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Top-level
 So first of all, thank you @bnewbold for not only encouraging me to write my first piece, but being so extremely lovely in your response. I genuinely mean that. And I'd like to go meta for a moment before we get into everything I have to say, because the discourse has been interesting. 30 comments
These days, one kinda gets the sense that "civil discourse" is dead, and maybe even undesirable. Everyone else is unpleasant, and if you even try to be thoughtful, you're going to be taken advantage of or actually dragged for it, so don't bother. This exchange has made me feel hope that's not true. I was critical of both Bluesky and the existing fediverse in my writeup, though I was more critical in my analysis of Bluesky. Nonetheless, Bluesky's team by and large were encouraging and thoughtful and expressed appreciation that *I* was attempting to be thoughtful. Grateful for that. Communities on both Bluesky and the fediverse were also receptive, much more than one would expect. This was nice to see. I did get a few criticisms that I was too harsh or even too nice, but not too many. In the aggregate, reception was positive. As with last time, I'm doing these threads on both Bluesky and the fediverse. This time I'm putting the links to each of you earlier in the thread. Feel free to see what the other side is saying: https://bsky.app/profile/dustyweb.bsky.social/post/3ld7im7htns2e I'll also say that I've been doing this in an incredibly stressful time, *on top of* a mountain of work. We're doing a fundraiser btw over at @spritely. If some of the things I talk about resonate with you, maybe look at our work and consider donating: https://spritely.institute/donate/ It's difficult to know how much I should talk about @spritely. The previous analysis wasn't about it, but it came up a little because our work there aligns directly with where things should go. For the most part, neither piece is about it. But it will come up more later on this time. Anyway, for the most part the reason it'll come up more later is because @bnewbold specifically put an ask for me to talk about it in his piece. So it will, but later. In the meanwhile, what I'm trying to say is that I'm a very tired and overworked woman and these are my words, not my work's. So the title of the piece I just wrote, yeah? It's "Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization" https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/ But the reason for that title is that I thought it was kind of funny that I was replying inline to a lot of @bnewbold's blogpost like it was an email thread Of course whenever I get some email subject like "Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Fwd: Re:" I'm like oh god I really don't want to read this thing and I thought, maybe I shouldn't name this blogpost that But @mlinksva told me that he thought it was funny and perfect and to keep it and so I did And so here we go, oh god again, not another reply in the email thread right? Well for my part this is the end, I am not *blogging* about this again, not on my blog Well not unless something *extremely* saucy and impossible to ignore happens Otherwise else this is it. THIS IS IT I PROMISE Also last time I hid three easter eggs in the thread, and I did that just because it was getting so *long* I thought it would be funny if I got replies that said "I found the egg" and at the end said "congrats you found all three eggs you collected the egg triforce, you can defeat gender ganon" This ended up turning out to be an interesting metric, one I was too lazy to *formally* measure, but I guess someone else could Friends I gotta tell you people loved the eggs in both places but the fediverse did way better on collecting the eggs Congratulations fediverse, you beat gender ganon But one way or another people did, after all, seem to actually read deep in the blogpost and especially deep in the thread, which leads to a question, why am I doing this to myself, why am I re-articulating what's already a long-ass blogpost into a long-ass thread? WHY AM I DOING IT AGAIN Well the last blogpost was 24 pages printed and took me 8 hours to summarize and this one is definitely shorter, it's only.. oh shit it's 20 pages oh fuck okay I've been awake since 4am and getting this post ready since 5am working 12 hour days lately haha it's no problem I'm gonna need more tea. One more meta thing before we get into it. I want to say up front: working on and building systems is deeply personal, and deeply emotional. We are talking about systems people pour their lives into. Trust me I know. It's worth doing a critique, but it's also worth acknowledging the human aspect. So anyway. We are going to get into it. And the further we go, the more serious my critiques are going to get. Just because I'm being nice doesn't mean my analysis won't be harsh at points. Nonetheless let's try to be decent to each other. We all deserve that. Thanks. 💜 If you can't tell, my narration style buries the lede quite a bit. So lemme tell you what you can expect up front: - Some fluffier bits I thought were good framing (cotd...) - A defense and analysis of my claim that Bluesky's approach explodes unsustainably ("quadratically") as you try to decentralize it (cotd ...) Oh yeah and just like last time I WILL NOT BE READING NOTIFICATIONS until I get through this Sorry, it's impossible. I'll never get through it otherwise. So see your comments on the other side! So yes, definitely burying the lede, we are now at "Interesting notes and helpful acknowledgements" Bear with me, we'll get to the deeper analysis, but this does help frame things I promise So first of all, @bnewbold was very nice: > I am so *happy* and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public. Her writing sheds light on substantive differences between protocols and projects, and raises the bar on analysis in this space. Aw thx 💜 WHOOPS I FRAGMENTED MY THREAD CONTINUE HERE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/113647312428959527   @cwebber @bnewbold It's cool to see this kind of reasoned back-and-forth on design, with the various intentions, requirements, non-requirements, and engineering compromises run through. I really appreciate reading it, and hopefully this helps at least some folks come to the realization that there are many ways to come at complex systems and how changes in requirements (or sometimes seemingly random small choices) can make large differences in the design you ultimately end up with. @cwebber A vital prerequisite to civil discourse is a level of comfort with possibly being wrong and admitting it. Coincidentally, that level of emotional and intellectual maturity has been sanded off our collective psyche by a quarter century of adversarial social engineering. 😫 |
Gregory's Server
I tried really hard to be fair and not mean in my writing last time. It is, genuinely, the way I prefer to behave. Nonetheless, I was expecting a lot of negative pushback, maybe from the Bluesky staff, but especially either from Bluesky's team or fans or actually even the fediverse.