I just did a post on #Bluesky pointing out that the #A11y issues that impact screen reader users it’s had since Day One and the message we're getting from their developers is we aren't welcome there. This is particularly interesting as more and more accounts from Twitter, all of which concerned with human rights in some way, are going over there. Blind people may be slowly bweing left in the dark, particularly for info surrounding #BIPOC, #LGBTQIA! and #PopCulture matters. (1/2)
What do you think of when you hear the word "Fediverse'?
Please note that this is only a question about the meaning of the term, not wich protocol is better or if bridges between protcols are a good or bad thing.
We Distribute is a CC-licensed open media project. It serves as a people-focused tech publication, with the goal of informing and educating people about three things:
1. Decentralized Communications 2. User empowerment 3. The future of the Internet
Most of what we do involves reporting on the day-to-day developments of the #Fediverse. In fact, our articles are ActivityPub-enabled, and integrate directly into the network.
However, the Social Web / Decentralized Social movement involves far more efforts and technologies that we think are also worth reporting on: #Matrix, #XMPP, #Bluesky, #Nostr, #SecureScuttlebutt, and #Solid all bring interesting pieces to the puzzle.
Our ultimate goal is to showcase the ongoing efforts to change the shape and form of the Internet itself, at a grassroots level. Join us on this exciting journey. #WeDistribute
OK this will probably be an unpopular opinion, but regarding the #bluesky#bridge and whether it's ok to be opt-out... For me the discussion doesn't make much sense because this is how fedi works. When you enable federation, your posts are federated to any activitypub-supporting server, unless you opt-out by fediblocking. Do you approve all of these servers? Do you agree with their ToS? Have you read the ToS of all of them, or know where they belong to? No. I know this might make you insecure about your data, but it's better to be honest than create a false impression of control, which then feels attacked when Threads or Bluesky appear. I understand that somebody may not want their content appearing in Zuckerberg's or Dorsey's platform. But they could already be running an AP server that's federated to your server, and you will never know. This is what we signed up for, adopting an open protocol and using software that federates with everyone as the default. And tbh I like it this way - an opt-in federation would be a disaster for smaller servers, it would practically be impossible to federate. By using an AP-enabled server, I'm telling everyone that it's ok to interact with my content - unless I actively block them. It doesn't include an agreement for how or from whom this content will be used. The fact that both servers run AP-compatible software is only a technicality. So if Bluesky implemented AP support it would suddenly be ok that interacting with their users would be opt-out, like with every AP server?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that everyone wants to be in control of their social circle, and I support you if you want to block Threads or Bluesky bridges. But I don't really see how it's unethical to have a bridge that is opt-out, just like any other AP-server. Our only "agreement" is using an open protocol, not any common ToS. ActivityPub is not ethically superior by definition, anyone can adopt it, and we have the right to block them, and this is all by design, it's not a different corner of the internet, everyone in the internet can use the protocol and see/display your public content. The drama every time some server does basically what we allowed them to do and we don't like it, is getting really old quickly. It doesn't "protect" fedi, it only makes it hostile and boring. If you're concerned about who sees your content, please run a followers-only account and control your followers. Running a public account in an openly federated platform and then getting angry when you don't agree with every single server you're federating with is a recipe to make sure you'll be angry for years to come.
Fediverse! I’ve been building a bridge to Bluesky, and they’re turning on federation soon, which means my bridge will be available soon too. You’ll be able to follow people on Blu…
For example: #Bluesky doesn't pass posts directly from server to server. They all go through indexing servers that are so costly that only corporations (like Bluesky) or governments are likely to run them. Companies can recoup those operating costs using the same sort of Big Data business model some of us left Twitter over. Governments might run one just to keep tabs on their citizens. Moderating code can be a way of moderating the people who are built into the basic operation of that code.
Admins should probably discuss with their communities whether or not they want their instances opted-in by default. I think it's unfortunate that he built it to be opt-out rather than opt-in, but Ryan does, at least, seem open to working toward mutually agreeable solutions.
Checking in on whether #bluesky / #atproto has become any more like a communication medium, and... nope. almost unchanged since i looked at it last in June. Bluesky is a spectator platform where a small number of accounts receive most of the visibility and smaller accounts are effectively invisible. The introduction of new feed algorithms (to the degree that happened, there aren't really many that I can find in wide use) did not change that. This is a non-normative analysis: in some cases, it is good to have a medium that promotes some very small number of posts and accounts, eg. to surface singular events, etc.
From a 25h sample of the firehose... - 600k posts, 2.4m likes, 250k boosts, 350k follows - 40% of posts receive 0 likes, 70% receive <= 1 - accounts in the 99th percentile of likes received 44% of likes, accounts in the 95th percentile received 74% - 40% of posts were from accounts within the top 95th percentile of accounts by likes received. - the maximum number of likes for a post by an account not in the top 95% is 32.
The first plot below shows the cumulative sum of likes received on the y axis against each account in the sample on the x axis - this includes accounts that didnt' post during the sample (but would still have posts that could be liked, so this also shows the extreme recency bias). The second plot is a hockeystick showing the number of likes (*not* cumulative sum) received on the y axis per post on the x axis.
For background, the default algorithm only cares about likes, boosts don't matter, which is why i am calculating things by likes here - they are the primary algorithmic signal.
These are the same calculations that I did back in June, but this time i'm leaving the firehose open to do a longer sample to be able to parse momentary virality from persistent effects.
I've been on BlueSky for 10 minutes and... (An Essay)
I get it now. I used to be like "Why can't people just stop using Twitter/Instagram/WhateverTheFuck? If they need social media, why can't they just use Mastodon? Why doesn't Pixelfed get more users? It's literally the same UI".
But I get it. I've been on BlueSky for what? 10 minutes? And I can feel my brain chemistry changing. Mastodon is a coffee shop. It doles out caffeine. You still get the little dopamine hit when you get notifications, you get that kind of substitute for human interaction that feels nice. But Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and these apps from companies with access to inordinate amounts of data to build algorithms designed by psychologists to literally be As Addicting as Possible? These apps are dealing meth. But they've pressed it like ecstasy and made it cute. They've made it socially acceptable. But let me tell you something.
Ever since I logged onto BlueSky, I've been thinking about it. I don't *think* about Mastodon all day. "Oh my god what should I post next? What will get me followers? Would this be funny? Is this on brand?" I don't think about it. I come here because I have interactions with people without the pretext that they're engaging with me to get engagement in return. Because sometimes in my life I feel isolated and because this substitute for human interaction feels nice.
I thought I'd get BlueSky (despite their horrifying privacy policy - more on that later) because there are some Things Going On that make me need to get a little more serious about making money. But fuck, if this is the only way? I'm taking a vow of poverty, or getting a day job.
Because then there's their privacy policy. Access to websites you visit before and after, identifying information about your device, purchases you make, and it goes on. But even that level of invasive access should give us pause, right? I have a lot of things set up on my computer that mitigate *some* of that access, but then let's think about how we give the app access to our photos and videos (all of them, not just what we post in the moment), our device's camera and microphone (not just while we're using it) and so on. And then think about how our society grooms us to believe (and maybe in some circumstances this belief is true) that we *need* these sites for access, for engagement, to make money.
The price of not working in a warehouse is every piece of information we can reasonably gather about you to use and sell however we please, for whatever purpose, indefinitely, and it never expires and we don't pay you for it.
This *is* exploitation and my ancestry makes me pause, horrified, at what this information *will* eventually come back and do to us when inevitably the wrong person/group gets ahold of it. And that's pretending like we even know who has our data and what they're doing with it, right? Because we don't know. We really don't. Call me paranoid, say that I shouldn't worry if I have nothing to hide, give me all of the excuses you've been programmed to give about why we *should not* worry about a surveillance state that *we* pay for. Then come online and rant about how dangerous governments are and fail to see the irony in it all.
And I'm a hypocrite. I bought in, too. For personal gain. After criticizing others for years for doing the same thing. It's true. But the interesting side effect is that I've gained so much insight into why we're so addicted to sensationalism, why we're so addicted to these sites, why we're so unwell in general. The kinds of things my feed is inundated with, especially since I haven't curated it yet and it's showing me what it wants to? My god. We cannot have a healthy society when this is what we're consuming all day every day. There is no way to be a healthy person, I believe, when consuming this all day every day.
So anyways. As always, perhaps a bit sanctimonious. But I'm a little dumbfounded at the experience of all of this after years off of corporate social.
It seems that #Bluesky is getting some traction, so it's good to summarize the facts: - it's centralized (99% of users on one instance), - it has insufficient moderation, - it's not easily publicly browsable, - it has terrible terms of service (you grant them broad rights to all your content).
The only thing that makes it different from X in principle is that it's not run by a mad man (yet)... Ah, I forgot it's Jack Dorsey's project, nevermind.
Mám tu další pozvánku do sociální sítě #Bluesky od zakladatele Twitteru. 😊
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An update on #BlueSky and #AI. They have answered to questions and revealed that their deal with hive.ai specifically forbids the latter from training their models on user data. BlueSky have also updated their TOS to be more clear.
See the linked toot from @growlbeast for more details.
I’d still avoid it personally, their “moderation” is nonexistent and I wouldn’t touch anything backed by cryptobros, but for now this is good news :)
Bsky does have say in how Hive uses the data Hive gets from Bsky as it's part of the agreement they have with Hive and It would have to be disclosed in our user end ToS.(The ToS states our data is NOT used beyond moderation models, meaning it does not go to the image gen model.)
BSky has been updating their ToS to be more clear about it apparently too.
here's an email sent from the team to my friend regarding some of this:
To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is used to train generative AI models.
BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called https://thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they use all content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.
An update on #BlueSky and #AI. They have answered to questions and revealed that their deal with hive.ai specifically forbids the latter from training their models on user data. BlueSky have also updated their TOS to be more clear.
See the linked toot from @growlbeast for more details.
I’d still avoid it personally, their “moderation” is nonexistent and I wouldn’t touch anything backed by cryptobros, but for now this is good news :)
Hive's APIs enable developers to integrate pre-trained AI models that address technically challenging content understanding needs into their applications.
Because #Bluesky requires an app and I won't install apps on my phone, I'm running it on an Android #emulator on my desktop. I refuse to get a Tiktok account, but I will view individual Tiktoks. I never got a Hive account because of the whole app thing and even more flimsy BS structure than most. I've had a FB account since the early days when it was for colleges only, but I only log in a couple times a year for work. NEVER used the app.
Right now the #Fediverse feels like a treehouse village full of ewok scientists, #Bluesky feels like the first week of senior year at a gifted college where everyone's doing amphetamines and no teachers are around, and #Twitter feels like a once-popular neighborhood playground where the tarmac is crumbling, it's always twilight, some of your friends are still clustered nervously near the edges, and crowds of bullies are moshing in the center.
> And then do a surprised picachu face when inevitably some surveillance capitalist robber baron enshittifies it to a point of complete unusefulness.
> It fascinates me how quickly people forget lessons from the whole Twitter kerfuffle, and just fall for another Silicon Valley silly con. Without even skipping a beat.
> In other words, “neutrality” and “speech” and “voice” and “protection from bans” is mentioned right there, front and center, in #BlueSky’s overview and FAQ. At the same time moderation and anti-harassment features are, at best, an afterthought.
(…)
> Of course the sad reality is that people will buy the hype, build communities under the everloving watchful eye of Jack “Musk is the singular solution I trust, likes are superficial if not paid for” Dorsey.
> In a pretty meaningful way, “speech and reach” is the model of #Twitter today. You just don’t get to choose your recommendation/discovery algorithm.
(…)
> The only way to effectively fight harassment in a social network is effective, contextual moderation. The Fediverse showed that having communities, which embody that context and whose admins and moderators focus on protecting their members, is pretty damn effective here. This is exactly what BS is not doing.
> Of course, fedi could also have some search and discovery algorithms built on top. Operators of such algorithms (there had been a few attempts already) would also benefit from being first and going big.
> But their potential power is balanced by the power fedi instance admins and moderators have (blocking and defederating) and by the fact that fedi is perfectly usable without such algorithms. And by strong hostility of a lot of people using fedi towards non-consensual indexing.
> #BlueSky’s decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.
(...)
> The rule of thumb with search and recommendation algorithms is: the bigger, the better. The more data you have and the more compute you get to throw at it, the better your recommendations will be. So it’s a winner-takes-all system.
> Almost exactly six months after #Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.
tl;dr: - #BlueSky seems designed to get secondarily centralized in the "reach" layer (as they call it) - moderation is an afterthought - Jack Dorsey
Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even
So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but pos…
Matt Mullenweg (founder of Wordpress and current owner of Tumblr) wants to know how you want Tumblr integrated into the #fediverse (or #bluesky). Those of you who have Twitter accounts should go voice your ideas directly cause this will probably happen in the not so distant future (they already had a job posting listed last year where they were looking for #ActivityPub people)
