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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says X rival is ‘billionaire proof’ cnbc.com/2024/11/21/bluesky-ce…

#Bluesky #SocialMedia

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is saying stuff that isn't true.

They've (deliberately?) structured their protocol to favour corporate ownership rather than grassroots community-owned servers.

Also a reminder that BS is a for-profit corporation where the CEO is a blockchain/cryptocurrency person, most of the board is too, and they're owned by venture capital firms including Blockchain Capital.

This entry was edited (1 day ago)

Roni Laukkarinen reshared this.

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

Let's dissect this...

"“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said."

Well, no. Open source tools can still be bring down and we've seen examples of that, where even "open source companies" have been bought and shut down.

#Bluesky #OpenSource #SocialMedia

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

"“We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”"

Well, once again, no. ActivityPub and the Fediverse really did this in terms of the users with no companies dictating the terms. What Bluesky is doing is not "radically different" or "put this much control in the users hands". We still can't 100% host our own instances on Bluesky and 90% of the user base is on Bluesky's servers. It did not start with users, it started with the company. Huge difference.

#Bluesky #OpenSource #SocialMedia

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

AFAIK you'll never be able to host your own instances on BS, BS federation happens through relays rather than server-to-server.

And the relays are expensive so they're designed to be owned by corporations, but without any clear business reason to run one except to inject ads or manipulate the content.

in reply to FediThing 🏳️‍🌈

@FediThing Yeah, I know the broad outline of the tech of Bluesky, but I'd like the idea I could also own the relay. It also bugs me that hosting things is not very cost-effective or built from the user's point of view like in the Fediverse. The biggest culprit for me is that all of this can be taken down as long as people don't host enough. There is a certain safety in numbers when it comes to self-hosting and Mastodon has that.

The article "Hosting Bluesky with Coolify" by @zicklepop is excellent in this regard.

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

Also structure of the company is suspicious, all the Bluesky developers are paid in equity so they are in line for a lottery win each if the company gets bought out. That is bound to affect their work when considering whether a feature favours a buyout or not.
This entry was edited (1 day ago)

Roni Laukkarinen reshared this.

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

@FediThing @zicklepop Excellent article, thanks for pointing this out! I am reposting the link for easy access:

melkat.blog/p/hosting-bsky

"most Bluesky apps and integrations do not support self-hosted accounts" -> Is this because of bad docs, because it's too complex, or because app devs don't believe in the concept?

"reliance on the venture-capital-backed front-end to Amazon’s Simple Email Service, Resend" -> This really worried me, but as far as I can see it could be any SMTP service?

Roni Laukkarinen reshared this.

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

(1/2)

@rolle
> Yeah, I know the broad outline of the tech of Bluesky, but I'd like the idea I could also own the relay.

The fediverse and Nostr both have relays that you can own (in the sense of self-hosting them). There's a lot that fediverse devs could learn from how they're used in Nostr, where they're fundamental to the network.

@FediThing @zicklepop

Roni Laukkarinen reshared this.

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

But is Bluesky really completely open source?

github.com/orgs/bluesky-social…

Sure, the app, ATproto and some components like a feed generator are there, but that does not make bsky.app open source...

Roni Laukkarinen reshared this.

in reply to Dr. Daniel Dizdarevic

In my experience, this is something that business people do not understand. Unless your entire code base is open sourced with a licence that allows others to fork, modify and redistribute it, you always have vendor lock-in. You always have to accept the company's terms and conditions or leave. And, as you say, it can always go down.

EDIT: Not to mention the fact that Bluesky is not even properly decentralised... (yet?)

This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

I feel this "oh we're fine, we're open source" is similar to Telegram's "we're private, the app's open source" marketing.

What I'm saying is I'm getting flashbacks

This entry was edited (1 day ago)

Roni Laukkarinen reshared this.

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

I don't think they have any plans to change that. It's hard to make money when anyone can set up an instance "for free". And with the numbers mentioned in the article, we can see how much money there is for investors to cache in before dumping the product...
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Dr. Daniel Dizdarevic

@daniel
> Not to mention the fact that Bluesky is not even properly decentralised... (yet?)

... and never will be. I'm so convinced of this, I'm willing to put money on it. I can't even be bothered setting up a tyre-kicking account. It interests me about as much as CoHost.

@rolle

in reply to Strypey

@strypey @daniel
Funny, I was just writing about this. That a de-centralized system has to be that from the day 1, not an afterthought. There's a huge risk that it won't ever be one, be it a technical or governing issue or both. And that's what I believe will be the faith of BS as well.
in reply to Henrik MPEG-1 Slayer 3

@henrik
> a de-centralized system has to be that from the day 1, not an afterthought

Bang on. Can anyone name a single example where something has started out a centralised system, controlled by a single investor-funded company, and evolved into a genuinely decentralised one?

#decentralisation

@daniel @rolle

in reply to Strypey

@strypey @daniel Threads will fully integrate activity pub before BlueSky has a second "instance" (neither will happen).
in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

> Well, once again, no. ActivityPub and the Fediverse really did this in terms of the users with no companies dictating the terms

Even before AP, StatusNet/ Identi.ca did it with OStatus, and Diaspora did it, and Mike MacGirvin did it with Friendica and Hubzilla, and New Vector (Element) did with it with Matrix. Hell, even Goggle folks got there before BS, with XMPP (Wave, left to die at the Apache Foundation, like OpenOffice). There are dozens of precedents;

wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Distrib…

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

That statement is actively ignoring the existence of the whole Fediverse. Wow!

"We did this first. Nobody else has done this." Sounds like some recently elected politician.

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

yeah, to some extent this concern could be alleviated by licensing but their choice also brings little comfort in this regard. They use a very permissive license which in effect means going to closed source is completely trivial for them if they were to decide to do such a thing.
in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

This is from someone who in an interview yesterday thought the minimum user age of her site was 18.
in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

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This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to aulis

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in reply to aulis

@aulis Protocols and servers can't be all purchased. There are 30 000+ servers.

Just like Internet is too far spread. It is not possible to buy it as a whole. And it makes no sense to purchase TCP/IP. For what gain? Same goes for ActivityPub. It is not possible to take it away from The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

in reply to Roni Laukkarinen

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