Mastodawn

Fucking Christ the @protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit I've ever looked at. It is complex solely for the sake of being complex and still suffers from *all* of the same problems as Mastodon.

Your server goes down? Sorry, all of your followers are lost. Account portability is no better than Mastodon. 'DIDs' serve literally no purpose. And none of the API code that Bluesky uses in their own app validates ANY of the crypto they're doing on the server. NONE OF IT.

I think the fundamental reason why we keep seeing more and more bullshit protocols and projects pop up like this is one fundamental mindset: a refusal to attribute the problems of the modern internet solely to capitalism.

The fact is that our protocols we have today generally work pretty great. The choice of protocols hasn't made the internet what it is today. It's the fact that unrestrained, late-stage neoliberal capitalism is reaching its logical conclusion: corporate control of commons.

There's a fundamental lack of trust in people with these protocols. That's exactly it.

Crypto assumes that everyone is an attacker and that nobody can be trusted, and so we need 'proof' of your actions.

Bluesky assumes the same, that you should have to prove that each social media post is yours cryptographically.

And the fact is just that that's not necessary. Mastodon's system works while requiring trust, and it scales remarkably well in an anticapitalist way.

Obviously mastodon isn't perfect, I don't think it is. There's definitely a general 'NIMBY' vibe here of "this is how things are and we refuse to change", and we have work to do to fix that.

But I think what's key is to keep an anticapitalist mindset. We can make things easier for users without allowing in what makes social media so fucking awful: capitalism.

DGP May 9, 2023

@sam As a capitalist political moderate, I agree 100% with you on this. We have already seen the disastrous consequences of "engagement-optimized" ad-supported social media systems, which are inevitable when they are being fully controlled by single for-profit companies.

🇺🇦 Maksim Lin 💙May 10, 2023

@sam @sam Thats quite the rant. I agree on some points, for instance the NIMBY-ism here, as soon as I get a chance to work on it, I'll quite happily build a client with both quoting & search, because I didnt ditch Elon getting to enforce his views on how I should use shortform social media to come here to get @Gargron to enforce his on me either.

David Gerard May 10, 2023

@sam the vibe on bluesky is awesome, and that's 100% in spite of the dev team being "former" crypto grifters

i will now extend my estimate of its non-suck lifetime from two weeks to a whole month

poswald May 10, 2023

@davidgerard @sam it has 65k users. Any favorable comparisons of the vibe there to mastodon are entirely due to the closed nature of it and wholly premature.

David Gerard May 10, 2023

@poswald @sam see second line of the comment you're replying to

edit: oh mastodon.social, of course

Pete / Syllopsium May 11, 2023

@sam Be very careful before attributing the evils of social media to capitalism.

There's no doubt that commercial interests do not help, data mining and skewing of the algorithm for the benefit of paying companies or specific agendas worsens things.

However, a substantial part of the ills of many communities needs to be laid squarely at self centred humans.

There was absolutely nothing stopping people carrying on using Livejournal or other longer form less self centred platforms. That's not what the community as a whole wanted, however, they willingly embraced the new model and many people still want a popularity driven algorithmic timeline on Mastodon.

Nicholas Weaver May 10, 2023

@sam @davidgerard
I don't think that actually is the case. Its a fundamental misapplication of mistrust. The cryptocurrency world plays "hide the trust" not "eliminate the trust" all the time. And you can build systems where the bulk of things are untrusted but are fine to the user.

EG, your iPhone's cryptographic module doesn't even trust the base phone OS, which is why ApplePay is so great for payments as the security is very very top notch.

Ursidinoj/The Bjornsdottirs May 10, 2023

@sam *stares at dialup DNSBLs*

Mx. Savanni D'Gerinel May 10, 2023

@sam In that light, I'll interpret it like this:

We know we can't change capitalism. Doing that would require changing the hearts and minds of more than 50% of people in our countries, and capital is damned good at beating us in that game.

Protocols are just the only way we can think of to try to carve out some control.

benjohn May 10, 2023

@sam I think, like other adversarial environments, there are genuine steps we can take to harden protocols against the capitalism you identify (CRDT seem a good thing, for example). I don’t think they can be expected to make them invulnerable though as it’s not just a technical problem. And ultimately, we probably want better non tech solutions; I hope we find them.

Malfunction54 May 10, 2023

@sam so, so much this 👆🏼

@sam Literally. The only reason why Bluesky takes off is because they have money, but that’s exactly their issue. The protocol is not controlled by a standards group like the W3C, and instead, by a for profit company.

Vexnatos Oct 12, 2023

@sam I will say, you lost me here.
Like, I'll follow if you're talking tech concerns but the moment you start attempting to link it to economic/political ideology you've lost the thread.