- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27143191
Why I recommend against Bluesky.
Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27143191
Why I recommend against Bluesky.
Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
Just so that I get this out while it’s fresh on my mind, what’s wrong with the internet right now is cyberfeudalism.
The internet is essentially an infinite world, so no matter how much the large companies gobble up, we’ll always be able to go somewhere else.
That being said, it gets really fucking exhausting to move over and over again to different apps and different locations just so to talk to people without some greedy, megalithic corporation there, snooping on everything you say and ingesting your words to feed some abomination intelligence simulation or to figure out the best way to sell you a new pair of fucking socks.
All of that being said, I’m just saying it fucking sucks to continuously be a refugee, and what sucks about apps and companies and programs that end up selling out for a dollar is that if you don’t emmigrate to a new platform, you become nothing.
Idk I’m kinda used to it, maybe that’s from growing up with Aol handing out disks at the supermarket to this. Being a refugee doesn’t bother me. If anything the ability to tank a corpo by making something new is kinda fun.
That being said I can see a point where that becomes impossible or just too difficult financially. That other comment about it needing basically 300 m to start a new instance really got me thinking. Is it just impossible for bluesky to fix itself now? I can see why it’s not a priority from a corpo perspective but is this something that the team could fix if they made it a priority now? or is the need to keep one ID simply in compatible with the fedverse?
Why would they want to “fix” it?
I want Twitter to fail for how it’s turned, but until shown otherwise, bluesky is another closed system. It’s better than Twitter and I hope they prove me wrong.
Because they don’t want to be twitter clone 7 in 5 years? I personally don’t care because I never used Twitter, but I use Bluesky to yell at senators in between emails and phone calls. So I am fine with abandoning the platform when it’s no longer useful for that.
The digital refugee system will continue as projects start and either collapse or thrive long enough to become corpo garbage.
Bluesky is in a position to really change that as more and more people ditch twitter. Users don’t even have to understand the fedverse or decentralization to use it. They should want to not become the next MySpace or worse.
The Internet is just a bunch of servers my dude.
Someone has to pay for them, and all the other infrastructure around them. And with a large part of the world being on the internet a significant portion of their day the costs for even the most efficient centralized services running “at scale” (see: hundreds of millions MAU) are astronomical. In the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of $ annually, just an infrastructure, never mind human resources.
Almost none of these companies survive off of donations. Wikipedia stands out as one that does mainly because they host static content, which is incredibly cost efficient to serve up., and even then their costs are pretty astronomical (there are some debates around their costs of course).
Federated services have an asymmetric scaling problem. A linear growth in users results in a exponential growth in infrastructure costs. While centralized services tend to be almost the entire opposite of that and usually see logarithmic infrastructure costs against linear user growth. Where infrastructure costs are more efficient as their user base grows.
Federated services don’t benefit from running at scale, the more they scale up the less benefit there is to scaling. It’s a really shit situation to be in.
This is why the internet is largely just cyber feudalism. Because the only ones that can afford to host large scaled services for their users are the ones that are making money off of it. And that’s for centralized services, never mind decentralized services which are unbelievably more expensive to host.
I’m coming at this from the standpoint of an engineer, I don’t have answers or solutions, but the first thing we have to do in order to start figuring out solutions is to recognize the problem.