from flamingos@feddit.uk to fediverse@lemmy.world on 03 Oct 05:32
https://feddit.uk/post/37315604
So, if you’re online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user.
[…]
Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. Bluesky was never really packaged as something that was relatively easy for someone to spin up on their own servers; the network has been historically extremely centralized, and only small minorities of users have broken off.AT Proto decentralization doesn’t exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won’t be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky’s end.
Bluesky inc isn’t really making ‘a protocol’, they’re making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.
I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don’t run a social media platform.
This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.
threaded - newest
Bluesky is of course just another American social media company. If they are not shit now, they will be once they get bigger. The American model has reached a dead end and it’s not suitable for good products, competition and real innovation.
Side note, it’s been a while since I’ve lived in the US, so my knowledge of local “culture wars” is from online sources, but the article is incorrect in claiming that Jesse Singal is a transphobe. I say this as someone who often disagrees with him.
I will add that many of the commentators in his substack are unhinged and likely transphobes.
Yes, he is absolutely a transphobe, by the very wiki article you linked?
US americans are largely the same, be it trumpers or self styled liberals, they always have to be “better than” or “the best” of something. This leads to dangerous orthodoxies that don’t allow debate or discussion which furter leads to stances that are nothing but distilled anti-intellectualism. The trumpers call everything woke, the liberals call everything phobe. Meanwhile the overton window has moved so far to the right, the country elected a pedophile scam artist as president because they know him from TV and the rest of the world is left holding the bag.
There is a bunch of normalized transphobia in America. That certain views are shared by elected politicians doesn’t make them not transphobic.
“Trans allies aren’t even bothering to debate this white guy, they’re just calling him names” isn’t proof of anything more than the frustration of said allies. It’s essentially the same thing as “Trump derangement syndrome”.
If we want to argue that someone is or isn’t transphobic, it would be a better use of everyone’s time to focus on what they actually said and what justifications their critics give for applying that label.
IMHO, the US has bigger fish to fry than transphobia, it’s ridiculous it has so much air time in the anglosphere in the face of the much more relevant inequality and destruction of association rights. The neonazis set up the bait and the idiots gobble it up, hook line and sinker.
Are you telling trans people that the unequal treatment they face isn’t relevant? It’s all part of the same pattern of restricting rights. It’s a bit like saying, “never mind all that about the Jews, let’s focus on the Nazis.”
I’m saying precisely the opposite, but nice testament to Godwin’s law. Your reply is a nice example of the “phobes” point I had previously mentioned.
I guess I’m Nazi-phobic, but can you point out any other sense in which your statement holds meaning?
Godwin himself pointed out that his law doesnt apply when discussing actual fascists.
The transphobes are getting ready to take away my healthcare, I think I have to be very worried about that.
If I can’t get my medicine I will die.
One of the beauties of socialized healthcare is transphobes can’t take it away from anyone.
And they use the threat of trans people getting government healthcare as a way to stop socialized medicine. They also use racism this way, and sexism, and homophobia, and xenophobia, and other reactionary ideologies. These things are directly connected, we can’t really ignore one to focus on the other.
Besides, we need to form a mass movement, and you can’t form a mass movement by telling minorities to shut up and wait their turn.
Also I might lose my healthcare in the next few months. It’s kind of fucking urgent?
Please tell.me that you have better sources in the UK than I, and that their recent transphobic swing didn’t make trans care harder to get and keep.
By “association rights” I infer that you mean the right of free association.
If so, can you be a little bit more specific as to whose “association rights”, specifically, are a more important issue than the right of trans folk to get healthcare, be free from discrimination, and be able to play sports without being harassed?
My inclination is that the most important targets to defend against facist oppression are the ones being targeted, which does suggest one plausible answer, but I really do want to know what you meant in your post.
I strongly disagree. Even the section on his articles about trans kids shows that Singal is able to show a measure of nuance and understanding with respect to the critiques of his work.
Not to mention the more global context. Are you sure that non-english speaking trans folks would have the same attitude (i.e. they may have their own opinions and priorities)? The reason I mention this is that I have some exposure to the local LGBT community and their attitudes don’t always align with “Western” expectations.
Anyone who doesn’t toe the line is a “transphobe”
I can see how the AT protocol is designed to scale. ActivityPub works fine now because the community is fairly small, but it will reach its limits as it is currently designed. Its basically an event driven model vs a push and pull model. Sure a docker image can more or less jusy be deployed, but that simplicity is a ticking time bomb.
Running a relay is way more powerful than the author states though. You could do stuff like selectivly intercept and reject events before they make it into or out of the firehose.
You mean that when there’s more traffic, the instances will start to DDOS each other?
Yeah i guess you could look at it that way. Each instance would have to scale horizontally to handle the load, which is waste.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that ActivityPub is just a rest api contract that one can implement in order to communicate with the rest of the “network”. Its simple, but its such massive overhead to do this all via http. Pushing all your instances events to a dedicated stream and letting the other instnaces read it can be more performant and handle the load better. The downside though is who controls the streams?
IRC is the OG of federation, i am sure we could learn something from it and have federated networks that are in turn federated with eachother. I dunno, just thinking out loud here.
But is that a limitation of AP?
As far as I understand one could split a fediverse instance into three parts: data, backend and UI.
The data is not shared 1to1 - each instance gets a copy of the activity and from that creates it’s own copy. Hence the same post on different instances will have different id
The problem we are speaking about is the capability of the backend to process incoming copies. Meaning, I also understand that the part that serves the local data to UI should not be the problem
What if there was a queue at the front and from the backend a scalable ingestion worker would be split off? Those would only do the putting the actions onto the data. Probably with per community(?) FIFO topics/partitions, so we can process data in parallel and not worry about an updoot for a post that does not exist yet
Those would still be fairly easy to deploy and be vertically scalable, right?
Or is there some bottleneck in the protocol itself?
So lets say there are 100 instances. My instance needs to issue api requests to each instance to sync with the network. They in turn need to issues 100 requests to me to sync (and eachother). What about when there are 100k instances? Its exponential.
From the looks of AT, its farily linear because its really just operating on a set of giant event streams (like kafka).
To me, ActivityPub being based on REST APIs was always a problem. On the upside it makes it approachable, but its not really the right tech imo. Use something without the overhead of http headers and whatnot.
Wouldn’t that mean that this stream will have to scale horizontally?
Yes eventually, just like the instances do once enough users are hitting it. Its a matter of how much all servers in the network need to scale, but also the nature of the protocol itself. Streaming binary data is more performant than individual http api requests for instance. Event streams are the way to go un a decentrliazed network for sure.
With AP does the exchange have to be http requests? If every instance had a stream instead, would that break the protocol?
With decentralized AT, who would be maintaining the stream? On the image I don’t see a connection between the alternative firehose and right-side pds’
I suppose technically someone could implement streaming using AP payloads. So long as the format of the payloads are the same they could translate. It would be a different thing though without the pull part of it
This falsely assumes that everything gets federated to everyone, which isn’t the case for ActivityPub. You only get what you actually subscribe to with it.
i ddos my wordpress-activitypub-enabled website every time i boost a post made from there to my 10k followers. tried every single caching plugin for it as well.
activitypub scaling is a very real issue
It gets DDOSed because after the boost, all the subscribers’ instances are calling it to retrieve the content?
Do you think a load balancer might help?
OP would have to have their wordpress site running on multiple instances to leverage that. It would work, but now they are paying for more infrastructure.
Yes, but those could be just “read instances” spinned up by a peak in requests at load balancer. Not running all the time
Fair point
ActivityPub is designed to scale well for millions of users with a low number of subscribers each (dunbars number and so on). It is not designed as a mass media publishing tool where a few have tens of thousands or even millions of followers.
I consider this a feature, but feel free to disagree.
This depends on what you think the purpose of ActivityPub is and subsequently the type of scale. ActivityPub is designed for horizontal scale in a “social network”. If you have lots of participating entities with a more or less similar number of interconnected subscriptions ActivityPub scales extremely well, unlike ATProto, which needs to more or less ingest the entire network in its firehose.
But you are right that ATProto is better designed for “social media”, meaning that most subscriptions are one sided affairs with highly visible “influencers” being the main point around which the network operates. Obviously this is what most commercial networks are more interested in as it allows profitable advertisement and other forms of social influence.
I see these two types as entirely different forms of social interaction, and couldn’t care less about the latter. So I am not worried at all about scaling issues of ActivityPub, as it scales extremely well in the “social network” type of interaction.
I like this take, but I wonder if there’s eventually a combinatoric problem with having hundreds of thousands of small instances, each with thousands of connection to other instances? I have no idea how that relates to the network/computational constraints…
Modern webservers don’t have a problem serving thousands of requests as long as they are spaced out a bit timewise. And since each AP instance only sees and interacts with a small part of the overall network it should not become an issue to expand the network horizontally. It is anyways probably better to think of interconected archipelagos and not of a singular network in the case of ActivityPub.
Is that really true though? Say we end up with 10k servers with 100-1000 users each, even if only 10% of those users have a connection to a server that no one rose on their server is connected to, that’s still a highly connected network.
Then add boosts from other servers (that incentivise cross-network follows)…
Mastodon already has those numbers you mention and there are no performance issues in the overall network.
They recommend people other american centralized social media as an alternative to Bluesky in response to this, yet again. When are they going to learn?
I feel like many people who went to Bluesky were desperate for it to work and grow, rather than necessarily believing it would work and grow and in some cases - weren’t even people who the Twitter style even appealed to. They just went there to try and do a bit of damage to Twitter. This is likely why its now slowly losing activity.
I signed up to Bluesky not too long after it surged. And I made a few comments, but quickly just… didn’t have anything say. It’s just a “shout into the ether” site like Twitter - but smaller, and no nazis. That’s a good thing in itself, but in an ideal world I would never really use it.
This sucks. Hopefully this will push ppl to sign up to mastadon or to other atproto instances and move away from the main bluesky acct.
For anybody looking for mastadon instance i recommend mas.to and for an atproto alternative, I’ve been on blacksky.community instance for a few weeks now and I rly enjoy it
Bad rant. Wrong on technical aspects and self-contradictory. Anyway, off-topic here.
Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.
Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.