@innocentzero @ricci @cwebber

Within the boundaries for this thread indirectly set by Dan Abramov’s blog post, I agree with you.

I would argue that even in terms of data ownership, the argument of ATProto fans is not as robust as they imagine. All those narratives about data ownership talk about an individual “owning” his data, which obviously derives from today’s socioeconomic system imagining society as a collection of atomised individual consumers. So the ATProto narrative about PDS says that each individual user owns the record of their posts and their connections.

But in the real world, most digital data is meaningful and useful only within its larger social context. For example, if I can read this post alone ten years down the line, with no access to posts by others in this thread, then it won’t make much sense to me. Even for targeted advertisements, the data about an individual is only meaningful in the context of the social group the individual belongs to (“30-35 year old married woman with two kids, employed, spouse employed, stays in Berlin”). Same for policymakers looking at census/survey data.

So a Fedi instance actually pulling all the threads of conversations its users are involved in is a more meaningful design of “the instance as community” collectively owning that data. So far, so good. However, the legal setup in most countries does not even recognize a loose collective, let alone allow it to own and run an instance. That is without even getting into the questions of national (judicial) boundaries and the funds for running an instance. So most Fedi instances are run by high-earning technophiles. They remain dependent on the goodwill and mental bandwidth of the owner(s) and on donations by well-to-do users. Only the instance owner(s) own/control the data that belongs to the community. There is no design, even at the technical level, for the community to ditch the owner and migrate (together, as a community) to another instance. Overall, this model of a Fedi instance is very fragile at multiple levels. (I am not even getting into communities that cut across multiple instances.)

At the scale of multiple instances, we can immediately see that today this model is bound to remain limited to the Western world. Most of the countries in the global south do not have sufficient number of high-earning individuals (in proportion to their population sizes) who can also run Fedi instances. Neither do they have sufficient number of users who can pay/donate. (The tiny size of the Fedi indicates that even in the Western world, the number of individuals able and willing to run/support Fedi instances is very low.) So the Fedi is bound to remain a tiny white suburbia, with all of its accompanying pathologies (which further repel brown and black people from the West as well as from the global south).

(Stray thought: Maybe we should imagine instances analogous to public libraries + discussion rooms. In that case, we want administrators and moderators as paid employees answerable to the larger community, not themselves being “owners”. But even then, the question of a sustainable funding model remains.)

So… in the larger context, the enormous inequality across the world and between the global north/south is the core reason why most people cannot get out of free centralized social media services, even if they want to. That’s THE reason why Bluesky has a far larger user base than the Fedi, and why Instagram or Facebook have orders of magnitude larger user bases than even Bluesky.

Debates about the relative merits of ActivityPub and ATProto are no doubt useful, but they make no difference to this larger context. (This is not a criticism of your post, just a general point applicable to all such discussions. I am simply flagging the larger context, I have no easy solutions.)

@404mediaco

I wonder if the task is too easy or to heavy to (most) publishers:

Independent Media:
Just use this wonderful protocol here #ActivityPub to create your own plattforms, audience and possibilities.
It is completely open.
It supports multilanguage and Linked Data for all the wonderful agency / editors vocabularies.
In digital times it is by far not enough to create words only. You need to create the surface too.
About the possibilities of ActivityPub don't hesitate, AMA