What is Hackers' Pub?

On the fediverse we also see a lot of accusations of Bluesky being owned by Jack Dorsey, and this isn't true. My understanding is that Jay performed an impressive amount of negotiation to allow Bluesky to receive funding independently.

These days Jack Dorsey is instead focusing on Nostr, which I can only describe as "a sequel to Secure Scuttlebutt with extremely bad vibes where bitcoin people talk about bitcoin"

There is also something which Bluesky gets right which the fediverse does not. I mentioned that Bluesky uses decentralization *techniques*, and the most important of those is content-addressing. This allows content to exist even when a server goes down.

This is a great decision and I have advocated that the fediverse do so as well. In fact several years ago I wrote a demo in @spritelyThe Spritely Institute's early days showing off how one could build a content-addressed ActivityPub in a spec-compatible way.

The fediverse has a lot of flaws. Oh trust me, we're gonna get to that.

But comparison-wise: what I mean to say is that architectural decisions matter, and scaling up isn't the only thing that's important, *scaling down matters too*.

If you care about decentralization, anyway.

As said, tens of thousands of people are self-hosting *today*. Fediverse software doesn't just scale up, it scales *down*.

GotoSocial is cheap enough on resources where you can run it for family and friends on a raspberry pi or spare laptop you have sitting around.

Now you're hitting the point in this thread where some of you may be thinking "aha! this is where Christine is saying that the fediverse/activitypub are awesome and atproto is terrible!"

you have NO IDEA HOW MUCH I CRITICIZE THE FEDIVERSE ALL THE TIME, I do it all the time, and will later here

Now yes, they are using decentralized techniques. Remember when I said content-addressed storage is a good idea and the fediverse should do it too? IT IS! (And as I also said, it's actually fully possible for the fediverse to do, more on that later.)

But the reality is, it's still *centralized*

Now you may be saying, "Christine, this is really unfair, because you're looking at ActivityPub servers which are only dealing with a small amount of the network, what if it were an ActivityPub mega-node? What are the costs THEN huh?" and "What if we hosted just PART of ATProto?"

What then INDEED

But where was I? Oh yes. We had talked about why PDS'es aren't enough (blog/google analogy), relative costs of hosting things on ATProto vs ActivityPub, etc etc

But we haven't gotten into the really interesting parts which are the structural analysis stuff, so let's move onto that

ATProto is not designed for the Relay and AppViews to only hold part of the network, not *really*, and ActivityPub is. We'll get to this in a moment.

But Bluesky actually has good justification for this! I will defend it insofar as Bluesky was making a serious *design decision*

Actually all these critiques of the fediverse are TRUE, these are known challenges, and actually it's not really so bad, but it could be better, and at any rate, Bluesky made a major decision to simplify a lot for new users, and they have. Things seem to just work for people! Incredible!

I'll take one more note about federation which is that often time the message passing mechanism of the fediverse is often called "federation", but theoretically another mechanism could exist, but I'm actually not so sure of that.

There's a reason the actor model and the lambda calculus are undying

Now historically, federation has been achieved on the fediverse via "message passing". Actually, this is to the degree where I just always associated message passing with federation, but really, federation is about the distribution of power, creating an abstract whole in a sea of autonomy.

Ok Fedifriends - I'm sure I'm only the millionth person to ask, but I want to confirm I'm on the right course here. Discord is poop. I want to self host something that offers text, voice, and video chat for a small group of friends. Is Matrix my best option? Have at me fellow nerds.

Rig is an old gaming PC running NixOS.

#discord #matrix #selfhost #linux

ActivityPub, as it turns out, follows the actor model of computation. Okay, many people implementing the fediverse don't know about the actor model aspect of ActivityPub but I am here to tell YOU, dear reader, that it is an important thing, not a detail

I actually think this is improvable but I mostly don't care because this isn't as big a complaint as people tend to think it is on the fediverse, the other concerns like "what instance do I pick" tend to be bigger and "oh no my server went down"

That can be improved, we'll talk about that later

I took apart the dishwasher to fix the door seal. That's fixed but the start button doesn't work. I hot-wired it to see if it was the button or the "computer" and it started but I couldn't stop it. That's how I know the door seal is fixed. Only $300 for a new button.

"Message passing" is what ActivityPub uses. It's "like email", people say, and that's true.

Actually it's even a lot like physical mail. You write a letter, you say where it should go, it gets delivered to your house.

Message passing. The world runs on it.

사용자에게 구독 모델을 강요하는 것을 중단했더니 일어난 일
------------------------------
- Lovable 은 기존의 *구독 전용 결제 구조* 가 사용자 불만과 비정기적 사용 패턴에 맞지 않음을 확인하고, *크레딧 ‘충전(top-up)’ 방식* 을 도입함
- 사용자는 구독보다 *유연한 결제 선택권* 을 원했으며, LinkedIn 설문에서도 ‘추가 구매(add-on)’가 ‘초과 사용(overage)’보다 선호됨
- A/B 테스트…
------------------------------
https://news.hada.io/topic?id=26969&utm_source=googlechat&utm_medium=bot&utm_campaign=1834

On top of that we can build even more abstractions and the net result is that this is how federation works in pretty much every "federated" system I know.

ActivityPub does some extra work to help you see replies on a thread, think "letters to the editor". This is a bit lossy sometimes though

I was doing that thing that I do when I decide to run a new service on the household server: subscribing to the Atom feeds for new releases; checking whether any of the core devs have personal blogs, and subscribing to those feeds; looking up the transitive dependency tree of the project and subscribing to the feeds of new CVEs for any of them (or annotating my existing subscriptions to those feeds so I can pull together a full prr-project feed view with a single reader search); and so on.

1/3

사용자에게 구독 모델을 강요하는 것을 중단했더니 일어난 일
------------------------------
- Lovable 은 기존의 *구독 전용 결제 구조* 가 사용자 불만과 비정기적 사용 패턴에 맞지 않음을 확인하고, *크레딧 ‘충전(top-up)’ 방식* 을 도입함
- 사용자는 구독보다 *유연한 결제 선택권* 을 원했으며, LinkedIn 설문에서도 ‘추가 구매(add-on)’가 ‘초과 사용(overage)’보다 선호됨
- A/B 테스트…
------------------------------
https://news.hada.io/topic?id=26969&utm_source=googlechat&utm_medium=bot&utm_campaign=1834

신칸트주의와 마르크스주의의 교역지대에서 형태결정론적 모델링은 가치 형태의 추상화 뿐 아니라 인간과 경험의 추상화, 특히 인가의 추상화와 관련해서는 인권의 무기화와 자유주의의 외설적 공모를 다루는 부분까지 커버되는군

今開くのはNetfixじゃなくてNetlify…

I said we are about halfway through and criminy we're halfway through the afternoon, I need a break to get some tea

We have a few big topics left:

- Decentralized identity, how does it work (magnets too, yes)
- The Org is a Future Adversary
- Christine critiques the fediverse
- Wrap up

On that note, again, I am not reading the replies right now because I am (a) afraid to and (b) I'm never gonna finish this and we are a bit over HALFWAY THROUGH the analysis but I have this fear that EVERYONE is mad at me, Bluesky fans, fediverse fans

I am trying to be analytical. I am trying!!!

블로그에 글을 썼어요~
https://mina.house/posts/30faccbd-05a9-80e6-96ad-dcf0ba4dba8f

WezTerm使ってみてよさそうなので福岡Rubyist会議のプレゼンで使お

Alright you've heard enough critiques of Bluesky for a bit and I SAID I was gonna critique the fediverse and I am a WOMAN OF MY WORD

So let's get into it!

I have returned, with tea

I am still not reading notifications. Well, I have seen a few fly by on the fediverse which is blipping and blooping nonstop in the Mastodon UI so people are clearly reading it there

Bluesky says "30+". How big is the +?? I will resist temptation to look and assume "31"

"Where are we going with this Christine?"

Well you could have just read the blogpost but 3 more sections remain, we are approximately 2/3 there

I know, bear with me, what is left is:

- What should the fediverse do?
- Preparing for the organization as a future adversary
- Conclusions

Actually something that is funny about ActivityPub is that there's "ActivityPub the spec", which I think is pretty solid for the most part, and "ActivityPub-as-deployed"

Many of the critiques I'm about to lay out we left holes in the spec for which I hoped would be filled with the right answers

I have actually critiqued ActivityPub and the fediverse a lot! I have kind of never stopped critiquing it, ever since the spec was released. There's a lot that can be improved!

I have even gotten criticism from AT LEAST ONE ActivityPub spec author for critiquing AP-as-deployed but I do anyway

Here is your recipe for making the "Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)":

- Integrate ocaps, which is possible because actor model + ocaps compose
- Content addressed storage!
- Decentralized identity (notice the *y*, I did not say DIDs) on top of ~mutable CAS storage
- Petname system UX

(cotd...)

Actually with this and several other things I am going to bring up, I actually made sure there was space to do things right: there was a push to make ActivityPub "https-only"

I pushed back on that, I didn't want that requirement, and it was exactly for this reason: enabling content addressing

One thing we have already discussed so, before I will say anything else, I will repeat: content addressing is really good, and I'd like to see it happen in ActivityPub, and it's *possible to do*, I even wrote a demo of it https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org

Bluesky does the right thing here, AP should too

洪民憙さんのサイトめちゃくちゃ恰好いいな

ActivityPub left giant holes in the spec around two things which sound the same but which are not the same: Authentication and Authorization

Trying to mix these two, you accidentally get ACLs, and then you get confused deputies and ambient authority, plagues of the security world

The other time I wrote about ActivityPub + ocaps was in a proposal to, yes, Twitter's Bluesky process in 2020 with Jay Graber titled... "ActivityPub + OCaps"! https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535398

I think that document laid out all the right ideas for *the fediverse* (not saying bsky, the fediverse)

The reason I bring up the proposal here is that I think it has all the right analysis of *what the fediverse should do*, if it was going to rise to the challenge of fulfilling its true potential

So let me lay out what the things in that proposal were:

Spec-wise in ActivityPub, I think it's possible. The ecosystem, as deployed? I think the ecosystem can and will only do part of it, if we really get everyone excited, maybe the content addressed storage and decentralized identity parts, in which case the fediverse will also survive nodes going down

The ocap stuff, I tried getting fediverse implementers excited about this and tbh, it's pretty hard to design into a Ruby on Rails or Django style framework and mindset. Backporting the right designs to existing systems is a real challenge.

Especially ocaps need to go bottom-up.

So too does the social structure flow from the tech. It does on Bluesky, and it does on the fediverse.

I won't elaborate further on this, I actually would like you to pause and think about it. In which ways are tech and social systems bidirectional, here and otherwise? It's important.

(cotd ...)

- Better anti-spam / anti-harassment using OCapPub ideas
- Improved privacy with E2EE ("encrypted p2p" even a better goal)

Whew! An improved fediverse?

"Uh, Christine, this sounds like a lot, do you think the fediverse can take this on?"

For this reason @blaine says of both ActivityPub done right and Bluesky done right, "they're the same picture" (The Office meme goes here, yes)

To a large degree, I think @blaine is right

Of course, adapting an existing system as deployed isn't easy.

I will say though that I think if Bluesky were to become *actually decentralized* it would look a lot like ActivityPub in terms of having directed messaging. This will also introduce similar challenges around eg replies, etc.

Let's leave the ocap stuff to the side for now, then. Let's focus on what Bluesky and the fediverse have to learn from each other.

- The fediverse should adopt content-addressed storage and decentralized identity
- Bluesky should adopt real, actual federation and decentralization

To the end of the fediverse, perhaps I sound bitter, "they didn't adopt ActivityPub the way *I* saw it!"

The truth is that Mastodon didn't, but Mastodon also saved ActivityPub. It then painted a vision of the future that wasn't, at least, what Jessica Tallon and I expected of it. But it saved AP.

When I laid out the ideas of OCapPub to various fediverse developers, the response was "this sounds cool but I have *no idea* how to retrofit a Rails/Django app for this kind of actor-oriented design".

And they were right.

Remember when I said Conway's Law flows in both directions?

The fediverse and Bluesky, at great effort, could learn a lot from each other in the immediate term.

In the longer term, neither is implementing the ocap vision I think is critical for the big vision, and in a way, I think maybe neither can be easily rearchitected to achieve it. Well, not yet.

And perhaps this is all my *massive* Cassandra complex speaking. I won't deny that I have one, for better or worse

Still, despite all I have said about both Bluesky and the fediverse technically, it is because I want a hopeful direction for all of us. Secure collaboration. More important than ever.