"Deactivated my blue sky account"

May the odds be ever in your favour.

Don't waste your time with the snake oil that's been sold as "AI" ATM. Real AI, like fusion energy, is and will always be a decade away. It's more useful to think about dumb, repetitive tasks you can get a computer to do, so you can apply your attention to other things.

By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!

Firefly is great. I'm finally working my way through Babylon 5. Fantastic stuff, highly recommend.

We're lucky to have you. Commiserations on the slow disintegration of your country of origin.

Can anyone suggest a good high level comparison of ATProto with other decentralised social software protocols like ActivityPub, Matrix or Nostr?

One that's technically accurate, without getting too deep into the weeds. One that confirms or debunk's BlueSky's claim that the only thing required to make BlueSky meaningfully decentralised is more vendors participating. Either by hosting PDS, relay and appview services, and/or writing independent ATProto implementations.

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Ah, OK. Fountain is new to me. Cool that you can send podcast clips as posts. Can you give me the timestamp for your clip, so I can find the relevant bit in my podcasts app? The episode is about 2 hours long ...

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Can you comment on how Amethyst is rendering that podcast link?

There was a problem with compiling some of the software in the Fennec F-Droid build chain from source. That's why it's taking F-Droid a while to ship an update;

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/fennec-vulnerability-recommended-to-uninstall/28826/39

In the meantime you can get more recent versions of mobile FF-based browsers by adding the DivestOS repo to your F-Droid client. But it requires uninstalling, then installing from that repo.

Tried to listen. NoScript is telling me the page is trying to load scripts from google.com and storage.googleapis.com and

wouldn't play the audio without my browser running them. Nope.

FYI a space between the "(" and the URL would make it much easier to follow the link.

"I think we’re going to increasingly see people hand over decisions to their AI."

Probably. For the same reasons we've seen them hand over their decision-making to alohohol, slot machines, opioids, and corporate social media. Desperately stressed people struggle to make good decisions.

Have had extended periods of being desperately stressed. Can confirm ;-)

In the early days of the net, most online projects were not-for-profits, working with a shared legal entity (eg FSF for GNU Project, SiPI for Debian). Some of the more high-profile ones were able to start their own Foundation (eg Mozilla, Wikipedia, Archive.org, Linux). The move to starting new ones as VC-funded, for-profit "startups" was the Original Sin of the current surveillance nightmare.

The unsolved problem is, how else can we get enough funding to start new projects that need fulltime work by people with highly sought after specialist skills?

".. the talks are all about the platform Bluesky and not about the protocol."

The point is that there's no functional difference between the two. BlurSky controls the protocol. Even if they didn't, they control the ID layer of the existing network.

When Gab and Truth.social tried to join the fediverse by setting up servers with Mastodon forks, and Threads by implementing ActivityPub, all fediverse servers could talk to them. Admins opposed to that had to campaign for other admins to block them, server by server. Those of us who saw benefits in people on those servers having access to other perspectives could argued against blocks. Each server's community could make its own decision, based on their own values and needs.

If they tried to do the same thing by setting up servers with BlueSky forks, or implementing ATProto, BlueSky could just ban their ID range from the existing network. For some people this is a feature, not a bug. But it's not decentralisation in any meaningful sense of the word.

This is one of the less-discussed benefits of open standards. Implementing them means working to an archictectural design that's been inspected, dissected and refactored by a group of specialists. So with that part of thinking done for you, you can have a laser focus on the quality of your implementation.

"Theoretically, whether you were having X.com or Y.com aggregate data from PDSs, it'd still be the same PDSs so people from X.com could talk with Y.com - assuming no blocking/errors/funny-buisness was going on."

The point is that x.com and y.com have the power to block each other's accounts. So as I say, there's no point setting up y.com. It's much cheaper and easier to set up an AP server or Nostr relay instead. So unless something radically changes in the ID layer of ATProto, it will always be controlled by BlueSky, and it will always be as centralised as Xitter where it matters most.

> most people probably won't care or even prefer custodially held keys

This is like when apologists for Gmail say that most people don't care about runing their own email server. Or when apologists for proprietary software say that most people don't care about reading or modifying source code. Or when apologists for dictatorship say that most people don't care about reading laws or government reports.

It's probably true, but entirely beside the point. The fact that you *can* do it, if you want to, totally transforms the incentive structures.

Like the pub?

"It's definitely not about the money, they can create that out of thin air. It's about control. They must keep you in fear and in compliance."

If you're talking about banks, 100% correct. Most countries follow neoliberal policy, where banks "print" new money every time they issue a loan.

Having outsourced this power, governments can only influence the money supply indirectly. The closest they get to "printing" new money is encouraging the central bank to lower interest rates. In the hopes this will encourage people to take out loans faster than they're being paid off, growing the money supply. If inflation is rising, they can do the opposite. That's their monetary powers in a nutshell.

If governments want to increase spending, they have to raise either taxes or public debt. So the sensible ones are raising taxes, and a lot of wealthy people are actually encouraging that.

"it's not metered, you're paying for time."

Pick one. Paying for time or data is what "metered" means.

"just like any other ISP."

Maybe where you live.

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Imagine X published all the source code for running x.com. You could set up your own version at y.com, but nobody who created an account there would be able to follow accounts on x.com, or vice-versa. So there's no point.

That's essentially the situation with ATProto. In theory, you can set up a complete clone of the BlueSky service, but it's totally up to them whether accounts on your service can be seen on BlueSky.

The chokepoint is not the software, it's the ID layer. The fediverse/ ActivityPub tried to solve that by taking a leaf out of the IndieWeb's book, and outsourcing the ID layer to DNS. The Zot/ Nomad branch of the fediverse has always had NomadicIdentity, which makes accounts ("channels") independent of the domain names of servers, and there are a number of FEPs describing how to do that in AP software;

https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/

Nostr solves the ID chokepoint problem in a similar way, by having a decentralised ID layer. So that's a step forwards from the existing AP+DNS dominated fediverse. BlueSky is a step backwards, and the main reason people use it is the aggressive Safer Spaces Policing that their ID chokepoint allows;

https://wedistribute.org/podcast/blacksky-rudy-fraser/

For some people that's a feature, and a permissionless network is a bug that feature solves.