In the short term, I think that Bridgy Fed's multi-protocol bridge has a better chance of decentralizing Bluesky than Bluesky.
scott
joined 1 month ago
@NigelFrobisher There actually are a bunch of competing fediverse platforms that use entirely different codebases. Some are actually older than Mastodon.
For example, I am posting from Hubzilla, not Mastodon. Hubzilla has an entirely different codebase and an entirely different feature set.
It is not made up. Read about Stalin. A lot of things happened when he was in power. And a lot of things changed after he was no longer in power.
If your goal is to solve society's problems, you have to listen to everyone, even people you disagree with, in order to identity the underlying problems.
And sometimes you have to read between the lines because they are not politically and economically literate. And unfortunately, that means people often latch onto ideas that sound good to them, but may or may not be a good idea in real life.
For example, some people may blame immigration for their problems. But that is not the real problem. That is just a scapegoat that the politicians use. The real problem is that they are struggling financially, and don't know how to fix it, most likely because someone is taking advantage of them and/or they don't have what they need to be successful.
If you fix their economic problems, and educate them on what the real problems are, they will realize that the immigrants were never the problem. This will reduce the tension and hate, and expose the propaganda for what it is.
But you can't change anyone's minds if you label them as enemies and refuse to listen to them. And you can't solve problems if you can't identify the underlying issues people are concerned with.
Hubzilla has built-in cloud storage, where you can host anything you want, and you can even determine who can see it. Images, videos, documents, binary files, whatever.
It's not just that they may not care. They may not know what they're being asked or know what the consequences are for choosing either option. Then they sit there for 30 minutes searching the internet for what the question means.
@jas0n All instances of Mastodon run the same source code, unless it is one of the many forks, like Hometown. But none of the other fediverse server software out there uses Mastodon code. They are completely different projects with completely different codebases. What they have in common is that they speak ActivityPub.
From what I read, apparently, AT Protocol does support decentralization, but the server requirements are pretty steep.
To put it in terms we can understand, there are servers and services. You can set up a server, but still wind up using a centralized service from Bluesky. But it is possible to set up competing centralized services so that Bluesky is not the only provider.
But, back to the first point, their minimum hardware requirements are so steep that you have to have pretty deep pockets to fully administer everything yourself.
There is a community called Blacksky that is trying to do this, so they are not dependent on Bluesky at all, yet still use AT Protocol.
Compare this with the fediverse, where you can start up a lightweight ActivityPub fediverse server on a small VPS.