That definitely makes it accessible to newcomers. But costs are going to gatekeep smaller communities from hosting relays as the network scales. There are plenty of obscure conversations happening on the far corners of the network that don’t concern the majority, requiring a full network mirror of this activity just increases cost for minimal perceived benefit.

There does need to be some level of seeding, I think the big push for getting starter packs and the like into Mastodon is an example of that need. At the same time, it’s hard to justify spending the money on extra storage and computer just so I can see posts on furry bluesky or some other niche but highly active community.

Being subscription based is what makes it feasible for smaller instances to exist on the fediverse. If every instance had to be a full mirror of the network only a few small groups could afford to host instances.

Almost nothing decentralized yet…

You can host your own PDS (making it distributed but not decentralized), there is an ability to host a relay but hosting a relay requires mirroring the entire network instead of just subscribed nodes like AP, making it cost prohibitive for communities to organize their own relays on ATProto.

If bluesky is serious about decentralization then they need to make mirroring the entire network optional, allow relays’ firehoses to only to stream the activity from subscribed accounts from their users and federate with relays that don’t mirror the entire network.

I would curious to see if you could access piefed using Voyager for Lemmy as a front end. It’s about the only decent app for Lemmy that doesn’t squash things on my iPhone mini with text zoom enabled

Thank you for sharing, that’s exactly what I was looking for!

Humans are social creatures by nature. The goal should be to improve our social interactions instead of letting others exploit them for profit

You can’t put that tube back in the tube of toothpaste

Corporate rot sounds better than just rot as enshittification happens on purpose due to seeking to extract maximum value from something where as rot is just a natural consequence of atrophy over time

I’ve read over the documentation a few times and maybe I’ve missed it somewhere else but I’m not aware of any option to host a relay yet. As far as I know only self hosting PDS’s are an option now (which only handle your own data and authentication but still relies on a relay to serve you content from the rest of the network) and app views (which are the front ends that sort and show content)

So in a sense bluesky is distributed and portable within the ATProto network, but still centralized until other entities can host relays and interopt (or opt out of interoperability) within the network.

I don’t particularly agree that it’s “greatly increased” by it. I’m on a server with them and I don’t see that much many more spammers. It seems like fearful hyperbole, I’m not saying there aren’t any I’ve certainly seen a few but it’s not as common as most people think it is.

My mastodon instance rarely ever sees spam despite having open signups either. Maybe my problem is I’m worried about future problems rather than the current state of how things are. My concern comes from personal experience with legacy socials like facebook and twitter when it comes to spam that I report and the frustration of when I get the automoderation notification back and they determine it didn’t break their guidelines.

I don’t want the cesspool of spam to become a problem on the fediverse as these experiences were a major reason I decided to join it.

I appreciate your comments again. You’ve softened how I feel on the challenge of balancing open user sign ups with moderating malicious users.

You are still using the bluesky relay to connect to the network, right?

Have they opened up federation to support other relays yet?

I appreciate your take and the thought put into the reply. I don’t mean to gatekeep the fediverse to keep normies out because that isn’t my desire at all. Merely my stance is while I believe that low engagement is very undesirable, high volume of scammers/spammers are equally undesirable.

I’m also thinking of things from a moderator/instance owner point of view where trying to defend your instance from illegal activity, spam, and harmful content is greatly increased by having open sign ups. If the majority of engagement on your posts are from pussy in bio accounts then that is a put off from the end user as well.

Trolls and assholes will always get through if they are motivated enough, fediverse platforms usually gives the end user enough tools to block them.

Your perspective has a lot of valid points as well, I think that there is a compromise somewhere that is slightly more effective than a simple captcha that could also streamline onboarding and validating users. I don’t know if it’s as easy as you suggest to ban spammers automatically but I’m all ears for hearing solutions. I think the fediverse is especially equipped for cooperation that could make that kind of automoderation more successful than on legacy socials

I don’t want the fediverse to be an exclusive club, I am already annoyed about how things can be an echo chamber even worse than legacy socials here at times. My hope that bridges and utilities will come that help people follow each other from bluesky/mastodon and allow account migrations from either as well.

It also acts as a filter to keep threat actors and spammers out. Open sign ups are actually a bad thing for the overall health of the network. Yes it also keeps out the lowest common denominator normies but those aren’t exactly the ones who contribute to the network as a whole anyway

This isn’t capitalism, there isn’t a need for growth for growth’s sake. There does need to be a more simplified way to onboard users but not at the cost of the health of the network.

Bluesky is not decentralized if you have to use their relay to access the network from your PDS

If the reason people only want bluesky is because it’s Elon-less Twitter then they are stupid and wrong (or just ignorant). But then they can move to the next thing in 5 years when the enshittification happens.

Mastodon doesn’t silo its users, that’s what federation is for. Everything you post on the public timeline is essentially public for everyone that’s on a federated instance that hasn’t gotten blocked.

You shouldn’t have shared your information with someone who is untrustworthy then. Data sharing is opt-in.

The sad thing is you have to balance the costs of requiring your customer to use 2FA with the risk of losing business because of it and the risk of losing reputation because your customers got hacked and suffered loss.

The sad thing is some (actuall most) people are brain dead, you will lose business if you make them use a complicated password or MFA and it puts them in the position to make a hard call.

They took the easy route and gave the customer the option to use MfA if they wished and unfortunately a lot of people declined. Those people should not have the ability to claim damages (or vote, for that matter)

They exploded

Apple is a hardware company first, not an advertising and services company like Google and Roku, and not a literal massive online retailer like Amazon.

Apple TV is the only one that doesn’t have ads on its home screen. I use an Apple TV to play all my physical media that has been ripped to mov and re-encoded with handbrake

I have to preface with my comment with the fact that I’m not someone who would be targeted for harassment because of my identity, so I can’t fully appreciate the distress a lot of people who are part of minority groups have to go through on platforms like X, Reddit’s, or Meta’s.

But I hate the argument that we can’t/shouldn’t federate with them because they are nazis, transphobes, etc. 99.9% of people on those platforms are not that.

Like the author said there are people like that already on the fediverse. We have tools to block it at the user or moderator level. We have the ability to migrate to instances that have higher or more lax levels of moderation.