Oh no, another 'safe space' brought to you by rainbow capitalism turns out to be, in fact, another 'safe space' brought to you by rainbow capitalism.
Anyway...
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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I'd like to hijack the top comment to say that despite news like these, a friend of mine who's been involved with development (interacted with developers, looked at code...) says that recent updates have made the ATProto service stack much more optimized and accessible. There's also quite a few "Atmosphere" services already, such as leaflet.pub
And I'm gonna be honest most implementations of ActivityPub I've seen so far have felt more like a normal social media with a "talk to other servers!" gimmick
TIL my comment is the top comment.
But the ATProto architecture is still too fundamentally centralized, and thus easily censorable.
Quoting myself from nearly a year ago:
Bluesky is ... arguably 'federated', but it is centralized, not decentralized.
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization
Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative ... 'Relay', that all 'federated' users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the 'AppView', ie, what all other people/users can actually see.
So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.
It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.
If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.
The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.
In that model... every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.
Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with... and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.
That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being 'distributed'.
Now, of course, thats a bit simplified, the AppView is actually more complex than that, the 'Relay' is in actuality a bunch of different machines in different physical locations...
... but it still acts as a monolithic layer, a gate keeper, controlled by a board of directors.
Is anybody else running their own Relay yet?
Thats a genuine question, I totally wrote off BlueSky long ago.
If not, this is all still fundamentally the same.
If you just see ActivityPub as 'normal social media that can talk to other servers'... you don't get it.
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There's no single centralized chokepoint that is under corporate control.
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Costs of running your own ActPub instance are generally not exhorbitantly expensive, thus the entire paradigm is more 'small d' democratic, has a lower barrier to entry and is thus more practically distributable.
From what I could find on my own with a couple minutes of research (currently at school) I know there's at least two independent relays active, the WhiteWind one and the BlackSky one. There's a blogpost written by the WhiteWind developers about the performance costs of running a Relay, and checking it out again I see they mention the recent update to improve performance at the top of the page now.
I said this before but since learning how they work on a conceptual surface level I've liked and felt more optimistic about ATProto than ActivityPub. I think I misspoke in the way I described how I felt about the Fediverse and gave the wrong idea about what I think. But I don't want to make this reply longer than it has to be.
I'm not going to say either is better than the other, from what I can tell it's just two different models of decentralization that are radically different, but I like ATProto's approach more What I am going to say though is that I do wish there were more ATProto based services, and I find it odd how ATProto and Bluesky have not seen the same sprawl of clients and services ActivityPub has, but that may just be a question of age (as iirc AP is much older than ATProto). Bluesky's got its fair share of Clients but AP honestly puts it to shame, I genuinely wonder why.
At some point, hopefully, the users will shape the social media platforms instead of the other way around.
That's all the talk so far? It feels like a bad sign to me when power starts moving from the true believers to the VCs.
It was always going to be this way. It didn't take long to see the signs of enshittification on BSky. They were subpoenaed for user info, they banned journalists, implemented age verification, and I left when they started adding link redirects and tracking.
They banned journalists? Who?
And I didn't know about the redirects and tracking either. They are doing that without ads?
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Which is why "Not for profit" organisations are such a good thing. They are harder to get going but because they are not investment vehicles in the same way you don't have CEOs installed just to maximise share value. Decisions are focused on what the company needs to perform its mission.
The American Healthcare system fully disagrees with your statement, as they actively exploit non-profit status to avoid taxes and squeeze any "profits" into bonuses for the people at the top. They aren't even the only industry doing this, but it all boils down to a piss poor lack of regulation and enforcement that really lets companies exploit non-profit structures.
Certainly things can be open to abuse, and different regulatory systems have different loop holes. However I have seen examples where it's been a good thing.
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What goes up must come down.... watch in the tech bro future we will be bailing out social media companies just like the airlines. Always making a good thing bad.
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Ahh, the "decentralized accelerationist" moves on to fuck up more platforms.
Does anyone know what desitions he made at Automattic?
> Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the Wordpress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014.
Does anyone know what desitions he made at Automattic?
given the way automattic has run for the last 15 years, probably the bad ones.
Blue sky was started by elon's good buddy. It was always going to go full shit.
it wasn't started by jack; it was an incubator project at twitter with the original twitter devs and jack remained on the board.
That goon has his DNA all over bluesky, and he has a long history with elon. Cling to semantics if you need to, but the spirit of what I said was true. If they could get away with the optics of dorsey heading bluesky in that "exodus" moment, they would have. But all knew that would leave a bad taste in the public's mouth and slow/stall adoption, so they had the charade they presented.
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Is she getting tired of death threats from trump's gang?
"Venture capitalist " pfffft “proves you build a real business around open software.” - well forget about that the corpos dragging us all into cyber war (wE hAvE +0 sAvE +He Ch!LdReN).... while we talk to LLMs with our subscription based suck and fuck machine brought to you by tesla gambiling with fart coin eating radioactive cornchips. Roman salute to the suck and fuck machine as your identity is being stolen by DOGE and sold to israel because you posted something naughty on the interweb. The future is stoopid the future is a nightmere. They always leave when something "BIG" is going to happen. Corpos are strategic.... Corpo messaging... "positioning itself as a progressive replacement"--- CORPO_WOKE... What you see is not what you see. Other than trying to read between the lines why the fuck would anybody care about these vampires. A circle jerk of the techbro wealthy. I take nothing at face value. Katie Drummond the current global editorial director at Wired at the WEF Annual Meeting in 2025
These capitalist are sick and tired of the constitution. Everything is a commodity that you can rent. I know I sound crazy but I am not. They are playing good cop bad cop and flooding the zone. They all in on it. It is one big club and you aint in it. I don't like change in general and I am not big on features and benefits. I have yet to be impressed other than be horrified by AI. Reinvent a wheel as a square, charge tripple and beat me over the head with it.
Julian Paul Assange + Edward Snowden = FUCK ALL BIG TECH
New pasta just dropped
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