cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390
https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v
tldr, it’s a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
Mark Ruffalo, Actor
Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker
Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan
Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’
Brian Eno, Musician
Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist
Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist
Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian
Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep
Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords
Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA
…
Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.
Funny, Mastodon just posted a similar thing about creating a foundation. But the problem is, the existence of a foundation does nothing to prevent billionaires from controlling social media. For billionaires its very easy to donate a few hundred thousand USD to the foundation and gain influence that way. I expect that Bluesky will be fine for the first years (maybe like early Twitter), but sooner or later the foundation will take decisions that the users dont like, and there is nothing they can do about it.
In my view, the only way to avoid influence from billionaires is to avoid any large centralized structures. In the Fediverse there are dozens of platforms and thousands of instances. Even if a billionaire were to take control over a couple of projects or large instances, people would create forks in a matter of days. Some admins would block these corrupted instances, and their users would barely notice that anything changed.
So Bluesky is just trying to repeat something that has already failed. The Fediverse is the future, but it will take a long time for most people to understand that.
The $4m would be better invested in the Fediverse. ATproto is designed with a winner takes all philosophy and Bluesky has the headstart and more funds, so this is a wasted effort most likely.
Would it though? I really don’t care about AT, but from their perspective, any € spent on AT will matter incredibly more than on AP. AP is a mature ecosystem, with a lot of complex interests, endless dialects and a lot of mess to grapple with. AT is basically not a protocol yet and can be shaped a lot more.
Well, obviously the $4m wouldn’t have to be spend on ActivityPub protocol development, meaning it could be spend way more effectively to on specific gaps in the network and software.
But even that aside, ATproto is a funnel towards Bluesky the company. It’s fundamentally designed to have a winner takes all situation, so yes maybe these $4m could be effectively used to improve it, but the only one that will ultimatly benefit from that is Bluesky.
Edit: I guess I am just repeating myself. But I recommend reading up on the ATproto design. It’s not necessarily bad if your goal is to create a single global town-square (i.e. Twitter like) microblogging website, but given this design goal, it will always be dominated by a single entity controlling the app view, and that is likely to be Bluesky itself.
From what I read, apparently, AT Protocol does support decentralization, but the server requirements are pretty steep.
To put it in terms we can understand, there are servers and services. You can set up a server, but still wind up using a centralized service from Bluesky. But it is possible to set up competing centralized services so that Bluesky is not the only provider.
But, back to the first point, their minimum hardware requirements are so steep that you have to have pretty deep pockets to fully administer everything yourself.
There is a community called Blacksky that is trying to do this, so they are not dependent on Bluesky at all, yet still use AT Protocol.
Compare this with the fediverse, where you can start up a lightweight ActivityPub fediverse server on a small VPS.
Well, if they build enough leverage, they could force Bluesky to adopt a version of AT that is less skewed in their favor. Protocol details are easy to change when you have only one adopter, lol. Not sure this is part of their strategy though.
Also you seem to be thinking that anybody involved in this (the fediverse, bluesky, this initiative) follow a logic of commoning, where this money will be spent to improve the technical protocol itself. I don’t think this is the goal at all here. They want to change the power structure in the world of social media and integrating with AT is just a tool for that, that might change going forward. AT is interesting only insofar it supports their goal, but the interest of the “AT commons” (which for what I know is basically non-existant) is a secondary concern for now.
No, like I wrote in my edit: I recommend reading up on the ATproto design. It’s not necessarily bad if your goal is to create a single global town-square (i.e. Twitter like) microblogging website, but given this design goal, it will always be dominated by a single entity controlling the app view, and that is likely to be Bluesky itself.
$4m is not nearly enough to wrestle control away from Bluesky, and even if that would succeed you would have not fundamentally changed the situation but just replaced one single controlling entity with another.
This scenario would also be aligned with the goals of this initiative. I don’t think they see a problem with it. The majority of the signatories are techno-optimist liberals who believe the good tech bros should be in control of society’s discourse to prevent the American empire from collapsing. Billionaries are evil because they are enemy of the status quo.
Still waiting for an ATProto relay managed by someone else than Bluesky
Too costly, from what I’ve read.
Then it’s not really decentralized
a tale as old as time, IRC has done this dance for ages now:
“it’s totally decentralized guys! why are you using other platforms??”
- “okay so i can just run my own server and chat with people on freenode?”
“well no, you’d need freenode’s permission to federate with them, obviously”
- “so it’s not decentralized then.”
“it is! it is! Freenode uses multiple servers!”
- “literally every large platform of any kind uses multiple servers, i’m going back to matrix where the only way i notice the large servers dying is because i stop seeing messages from their users…”Correct. I think they’re working toward that, though.
Just posted on !fedimemes@feddit.uk
How so? I heard their protocol was better than Activity Pub, but I don’t really know the details or what the difference is.
It’s better for Bluesky (the for-profit company) to keep control of the network, otherwise it is a lot worse than ActivityPub.
It’s more usable, less decentralised at the moment but theoretically could be as good as mastodon.
Mastodon UX sucks balls. If they want people to use it over bsky they need to fix that.
So I presune these people didn’t have google to search something less stupid than funding another silicon valley tech startup to counter the problems of a silicon valley tech startup.
They are exactly the people that have always been advocating for this stuff all along. They are doing their thing. Nothing to be surprised of
Why they ignore the established fediverse instead of boosting the effectively centralized bluesky and its questionnable at protocol
I wouldn’t say the fediverse is established. It’s a very small and niche phenomenon compared to mainstream social media. By now it’s clear it’s not going to ever grow to an impactful size. It’s here to stay, but it will stay as a minor, geeky thing.
I think the fediverse will continue to grow, and it would mostly be because of projects like Loops and Pixelfed and other new services. But I think that Bluesky has a lead on us and it will continue to grow, mostly because bigger players with money can afford to actually build on the AT Protocol, which has higher hardware requirements.
Eventually, thanks to bridges and multi-protocol platforms, there will be a multi-protocol network, with big players who have money using AT Protocol, and people who want to start a server on a lower budget using ActivityPub.
There’s no evidence to support what you’re talking about. Mastodon, Misskey and Lemmy monthly active users flatlined a long ago. They are not growing and there’s no evidence they will resume to grow in these conditions.
A multi-protocol network might not be unlikely, but it will still be very asymetric, with AP as a secondary actor. Power shapes technology, not the other way around.
I agree that there needs to be some more “killer apps” for the fediverse for it to really take off. Luckily there are some people working on that. Loops and Pixelfed seem to be some recent highlights and are growing fast. And there are other apps that are being worked on that could change things.
One of the problems is that ActivityPub is somewhat limited to what Mastodon has implemented. A lot of other platforms want to implement some cool features, but none of those are supported by Mastodon. This limits the rest of the fediverse since they have to cater to the lowest common denominator.
It is one of the main reasons why Hubzilla still uses Zot6 as its primary protocol, and uses ActivityPub to communicate with everyone else. Hubzilla has features that the rest of the fediverse does not support, such as nomadic identity, privacy, and access control. And related to that, Bluesky also has features that ActivityPub does not support, or if ActivityPub does support it, is not implemented by the larger platforms.
I think this is the primary reason why the fediverse is falling behind. People look at what Mastodon has implemented and think that ActivityPub is weak compared to Zot6 or AT Protocol.
In the short term, I think that Bridgy Fed’s multi-protocol bridge has a better chance of decentralizing Bluesky than Bluesky.
Any confirmation this is real? The donate button goes to GoFundMe.
Any confirmation this is real? The donate button goes to GoFundMe.
- Audrey Tang confirms https://bsky.app/profile/audreyt.org/post/3lfn56wzdf22n
- Bill S. Preston Esq confirms https://bsky.app/profile/alexwinter.com/post/3lfmzjpszsc25
- Vox Media confirms https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342799/free-our-feeds-social-media-ecosystem-at-protocol-bluesky
Thank you.
