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In which I consider the announcements from Mastodon and Bluesky-adjacent “Free Our Feeds”, both surfacing on the 13th, concerning fundraising and governance measures for the worlds of ActivityPub and ATProto: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/01/14/Protocol-Churn
Overall a good post, but I still think that "overall AP servers are pretty cheap to operate" is only true if we take the work of admins for granted.
At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of people are not interested in paying $50, $30, and not even $10 per year to have an account at a server.
So AP only has a shot of becoming really mainstream if one of the following happens:
- we move *away* from servers, and start building client-first applications which are "powered by AP" and the servers are much more lightweight (responsible only for routing messages to the right inboxes)
- different governance models come up where operating costs are hidden from users: perhaps your phone company gives you an AP account with your plan, or your employer/university/school...
In any case, neither of the following initiatives raised my hopes much.
- Bluesky/ATProto is still fundamentally broken (https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/113796033637861505)
- Regardless of their for-profit/not-for-profit status: I'm not a fan of Eugen's / Mastodon's "centralized planning" approach and I really don't like how everything they do seems to be in *reaction* to what "evil capitalists" are doing. It's never going to hit mainstream if they keep looking at the rear view mirror.
@timbray Yes running full Relay sounds like too big of a task.
I don't see why one couldn't run relay that only gathers data from PDSs one follows. This way it would act a lot like Mastodon server, it wouldn't see all likes, it wouldn't see all comments (but they could be still fetched from other relays).
Running full replica relay of 20 million people? That is a big ask for non-profit.
@timbray This is a great analysis, and roughly reflects my own sentiments. At the SWF, we're lending moral support to Free Our Feeds, because we want the ATProto space to be more open and participative than it is now. But we're putting our eggs in the Fediverse basket, because it seems like the better long term bet.
I think FOF is actually calling bluesky's bluff.
"you keep saying you'd interoperate with other relays but there just aren't any yet. well now there is."
BS will either go back on their promise, slowly enshittify and lose users to the FOF relay, or be forced by the competition not to enshittify and we all get to see how inefficient and silly their model is long-term if it was actually at all decentralized.
otherwise I just don't understand @pluralistic being involved.
we have been in touch with the FoF folks and are very excited for them to be running alternative infrastructure of all types in the atmosphere! and maybe resources to go further, not just providing exit, but to push forward software/protocol as a "peer" org, improving governance going forward
also pretty confident about infra costs and smooth interoperability. there has been a lot of speculation on costs and scaling the shared heap model in theory; looking forward to a real independent demonstration of operating costs and what the experience feels like.
so then it will be my third option. you did not have a good response to @cwebber's criticism of the BS approach. I want decentralized social to dominate but if your model won, how would a govt or news org ensure that they have unfettered social reach to their followers like they do with a website on the open web today? they'd have to run their own expensive relay?
some accounts are very important but controversial. witness the @mondoweiss server talking about #Gaza.
I think our best response to Christine will be "show not tell". don't think there is any single silver bullet to resolving disputes about content on public networks. can't really imagine an infra operator blocking the content you mention, but if they did, yeah, folks could use alternative infra
to flip your question around, what if mastodon.social blocked such an instance? would it be the responsibility of the mondoweiss server to migrate all the accounts over so they can continue to access? I don't think so; there would presumably be many alt instances with access
better would be governance mechanisms to resolve disputes without exit/migration. folks can of course operate any infra with whatever governance and sustainability mechanisms they can make work!
show not tell is what it's taking FOF and million$ to do.
The structure of AP is the silver bullet. It's as transparent as websites and browsers.
We have a ton of recent history re platforms deciding what to show or not. Use alt infra is like one step better than "sure go ahead and leave X". it's not that kind of lock-in but you do seem to be building lots of extras that wouldn't be available on other relays/app-views.
sorry. getting decent social right is vital
@evan @timbray I agree. I want Bluesky to succeed, which is why I post there, and also why I’m considering running my own PDS.
But the gap in actual server counts is huge. And other than Bluesky, there’s few viable apps.
This week, people migrated to Pixelfed from Instagram and TikTok—not an app that runs ATP.
@timbray "most credibile players" LOL
@mastodonmigration
I know you keep up on BlueSky related funding and whether BlueSky is truly decentralized. Have you heard of Free Our Feeds? @timbray has a link to an interesting writeup he did about it in his post that I’m replying to.
Thank you! Had not seen Tim's article and look forward to reading it.
Here is an opinionated thread regarding #freeourfeeds with links to other posts on the subject:
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/113873141877248672
@mastodonmigration
Thank you! The thread you shared is interesting…and yes opinionated as I’ve learned to expect from you 
.
Thirty years of software management experience, and experience with vaporware can do that to a person. I have a similar number of years as a software developer/data engineer, just not in things like relays
I need to put Cory’s article that you linked to on my reading list: enshitification is *not* caused by venture capital?