Quick Comment on Blue Sky

i'm sure it's not popular with the dude-bros or reactionaries on here but it's wild how ill informed (it's open source) or poorly researched some of the takes are on here.

is it perfect? no. neither is anything else in the decentralized space in any way shape or form.

it's also beta, and they're working their asses off on it with the right directions in mind.

as someone who's worked in software for 25 years now (most of them as a developer) i find the criticisms to be mainly about boosting the profile of the critic and less an honest take on the platform and protocol.

i find what they're trying to do to be delightful with a very good north star.

take that as you will.

It's pretty neat. So is Mastodon though, and the ActivityPub network feels a lot more active IMO. People aren't going to want to buy-into a DiD service just to microblog - Pleroma and Mastodon have much lower barriers-to-entry in that sense. In a way, it feels like Dorsey is star-struck by all the nerd porn protocols of the past and desperate to re-hash stuff that has already existed (eg. GPG, RSS, bitcoin, etc.). It's a valiant effort, but nothing will ever "replace" Twitter now. We are in a post-Twitter world, and people are learning to adapt. We need better glue to connect these disparate users, not Another Competing Standard with Blackjack and ID servers.

ottoflux · 3 years ago

i agree with a lot of that. i run a Pleroma server (less overhead than Masto), i think the winning combination will be the group that comes up with a universal baseline for online behavior. the intellectually dishonest purveyors of hate speech have been making a lot of inroads in the fediverse and in part (imo) due to the fact that we don't have a good way to trust other admin's decisions to block/ban servers and users and relay those quickly.

Dorsey isn't really "actively" in any of this process or direction beyond the initial setup of things at Blue Sky btw. Jay is doing a great job and a lot of the "protocol" hubbub is actually some unfortunate (in this scenario) nomenclature and less actual new protocols.

i'm for whatever thing(s) allow for a healthier online experience for folks and whatever keeps _us_ from being the product.

ottoflux · 3 years ago

(i'd add that as someone who's made most of my living developing integration software - i'm hoping once things are cemented a bit that there's a non-ridiculous path to having a 2-way relay for sites that want it)