You can run your own relay, in that sense the “body” of bluesky is when considered in the abstract potentially decentralized… but when you consider the “brain” of bluesky nodes and the layer of moderation and post/commenting is still locked into a centralized system it is a bit like arguing borg drones have free will because they are physically individual beings.

Or it is like arguing an ant isn’t existentially dependent upon the structure of the ant colony to survive since each ant posesses an individual body with its own six legs.

At a fundamental level the intended meaning of “federate” is that disparate communities and softwares can “connect” seamlessly, a bridge by definition is a tool used to connect things that are not connected or seamless.

A federated landscape of interconnected trails is the structural antithesis to a landscape of bridges each laboriously muscled out of the headache inducing process of connecting two disparate systems with a third system specific to that bridge and that bridge only that must be endlessly revised and rebuilt to keep everything from collapsing in a heap.

A bridge, by definition, is a composite of parts that are existentially vital to the sucessful conveyance of what passes over them, it only takes one section failing to break the entire bridge and it only takes one troll to block everything. A bridge, again by its very definition, is the most brittle architecture as every bridge is ultimately only a temporarily open door that must be continously be maintained and eventually rebuilt at the expense of great effort.

Some recommendations for lefty mastodon instances, all are vaguely tech themed, but that comes with the territory. That being said none of these instances feel like weird places to not be a techy person, the conversations and interactions on these instances occupy as diverse a range as anywhere else.

https://mas.to/about

https://elekk.xyz/about

https://tech.lgbt/about

https://eldritch.cafe/about

https://digipres.club/about

https://toad.social/about

https://hellsite.site/about

Your lemmy instance lemmy.world is under the umbrella of https://fedihosting.foundation/ which oversees both lemmy.world and the mastodon instance mastodon.world

Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?

Please do whatever helps you express your identity/identities of your self best! You can always link between accounts in the public account bios.

I will offer you a suggestion though, if you already made the account [email protected] why not make [email protected], link between them and perhaps indicate if you use one or the other account more. You might as well, people will still recognize you immediately on your mastodon account but you might find it nice to be able to interact with the fediverse through the perspective of mastodon/microblogging.

Then make another account on a different mastodon instance that looks cool too, go wild, do whatever fits your fancy, the consequences to making an account and never using it are small enough that except in edge cases (you took up a slot on a server with a limited number of registrations or something) nobody is going to care!

p.s. Notice all of these mastodon instances have thoughtful moderation policies that place an emphasis on protecting and centering vulnerable voices over valuing the “right” of socio-economically advantaged groups to spread hate speech in public. All these instances have links to the mastodon accounts of the humans who moderate those instances so you can get an idea of the human element of the moderation. How cool is that? Each place has its own slight spin on being a healthy community and you can find the place that is perfect for you!

Or Misskey!

It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.

Like seriously… that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.

I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.

Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money…to get more money.

yes, see this thread

https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474

“#BlueSky isn’t decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that’s all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find “networking through Relays instead of server-to-server” as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else.”

There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A…

Of course it is, why would people throw millions at investing in a product and then decentralize it to the point that there weren’t any bottlenecks to apply pressure and extract a profit back out of it? It makes no sense and would be a ridiculous business strategy.

What is a good business strategy is associating your product with visions of decentralization while never truly intending to get there in practice.

One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.

Sure but also ugggh

They will break the internet as much as they need to in order to accomplish this.

wtf kind of lame criticism of mastodon is this…there are constantly cute pictures of pets being posted on mastodon… and like anywhere else with humans these posts are very popular on mastodon.

I would say these posts are MORE popular on mastodon because without an algorithm cute animal photos are going to stick out as popular even more.

This is all nonsense anyways, Bluesky is considered “cooler” by techy types with a childlike awareness of history, politics and power because the tech is cooler when considered in the abstract.

Coincidently none of these technical details have the capacity to make bluesky a truly open and free place otherwise those investors would sue bluesky for purposefully and willfully not pursuing profit for shareholders. This won’t stop certain types from pointing at pictures in the sand and reciting idle words thrown to the wind by the people in charge for now.

Bluesky exists as a legal instrument of profit, all else about bluesky is malleable and changeable and will eventually be bulldozed or undermined in the pursuit of profit for shareholders.

edit 2 this is a real human, and I was grumpy and while it was satisfying to point fingers it just makes me into the asshole so I removed that, but my broader point still stands

The third part is youtube keeps implementing more sophisticated ad blocking to the point you can’t block ads…

Subspace Continuum

Right, they see the business of car sales as like horses for the rich and more crucially they see themselves as a luxury brand that associates itself with wealth via the inherent difficulty of owning and maintaining a large luxury car that excludes all but the rich. It is the same with Ralph Lauren and horses, polo in this case being analagous to the ridiculous high stakes driving fantasies luxury car commercials evoke.

I think the delusion that fuels this insanity is western car companies understand the future is no longer defined by visions of the car but they can’t admit it. They can’t make cheap, reliable ev commuter cars because from their perspective that would be admitting the truth they can not accept to themselves.

I don’t even think this has to do with money, surely there will be big markets in ev vehicles long into the future, rather it is about something deeper, it is about refusing to participate in any future that doesn’t unquestionably place cars at the center of it.

To western car execs a simple, reliable compact electric commuter car isn’t a car, zero percent of them drive anything other than sports cars and massive trucks/suvs and they see one of the fundamental utilities of a car is to seperate oneself from the city of dirty working class people between your mansion and executive suite office (who would actually benefit most from said practical small electric commuter cars).

“What you think about them, they think about you”

No, this is precisely the issue. Any leftist worth their salt can’t fucking stand conservatives and YET we will still protect their basic human rights and accept them into a collective society.

Conservatives on the other hand are perpetrating violence every single day against leftists and minorities they LOUDLY do not accept into a collective society. They deny abortions for women who are on the verge of death, they advocate for draconian health care policy that massively raises the suicide rates of trans kids because they hate trans kids and they believe deep down in their racism with an unshakable fervor that makes their meager spiritual practice of christianity look sad and pathetic in comparison.

It is far past the point of having a debate with rightwing conservatives, what is left is to intimidate them into shutting up, drowning out their voices and laughing at their tiny hateful visions of the universe.

The social fabric of the US is being ripped apart by conservative white men because they can’t handle how scary using pronouns is and frankly the solution is to activate everybody else, not humor these people yet again with another discussion they are going to approach in a fundamentally disengenous way.

What makes comedy and art in general good is when it torpedoes simple reductive narratives and leaves behind chaotic, nuanced and existential truths.

I heard someone describe the existentialist humor of their irish friends as being a joke framework where the original context and framing of the joke is utterly obliterated or trivialized by the end of the joke, and I think that is a good lens to diagnose why conservatives are largely incapable of making good comedy.

Conservativism is the antithesis of existentialism, it attempts through any means necessary to cement specific narratives in the minds of the audience and prevent the framing of those narratives from being examined or questioned.

Conservative art is just an even lamer version of advertisement, it is simply a narrative being presented for the audience to believe. There is no substance or free spirit to conservative humor that allows the exploration or creation of anything new. All that conservative art does in the realm of symbols and meaning is point at the correct ones and say “we will hurt you if you tell any other story than this”.

The ONLY two things conservative humor is capable of doing by design are punching down at stereotypes for laughs and pretending like saying mean weird thoughts that randomly pop into your head from kneejerk reactions without considering whether it might hurt others or not is edgey rather than a selfish pushback to being told your views are hateful trash.

I’m sorry I am not trying to dispute the spirit of your respose but I have to disagree, freight trains are thousands of feet long and haul unbelievably large quantities of material, the idea that it is inefficient to have a human (really a pair of humans) oversee and be responsible for a machine that large is laughable honestly.

…so is the idea that there is a genuine shortage of people willing to work as conductors, it is a convenient lie companies tell to rationalize why nobody wants to work for them because they pay shit and respect their employees so little that they won’t even give them unpaid time for necessary doctors appointments (see recent action of US train workers).

This point is even more true for passenger trains.

It is a massive responsibility we can afford to pay two humans to do it, a certain micro amount of inefficiency is ok.

I don’t have an opinion either way on this but can we not act like corporate for profit social networks haven’t thunderously dropped the ball on this kind of thing lol