> If it’s analyzes my ID 100% client side I can fake any info I want. If my ID goes to a server,
amplifying your point, there is effectively no way for the layperson to make this distinction. And because the app needs to send data over an encrypted channel, it would be difficult at best for a sophisticated person to determine whether their info is being sent over the wire.
> And because the app needs to send data over an encrypted channel, it would be difficult at best for a sophisticated person to determine whether their info is being sent over the wire.
Devices are built from the ground up to prevent even sophisticated users from tapping them to verify we aren't being lied to. The average person thinks that "hackers" will mobilize if things get too bad and they're completely wrong.
Tamper proof, encrypted chains of trust start from the second a device gets power and it's infecting everything from appliances to phones to computers. Get ready for a future where your rented toaster has parts serialization that can't be bypassed.
This is a fairly weak argument though: the layperson also cannot verify the software updates we push to their phone/computer or any number of other critical devices in the chain.
All of this is reputation management: if technical experts broadly agree the system does what it says, then all of us have to accept that in aggregate that's probably good enough and significantly better then many other areas.
I'll come at it from another angle. Some of the most popular podcasts (and YouTubers) produce hours of long-form video (an acceptable format) daily. Without naming names, some of those convey less information in 2-3 hours of video than some short form creators do in 2-3 minutes.
The medium influences the message, but the channel still matters.
(And some messengers, especially public intellectuals, are not doing the long form video/audio at all. One prominent TikTok poster has a $$$$$ job as a public intellectual and outside of short form, the other options to consume his content involve $$$ subscriptions or $$$$ in-person events. I'll take his 5-minute videos over those alternatives.)
Separately, I am chuckling at people saying TikTok is "all X" or "nothing but Y" or "overrun with Z." Do people still not know that statements like these are confessions?
This app flags "'s infrastructure" as a hallmark of AI-generated prose. Other markers of AI generation include "'s not just", "making it", "'t just" (33x more likely in AI!), and "ecosystem".
When reading any essay about the perils & merits of Bluesky's architecture, save yourself some time by searching for "Blacksky" in the post. If they don't address Blacksky, more than likely the author's understanding of the space has major gaps.
(Blacksky is the/one of the furthest along in building competing versions of each part of the AT proto stack.)
But how is that 'decentralized' which was the entire point of Bluesky and the AT protocol to begin with? We're just back to running centralized services. Without decentralization this is just XMPP with extra steps. You might as well just run something like Movim and save yourself the hassle.
There's "decentralized" in the sense that every device runs the whole stack. In an analogy to another protocol, this would be like running SMTP and IMAP on your phone and laptop.
Then there's "decentralized" in the sense that the protocols that govern are open and anyone can plug in without permission. This is how email works in practice. Most people do not choose to run their own email servers, but they nonetheless benefit from the fact that people who are interested can do so and provide email service.
Purists. There are some people who run email for their personal domains on Raspberry Pi machines sitting in their homes. Maybe they want everyone to live the same way?
Personally, I think it's better that there is choice. I do not want to run my own social media site any more than I wanted to run an IRC server.
There are some people in other networks who feel very strongly their answer is the right answer to the great question of decentralization [insert south park atheist otters]. I think they are in part frustrated that ATProto (not the "right" answer) has attracted the users and developer. The meanness and lack of curiosity certainly provide the undertones to justify this interpretation.
is really to find a good enough middle ground that has competitive enough UX to get people off of the fully centralized, locked in social media providers. In the broader context, ATProto to me means user choice and provenance, which ATProto does better than any other protocol. See all the parts beyond just data hosting, where the entire distributed system is plug-n-play. [1]
ATProto not being purist, preferring pragmatism, is what attracts me over alternatives like AP and Nostr.
Does it require people change defaults? If so then 99% will never use it.
A system or protocol is whatever the easiest user journey is. Anything outside of that will never be seen by many users unless there is some value to be gained by going there. And that value has to be something gained now, not a hypothetical like insurance against future closing of the network. People don’t like to buy insurance.
I think these are reasons that Mastodon and Nostr aren't ever going to have a critical mass of users, remaining a niche thing for people who care about the hypotheticals (which is fine). Imho, BlueSky is the only distributed social media project that has a chance of meeting users where there are with usable search, realtime discoverability, and other consequences of centralizing event-busses.
People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.
The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.
25G < PLC postgres < 100G, depending if you want to keep all the spam operations (> 50%) and/or add extra indexes for a handle autocomplete service (like me, takes it over 100GB with everything)
Repo data (records) is in the double digit TB range (low end, without any indexing, just raw)
Blobs are in the Petabyte range.
I aim to find out current and accurate details soon.
Bluesky works because people are told "Go to Bluesky" and they hide the federation. When you're told go to Mastodon and pick mastodon.social or any of the hundreds of other servers, you've lost. For some reason, the federation fans never understood this. I remember an interview with Diaspora's developers and they couldn't stop talking about how people can run their own servers.
Dude.
I have two friends who left Twitter for Bluesky. One's an HR rep and the other is a business analyst for warehouses. Does anyone think a selling point for them was that they can run their own Bluesky infrastructure?
Sorry, meant say that Blacksky is much more important than the metrics you point to, with more detail on that wiki.
They're the first alternative full stack, the first alternative AppView, and that is something that the author should have mentioned. However, it weakens the argument so they left it out.
"Number of contributors" has never meant impact. You wouldn't dismiss openssl or curl, ya know?
> even when Peter Steinberger didn't know what he will do with OpenClaw, it was clear to him that the only place to move to was USA
We don't know how much OpenAI offered him, but I would bet big that it was enough to get most people to relocate across country lines. [To level-set: we know Meta was offering $100m pay packages to researchers who had not already released something like OpenClaw.]
This is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn.
Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software.
Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money.
We still live in a world where most individuals own more compute power than most universities did in the '80s, yet the only sign of automation is useless push notifications.
Data behind one pane of glass can't easily be moved to data behind a second pane of glass. Simple stuff like "move my Instacart shopping cart to Costco.com same-day" is a manual affair. This is a subset of the general problem that more apps has resulted in more data silos that are generally isolated, without APIs, without automation.
There are zillions of problems out there for which people will pay money, but money chases the same 4-5 problems at a time. Just work on one of the other ones.
I've been enjoying smashing through those panes of glass with LLMs. Just spin up a browser, go and export all the requests to undocumented user endpoints to curl commands, specify what you want out of it and after a few minutes you have an api endpoint up and running!
> as building software gets easier [...] new entrants to displace Bad Old Software
This didn't happen for music.
It is much easier to create/record music today than in the 70s and 80s, but the music created today is mostly boring AI music and not new exiting/inventing music.
This is exactly, precisely the opposite of what the impact will be.
For example:
- every technology has false positives. False positives here will mean 4th amendment violations and will add an undue burden on people who share physical characteristics with those in the training data. (This is the updated "fits the description."
- this technology will predictably be used to enable dragnets in particular areas. Those areas will not necessarily be chosen on any rational basis.
- this is all predictable because we have watched the War on Drugs for 3 generations. We have all seen how it was a tactical militaristic problem in cities and became a health concern/addiction issues problem when enforced in rural areas. There is approximately zero chance this technology becomes the first use of law enforcement that applies laws evenly.
The "media" in "social media" doesn't refer to image/video/audio, it refers to "the medium being used". Twitter/Blue Sky/etc are all social media. Read it like "a medium being used for social interaction".
OPs is closer to the truth; the shift from network -> media shows a useful distinction between what the focal point of activity is.
Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while it is not in "social media". You may as well call it "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use it most of the time.
Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while 'social networking' is primarily based on social connection and interaction.
If anything the terminology shift was the other way, we called forums and MySpace social media back then even though MySpace is called social networking now. "Networking" back then was pretty restricted to business / self-promotion oriented stuff like LinkedIn.
This is based on changes in trends and is somewhat of a moving target so I'll give some dates.
In the 2000s, 'forums' were forums, and 'social network' was the dominant term for products like FB and Myspace. A movie even came out with that name. Both were also 'communities'. These are verifiable on Google trends.
In the 2010s, 'social media' became the preferred term, mainly because it contrasted with 'the media' as the other major source of information available, but also because it was just an easier to use and more generic term than 'social network'. 'Forums' were still largely forums, tho like all activity online, on occasion it got lumped into 'social media'.
Sometime in the 2010s we started to delineate 'social network' from 'social media' as distinct eras of social products and properties of how the products work. This became extremely clear once the era of video took over in ~2020, as video is historically 'media' in a way that exchanging text never was.
The term 'networking' is/was its own thing and mostly unrelated to 'social networks'.
FWIW I did market analysis for Yahoo's online communities division in 06 and worked on two FB app startups, one which was a college social network, and interfaced a lot with FB in 08-12. All of these words and fine delineations were essential to my work and part of the research I was doing at the time. I looked over my notes to confirm.
I was also there. We (ie the people I interacted with) called myspace social media and considered discussion forums to be a specialized subset of social media.
We also considered myspace to be a social network (due to the friend graph) while forums were not.
The chans were a weird almost edge case. I think they qualify as social media but the lack of persistent identities significantly changes the dynamics (obviously).
As far as I know chans are always considered "image boards" and they are usually distinct by the fact that the information is "pushed off" the board after a time or amount posted afterwards.
This delineation does not match the common usage of the terms as I understand them. If you want to talk about parasocial media then just use that term.
I can understand what this means in the context of visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on TT in that a number of very large creators there record from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ specialized production.)
In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not social media?
> On a network, people interact with each other.
On any platform that would be considered social media by any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than a subreddit, but they serve the same function.
I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't understand the distinction.
amplifying your point, there is effectively no way for the layperson to make this distinction. And because the app needs to send data over an encrypted channel, it would be difficult at best for a sophisticated person to determine whether their info is being sent over the wire.
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