I hear you.

Many will likely parse this as hidden depression or an unhappy marriage or a need to find a hobby or something.

I feel like it’s deeper. The whole urban grind lifestyle just doesn’t work for some. They feel the prison bars on their skin. They’re wired for movement and novelty and exploration. And I think that’s perfectly fine. To be celebrated even.

Moreover, I think we’re all like that a bit but find it hard to question modern life which for all of its material gains is, IMO, unnaturally keen to lock people into highly repetitive rhythms and constraining obligations.

The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.

So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.

For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.

Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.

Yea, it would seem the embrace from those “who should maybe know better” is based on it being the appropriate compromise to make progress in this field.

BlueSky is not just another centralised platform. It’s open source (or mostly), based on an open protocol and an architecture that’s hybrid-decentralised. The “billionaire” security, AFAICT, is that we can rebuild it with our own data should it go to shit.

This thread from Andre Staltz is indicative I think: https://bsky.app/profile/staltz.com/post/3lawesmv6ik2d

He worked on scuttlebut/manyverse for a long while before moving on a year or so ago. Along with Paul Frazee, a core dev with bsky who’d previously done decentralisation, I think there’s a hunger to just make it work for people and not fail on idealistic grounds.

Just to add to the many responses here with a simple quip on this issue (which I’m taking from one else)

The fediverse presumes people care more about independence than socialising. For most it’s the other way around.

IE: it’s about the socialising “stupid”.

Even for us techy types happy with the system here … it means we get to socialise with like minded people. The independence we have here is often secondary, I’d wager, to what we all get out of this.

I mean, I hear you (we’re both here after all), but honestly, I think this is a bad take and approach (if getting more users is a goal.

It’s not the 90s anymore. And even email services are given to you by your employer or selected from the closest big brand provider (Google etc).

All of which is a far cry from “nerdygardeners.io” administered by some rando anonymous account you’ve never heard of before.

For mainstream success, the instances thing was dead on arrival. Just was and is. Which is fine, the Fedi can be and arguably should be something else.

IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.

There was an article by Google about the security of their code base, and one of their core findings was that old code is good, as it gets refined and more free of bugs over time. And of course conversely, new code is worse.

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html

Generally it seems like capitalism’s obsession with growth is at odds with complex software. It’s basis in property also.

It’s not too hard. There are a bunch of different platforms one might experiment with as well as instances. Some will use multiple accounts for different needs or interests. On lemmy, multi accounts are useful for have different feeds, for example. I probably have 7-10. I’ve probably forgotten about a few of them. If you’re curious, it happens.

Yea. Even nicer if it could be adjusted on a post-by-post basis (however viable that is).

By the same token Evan seems a bit self centred and egotistical about his projects. Of you look at his comments about BlueSky it seems he’s pretty bitter that someone dared to make an alternative protocol that so far has a decent amount of users, when a acceptance of multiple systems experimenting and borrowing from each other for the good of the open web is right there as a natural position.

It’s definitely an interesting and relevant idea I think! A major flaw here is the lack of ability for communities to establish themselves as discrete spaces desperate from the doomscrolling crowd.

A problem with the fediverse on the whole IMO, as community building is IMO what it should be focusing on.

Generally decentralisation makes things like this difficult, AFAIU. Lemmy has things like private and local only communities in the works that will get you there. But then discovery becomes a problem which probably requires some additional features too.

it’s the sort of tool that is really just fundamental now and should be ubiquitous and promoted and taught and talked about every where there is knowledge work. Even more so as there’s a great open source version of the tool.

Oh yea, I hear you.

What your point does though is open up the discussion about whether enforcement makes financial sense in isolation. And once you open that door, the whole becomes uncomfortable for a lot of people who are stuck in a simple black-and-white justice mentality, where “do what you’re supposed, pay what they charge, or be punished” is all there is to making the world work well. You know, “law and order” types.

You’re trying to talk about incentives. For many though that’s a very dangerous slippery slope. So I’m trying to get a head of that and wonder if the end of that slippery slop is actually a demonstrably good thing.

I remember hearing rumours during the role out that tech employees were found asking for help on forums in ways that weren’t promising for the health and talent of the people building it.

But yea, it’s the embarrassment of this sort of stuff that must be masking the real financials of PT and how viable a free system would be.

Yea I’ve kept track of how often I’ve encountered inspectors, and most of the time it’d be worth it to not get the ticket or not tap on. Sometimes though I’ve noticed an increase in the number of inspectors that would definitely shift the equation. Also train stations with gates complicate the matter.

I don’t know if it’s out there, but I’d personally like to know how the finances come out for making PT free. You obviously lose revenue, but also all the overhead of paying for inspectors and for all of the ticketing infrastructure. I also wonder if the part that makes the finances work is all the fines collected, which would be pretty fucking shithouse if true.

The catch is that the whole system is effectively centralised on BlueSky backend services (basically the relay). So while the protocol may be standardised and open, and interpreted with decentralised components, they’ll control the core service. Which means they can unilaterally decide to introduce profitable things like ads and charging for features.

The promise of the system though is that it provides for various levels of independence that can all connect to each other, so people with different needs and capabilities can all find their spot in the ecosystem. Whether that happens is a big question. Generally I’d say I’m optimistic about the ideas and architecture, but unsure about whether the community around it will get it to what I think it should be.

I don’t recall seeing ads in Netflix

Didn’t they start an ads tier ages ago?

And yea I wasn’t commenting on the shows, just that I’d been away from Netflix for so long I haven’t even had a chance to see any of these.

It’s funny how long I’ve been off of netflix … I haven’t seen any of these (even despite wanting to watch Stranger Things S4 just to finish it).

Something about netflix just burned me. I tried subscribing again after they introduced ads and the amount clunkiness and incompatibility they’d introduced through that basically burned me for good. I subscribe to some things here and there but I’d lost track of how much netflix is basically off of my radar.

Suspicion is totally fair re BlueSky IMO. The system they’ve design seems to me (and others AFAICT) to have the potential to include interconnected components or sections with various degrees of independence.

The elephant in the room, which I point out on BlueSky whenever I can, is that no one seems to really be trying to build the hard parts of that out. Which is a shame because it could be interesting.

EG, there’s a chance that a hybridised system running both BlueSky’s protocol and the fediverse’s could be viable and quite useful. Add to that the integration with some E2EE, and it finally feels like an actual attempt at building something new for the modern internet.

Fortunately there is some noise around these ideas, so hopefully their system can outlast their finances. But yea, a rug pull is definitely not out of the question.

Oh I’m with you there! And otherwise totally understandable.

I’m not close to Gaiman or the fandom or the story, at all … but I did manage to pickup on some of the whisper network through mastodon, where I read a couple of posts or blog posts by people who seemed to be close to the fandom and even be friends with him (in one case). The vibe was very much he’s likely a womanising guy and has been his whole life and likely has standards “below” what most would consider normal. There also seemed to be a bit of introspection about how much the fandom around him was kinda culty and that that clearly enabled whatever he did, as a common enough pattern seemed to be that someone would go through something unseemly, but because it was Gaiman and all their friends were fans, they presumed it was them or their fault and never wanted to open up about it.

Like I said though, this is essentially gossip, so don’t take it seriously or anything (also I don’t have any links or anything).