Could my perception of moderation be skewed? Maybe. Maybe yours is. But let's say I'm wrong. How does that change the fact that instance = community isn't a good abstraction? Very few people are only ever part of one community; standards of behavior differ depending on which community you engage in, and may even conflict. And yet, I have to choose one that gets to dictate my whole being on the network. Transfer this to real life and imagine you'd have to be your worksona 24/7 forever (because work is also a "community"). I can't be the only one who feels this is weird, right?
I don't know why I keep writing posts about platforms because in the end it's just annoying. Annoying because I could've expressed myself better, and annoying because people like to get hung up on that one weak part and discard the whole post as a result
@Korawolfsrain Yeah, it looked nice, but I couldn't help but feel it was out of place. Now it won't draw that much attention so the brown feathers get to shine more.
@kirby I really do wonder how they're planning to get any money out of this. It's not like they're sabotaging the decentralization efforts. I heard they handed the central identity server over to some other company (take with a grain of salt because I only saw that in passing), and they also significantly lowered the cost of running a relay by dropping the "keep the entire message history for all of time" requirement. Blacksky is replicating the entire stack, too. So that's quite an improvement since the last time I looked into ATProto (which was when they allowed self-hosting the PDS).
@kopper@gabboman@makiki Do you know of a resource that gives you an easy-to-understand and accurate overview of ATProto? Because in all the diagrams I've seen, PDSes point to one relay instead of (what I gather from your explanation should be) PDSes and relays having a many-to-many relationship.
I have gotten one dismissive reply, so let me add something: Blind fanaticism isn't just unnecessary, it actively prevents positive change from happening because it refuses acknowledgement of problems that always do exist. Nothing is perfect.
I have criticized the fediverse a lot over the years. Especially the instance = community boundary is a huge problem because they serve as both a social space and a gateway to the network all in one package. However, community matters and provider matters are very different. If an instance defederates from another, people don't just lose access to that community - they lose access to communicating with people on an instance entirely until they create a new account elsewhere. Imagine if a Discord server admin banned you and Discord also blocked your communication with the server members even in other servers or 1-on-1. That's fedi. This means your choice of an instance is extremely important and happens at a time when you don't even know anything about the fediverse at all.
This is why I think what absolutely needs to happen here is to give instances less importance by implementing communities on a higher layer, independent of those boundaries. Is this happening? I doesn't look like that to me. Hell, we don't even improve on the microblogging formula in a meaningful way. I think the ecosystem at large has become complacent with the existing structure and has no interest in making fundamental changes.
ATProto seems closer to the ideal I have in mind, so obviously I've taken an interest in it.
@makiki Relays can talk to each other, otherwise you wouldn't see any Wafrn posts on Bluesky (they use the Blacksky relay). I don't know how specifically this works, though. I would assume that because a relay merely bundles messages from multiple PDSes, it can also act like a PDS and tell other relays about its existence so they subscribe to it.
When discussing Bluesky, people on here really need to stop thinking in terms of instances, i.e. running the entire stack themselves.
If many people run only parts of it -- and this is happening now that running relays has become easier -- and members of the network spread out, then that's perfectly fine. If your relay does some bullshit, you can take your PDS to a different one and get to keep your entire history. Relay admins and PDS admins are less incentivized to play stupid blocking politics because neither are a useful boundary for communities. This is better than what we have here.
The real problem is getting people to spread out to different PDSes and relays because most simply don't care about decentralization. This is pretty much like the "mastodon.social vs. the rest of the fediverse" situation, just more severe.
Volpeon