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Top-level
 Conway's Law says that a technical architecture reflects the social structure under which it was built. But the reverse is also true. The social structures *we can have* are made possible by the affordances of the tools we have available. "Tech problems/social problems": false dichotomy. 99 comments
Remember when I said that IMO @jay.bsky.team is the right person to lead Bluesky and that I am sympathetic with many design decisions of Bluesky (even if critical of them for being non-decentralized)? Bluesky is building what they can for a scale big objective. The tech flows from goals. 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.  The vision laid out for the fediverse, both independently in my writings and even in Jay Graber and I's joint proposal... well, it's a big lift. @spritely would like to see if we can retrofit our version onto ActivityPub. Time will tell if that's a separate thing. 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. Let's take another tea break. (And another bathroom break. This teacup is massive.) We're getting close to done, I promise. Just two sections left, they're both much shorter. Then I can finally brave reading my notifications. Maybe. == TEA BREAK THE THIRD: BEVERAGE TRIFORCE ==  @cwebber I've bookmarked more posts today than I have in weeks. Will definitely be reading over all of this. Hello, I am back again. Did you miss me? I still am not reading notifications. Help I started writing this summary at 11am and it is now 6pm here I have wasted a whole day of work But I have tea, and I also flossed my teeth, and it is time to resume this thread. If you are here, you know why.  @cwebber that sounds like such a Gossip Girl way to return to the conversation ๐ Before we go any further, earlier I mentioned the US House of Representatives, and here I am giving a MASSIVE content warning for transphobia But @evangreer is the coolest fucking person for standing up to Rep. Mace at the Project Libery summit https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-11-21-transgender-digital-rights-activist-confronts-hate-monger-rep-nancy-mace-at-internet-summit/ What I am trying to say is I don't have many heroes but @evangreer is absolutely a heroine of mine You should donate to @fight they are some of the only people doing sensible advocacy against terrible internet laws Also fuck TERFs But anyway Also you have reached it: the third secret egg You have now collected the egg triforce and can defeat Gender Ganon If you want to The power was in you all along But let's continue. It's time, we have reached the second to last section: "Preparing for the organization as a future adversary." I love this one because I love that phrase, and the best part is that the Bluesky team came up with it, "the organization is a future adversary". It's genuinely good and self reflective Occasionally an org creates a phrase like this, and back in the day Google had "Don't be evil" And yeah, people criticize Google for never having been sincere but it gave an opportunity for people inside and outside the organization to critique Google on its own stated values. That was good. It was *at least* good insofar as the moment Google retired the phrase as never really meaning anything anyway, as evil as Google may have been before, Google got *noticably* worse. To Bluesky people internally: keep that phrase going as long as you can, and use it reflectively. As opposed to Google's "Don't be evil", a commandment for the everpresent, "the organization is a future adversary" acknowledges the realities of the future, that it is uncertain, and in fact, that power-dynamics-wise, there will be pressure to make things worse. Making design decisions in the present which guard against the future is one of the most important things we can do. It is one of the most important reasons to choose FOSS licenses, for instance, which provide an exit plan and also counterbalance against temptation to enshittify a project.  @cwebber good work here. i *really* detest the seemingly objective fact that a google can't be p2p, but i can't crack it either. though considering the SEO vulns that google has, i wonder if even google "works" To this end, Bluesky's goals of "credible exit" are actually very important. It creates a similar pressure for the organization itself to stay true as long as it can, even acknowledging the organization as a future adversary, and actually preparing for it. I am pro-Bluesky-credible-exit. And there *will* be a lot of pressure: Bluesky has taken VC money as investments; the pattern of such is that early on, things are very good and flexible, and after some time, the investors start placing pressure to enshittify. I have seen good peoples' orgs clawed from their hands. It happens. This happens despite the very best people with the very best intentions. Talk to early Twitter co-founders and they will tell you the org that things became was not the org that they envisioned. A future adversary indeed. So we should plan for it today. Before we continue further, I have done about every job imaginable in a FOSS project/organization. Fundraising, by far, is the worst, and the most stressful. It's incredibly hard to raise anything to do anything. I think that's worth acknowledging. The structure of an organization does matter. There's a reason that @spritely is a 501(c)(3) in the US. Any money we take in is a donation: we aren't "delivering on an investment" (though we must deliver on *results*) Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation, also interesting A Public Benefit Corporation has a mission for the public good, but can take investments in the way a nonprofit cannot. This also means it can move much faster. Given the influx of users to Bluesky, taking investments this way may have been the only load handling route available this fast. Again, this is all tuned to "What is Bluesky trying to build?" Bluesky might not be a good "decentralized Twitter replacement", but it is a good "Twitter replacement" with the possibility of "credible exit" That Bluesky is providing needs for many users who are looking for refuge from a white supremacist site *today* is something to pause and acknowledge the difficulty and scope of doing so quickly and in the moment. I'm glad Bluesky is here at this stressful geopolitical moment in history. There will be a lot of pressure soon from investors: run ads, make premium accounts that do not actually make sense in a decentralized way, so on and so on. In this way, "credible exit" is the most important thing for Bluesky the organization and its community to push on *today*  Why give them soooooo much space? Did they pay you for it? What I will *not* accept is the goalposts being moved on decentralization and federation. Bluesky is neither decentralized nor federated. If Bluesky wants to become so, it has an enormous amount of work to do, particularly in terms of architectural design. Blogs are decentralized, Google is not. Bluesky will face every pressure to be enshittified. Bluesky has even, correctly, acknowledged this. It is up to Bluesky and its community to rise to the challenge of "credible exit" knowing that this is a likely, perhaps inevitable, risk. The org is indeed a future adversary. So what now? And here it is. We have reached the final part. I am not even going to take a tea break. I am not even going to go to the bathroom. I kinda have to, but we are powering through. We have reached the conclusion of this megathread, and "summary" of an equally long article. I laid out definitions of "decentralization" and "federation", and Bluesky meets neither, without major rearchitecting or moving the goalposts on those terms, which I cannot accept. However, "credible exit" is a good goal for Bluesky. Bluesky created that term and it's a good and feasible goal. I laid out a strong critique, but let me end on a call to empathy. Bluesky is built by good people, and the fediverse is built by good people. Neither reflect the designs I presently would like to see today, but ultimately these are built by humans trying their absolute hardest. The infrastructure we build reflects our social dynamics, and our social dynamics are made possible by our infrastructure. This thread has been long, and I have said everything I have to say. Thanks for listening. I hope we can build a good future for each other. ๐ @cwebber It's taking away from mastodon for no good reason. It's also taking away the opportunity to run more nostr relays and form a twitter like bubble on nostr instead of supporting an unnecessary project like bluesky - which many have written about. We dont need centralization like bluesky is offering. We can do better now If there was no mastodon and no nostr, then maybe yes, but it's not 2006 anymore, so today, a replacement for twitter would not look like bluesky. Today twitter would look much more like nostr, maybe mastodon. Recommending bluesky in any way in this day and age doesn't sound really serious tbh. @cwebber FWIW, I'm not interested in anyone's proprietary platform, ever again. I will revert to emails and text messages and Signal. But Mastodon instances are the best response I've seen.  @cwebber I took a 2 hour nap. This is still going?!?!? You're a trooper. @cwebber Yeah. Fig leaves aren't enough, but they're not nothing either. They are an acknowledgement of a problem, no more. But they are that much. No one uses a fig leaf to cover shame without a little shame.   @cwebber โi still am not reading notificationsโ ๐๐๐  @cwebber You have given me - and all of us - an excellent exploration of ActivityPub and Bluesky. For me, itโs the best one Iโve read on here, period. So no, you havenโt โmissed a day of workโ. Quite to the content, youโve done a good dayโs work, and then some.   @cwebber One of the things I teach in my information ethics classes (to MBA and BA Management) students is that ethical excellence is a fundamental part of technical excellence. |
Gregory's Server
It's for that reason that @spritely, while aiming for a *socially collaborative* revolution, is first focusing on a *technical* revolution.
It's too hard to build massively, securely collaborative tools right now. With Spritely's tools, p2p ocap secure tech is the *default output*.