibalizing an existing service and trying to own the part of Mastodon that nobody can: user focus and it's openess. What they're focusing on today is stealing the user base from Mastodon.

For the time being? B O R I N G.

@konstantin This is a good point. For Bluesky’s decentralization to be real, I should be able to start up my own server and connect. Otherwise, it’s just a gimmick.

@atomicpoet @Archnemysis @konstantin @fediversenews

Facebook.
Claimed initially to be force for good.
Has CEO etc structure.
Look how it turned out.

Twitter.
Claimed initially to be force for good.
Has CEO etc structure.
Look how it turned out.

Blue sky.
Claims initially to be force for good.
Has CEO etc structure.
Why should we believe this again?

@zorangrbic @atomicpoet @fediversenews

Discoverability?

I don't want to be discovered by all those crypto scammers, haters and other crazy fucks 😂

@jupiter_rowland the only true portability means storing your profile on a blockchain or into the IPFS

@jupiter_rowland I can't see a way to truly allow portability of anyone's posts, only a picture, info and a list of friends

@atomicpoet@mastodon.social @fediversenews@venera.social Hey Chris. Where did you get the invite code? I'd like to try Bluesky as well. Thanks!

@kyoko @fediversenews A friend gave it to me, but I think they might be out of invite codes.

@Fred Brooker Not on #Mastodon with #ActivityPub as it is right now.

But the #Zot protocol, created by the #Friendica inventor Mike Macgirvin in 2011, seven years before ActivityPub became a standard, allows for something that's called #NomadicIdentity. In fact, Zot was created specifically for this feature.

Friendica with its #DFRN protocol already allows full account portability between instances on a degree that Mastodon users still think is absolutely impossible, and a Friendica account contains much more data than a Mastodon account.

Nomadic identity goes even further: It lets you have the very same channel on multiple instances at the same time. So you don't move to a new instance, leaving a dead and disconnected account behind. You create a 100% clone of your channel. And that clone will remain a clone, for it's kept in-sync with the original in real-time. And you can have as many clones as possible.

Sounds like utter science-fiction, right? But it's reality.

In 2012, four years before Mastodon, Macgirvin himself forked his own Friendica, ported it to Zot and renamed it Red. It was later renamed #RedMatrix, and when it saw its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, still months before Mastodon, it got its final and current name, #Hubzilla.

If you think it's still born, if you think something like this couldn't possibly have survived: Hubzilla is still around. It is still being developed. Its current version is 8.2 from last month, and 8.3 is being field-tested.

And yes, it still offers nomadic identity while each channel has features which Mastodon users couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams. And all of it is kept in-sync between instances by nomadic identity.

Also: I speak to you from Hubzilla right now. No, I'm not on Mastodon, although this should be clear from how long this post already is. Hubzilla has optional ActivityPub support per channel.

And even Zot itself is advancing. Not long after the launch of Hubzilla, Macgirvin created two forks for the development of Zot/6, #Osada with ActivityPub and #Zap without it. More forks came after Hubzilla had been upgraded to Zot/6 in order to develop Zot/8, #Mistpark2020 and #Roadhouse. All four are EOL now and superseded by #Streams which first saw the light of day last year, and which runs on #Nomad, formerly known as Zot/11, providing better integration of non-nomadic protocols such as ActivityPub.

@jupiter_rowland the question is, do we need that really?

@fredbrooker@witter.cz #Calckey currently has post & image import in beta. I've imported my posts from my previous #Mastodon instances. So it's just not the domain of #Fediverse services using additional protocols to #ActivityPub now. The "technical limitations" reasons of Mastodon's devs is bunk. As usual, those who fork around them get it done. @jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Fred Brooker It's there. It has been in productive use for longer than Mastodon. So why abandon it in favour of more well-known but inferior technology?

Besides, many other Mastodon users who have heard about it say, yes, we need it. Ask people on mastodon.lol.

If witter.cz should disappear for good without a notice, you're fucked. Your account is locked in on that instance. Have fun starting over from scratch.

Even if witter.cz should announce its shutdown, you can only take so much with you as you move to another instance. You lose all your toots, you lose all your uploaded media, you lose all your followers, at least the one-sided followers whom you don't follow back.

I already have a clone of my channel. If hub.netzgemeinde.eu should go under, I can shrug it off and make the clone my new main without losing anything. And I can make more clones.

However, I can't see nomadic identity come to Mastodon anytime soon. ActivityPub won't introduce it because the W3C committee steering its development has disbanded, and nobody is maintaining it anymore. And Mastodon can't easily be ported to Zot or Nomad.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews

It is still in Beta, right?

If so, then most of the users are going to be techies, and so there will be very few bad actors, and therefore very few moderation problems.

I agree with you, it may not scale, and they may not have experienced the problems that lie ahead.

@fredbrooker @jupiter_rowland IMO making nomadic identity an integral part of the protocol is the best way to prevent lock-in mechanisms, i.e. to make Fedi more resilient to VC capture strategies

@jupiter_rowland

The sterility of ActivityPub is a problem, though Mastodon's lack of standards support is more limiting, that isn't a criticism because it's a system that does what it set out to do.

I don't know if Zot:Streams is the right kind of individual shared identity but I wish it wasn't called Streams as it's hard to research from the name.

Essentially, applications shouldn't have anything to do with identity other than the user saying I use this, verify me.