I see his point about the "fediverse" and the potential benefits of anyone hosting their own message board, that has interoperability with other message boards, aka Mastodon.
We've seen it though, Mastodon's model is garbage, and they lost from the start. No one wants horrible Reddit style mods ego tripping over their own echo chamber. There is no future for Mastodon.
To the point of the article, the real question is if we'll see more atmosphere hosts (aka using a PDS other than Bluesky's) and more applications built on the protcol. And I think the real test will be if anyone ever builds their own relay that gets popular.
Bluesky's model is still better (more open, unbiased, harder to censor) than Mastodon/Threads/X by default, and yes it has a long way to go, but we've known that from the start.
Saying “mastodon has lost” is like saying gopher has lost, or personal web pages have lost, or rss has lost. You don’t need most people to be there to “win”; the best conversation isn’t the one with the most people.
> the best conversation isn’t the one with the most people
I think this has to be the sentiment that saves discourse on the internet. We spend too much time focusing on the size of the network graph and not nearly enough time considering how to elevate the best conversations.
Well, but personal websites and rss have lost, sadly. I agree with you that being mainstream is not the defining characteristic of a working system. OTOH, every "community" has a lower bound when it comes to involvement. At some point, things just die out, like FidoNet or CB radio.
A lot of subs on reddit really did get destroyed by its free time moderators. And it is mostly the "powermods" that have some form of addiction to be the arbiter of truth, not the ones that just lead an enthusiast or topic centric subs. Those are still mostly fine.
There are similar cases for mastodon instances and it really did repel many users. But there are still open and interesting ones. Not ones where you see celebrities posting, but that isn't the focus of everyone. They will remain niche because exposure of communities is minimal on other places. Maybe that isn't a bad thing.
In contrast to media propaganda, that it is hate that drives users away, in my case it is the paternalistic and childish content moderation. If everything is safe, everything is boring.
I hope Bluesky is more tolerant here, but I fear its discovery just forms information silos as well. Time will tell. Until then it probably is an improvement that we get more distinct platforms.
Some use these sites for networking. For me it is purely entertainment.
I learned my lesson when Google+ turned to shit while trying and failing to eat Facebook’s lunch. Parasocial media isn’t worth my time. Not even for POSSE. If somebody thinks something I’ve written is worth syndicating on Bluesky they can share it themselves. And if a platform wants their users to see what I write they can pull my website’s RSS feed. That’s what it’s for.
ActivityPub seems better for POSSE than the badly named At Protocol:
Hosting you own data/integrating in your own CMS is of course possible with both, in Atproto that would be PDS.
But getting other peoples reactions in you own website is hard.
In ActivityPub there is a push model: If someone likes your post, they send a message to you AP inbox and you can use that message to bump an integer in your database.
Atproto in a way has a pull model: You need to read other users PDS. Of course you can do that, but only of PDS you already know. Unknown PDS of other unknown users stay unknown. ATProto solves this with Relays, which index PDS, transforming the data into a firehose. So if you want to get reactions, you'll need to run you own Relay or subscribe to someones elses Relays's firehose and do a lot of filtering.
In a way the Relay part of ATProto seem tailormade that only one or a few multi-million companies can run this expensive part of the network.
Bluesky now has a lot going for
it that solves real pain points compared to mastodon. It has quote posts, it has full text search, it has DMs that are actually DMs. It does not suffer from an experience spanned across multiple domains. Most importantly it has a good client.
A normal human being can use it as if it was a normal website and I really think this might just be what is needed for this to stay alive.
The discourse is also at least today much healthier than on mastodon for the communities I’m a part of.
I think the most likely outcome however is that Twitter will just continue to be the platform to be on.
Jumping from one centralized, single-company platform to another doesn't seem to accomplish much.
Every major social platform has turned into a shithole. Orkut, Facebook, Twitter...
Musk is such a child that he could easily decide to buy out enough investors to get a majority holding and...then what? You're right back to square one.
In what other communication medium or protocol would you tolerate one company controlling everything about it?
I do think a lot of this comes down to who can create a better development community.
And Mastodon seems remarkably single leader. And the community seems expressly hostile to letting people make cool experiences that span the network -nthey want a level of insularness & isolation, where the only things happening are defined by their server. And right now there's not much variance across servers; they all do mostly the same things, with only moderation & community differing.
It's going to be an enormous challenge to see competing Relays and AppViews spring up for At Protocol. That really is the challenge, seeing if other people can chew the network. One interesting idea I heard floated was that cloud providers might be able to host their own, that see less platforms or what not might hook into. Not perfect, not as distributed as totally desired, but it sure could be cost effective to have them maintain network copies.
Where-as you will be burned alive if you try that on Mastadon.
There seems to be some conflating of activitypub and mastodon here. Also perhaps a lack of distinction between mastodon.social and all other mastodon instances? There are hundreds if not thousands of individual mastodon instances each with their own hosts and admins. Then there's all the activitypub based micro blogging platforms that aren't mastodon, pleroma, diaspora, miskey etc. Finally all the wild and wonderful activitypub based not micro blogging sites like pixelfed, peertube, bookwyrm, anfora. So who's this "single leader"?
My usual take is just like yours, I'm on the fediverse and not necessarily on Mastodon (although one of my accounts is) but I also think that the survival and general wellbeing of the ecosystem is tied to Mastodon-the-software's continued success. It's the only one with critical mass. I know I'm a fringe group and yet I'm not so disconnected that I found anything useful there before 2018 with statusnet and identica.
This is exactly my feeling. I was on both pretty early, and was more excited about Mastodon in the early days – but when I started seeing the pattern of hackers who’d built cool new features being flamed off the platform, it became clear to me that the Mastodon community didn’t actually want to be part of the open internet. Which is fine with me, but not at all the kind of thing I’m on social media for. I’ll take my chances with Bluesky.
I tried with Masto, I really did. I even self-hosted for a while. But the problem it has in my humble and not hugely technical opinion is: 1) it’s complicated (learning about why your server wasn’t federating with another was not what I needed when I just wanted to toot about my lunch), 2) there’s no (global) search, which makes it awful for discoverability, 3) the theory of portability is b/s - when I moved from self hosted to .social because of the horror of self-hosting it turns out you lose your history. Or at least it did back when I did it. So the only “portable” thing is just a small part of the package, ie not really portable at all.
The other “network effect” in play here is that there’s only one viable place for masto accounts and that’s .social - and if everyone is flocking towards a single place with a single owner then the tech being federated still fails in the face of enshittification when the instance or instance owner goes bad.
TB and CD’s points are spot on - but Masto / federation needs some serious work on the usability side before anyone approaching a “normal” (non-geek) user is going to find this a serious contender to X or any of the others.
Why not mastodon? why not reddit? All of these social medias have been crafted to protect their users from the deplorables.
I had the r/ontario mod publicly admit they ban ALL canadian conservatives because they are ALL homophobic. Mastodon has a public blog post where they admit the same problem. as long as you ban opposing viewpoints you can never win.
Why is it each time the cognitive dissonance peaks in an echo chamber they simply seek a new social media safe space?
Toronto Maple Leafs are on a 10 game winning streak after they banned their opponents from the building.
Reddit has plenty of conservatives! Personally, I just don't want to hang out on /pol/, or have the top comments being slurs and antisemitism. A lot of the "own the libs" energy can't exist without an enemy to be polarized against.
Reddit banned most conservatives, this was studied by multiple universities. Reddit started a new project something like "reintegration of banned individuals to maintain community health."
Reddit has fallen out of the top 15 social media platforms, now ranking around 20th and soon to fall behind LinkedIn. Most of reddit are bots creating the illusion of activity.
Banning conservatives goes well beyond politics. All community sizes shrink. With fewer opposing viewpoints, left-leaning users dominate discussions, reinforcing a one-sided narrative.
But you might say, no how could that be?Ive been banned from a dozen subreddits for violating rules that dont even show up in the rule list. You just so happen to hit a subject which is secretly against the rules.
I asked the mods how I would know not to break that rule, talking about what they claim is a conspiracy theory. But they dont even list in the rules because they dont want to give it any additional coverage. But i dont even get a warning?
Digg died because of their move against free speech. Every rolled over to reddit because they claim to be free speech but really never was, it was just micro censorship. outsourced antifree speech.
Reddit and digg will be hosted on the same servers in thefuture.
Readit News
We've seen it though, Mastodon's model is garbage, and they lost from the start. No one wants horrible Reddit style mods ego tripping over their own echo chamber. There is no future for Mastodon.
To the point of the article, the real question is if we'll see more atmosphere hosts (aka using a PDS other than Bluesky's) and more applications built on the protcol. And I think the real test will be if anyone ever builds their own relay that gets popular.
Bluesky's model is still better (more open, unbiased, harder to censor) than Mastodon/Threads/X by default, and yes it has a long way to go, but we've known that from the start.
I think this has to be the sentiment that saves discourse on the internet. We spend too much time focusing on the size of the network graph and not nearly enough time considering how to elevate the best conversations.
There are similar cases for mastodon instances and it really did repel many users. But there are still open and interesting ones. Not ones where you see celebrities posting, but that isn't the focus of everyone. They will remain niche because exposure of communities is minimal on other places. Maybe that isn't a bad thing.
In contrast to media propaganda, that it is hate that drives users away, in my case it is the paternalistic and childish content moderation. If everything is safe, everything is boring.
I hope Bluesky is more tolerant here, but I fear its discovery just forms information silos as well. Time will tell. Until then it probably is an improvement that we get more distinct platforms.
Some use these sites for networking. For me it is purely entertainment.
What? About half the people I care to follow post exclusively on Mastodon.
Hosting you own data/integrating in your own CMS is of course possible with both, in Atproto that would be PDS.
But getting other peoples reactions in you own website is hard.
In ActivityPub there is a push model: If someone likes your post, they send a message to you AP inbox and you can use that message to bump an integer in your database.
Atproto in a way has a pull model: You need to read other users PDS. Of course you can do that, but only of PDS you already know. Unknown PDS of other unknown users stay unknown. ATProto solves this with Relays, which index PDS, transforming the data into a firehose. So if you want to get reactions, you'll need to run you own Relay or subscribe to someones elses Relays's firehose and do a lot of filtering.
In a way the Relay part of ATProto seem tailormade that only one or a few multi-million companies can run this expensive part of the network.
publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
A normal human being can use it as if it was a normal website and I really think this might just be what is needed for this to stay alive.
The discourse is also at least today much healthier than on mastodon for the communities I’m a part of.
I think the most likely outcome however is that Twitter will just continue to be the platform to be on.
Every major social platform has turned into a shithole. Orkut, Facebook, Twitter...
Musk is such a child that he could easily decide to buy out enough investors to get a majority holding and...then what? You're right back to square one.
In what other communication medium or protocol would you tolerate one company controlling everything about it?
And Mastodon seems remarkably single leader. And the community seems expressly hostile to letting people make cool experiences that span the network -nthey want a level of insularness & isolation, where the only things happening are defined by their server. And right now there's not much variance across servers; they all do mostly the same things, with only moderation & community differing.
It's going to be an enormous challenge to see competing Relays and AppViews spring up for At Protocol. That really is the challenge, seeing if other people can chew the network. One interesting idea I heard floated was that cloud providers might be able to host their own, that see less platforms or what not might hook into. Not perfect, not as distributed as totally desired, but it sure could be cost effective to have them maintain network copies.
Where-as you will be burned alive if you try that on Mastadon.
The other “network effect” in play here is that there’s only one viable place for masto accounts and that’s .social - and if everyone is flocking towards a single place with a single owner then the tech being federated still fails in the face of enshittification when the instance or instance owner goes bad.
TB and CD’s points are spot on - but Masto / federation needs some serious work on the usability side before anyone approaching a “normal” (non-geek) user is going to find this a serious contender to X or any of the others.
Deleted Comment
I had the r/ontario mod publicly admit they ban ALL canadian conservatives because they are ALL homophobic. Mastodon has a public blog post where they admit the same problem. as long as you ban opposing viewpoints you can never win.
Why is it each time the cognitive dissonance peaks in an echo chamber they simply seek a new social media safe space?
Toronto Maple Leafs are on a 10 game winning streak after they banned their opponents from the building.
Reddit has fallen out of the top 15 social media platforms, now ranking around 20th and soon to fall behind LinkedIn. Most of reddit are bots creating the illusion of activity.
Banning conservatives goes well beyond politics. All community sizes shrink. With fewer opposing viewpoints, left-leaning users dominate discussions, reinforcing a one-sided narrative.
But you might say, no how could that be?Ive been banned from a dozen subreddits for violating rules that dont even show up in the rule list. You just so happen to hit a subject which is secretly against the rules.
I asked the mods how I would know not to break that rule, talking about what they claim is a conspiracy theory. But they dont even list in the rules because they dont want to give it any additional coverage. But i dont even get a warning?
Digg died because of their move against free speech. Every rolled over to reddit because they claim to be free speech but really never was, it was just micro censorship. outsourced antifree speech.
Reddit and digg will be hosted on the same servers in thefuture.