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Chris Trottier

Believe it or not, most people who work at Big Social are *not* social media nerds, and have zero interest in how the technology works.

When they look at Mastodon, their response is pretty much the same as everyone else's: they throw up their hands and say, "This is too complicated!"

And then they close their browser tab.

17 Nov 2022 at 22:48 | Open on mastodon.social
6 comments
Chris Trottier

The only way Big Social challenges the Fediverse is through small competing skunkworks projects.

Which has actually happened with Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky project.

And to be honest, I'm skeptical about Blue Sky for many reasons—which I may talk about in a separate thread.

But more to the point, Blue Sky has been around for 4 years—and why aren't we using Blue Sky?

17 Nov 2022 at 22:51 | Open on mastodon.social
Darnell Clayton :verified:

@atomicpoet They do not know how to extract money if they Federate too. That is what is holding up the Blue Sky development in my honest opinion.

17 Nov 2022 at 23:31 | Open on one.darnell.one
Adam Dalliance

@darnell @atomicpoet
They were stalled arguing about blockchain for almost all that time.

Dorsey took over, and they have since basically all but abandoned any blockchaininess, released a couple of papers, and got some test code running.

Their plans are ambitions and unproven, and seem to amount to still having algorithms written by advertisers deciding what you see. Just you get to pay to pick which advertisers wrote the algorithm.

I think they wasted 3 years and are now doing work but I don't think their incentives and aims are for the communal good.

@darnell @atomicpoet
They were stalled arguing about blockchain for almost all that time.

Dorsey took over, and they have since basically all but abandoned any blockchaininess, released a couple of papers, and got some test code running.

Their plans are ambitions and unproven, and seem to amount to still having algorithms written by advertisers deciding what you see. Just you get to pay to pick which advertisers wrote the algorithm.

18 Nov 2022 at 0:01 | Open on boing.world
Chris Trottier

@pre @darnell There's another plain matter: I don't think Dorsey's investing a lot of money on Blue Sky. The people who work there either don't have the time to work on basic things like DNS management *or* they're just asleep at the wheel.

Which doesn't bode well for the future of the project.

18 Nov 2022 at 0:07 | Open on mastodon.social
Darnell Clayton :verified: replied to Chris

@atomicpoet @pre I am surprised that Blue Sky is this far behind after several years in development. I know ActivityPub was not built in a day, but at least there was progress being made over it’s development.

I know there are other protocols around aspiring to do what ActivityPub has done, but most lack widespread adoption (basically having a million active users).

18 Nov 2022 at 2:19 | Open on one.darnell.one
Chris Trottier replied to Darnell Clayton :verified:

@darnell @pre You know what I think is crazy, but awesome? How individuals folks are like, "You know what? I want to build something so I'm just going to make it happen." And they do it. I've been talking to a whole lot of devs like @dansup, @thatonecalculator, and @Are0h and they're doing more than a billionaire with paid staff at his disposal.

18 Nov 2022 at 2:34 | Open on mastodon.social
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