P03 Locke

Old, but still relevant:

That’s exactly my point. Reddit is still shit, and you can’t exactly fork the data, because they’ve locked down the API.

Bluesky could do the exact same thing.

Bluesky is centralized but it seems like its design is committed enough to open technology that it would take them a long time to walk it back

Let’s not forget that Reddit’s code is open source. Just because their technology is open doesn’t mean that the data, usage, and network are protected.

You really trust the US government to control your communications? Especially given the last 20 years?

No, I don’t trust right-wing Nazis to control my communications. And I sure as fuck trust the government more than I trust greedy corporations. The problem is that the corporations have been fucking up the capitalistic/democratic balance for the last 50 years.

The raw SMTP landscape on the internet is such a shitshow. Setting up a SMTP server requires so many goddamn condoms that you might as well just give up and start using some other professional email service. Or you set it up just to forward email to a GMail account, and even then, Gmail bitches about how much spam you’re forwarding it and blocks you for a time.

They have conferences about ActivityPub. Why isn’t W3C trying to fix this mess in newer backwards-incompatible versions? The time to do it is now, not later, because it would involve a major version and years of pushing for adoption. The lack of standardization of basic concepts is why integrations of different types of implementations is a broken mess, which is the whole fucking point of ActivityPub! Now, we have to compete with ATProto, which has different kinds of problems, and it’s very possible that it just wins out and kills ActivityPub.

This reminds of the early days of SMTP, where there was zero thought behind security, and that created an entire spam industry.

PeerTube integration into Lemmy is still shit, poorly implemented, and rarely linked by Lemmy admins.

The internet is essentially an infinite world

I think this worldview is part of the problem. Nothing is infinite, not even the Internet. The tiny pillars that maintain critical pieces will eventually move on. We used to joke that the Internet is forever, but it’s not. Data decays and dies. Old web pages are lost.

Archive.org, Wikipedia, Linux, free and open-source things we take for granted could just disappear.

Even the scope of the Internet isn’t infinite. Just because something is created doesn’t mean that people will see it, and not everything you can think of exists on the Internet.

It’s large, for sure, but it has boundaries. Boundaries we can see in macroscopic forms.

you become nothing.

You are not nothing because you’re not lost in an infinite landscape. Again, the Internet has boundaries, and singular actions that nobody has seen can happen.

I still don’t understand how the PDS concept matters in an interconnected network of replies. Conversations are threaded, and that “personal data” needs all parties involved in the chain to move to this new thing at the same time. It’s not going to happen.

People who are on Nebula already made it in Youtube and they’re so big that they just want to make more money.

Nebula is a gated community for YouTubers who have already made it. In fact, they are basically subsidized by YouTube, as that is the place for new content creators to grow, and they only allow creators that have gotten high enough on the YouTube hierarchy to get their attention.

Really, they have no avenue for adding more users, like the wealth of good indie YouTubers that are up and coming, and they don’t even seem to want to add to their own curated list themselves. Their community has been stagnated for years. All they have done is forced their current membership to constantly advertise for them on YouTube.

Nebula is not the answer and never will be. I don’t even see a point in going there, because I already have these same channels on YouTube.

Maybe start with “What the hell is ATProto?”