Humans are social creatures by nature. The goal should be to improve our social interactions instead of letting others exploit them for profit

You can’t put that tube back in the tube of toothpaste

Corporate rot sounds better than just rot as enshittification happens on purpose due to seeking to extract maximum value from something where as rot is just a natural consequence of atrophy over time

I’ve read over the documentation a few times and maybe I’ve missed it somewhere else but I’m not aware of any option to host a relay yet. As far as I know only self hosting PDS’s are an option now (which only handle your own data and authentication but still relies on a relay to serve you content from the rest of the network) and app views (which are the front ends that sort and show content)

So in a sense bluesky is distributed and portable within the ATProto network, but still centralized until other entities can host relays and interopt (or opt out of interoperability) within the network.

I don’t particularly agree that it’s “greatly increased” by it. I’m on a server with them and I don’t see that much many more spammers. It seems like fearful hyperbole, I’m not saying there aren’t any I’ve certainly seen a few but it’s not as common as most people think it is.

My mastodon instance rarely ever sees spam despite having open signups either. Maybe my problem is I’m worried about future problems rather than the current state of how things are. My concern comes from personal experience with legacy socials like facebook and twitter when it comes to spam that I report and the frustration of when I get the automoderation notification back and they determine it didn’t break their guidelines.

I don’t want the cesspool of spam to become a problem on the fediverse as these experiences were a major reason I decided to join it.

I appreciate your comments again. You’ve softened how I feel on the challenge of balancing open user sign ups with moderating malicious users.

You are still using the bluesky relay to connect to the network, right?

Have they opened up federation to support other relays yet?

I appreciate your take and the thought put into the reply. I don’t mean to gatekeep the fediverse to keep normies out because that isn’t my desire at all. Merely my stance is while I believe that low engagement is very undesirable, high volume of scammers/spammers are equally undesirable.

I’m also thinking of things from a moderator/instance owner point of view where trying to defend your instance from illegal activity, spam, and harmful content is greatly increased by having open sign ups. If the majority of engagement on your posts are from pussy in bio accounts then that is a put off from the end user as well.

Trolls and assholes will always get through if they are motivated enough, fediverse platforms usually gives the end user enough tools to block them.

Your perspective has a lot of valid points as well, I think that there is a compromise somewhere that is slightly more effective than a simple captcha that could also streamline onboarding and validating users. I don’t know if it’s as easy as you suggest to ban spammers automatically but I’m all ears for hearing solutions. I think the fediverse is especially equipped for cooperation that could make that kind of automoderation more successful than on legacy socials

I don’t want the fediverse to be an exclusive club, I am already annoyed about how things can be an echo chamber even worse than legacy socials here at times. My hope that bridges and utilities will come that help people follow each other from bluesky/mastodon and allow account migrations from either as well.

It also acts as a filter to keep threat actors and spammers out. Open sign ups are actually a bad thing for the overall health of the network. Yes it also keeps out the lowest common denominator normies but those aren’t exactly the ones who contribute to the network as a whole anyway

This isn’t capitalism, there isn’t a need for growth for growth’s sake. There does need to be a more simplified way to onboard users but not at the cost of the health of the network.

Bluesky is not decentralized if you have to use their relay to access the network from your PDS

If the reason people only want bluesky is because it’s Elon-less Twitter then they are stupid and wrong (or just ignorant). But then they can move to the next thing in 5 years when the enshittification happens.

Mastodon doesn’t silo its users, that’s what federation is for. Everything you post on the public timeline is essentially public for everyone that’s on a federated instance that hasn’t gotten blocked.

Nobody stayed up for Kansas @ BYU? It was worth it. Hope my Jayhawks can win out for a bowl!

Enters first room

YOU WILL DIE

Quite the opening to that game.

So ATProto that bluesky is built on has 3 core aspects. PDS’s (personal data server, stores your account content and data), Relays (transmits your actions such as likes, favorites, replies etc), and Appviews (basically the front end that you use to convert the data to a human readable front end like the bluesky app)

PDS’s are allowed to be hosted by others right now but Relays are not. So even if you host your own PDS on the bluesky network, you rely on the bluesky controlled relay to be able to interact with the network.

In theory there is a future where other people can host relays on the network but it’s not that way right now and is likely going to be too cost prohibiting for the people hosting to ever be realistic.

A game that’s never mentioned on the internet? Probably would have to be something that came on those shareware discs in the 90s then.

I’ll go with the Adventures of MicroMan

“What’s up Wanda” “Let’s sprint”

The delivery of those two lines are burned into my memory.

Inevitably every movie I’d make in that program would just be 2 characters karate kicking each other and then exploding

Our oldest kid doesn’t believe in the tooth fairy. We didn’t push him to be a skeptic he just is that way. He still wants the money put under his pillow so we oblige in that part of the tradition at least. Our younger two haven’t lost any teeth so don’t how we will handle it for them.

The idea would be the servers would have shared ban/block lists and similar rules so that they can share the load of having open sign ups.

Basically a coop of instances to improve on-boarding. If you join the coop then you get added to the pool of instances that get assigned normies at random.

If the authentication was federated it’d be ideal as well but I assume this would be outside the scope of AP and would cause issues if you tried to post from your mastodon.social account from mastodon.world’s server for instance.

The bridges are singular points of failure. If the bridge you use goes down you lose all your audience that was on that bridge. It’s better than nothing however. I will consider normies using threads and Bluesky a win as much as I can but it’d be so more ideal if we just all were on open and truly federated protocols instead of relying on half measures

Not really. You can host your own data but you still rely on Bluesky’s services to access it. And there is no realistic way to migrate your content or audience to another platform outside their control

57 different 3rd party apps is probably a good start. Mastodon has to be easy to on-board and it isn’t for someone with no technical understanding what domains, servers or instances are. To that group Bluesky makes sense. You are signing up for Bluesky. Try to onboard that group to mastodon and they don’t understand if they are on mastodon.social or mastodon.world or any other instance.

Why would they be on one of those fringe services with less users than bluesky? That’s what a non expert understands