Gregory's ServerJack Dorsey says if AT protocol has a CEO, it fails.
I agree.
I guess Bluesky should decentralize soon.
|
52 comments
 Here’s what I don’t understand: why does Jack Dorsey pretend that ActivityPub doesn’t exist?   @atomicpoet I would tend to think because he believes he will get enough screentime to make with his own protocol, which will give home more control and therefore more opportunity to monetarize @atomicpoet ha! Had I read the posts before those, I would have been more puzzled an would not have come to this answer  @atomicpoet@mastodon.social Easy: Because it's become an existential threat to his business, just like Linux against Microsoft. Jack doesn't want to participate in a distributed, open world. He wants an empire he can control. @yuki2501 @atomicpoet YUP. All the while pretending like he’s some kind of man of the people. Where have I heard this song before?  @yuki2501 @atomicpoet it is even sadder than that - he believes that he is only one who "gets" it. Any competition or open source entity is non-existant. @atomicpoet Because he doesn't control it. People who build things with open protocols don't become worshipped as tech gods. They may become names recognized in communities, but they don't get rich.  @packy he doesn’t control at protocol either. he has one board seat and no control. so if it’s control he’s after he’s doing a terrible job of that. @MikeBeas Okay, how about the "not invented here" phenomenon? Rather than working on ActivityPub, something that already exists, he'll make sure BlueSky reinvents the wheel. I still believe the credit for the invention is most of it. Jack can't be lauded as a tech innovator if he just embraces existing technology. I don't care if he's one seat on the board: he's getting ALL the credit for BlueSky. @MikeBeas Oh, you're one of THOSE people. What sucks about ActivityPub, and why couldn't that suckage be fixed by extending the protocol? Please be specific. Just reiterating that it sucks doesn't clarify your current standing as a Jack Dorsey fanboy. @packy i’m not a dorsey fanboy. i couldn’t care less about him. atproto isn’t his system. he gave people money but he didn’t create anything. they did. and activitypub has moderation only based on what your server admin wants to moderate, zero true account portability, usernames based on your host that change if you move, and a lot of other terrible foundational choices. you can’t retrofit fixes for all of this stuff into the protocol. @packy If you want to know why they didn’t use ActivityPub after they considered it, here’s their own explanation of the shortcomings. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/28/six-months-in-thoughts-on-the-current-post-twitter-diaspora-options/ @MikeBeas but also, why aren't you including @atomicpoet in your replies? I mean, **he's** the one asking the question. I was just speculating on the answer. @packy @atomicpoet oh I didn’t realize I had accidentally over written his user name @atomicpoet @packy the blue sky team evaluate it all the options and decided none of them were good enough. I don’t care what you think. You’re not building anything @MikeBeas@mas.to @atomicpoet @packy bluesky has built something very cool, cooler than what we’re using here, and I’m just gonna use that and be happy @atomicpoet @packy I said they had a cooler protocol and activitypub. You gotta get over it.  @atomicpoet Because be wants to believe he’s “the only one”. His ego can’t allow him to not be in control. @atomicpoet a very normal symptom of a techie. Admitting that it did would undermine his own efforts. And if course, in his own head, he has a very clear picture of how his own stuff works but figuring out alternatives takes effort.  @atomicpoet a borderline conspiracy theory I'm wondering about is whether Nostr was created solely to prevent the development efforts in decentralized social media from gathering around ActivityPub. In a "divide and conquer" kind of way.   @atomicpoet He has a consistent stance about this since years: https://twitter.com/meduzen/status/1204858614789427207 @atomicpoet And there’s also this one where he says centralization is bad, but stilll the first decentralization move from Twitter was all about crypto: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1510314535671922689 @atomicpoet @atomicpoet competition. Also it was easy to understand that he does not believe in open standarts.  @atomicpoet Because he wants to pretend it's illegitimate. In his way of thinking, if he deigns to notice ActivityPub, then ActivityPub gains legitimacy. He could also (& very likely does) have contempt for anything that's not paid for by VC funding, or designed with monetization in mind. @atomicpoet Because it doesn't make him money, because he's a fucking techbro, and I don't know why so many people seem to be surprised about this.  @atomicpoet If I had to guess, I'd say it's because he doesn't see any way to make quick billions off of it and it's a threat to his other investments  @atomicpoet bluesky's official website says "we couldn't find a way to retrofit our ideas into ActivityPub" without elaborating further, which sounds like BS because AP is an extremely extensible protocol. @atomicpoet one argument I read somewhere: With Mastodon, if the server you are on is completely down, you cannot move your data. With BlueSky that should be possible. And it was claimed that retrofitting such a feature to ActivityPub (not talking about Mastodon) was considered difficult. Sorry, I cannot remember the source, perhaps it was https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/255#issuecomment-1287953987 @kontrafiktion It's hard to do with Mastodon, but it's easy to do with Zot -- which is what Hubzilla uses for nomadic identity. Hubzilla also uses ActivityPub, by the way.  @atomicpoet because it would be harder from him to control it (not impossible). Best to put on blinders and ignore all other options that aren't VC funded than ever acknowledge another (better) way might exist.  @atomicpoet What value is he bringing over ActivityPub then? Tech bro gotta find something and pee on it till it smells like tech bro @GhostOnTheHalfShell first off he’s not bringing anything. he has no real power at bluesky. the actual CEO has said so herself. but atproto does bring benefits over activitypub, like the ability to define many types of apps and their relevant entities (posts, etc) without polluting each other’s namespaces, total account portability (including post history) even if your original host is no longer available, etc. it actually is a better protocol. |
Jack Dorsey doesn’t want AT protocol to be capable of DMs.
That means they’re probably not coming to Bluesky either.