On Discourse and Decentralisation
The Community Group for #ActivityPub is drafting an open letter calling for respect and collaboration between the people working on the different protocols in the open social web.
I’m signing the letter, and with it, I have some thoughts regarding discourse, decentralisation and why I think this space matters.
In a post where she signs the open letter, ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber summarises the changing world well:
“This is actually a really important time for that message to come across, because our communities do both face major threats which I believe we are ideologically aligned in wanting to face:
We are facing a large number of laws which appear well-intentioned and aimed to try to take on tech gatekeepers, but unintentionally build regulatory moats that allow only gatekeepers to participate, and which threaten user freedom at large.
The rise of techno-fascism and omnisurveillance affects all users. Neither ATProto nor ActivityPub, at present, are built in such a way that they can provide the levels of protections necessary to respond to the needs of activists and community members against nation-state level threats.
These are our existential threats, not each other. And we need to figure out how to work together.”
I’m reading this as “be nice to the Bluesky guys, because we have a bigger problem to deal with.”
That’s fine, I’m not inclined to be mentally ill at strangers on the internet.
But I’m also not going to call it decentralized when it’s meaningfully not, and I’m going to keep an eye on where their money comes from.
We have a common enemy in government control.
But if you’re going to be my friend, I need you to not lie to my face.
All this rests on the implied assertion that ATProto is part of the open social web.
I don’t know the answer to that and I don’t really care to find out.
I’d say it is, since atproto is, at the very least, open.
open social web is used here as a descriptive term, to mean the collection of networks that includes activitypub, atproto, nostr (and potentially more like matrix and farcaster, depending on your inclination).
whether open social web is the correct term or not does not really matter, because if it was not than i would simply have to replace it with another term that describes the exact same thing
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Comment explaining how to create an account without any of the Bluesky infra:
Example of independent ATProto platform: https://blackskyweb.xyz/
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Pixelfed has 112k monthly active users, 89k being on a single instance
Does this make Pixelfed centralized ?
https://lemmy.zip/post/48357775/21408588
Where does Bluesky intervene in that sign up and usage process?
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I do not earn BTC talking about AT Proto.
I mod !fedigrow@lemmy.zip and !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com , and try to make the ActivityPub platform grow and better known.
Qualifying someone as being paid by Bluesky when talking about non-Bluesky managed AT Proto platforms such as deer.social or Blacksky doesn’t appear as good faith for conversations.
It was actually sorta funny to see an accusation against a fediverse member I know well enough from posts to roll my eyes at. I think I had someone call me a tankie the other day not that long after I had an interminable argument with a workers owning the means of production level socialist.
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We can loop back to https://lemmy.zip/post/48357775/21510389
When Gmail started supporting XMPP, did that mean that XMPP as a protocol wasn’t decentralized?
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The discourse around decentralisation has elevated a form of network architecture that facilitates and contributes to a healthier social internet into a goal into itself.
Big agree with this.
