Nostr Web Client

I've listened to it.

It's so vague when they say "Bluesky will be more decentralized". They have been saying this for years, and a bunch of their users read that as "federation", assuming they will become like Mastodon (because that's the only example of decentralized social network they know), but in fact Bluesky has never planned to be like Mastodon at all and all their future-planned-upcoming "decentralization" updates are irrelevant things like people being able to host their own PDS.

At some point it becomes a little more clear that Masnick doesn't have anything in his mind about the "decentralization" other than what Frazee says in the article above: their entire vision consists of this competition between all-powerful "apps".

Masnick says something like "if we have this in place then Bluesky won't be able to become evil because if they do then everybody will migrate to a competitor overnight", and I've seen Frazee also say this in the past, that the entire point of ATProto was that "if everybody realized that Bluesky was doing bad things they could all switch to Skyblue".

I don't know how they don't see how that is impossible to work. A huge part of the current Bluesky userbase is already furious with them, but they're not leaving because of their network effect, it is an immense cost to leave, so the platform can continue to do a lot of bad things, exactly like Facebook and everything else. Maybe ATProto makes it 5% easier to setup a competitor that can reuse existing software, but software was never the problem.

Right after Masnick said that Rabble started giving the example of how the existence of GitLab places a check on GitHub, an the example couldn't be more appropriate. Despite the fact that GitHub doesn't have anywhere near the network-effect that a social networking website has, still the little bit it gets is enough to prevent anyone from leaving at all, even if the overall hate for GitHub has been growing for years.

fiatjaf 3mo ago

Another thing I forgot is that they seem to operate in this realm of "being evil", like an "app" can either be good or evil: if it's evil everybody will migrate, otherwise everybody will stay.

But this is obviously not true, the same policy can be seem as good by one group of people and bad by another, but in the ATProto world they don't seem to realize that.

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Discussion

fiatjaf 3mo ago

Of course, some ATProto lovers may defend their protocol by saying everything can be worked around by making new clients that connect directly to PDSes or something like that, which is stupid because the entire protocol makes that very difficult and you would just be recreating Nostr on a worse foundation.

fiatjaf 3mo ago

Oh, in the beginning of the interview Masnick talks about "freedom of association" and the idea that each server should be able to have their own rules, much in the veins of nostr:nevent1qqsdc37ghsxs05lsjw4fs9x2lqqfu23cxuc6veq6m29jueq9fdy257cppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctv9uq3xamnwvaz7tm0venxx6rpd9hzuur4vghs9hept7 so I thought he was going in the right direction, but later he forgets that entirely and reverts to the all-powerful "app" paradigm above.

It could be that he had good ideas that could have lead him to something more like Nostr with sovereign servers that make their own rules, but them he got confused by the weird view presented to him by the Bluesky team that involves "labeling" and "custom algorithmic feeds".

I've seen many people (although that is decreasing now) talk about those things (they often use the misnomer "algorithmic choice" which makes no sense) as if they were relevant to the discussion of "Bluesky decentralization", but they're not.

They are very cool and elegant and I understand why people would like the idea, but they are just features provided by a centralized "app" (in fact they assume a centralized server and can only work with that), they're not principles of a decentralized protocol.

fiatjaf 3mo ago

So you get this world in which all the problems of selective censorship are "solved" not by the app (i.e. the centralized server) censoring things, but by giving the user the tools to censor what he wants. This will obviously break because the censorship is never about what you want to see, but about what you want to prevent others from seeing, so there will be pressure for the app to apply absolute censorship. And the app owners themselves will want to censor some things, like they have done with CSAM from day one, and no one disagrees with that at first, but then as time passes their opinions will change too, just like it happens on every platform.

The same applies to the choice of algorithms: users are free to choose, but only within the limits of what the app allows them and for as long as the app allows them.