Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains
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As much as I hate to be that guy, it's worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It's better to leave your money elsewhere.
ActivityPub is just as susceptible to centralization as people claim Bluesky is with the only difference being that at least Bluesky has made some sort of mechanism for credible exit. It's old news that its expensive to run the perceived expensive parts, if fact you could do without it as many devs in the community are doing. ActivityPub is literally the easiest one to monetize because it can lead to moat building and user capture. It's why Meta is more than willing to become the biggest node in the Fediverse with Threads.
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Fair - you could host a copy or a link (or a sort of combination between the two, I guess), but it wouldn't transfer the ownership of the original post. I'm still not sure this is such a pressing feature that I accept it as the actual raison d'etre of AT proto, especially considering how it very much exists there only in theory at best. But it is interesting technology, and something they could maybe have worked with ActivityPub to try to achieve.
I'm glad to hear that maybe Bluesky is more decentralized than I suspect, but Bluesky engineer whose blog post you linked still links to his bluesky account on bsky.social. If running a separate instance is achievable, I would love to see people actually do it.
You full on misunderstand the protocol. The .bsky.social subdomain does not denote what "instance" you are on. There are no instances on atproto. That user could be self hosting all there data and still use that subdomain. It's not mutually exclusive. Atproto is far more atomic than AP.
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You full on misunderstand the protocol. The .bsky.social subdomain does not denote what "instance" you are on. There are no instances on atproto. That user could be self hosting all there data and still use that subdomain. It's not mutually exclusive. Atproto is far more atomic than AP.
Right. I guess that's similar with bridged users - you see them on bsky.app, even though they are actually located elsewhere.
What I struggle with is seeing the decentralization in practice, when the only place I can ever see AT proto in action is when Bluesky users are bridged to the fediverse. Bluesky has a shitload of users and there are a bunch of people jumping on the technology - why is there not so much as an understandable proof of concept out there?
On ActivityPub it's so easy to understand. "See this post? Well, here's the same post on some other domain, hosted by other people".
I don't understand how Bluesky can be this difficult to understand, yet apparently fulfil such a fundamental need.
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Right. I guess that's similar with bridged users - you see them on bsky.app, even though they are actually located elsewhere.
What I struggle with is seeing the decentralization in practice, when the only place I can ever see AT proto in action is when Bluesky users are bridged to the fediverse. Bluesky has a shitload of users and there are a bunch of people jumping on the technology - why is there not so much as an understandable proof of concept out there?
On ActivityPub it's so easy to understand. "See this post? Well, here's the same post on some other domain, hosted by other people".
I don't understand how Bluesky can be this difficult to understand, yet apparently fulfil such a fundamental need.
It's fairly easy to understand but you won't really see it and that by design. The point is to make the underpinning so seamless that it feels like a centralized app. The proof of concept is Bluesky, but if you would like to see other services that are completely unaffiliated with Bluesky PBC than check out:
- whtwnd.com (Whitewind)
- A longform blogging platform that has its own Lexicon and AppView
- pinksea.art (Pinksea)
- An oekaki BBS with its own lexicon and CDN implementation
- tangled.sh (Tangled)
- A git forge integrated with atproto, they even have made some additions with regards to knots.
All of these and many more are being built along with infrasstucture plays from the like of Blacksky, Northsky, and Free our Feeds.
- whtwnd.com (Whitewind)
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I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.
I swear there really are two types of people who learn latin…
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I swear there really are two types of people who learn latin…
Lawyers and biologists?
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Lawyers and biologists?
I was going for a specific type of nerd with fascist sympathies ans a very different specific type of nerd with antifascist sympathies. But also yes
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At Meta’s annual Connect event in Menlo Park, Calif., Zuckerberg wore a custom T-shirt with the Latin phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” or “all Zuck or all nothing,” as he revealed the first working prototype of Meta’s augmented-reality glasses.
The phrase was a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “either a Caesar or nothing,” or more simply “all or nothing.”
Zuckerberg has long been interested in the Roman Empire. He spent his honeymoon in Rome and two of his children, August and Aurelia, are named after emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.
Incidentally, fascists tend to have a hard-on for ancient Rome, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
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It's fairly easy to understand but you won't really see it and that by design. The point is to make the underpinning so seamless that it feels like a centralized app. The proof of concept is Bluesky, but if you would like to see other services that are completely unaffiliated with Bluesky PBC than check out:
- whtwnd.com (Whitewind)
- A longform blogging platform that has its own Lexicon and AppView
- pinksea.art (Pinksea)
- An oekaki BBS with its own lexicon and CDN implementation
- tangled.sh (Tangled)
- A git forge integrated with atproto, they even have made some additions with regards to knots.
All of these and many more are being built along with infrasstucture plays from the like of Blacksky, Northsky, and Free our Feeds.
Thanks! Maybe I'm just dumb in my own unique way, but I find the practical implications of AT proto hard to wrap my head around.
- whtwnd.com (Whitewind)
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I was going for a specific type of nerd with fascist sympathies ans a very different specific type of nerd with antifascist sympathies. But also yes
Laywers and biologists. Like they said
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I had an 11-year old Reddit account permabanned and they didn't even give me a reason. Feels bad man
Feel you. my 8 yr old alt (my only account left) mysteriously has had a total karma of zero.
Since shortly after election strangely enough. Wonder what happened there /s.
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He's not doing those roman salutes in public yet, though.
But it's kinda funny that the oligarchs are so obsessed with Rome, famous for baking a fallen empire, while enabling the fall of the US.
Such a shame that Coppola’s movie was bad. He was onto something there.
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It occurred right around when the kingdom in orange took power. Somehow zuck thought that it would be advantageous to his interests to compare himself to Caesar during an obvious triumvirate. The orange one and phony stark would be crassus and pompey by extension. But I think commodus is a far more appropriate roman emperor for zuck to choose as his patron saint
lol well Commodus associated him self with Hercules so they both had a lot to overcompensate for as it seems. so yeah good match agreed
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I was going for a specific type of nerd with fascist sympathies ans a very different specific type of nerd with antifascist sympathies. But also yes
It's the same with the Norse, its either a Nazi or someone who wants to bury a Dænaxe into a Nazi.
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I wonder why all these high profile people are so fascinated with a dictator that oversaw the transformation of a republic into an empire. Just like fascists were/are. Must be just a coincidence! Just like that Musk salute from the heart.
To be fair, that was more Augustus.
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Cool.
It's funny how one of the main criticisms of ActivityPub is that it's too difficult to implement, yet after all this attention the best the ATmosphere has managed to come up with is a toilet flushing repository. But I see the value of the portable identity. I think.
That's because its new. ActivityPub has been around for 7 years now, and I'd argue its totally stagnated on Mastodon to the point that the fediverse is mastodon to most people, and the norms of message passing are ruled by mastodon. Whereas atproto has been around for 2 years, one of which was in a very small and restricted alpha stage to get the core blocks stable. Now we see so many projects getting off the ground, some of the ones I mentioned being the most mature. With that said they are all earlydays, as is the protocol.
If we really want to talk about massive leaps, and a vibrant dev community thats actively build and expanding the protocol even faster than atproto, than its Nostr. Problem with them is the community building it
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lol well Commodus associated him self with Hercules so they both had a lot to overcompensate for as it seems. so yeah good match agreed
It's odd to me that someone would feel the need to compensate for their socially awkward highschool years by learning Brazilian Ju-Jitsu and taking growth hormone. You'd think being rich would be enough for these people but it's not.
For a brief period of time, I entertained the hope that the t-shirt was Zuck's way of warning the world that the US was slipping into a fascist dictatorship, but that was not the case. It seems clear that that he wore the shirt out of hubris. It was his way of telling the world that he was the modern era's Caeser and the two others men running the failing superstate were crassus and pompey. An absolutely mindless message given how it ended for all three of these men.
By the way, isn't the word "commode" derived from Commodus? We should name something after Zuck. Perhaps this new strain of bird flu that's been spreading wildly because of a lack of a federal response?
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I don't think usability problems in Lemmy are related to the protocol. For me open source alternatives carry the promise that they will only get better, while profit-oriented alternatives will eventually have to get worse.
I don't think any of what makes Lemmy difficult to use is a necessity based on its distributed nature; its a result of the developers being more geared towards the back-end than towards the front-end. Which is not an inherent weakness - the back-end needs to be good before a nice front-end can make sense. So I'm optimistic.
Exactly. If I want to subscribe to a group (sublemmy?) that isn't on my home instance, then I have to search for it from my home instance and then click the "Subscribe" button. This is a somewhat painstaking process, but there's no reason that I can see why that couldn't be streamlined.
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I was going for a specific type of nerd with fascist sympathies ans a very different specific type of nerd with antifascist sympathies. But also yes
the Classicists and the classists!
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Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar? Why is that every time I think I’m up-to-date on the latest weirdness there’s more of it?
Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar?
Yet March 15 has come and gone yet again without Zuck having a bad day.
