So, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m going to go out here on a limb and say that it seems to me that the majority of good faith #bsky criticism of the vibe on mastodon, calling it “stuffy” and “no fun”, comes from people who joined mastodon.social, after complaining loudly that there was no default instance to quickly onboard people to the new service.
So like, the irony, I guess, is what hit me this morning.
The ratio of folks on #bsky using custom domains is really interesting and will get moreso when the 2M reportedly on the waitlist get released. So many wonderful influences of the #fediverse on #Bluesky and that software makes using domains as handles nice and easy. Who knew zany tlds could be so much fun? But of course such a nerdy proto web thing could unexpectedly monetize the great federation. #namespace
Incredibly fascinating and tragic to observe a decentralized social platform get off the ground without the effect of distributed de-hierarchical multi-instance moderation that we experience on fedi. Super crucial to instantiate a decent prototype instance prior to federating, right? #bsky is in a terribly awkward stage right now, but at least it’s closed and can contain its nazibar moderation problem to address before it opens for business.
Finally got my invite and tried out bluesky. Didn't like it. No docs for setting up your own server, no hashtags, not much anything? The algorithm things are good, but overall the service is not worth it. The UI is like the old Twitter, but with clumsy proportions. Nope. I'm enjoying Mastodon, here to stay. #SocialMedia#bsky#BlueSky#BlueSkySocial#Mastodon
So OK I keep trying to like #atproto / #bsky, lexicons specifically but they make it so hard. like... let's see, OK we're going to reinvent RDF and JSON-Schema such that
there is some concept of a "namespace authority" rooted in DNS ownership of a domain name that is supposed to maintain a set of lexicons and do things like make sure there are no duplicates (eg. lexicon IDs are case sensitive but you are not allowed to have IDs that differ only in case, which a ns authority has to ensure)
but there is no means of using the domain to retrieve a schema, so eg. it is explicitly not spec'd to require com.example.myLexicon be at myLexicon.example.com - so the whole goofy Javabrained reverse-domain name thing as the ID is pointless
Accordingly, lexicons have to be sourced ad-hoc and by convention, and the convention is bonkers!!!! According to their reference implementations, the way you are supposed to use lexicons is to autogenerate their json schema definitions and version them locally everywhere they are used. I can't express how baffling this is to me - like the atproto monorepo has a top level lexicons directory, and then their Makefile then goes through several of the subpackages calling each of their (separate) code generation scripts, resulting in local, vendored copies of each of the lexicons - and by copies of the lexicons i mean both generated code AND typescript interfaces AND an entire copy of the whole schema.
This is presumably because there are REFERENCES between lexicons EVEN WITHOUT those lexicons having a meaningful notion of location or dereferenceability - how would you know what 'app.bsky.feed.defs' is referring to unless you packaged and built all lexicons together? the method for resolving references literally requires them to all be locally present at runtime as far as i can tell, idk the lexicon code is unreadable to me.
There is no means of versioning, so "Once a schema is published, it can never change its constraints" and the only means of changing is to change its freaking name, so com.example.myLexicon.FinalFinalv2 is explicitly encouraged. The reference implementations repeatedly violate this, though, so whatever.
Again, there is no actual mechanism of "publishing" a schema, though, so it's completely unclear what that's supposed to mean - how do people know the schema has changed names since they just have it hardcoded in their clients?
and the entire spec documentation is just a bunch of harebrained ideas that amount to, as far as i can tell, just literally being JSON-Schema just different? And they compare it to RDF but there's literally nothing to compare there except for the absence of an explanation as to why they didn't just use JSON-LD. I literally cannot tell how this is supposed to work as an interoperability/extensibility layer if there is no means of resolving terms or lexicons and all definitions have to be known in advance.
Strange that lots of #academics on #bsky are not really engaging with anyone, except perhaps with few other academics and they just reposting their original twitter material. Huge majority anglo-american. Probably some of them are on #threads too.
Not sure what the actual point of such activity is all about though
By the way I'm just doing a bit of looking into bsky, once I finish that I'll be off!
If you’re feeling any #bsky#fomo this week (and it is fascinating being from the #fedi to observe folks grasp with open access and federation on the horizon) let me tell you that a non-trivial amount of the site’s engagement leads to this error message cul de sac, the remains of the so-called hellthread, where if you weren’t in among the early wave (I wasn’t) it’s a bit befuddling. This is what you get when you beta launch without any moderation tools (they just appeared this weekend).
It's yet to get bad, because they are flush with venture capital money right now. Eventually they will need to monetize that. VCs always demand their money.
Bluesky-ians will be shocked, shocked to discover their platform has ads and Nazis.
We can wait. We'll still be here, with no ads, and nazis being shut down and ejected from civil discourse.
You might be having a bad day, but at least you didnt spend like a decade developing a social media protocol that was structurally incapable of DMs so you needed to make a whole second E2EE protocol
#bsky is really interesting
fundamentally a dead virtual space, for Europeans at least (and even more so for academics)
Americans (USA) seem a bit more engaged
..only English-speaking users..
looks and feels like (early) #Twitter
buckets of accounts with no posts, some just with the odd re-post, or posts that are days or months old
some people (like here) are just re-posting the same material they have on Twitter
I'll post some more on bsky if there's anything new /1/ #tech#socialmedia
The latest drama is that Automattic is about to sign a deal with OpenAI to train AI on WordPress.com and Tumblr content.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that OpenAI probably already had crawled most if not all of WP and Tumbler.
Automattic also allows users to opt out and that fueled the Opt Out/Consent discussion that started a bit earlier. I’ll get to it later.
Just the day before (or it feels like it) Google signed a deal with Reddit to get all the data to train their AI.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that Google of all corps probably already had crawled most if not all of Reddit. The $60M Google paid is a convenience fee to get a nice db bump instead of having to scrap and clean up all that text.
Reddit doesn't let user to Opt Out.
Last week (or it feels like it) one guy wanted to bridge public toots from Mastodon to bluesky.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that people could read those toots just using a different client or a browser. All the bridge did was bring toots to a different audience and allowed them to engage with those toots.
The bride also allows people to opt out and that rekindled the Opt Out/Consent discussion that started a bit earlier. I’ll get to it later.
Some time last year a guy built a Fediverse search engine because discovery between instances is terrible.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that most toots are indexed by big search engines anyway but because they rank low they just rarely surface in the results.
The search engine also allowed people to opt out and that kinda started the Opt Out/Consent discussion. I’ll get to it in a bit.
Some time later a completely unrelated thing happened. Discord decided that they won’t let people hotlink images uploaded to Discord.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. But also this time people didn’t forget to mention that you shouldn’t use discord for anything you don’t want to lose. Thing like lore, documentation and basically anything that can be useful 5 minutes after it was said better be somewhere else. The reason is Discord servers are private in the sense that you have to use a specific piece of software with an account to access it. Anything posted there is not accessible outside, including through a search engine.
While all this was going on quite a few people in seemingly unrelated fashion were expressing dissatisfaction with interactions they were having on Mastodon. Specifically they were angry about certain types of replies they were getting. The replies were not threatening or insulting but they were not welcome in a way that I’m having trouble articulating. The most common case I saw is someone would post something open-ended or state a problem they have and they would get a bunch of suggestions how to possibly solve it or people sharing their experience either affirming the problem or otherwise.
Some people got very angry about this. They also conveniently forgot to even notice that this is a non-standard arrangement and they want to Opt Out of the more common case provided by the platform.
So finally we’re at the Opt Out. There’s a lot of different takes but the main thrust is that things should be Opt In instead of the other way around. And I agree. Where I don’t agree is that you all Opt In when you post stuff publicly on the internet. Once you do you set your thing free into the world. You resign control over it. You do not expect to opt in to every single read on your blog. If you want to control who access what you write you don’t post it on the internet in public, you send it in private. Consequently you do not retroactively revoke access. You all know that internet never forgets. You can’t unpublished things on the internet. It was already copied, screenshotted, and archived. And you didn’t know what happens to it unless you’re told.