alt Hacker News> Bluesky users can interact with Blacksky users and vice versa unless Bluesky has applied moderation to the Blacksky user, because they are decentralized via ATproto.
Yes and I find it rather egregious that you can pay (a lot) to self-host a full stack then still be locked out of the majority of the audience of an entire "decentralized" platform by a single centralized entity.
For all of the problems with ActivityPub defederation, at least with ActivityPub you have:
- Many options of places to go in the Fediverse, with a wide spread of different ideologies and approaches to moderation.
- The option to feasibly self-host your own instance that is completely independent. You can be blocked by the major instances still, so they still have the ability to moderate just the same. However, as far as I know no AP server has more than half the active users of the whole network, which is a much more robust split.
It's true that Bluesky architecture enables something like Blacksky to exist. But if there were just two independent ActivityPub hosts and one of them was many multiples the size of the other the protocol would've been declared a massive failure for good reason.
And as far as I know the Fediverse mobile apps and clients are agnostic to your instance, so the apps don't have any influence over what you're able to see. Isn't this what is expected from something that is decentralized?
> Yes and I find it rather egregious that you can pay (a lot) to self-host a full stack [...]
I wrote this other comment that I think does well to address this misconception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601998
> Many options of places to go in the Fediverse, with a wide spread of different ideologies and approaches to moderation.
And an account tied to exactly one of them, that is a pain to migrate if it's even possible with the ActivityPub application you use. This causes decision paralysis and dissuades most people from even considering joining.
> The option to feasibly self-host your own instance that is completely independent. You can be blocked by the major instances still, so they still have the ability to moderate just the same. However, as far as I know no AP server has more than half the active users of the whole network, which is a much more robust split.
Within what is effectively a rounding error, everyone that uses ActivityPub uses Threads. Blacksky is definitely a larger percentage of the ATProto network than mastodon.social is of the ActivityPub network.
> But if there were just two independent ActivityPub hosts and one of them was many multiples the size of the other the protocol would've been declared a massive failure for good reason.
True! Just like if there were hypothetically only two ATProto applications, that would not be very interesting. I think I've used four or five ATProto applications with my identity? Pretty cool stuff!
> And as far as I know the Fediverse mobile apps and clients are agnostic to your instance, so the apps don't have any influence over what you're able to see. Isn't this what is expected from something that is decentralized?
There is nothing in the protocol enforcing this and this expectation has been broken in the past.
https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/2224
This is in addition to the fact that "clients" in ActivityPub extend to the monolithic instance itself, and therefore is also broken by the very "defederation" you already mentioned!
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I am very familiar with ActivityPub. I don't hate it. I ran multiple instances for years (one for my friends, and one for my family). ATProto is simply more flexible (allows applications to scale up to provide an experience that one would expect coming from centralized applications) and easier for non-technical people to use. And it's decentralized, which is awesome.