alt Hacker News> 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.
> I wrote this other comment that I think does well to address this misconception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601998
OK, but that raises a question. Can I do that right now? If so, I don't understand why more people are doing this. When I looked into this I definitely didn't see anything like this.
> 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.
I like the concept of W3C DIDs, but it's a little soured for me that there was no real solution to the PLC DID problem. It is, quite literally, the exact opposite of being decentralized. (IIRC they do support one of the other DID methods, but it's not default, and I couldn't figure out how.)
Which seems like a common theme. You can absolutely fix the downsides of the Fediverse, it just requires you to reduce how decentralized the network is :)
> 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.
While this is technically correct, Threads is not widely considered an instance in the Fediverse and is missing in "instance lists". Threads is less like a part of the Fediverse and more like a centralized social media service service that supports interoperability with ActivityPub.
> 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!
This is cool but not relevant. I'm more specifically talking about Bluesky vs the Fediverse here, when referring to the protocols. Obviously there are also uses of ActivityPub that are not Mastodon/Misskey as well.
I haven't seen another ATProto application that I found interesting enough to try yet.
> There is nothing in the protocol enforcing this and this expectation has been broken in the past.
> https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/2224
I never suggested it was literally impossible for someone to do it... but the concept of a "Mastodon" app is inherently agnostic to the instance in a way that Bluesky's apps are not.
> 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!
Sure. I'm suggesting you can't actually have decentralization without the possibility of all of ActivityPub's downsides. You can't use technical means to fix the social problems with decentralization; you can only defacto centralize things.
> 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.
ATProto is decentralized, at least to some extent.
Bluesky isn't really, though.