You're right, but can we stick with Blue Ocean and Red Ocean as metaphors? 0 to 1 makes sense, but 1 to N loses it, and the whole framing reeks of pseudomathematics and math envy (which there is way too much of in the tech industry), when we have a perfectly good metaphor from competition in natural selection. Also the tech industry has way too much renaming-things-with-less-intuitive-terminology-to-seem-original.
While relays are among the more intensive parts of AT Protocol infrastructure, their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. What is truly expensive and difficult is something that will be immutably so regardless of how centralized or decentralized you are: moderation.
If $30 a month is too much for you, then you probably should be doing something other than trying to run a relay. It is just not a significant amount of money.
$30 a month is a pretty massive costs for such a program. Why does it require such a beefy VPS, is it just the initial bootstrapping that requires such resources?
Because if you want to relay every single public event for every single user on the entire atproto network in real-time to many consuming apps and services… that's gonna cost something. Not that it costs a lot, but to expect what a relay does to be infinitely cheap is to not understand what it's doing or why it's doing it.
"Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay.
And I honestly think this is one of the fundamental problems with the push back towards protocols and decentralization. We're overestimating the bandwidth and capabilities of the average user and we haven't fixed the problems that pushed everyone towards centralization in the first place.
Take me, for instance. I am not only capable of running my own Mastodon or Atproto data server+relay -- I'm technically capable of writing my own ActivityPub or Atproto app.
But I'm currently sitting with accounts on bsky.app and mastodon.social -- the biggest most centralized "instances" (yes, I know, but it reasonably describes the problem). This is because I do not have the time or mental bandwidth to even pick an "instance" that would be better suited to me and migrate, let alone run my own.
And this is doubly and triply true for the average person who doesn't have the technical abilities I have.
As a result, both Mastodon and Bluesky are still practically centralized to a large degree. An overwhelming majority (more than 90% last I found data) of Bluesky users are hosted by bsky.app. Similarly on Mastodon, a large plurality of users (~20%) are on Mastodon.social. Mastodon's obviously doing better than Bluesky in this regard, but it also has about a quarter of the overall traction, and I'd honestly put that down to Bluesky's apparent centralization which makes it a lot easier for people to join and wrap their heads around it.
This isn't about "average user". Relays have nothing to do with using atproto as a user. They're about developers making new apps.
By "most people" it's implied we're talking about most people who want to run a web app in their spare time. Do you mean a different definition? If you want to run a web app (which is the only reason you'd want a relay) and you're able to pool with ten other developers who want to do the same, you can make the cost to $3/mo. Is that feasible? What do you normally pay for web app hosting?
And again, if you're a hobbyist developer, you'd just use a community relay that already exists and is free. I assume that, if you want to run your own, you have a specific reason to do so.
You're getting hung up on the relay distinction (which is fair). But I'm not talking about relay's here.
And to be clear, I'm talking about the push back towards protocols and decentralization as the solution to enshittification and lock in. I fully believe decentralized protocols and the ability for us to run federated instances for our communities is valuable in and of itself. What I'm arguing against here is the degree to which the pro-social tech community has coalesced around this push as the one and only solution to the problems of enshittification.
And in that context, the average user is everything. And the push fundamentally misunderstands both how enshittification works (email is fully decentralized but still enshittified to a large degree) and the capabilities of the average user (not just their technical capabilities but their cognitive load capacity).
If you want, s/relay/pds/ and my point may become clearer. Or, even, s/relay+pds/app/. The point is pds+relay+app functions as instance for the average user. And the average user doesn't have the time, energy, or cognitive capacity to pick an instance that would be the right fit for them. Which means these decentralized networks are still heavily centralized. And if they remain heavily centralized, those central players still exercise an enormous amount of power over the network.
Including the power to enshittify it.
We can't solve enshittification if we're not cognizant of what the average user is capable of. And that capability extends to more than just "technical understanding". So far, I don't think the protocols push, in so far as it is being pushed as the solution to enshittification, is grappling with that adequately.
I view Bluesky as being decentralized-optional. It's cool because you actually can join first and wrap your head around it later. You can continue using your account you created on the fully 1st-party stack, and you still have the option to switch to self-hosting the parts you care about, without losing your posts or followers.
- If you just want to use your domain name as a username, you set a DNS record.
- If what you care about is the client, you can build your own website or native app. You don't really even need to host a server other than for your own static assets, since the app can request Bluesky network data directly via the logged-in user's PDS (they even have CORS headers!)
- If what you care about is data sovereignty, you can self host your PDS (personal data server) on a low-end VPS. It's cheap because it pretty much just holds your data, passes events to Relays, and proxies data requests to your preferred AppView.
- If what you care about is not needing to trust Bluesky to reliably gather and collate events from each PDS, then you'd need to host a Relay ($30/month) and an AppView (even more expensive) so you'd be best off pooling resources with other people you trust. But that's kind of the nuclear option.
- With a narrower scope though: if you noticed that Bluesky was censoring a handful of legitimate accounts and you still wanted to follow them, I think you could probably have a personal Relay+AppView that only listens to the censored accounts' PDS's, and proxies other requests to the 1st party AppView. (I'm not 100% sure if that would be allowed.)
>"Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay.
I don't think that was a recommendation for people to do, but to demonstrate that it doesn't require much in the way of resources. That VM could probably host hundreds of people, since relays scale and de-dupe shared content.
If someone said that email or a personal website was inexpensive and could be hosted on a cheap VM, I don't think you'd make a comment like the above dismissing it as impractical: the idea is that if it's that cheap, then there are people that can host cheap/free (maybe ad supported) relays, similar to how cheap/free webmail exists today.
> "Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay.
??? that's not the point. the goal isn't that some non-technical 40 year old will run their own relay. the goal is that relays will be cheap enough to run that there can be hundreds of relays for developers of apps to choose from.
relays are DEVELOPER facing only, meaning the developer of the app chooses which to use, and can even use none at all and build the functionality of the relay into their app itself.
no matter where your account is hosted, it will be crawled by every relay (unless it's banned from some of them) so users or people who "don't have the bandwidth to think about this" don't have to worry about relays at all. anyone who will ACTUALLY BENEFIT from an independently hosted relay (app dev) will perceive them as an incredibly marginal cost.
> This is because I do not have the time or mental bandwidth to even pick an "instance" that would be better suited to me and migrate, let alone run my own.
Idk what to say to that. So I'll just say that you can run `npm create pds` and have a single-user PDS hosted for free on Cloudflare in minutes.
But I think what you meant to say (stop me if I'm wrong) isn't that you don't have the "mental bandwidth", it's more that you (and the average user) don't actually _want_ to migrate because there's no tangible benefit.
To this I would say: migration is not the path to spreading users out across instances at a large scale. Migration to me is more of an insurance against a service going down or turning evil. The real way to get people to spread out across different PDSes is to make it so there are more "entry points" to the atmosphere, so more people are onboarded to the atmosphere in more places other than Bluesky, where they can sign up and automatically be on another instance. If more independent atproto apps are created with their own PDSes for onboarding, that's what will solve the problem imo, not encouraging users to migrate (although that can also be done at smaller scales, as Blacksky and Eurosky have proven)
>To this I would say: migration is not the path to spreading users out across instances at a large scale. Migration to me is more of an insurance against a service going down or turning evil.
I think people aren't paying enough attention this part right here: I think the architecture of atproto creates a different set of incentives. People running communities are more likely to face community pressure to ban users, or de-federate with other communities they don't like, and your open/decentralized network fractures apart, creating little silos.
People running infrastructure connecting them to a global network/resource are less likely to feel those pressures. No one asks an email provider to ban another webmail host. The architecture colors the perception.
The biggest problem Bluesky has had is that by virtue of being the only effective relay at launch, people viewed it more like the former and less like the latter. But I think if we start to see more places like Blacksky and Eurosky get mindshare, we can shift it back.
An average user does not need to run their own node for decentralization to work. It just needs to be cheap and easy enough for enough of technical users to run
> Talking to random people about anything, and talking to girls, and talking to girls romantically are all separate skills from talking to someone about an interest
This is entirely contradicted by my experiences. Broad generalizations and generalizations about broads are usually wrong.
the author wrote this in the Leaflet comments sections:
"""
through some upsetting turn of events, someone put this on hackernews and started a piranha feeding frenzy of speculation about what / who im referring to here. so just to be clear:
i wrote this bulleted list in a couple minutes as a way to rant about the lack of charity i was noticing in 2 places
- my family, where 2 members aren't speaking to each other for petty reasons, looking for the other to capitulate and admit they're the aggressor
- on bluesky, where users are blaming every outage on "vibe coding"
if you took extra meaning from it, i'm sorry or congrats!
Yeah that pretty much lines up with my expectations - I've seen the type of behavior described both in real life and in various online spaces. Luckily never ticking all of the boxes at once, but they don't need to to cause a lot of needless suffering to themselves and collateral damage to the people around them.
The worst situations usually were if someone with this kind of self-sabotaging coping mechanism for some kind of trauma (because that's what it usually seems to be in my experience) ended up in some kind of moderator position in some on-line community, which they tended to seek out to get more control to cope with their fears.
Having lived through intractable family conflict before, I believe it is a good analogy as to why the continual reinvention of social media will be a fruitless endeavour.
That Bluesky comment snuck up on me and got a good laugh from me!
You mean the fine folks over at Bluesky, the social media network built around isolation, intolerance, and refusing to listen to other’s POV, exhibit these same character flaws?!
> do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, especially those that you have never met or otherwise spoken to
> do not seek to understand those you do not already understand
Are these not reflected in your comment?
For unrelated reasons (looking up the author of a quote in the bsd fortune file) I was looking at François de La Rochefoucauld's wikipedia page and learned that he wrote this in the intro for his book of maxims on human behavior:
"... the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities. After that I guarantee that he will be the first to endorse them and he will believe that they do credit to the human spirit."
The basis for its existence is to supply a platform for people who want to isolate from ideas and narratives they find uncomfortable, so they self-select into echo chambers that cater to their preexisting ideologies. That's their whole business model!
> platform for people who want to isolate from ideas and narratives they find uncomfortable
Ahh, like how if you say the word "cis" on Twitter, you get banned because the idea that gender is not binary is an idea that the owner of Twitter finds uncomfortable wants to isolate the audience from. So he promotes his own tweets, shoehorns it into peoples feeds and notifications, in order to create an ideological echo chamber. Like that?
I just searched Twitter for “cis” and found endless results, including a forgotten tweet of my own from 2+ years ago that’s never been taken down and I haven’t been banned for! :)
Nobody is getting banned for that, that’s just another Bluesky-ism!
The policy was enacted less than 2 years ago, which is why your previous tweets didn't get affected, and it seems new Twitter owner might have since walked it back. Seems it also only affected mobile app users.
> In November, X ran a “timeline takeover” ad promoting an anti-trans film from PragerU, a conservative media nonprofit that has also been criticized for doubting climate change and downplaying the realities of slavery.
Climate change and the history of slavery... More ideas and narratives that the owner and his allies find threatening and uncomfortable.
Your only reference is a reversed policy from 2+ years ago that displayed a message but never stopped you from posting at all, and it only ever affected mobile users??
Also, promoting a specific documentary from a production company doesn’t mean they agree with all the other things PragerU says. Even if they did, it literally doesn’t matter, because X isn’t actively restricting alternate opinions the way Bluesky does. I know, because I see awful takes on X nearly everyday! ;)
People in this thread are celebrating this, though it inevitably means ID-checking and mass surveillance. Australia's ban also exempted Roblox, a platform that exploits children and is a haven for child predators. Also, it's no coincidence that all these social media bans are arriving the same time youth are using social media to spread awareness of Israel's genocide of Palestine.
This compares it to Python and Rust implementations, I wonder how it compares to Julia's SatelliteToolbox.jl? Julia also compiles to LLVM and has macros for explicit SIMD.
I'm guessing he means Rust voicing solidarity with Ukraine and sympathy with everyone affected by a conflict? It's hard to tell when people vaguepost. I guess wars of invasion/annexation are too controversial to oppose.
"Before going into the details of the new Rust release, we'd like to state that we stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and express our support for all people affected by this conflict."
Agreed, the vagueposting is indication of ill-intent of the top-level comment. No hyperlinks or specifics, it might as well be a game of mad-libs where you insert your grievance here.
The problem is that the AI companies are most interested in displacing the existing labor force more so than they are interested in developing new uses of AI in areas that humans are inherently bad at. They are more interested in replacing good jobs with AI rather than bad jobs. It's not that machines are doing jobs better, they are just doing them for cheaper and by cutting more corners.
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