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Reblogged by kornel ("Kornel"):

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really? https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

A technical deep-dive, since people have been asking me for my thoughts. I'll expand a bit on some of the key points here in a thread. 🧵

Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):

n3verm0re wrote:

@fromjason That is needlessly aggressive posturing from him, though I imagine it's easier to take this approach than risk bursting the bubble with an actual conversation.

FWIW billionaire acquisition is a perfectly valid concern, but I think it's an easy way for those handwaving (lying) to dismiss the questions as hyperbolic histrionics. Then fallback into "This is completely different. You're all the good guys, remember? And protocols means power in your hands." *gesticulates wildly*

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

My favorite reply comes from Kye Fox, who indirectly called me a grognard.

This comment really drives home these people's belief that they are the unquestionable leaders of the "social internet revolution," and anyone who challenges their self-appointed authority can simply be ignored.

Imagine if they had actual power.

#Bluesky

Attachments:

• Kye Fox: Yes: Ignore grognards, ignore people who ask poorly-formed questions (you can't "buy bluesky" the technology which is open source, and the PBC structure is why Bluesky survived Twitter), listen to people who have bothered to learn enough about the new thing to meaningfully discuss and criticize it

Reblogged by jwz:

RadicalGraffiti@todon.eu ("Radical Graffiti") wrote:

Anti-cop mural in Mexico City

Attachments:

• 18305263eb65266b.jpg (remote)

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):

angelikatyborska@mas.to ("Angelika Cathor") wrote:

Did y'all get your Divitis vaccination this year? https://webglossary.info/terms/divitis/

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

You might have noticed that Mastodon list management got a major facelift in the web app, and more is to come. Let me know how you like it!

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

BlueSky is doing some really interesting things. I've spent more time there last week than since I created an account almost a year ago.

But this "savior of the internet" messaging does not hold up to even a light wind of scrutiny. It's going to come back and bite them in the ass.

And now that BS has 20million users, this whole situation is starting to feel less like a people's revolution and more like the crowning of a new monarch.

Attachments:

• From the hunger games: President of the rebellion Alma Coin

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Even some of Big Tech's most staunchest critics give Bluesky leaders remarkable helpings of the benefit of the doubt.

In a recent episode of Better Offline, Ed Zitron interviews Bluesky board member Mike Masnick. I was stunned to hear Ed repeat the claim, unsolicited, that Bluesky was somehow more resilient to billionaire acquisition.

The whole episode read as if Ed wanted to prove he wasn't a tech grinch by praising Bluesky (something I can related to for sure lol).

https://pod.link/1730587238/episode/75122309e1df5ea3641c05b93a80ff5a

jwz wrote:

Pretty regularly as I'm scrolling Explore, some article will be in there with a headline I'd expect to see in the supermarket checkout, hyping snake-oil supplements, or AI, or something this mom did that they don't want you to know about, or the top ten travel destinations, and 100% of the time it is from flipboard dot social.

Really doing the lord's work there, guys.

Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):

pilum@fedi.j1nk4l.com ("Pilum::🌞") wrote:

I've had the privilege to contribute to “I’m Staying Home This Christmas” by the @lplateplayers masterminded (and mastered) by our one and only @futzle

Go have a listen to this amazing christmas song.
https://futzle.bandcamp.com/track/im-staying-home-this-christmas

Reblogged by jwz:

ComicContext@mstdn.social ("Comics Outta Context") wrote:

Attachments:

• Standing next to a spacecraft, an alien tells an earthman, "You speak only of TRADE! Does nothing ELSE interest you? Do you not want to hear about my planet's advanced CULTURE...about our superior way of life??" "I couldn't care LESS about your culture!" says the earthman. "I care only about making MONEY! Nothing else matters to me!" (remote)

pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:

No, MAGAts, I will not let you downplay your actions. Get the fuck out of my life forevermore.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/11/23/wtf-npr/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDM-8zBePu0

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

When people learn that, at best, Bluesky's decentralized utopia is complicated, and at worst, is not at all what they were promised, they'll feel betrayed.

Some may turn on the Bluesky team. This is especially true for journalists who are currently parroting the "decentralized power and authority" narrative without doing the work to know what that even means.

From Kate Conger for NYT:

Attachments:

• "That meant building the app with an “open protocol,” which keeps the social network’s power and decision making out of the hands of any one company or group of people."

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

The very obvious problem with Bluesky's foggy messaging is that eventually, people living under Jay's vision of the Social Internet will start asking hard questions.

So many enthusiastic Bluesky members are simply along for the ride, trusting that the soundbites tell the full story and the details harbor no devils.

It's a ticking time bomb.

Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):

lindsey@recurse.social ("Lindsey Kuper") wrote:

another sneak preview of our choreographic programming zine, which will hopefully be done soon!

Attachments:

• An Intro to our Systems In order to understand choreographic programming, we should first understand the context it exists in. In a message-passing system, independent nodes communicate by sending and receiving messages over some kind of network. Message passing is everywhere in computing, and is especially important to the study of concurrent and distributed systems! Every message has a sending node and a receiving node. Each node performs a sequence of sends and receives. Think of each node as running a program that makes send() and recv() calls, along with its own internal actions. [Comic of Alice giving a present to Carol. Alice is running the program `send(Carol, 🎁)` and Carol is running the program `my_present = recv(Alice)`. They both look very happy!] However, if the intended recipient of a sent message does not call recv(), they won't actually receive it. [Comic where Alice is trying to give a present to Carol, but Carol isn't paying attention! Alice is running the program `send(Carol, 🎁)` and Carol is doing nothing. Alice is like 😅. Poor Alice!] (remote)

Reblogged by jwz:

dansinker@omfg.town ("Dan Sinker") wrote:

Quietly judging people who refer to it as X.

Maybe not so quietly.

Reblogged by jwz:

angusm ("Angus McIntyre") wrote:

At a startup long ago I heard for the first time the names of assorted tech bro entrepreneur types (our startup was a great place with great people, but these were the gods of the startup world, success stories to emulate). I didn't know who they were, but thought they all sounded vaguely like assholes & their ‘genius insights’ seemed lame AF.

Now I'm hearing all the same names I heard back then again, as they all orbit around Elon Musk like flies on shit. And now I'm sure they're assholes.

Reblogged by keul@fosstodon.org ("Luca Fabbri"):

faassen@fosstodon.org ("Martijn Faassen") wrote:

I blogged about it too.

https://blog.startifact.com/posts/print-debugging/

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

In a separate thread, Peter Wang suggests "It’s not about resilience to purchase" then openly ponders, for example, "what about a Microsoft acquisition [of BlueSky] would be so terrible?"

Attachments:

• Peter W Follow @wang.social I'm addressing what I assessed as your underlying point, namely big tech "capture" of something you like. I'm not here to defend the evils of Big Tech. But I can plainly see that large-scale for-profit activity has benefited open tech. What about a Microsoft acquisition would be so terrible? November 20, 2024 at 6:38 AM
• Peter Woo @wang.social Follow It's not about resilience to purchase. GitHub got purchased and you can still move your git repos. ATP is still a baby protocol, yes. But its design allows different providers at different layers of the stack. Your identity on ATP can never be taken away from you: it's DNS, and you and I can use it

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

The prevailing attitude towards anyone questioning #Bluesky's hearty claims of decentralization is to imply they're simply under-informed.

When I asked Eric Blair to clarify his claim that Bluesky was more resilient to billionaire acquisition, his reply was Mike Masnick's Protocols Not Platforms essay.

Putting aside the fact I've read Protocols Not Platforms a half dozen times, and it's the most annotated in my bookmarks currently, Masnick's essay doesn't even answer the question.

Attachments:

• Eric Blair @protecttruth.bsky.social • 6d First, bluesky is much more resistant to billionaire takeover than Twitter was. Bluesky is far superior to Twitter or Threads, both closed platforms controlled by US billionaire oligarchs. Because bluesky was built on an open protocol. @mmasnick.bsky.social in detail on this, 2019:
• fromjason.xyz @fromjason.xyz Question— what makes BlueSky any more resilient to purchase than Twitter? I'm familiar with the ATProtocol architecture and BlueSky corporate structure. So I think I'm overlooking something.
• fromjason.xyz @fromjason.xyz • 4d Thanks Franklin, good thread. I'm trying to reconcile this with the many, many claims that BlueSky is more resilient to purchase and operates under decentralized power structures, and I simply cannot. Eric Blair @protecttruth.bsky.social • 4d Protocols not platforms fromjason.xyz @fromjason.xyz • 4d What about it?

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

Speaking of Transmission64, I have revisited this performance from REYN multiple times since last year. In case you're in need of some wonderful music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxgpBcXpbpk

Reblogged by keul@fosstodon.org ("Luca Fabbri"):

wholesomememes@mas.to ("Wholesomememes") wrote:

thnx so much (by u/Potential-Answer-565)
(AI Alt-Text)

Attachments:

• A tweet from Max (@MaxSernie) reads: "hey can someone remind me to cancel my spotify premium in 3 months" with a timestamp of 11:36 PM, 23 Jun 18. A reply from Olly Smith (was) @ #EGX (@Ol...) says: "You should cancel your Spotify Premium." The reply received 1 like and 2 retweets. Max (@MaxSernie) responds with: "holy fuck thank you i completely forgot," which received 1 like. Both profile pictures feature dogs. (remote)

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Bluesky evangelicals did what crypto and NFT bros couldn't—

They got ordinary people to buy into what is very much a libertarian worldview of the “social internet.” It's remarkable.

But for some, that's not enough. They _need_ the unquestioning praise. It's a 🚩 for sure.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

React Native, in a nutshell.

Attachments:

• Homer in the cult: "remove the stone of IE...and attach the stone of App Stores!" (remote)

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

The number of times over our Lost Decade I've heard people (men) confidently assert to me that they knew what they were doing with React as we casually perused the incontrovertible evidence that they did not, in fact, know what they were doing is unsettling.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

So bsky's site is...what's the word?...bad, performance-wise. [1]

I pointed this out, and folks asked what I'd do differently. I had to preface the response by saying that you don't start any new projects with React in the 2020s because it was designed for the (early) 2010s and has aged like fine milk.

This drew out a reply by someone saying that *they* start with React, but *they* know what they're doing, and all I can think is "does your boss know?"

[1]: https://treo.sh/sitespeed/bsky.app?mapMetric=r&formFactor=phone&metrics=lcp%2Cr

Attachments:

• bsky's web site is universally painful to use on phones, as seen by this INP chart showing no geographies with a green score. (remote)
• bsky's mobile LCP (how long it takes to load) and INP (how usable it is post-load) are not OK. (remote)

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):

exchgr@mastodon.world ("elle mundy") wrote:

the national endowment for telling men that one credential doesn’t qualify you in anything else (NETMOCDQYAE)

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):

april@macaw.social ("April King") wrote:

Handling Cookies is a Minefield:

inconsistencies in the HTTP cookie specification and its implementations have caused a situation where countless websites (including Facebook, Netflix, Okta, WhatsApp, Apple, etc.) are one small mistake away from locking their users out.

https://grayduck.mn/2024/11/21/handling-cookies-is-a-minefield/

Attachments:

• (A @ A https://www.facebook.com . Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can. Go Back Help Center (remote)
• https/www.netflix.com Something went wrong Sorry, we're having trouble with your request. You'll find lots to explore on the home page. Learn More |Error Code NSES-500 (remote)
• okta.com: Bad Request Your request resulted in an error. Go to Homepage (remote)
• WhatsApp Error (remote)

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

It's a minor scandal that browsers added cbor formats but no JS APIs for encode/decode.

Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):

transmission64@c.im ("Transmission64 :c64:") wrote:

And Transmission64 is live. Head on over to https://t64.to/watch .

#c64 #demoparty #demoscene