The fact that this is Chromium [1] kills it for me right off the bat. I cannot stand the battery hog that chromium is and the lack of support for UBlock Origin.
A damn shame, I was hoping it was at least webkit based which doesn't support UB Origin either, but at least it isn't a battery hog.
The average person does not care enough about the operating system they use to buy a tpm 2.0 module, install it on the motherboard, and then risk their personal data by upgrading the OS just for a marginally improved windows experience.
Microsoft, you guys need to give actual incentives to upgrade, not punishments for not doing so.
Sadly, it's hard to imagine a world where something like this will ever catch on. The target audience for "traditional" social media is very different from the niche of people who want decentralized social media. Most people just use social media as a means to an end and don't really care about the systems behind it.
If the answer is that most people should just make a bluesky account, that defeats the whole purpose because then everyone will still be on one or two large providers.
Even if everyone is on bsky.social, that's still a huge improvement on the status quo. It's not like the web isn't decentralised just because lots of people are on AWS - you can move away at any moment, adversarially if necessary.
Looking forward to the future where an app just sort of silently backs up your PDS/keys on your device until the day you need it and everyone finds out they can log into whatever platform replaces the one that blew up like nothing happened.
This is misleading. I’m not sure if you’ve read the article so it’s difficult to elaborate — it aims to explain precisely that.
There isn’t such a thing as “Bluesky getting federated” — that doesn’t on its own mean anything. In Mastodon world, “getting federated” means many copies of the same webapp emailing each other. In atproto, you don’t create many copies of the same app. Instead, it’s shaped like the web — individual users can host their data in different places, and apps aggregate over that data. There’s no point in having many copies of the same app.
The BGS server you’re referring to is the “relay” mentioned in the article. Running your own relay is possible (Blacksky does it, as mentioned in the article). It costs about $30/mo with the current traffic. However, note that a relay is very dumb (it’s just a retransmitter of signed JSON over websocket). It’s cool that anyone can run one but by itself this isn’t a vanity metric to chase. We’ll probably see more independent relays but usually someone would run one for a reason — to insulate a company or a community from upstream failures, or maybe to censor things (in repressive governments).
I think the other issue here is that there's a serious question of why bother "upgrading" your social media from closed to open when we've all figured out that it's bad for you, worsens your mood, and generally wastes your time?
If I'm going to delete my Facebook/Instagram account then why am I trying to pick up a new drug to replace it?
Those products are both owned by an ad company, they're incentivized to push all your buttons so they can maximize the time you spend looking at ads. Similar offerings exist which don't, and as a result have a very different vibe.
Social media is just a paradigm for multimedia communication and networking over the internet. It isn't inherently good or bad, any more than telephones, television, radio or the internet itself.
I think many people find social media useful. If you aren't one of those people, fair enough. But not everyone is angry and addicted all the time.
It is quite debatable whether it is inherently good or bad.
There is not a whole lot of scientific evidence for it being good from what I understand.
I would also argue that if you broaden the definition of social media too far you’re not really talking about social media anymore. Calling your friends on Signal isn’t “social media.”
"good" and "bad" aren't objective or quantifiable, so there can't be scientific evidence that social media is either.
And the definition of social media is broad. I would argue Signal is social media. It lets you form social networks, chat and share different kinds of media. That's all social media is. Social media is more than Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. And I have trouble with the argument that being able to form social networks and share different kind of media is somehow ontologically evil. There are hundreds of social media platforms around the world and countless apps integrating social features, but only a few American platforms seem to be a problem. So maybe it isn't "social media," maybe it's American culture and Silicon Valley capitalism.
The addiction loops, surveillance, data mining, radicalization through algorithms promoting extremist content, etc. aren't fundamental to what social media is, they're aspects of how specific social media platforms have been implemented. It is possible to have social media without all of those negative externalities.
They said the same thing about video games, and the internet as a whole, and cellphones, and television, and magazines.
I'm not going to claim that social media can't have negative consequences for young people, lots of things do. But the hyperbole behind the discourse makes it obvious there is also a moral panic at work. In every case, technology is blamed for a failure of society's responsibility to educate and raise children properly.
A damn shame, I was hoping it was at least webkit based which doesn't support UB Origin either, but at least it isn't a battery hog.
[1]https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12628461-setting-up-the-...