If there can exist an "extinguish" step for the concept of decentralized social media itself then decentralized social media has already failed. The whole point is supposed to be about changing hearts and minds to embrace self-governance, a rug pull should just result in people moving somewhere else.
But that's sort of why Bluesky is not really decentralized, just federated. It's a pretty significant difference. Mastodon is federated and decentralized. Twitter is non-federated and centralized. Bluesky is trying to be the federated, centralized option.
Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's nothing like the disaster my online life was before I gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social media functions against my person.
How is BlueSky centralized? I could see that argument before this feature shipped, but "BlueSky is trying to be the federated, centralized option" goes counter to what the team has said directly.
I could maybe see an argument not based on technical premises, but instead something like "it will defacto become one because running a relay is too expensive" or such. Is that what you're going for?
I'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to pay back the money it owes investors.
I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes.
Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness.
I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed.
Yes. In the sense that Mastodon is decentralized because there is no one Mastodon server. One may accumulate more users or be the "default" for the community of users, but there is no Mastodon server (much to the chagrin of many new users).
We don't even need the hypothetical "it will defacto become..." because Bluesky Social was, up till now, the ONLY way to participate in the community. They had 3 million users before federation, and now we can start to hook into what they've built, but the idea from the start was clearly not built around federation and decentralization, otherwise it would have been federated from day one, as Mastodon was. They can HOPE now, that people accept the federation concept, but there's enough gnashing of teeth around the pain of running Mastodon instance that it seems really clear that going from central to decentral is, if we're being intellectually honest, a bridge too far for most to cross.
I'm undecided if it would be a net good or bad. If you think government should subsidize infrastructure that creates value that's hard to bill to users (like roads), then software is a pretty logical extension. However, given my personal knowledge of transportation project delivery and the astronomical amount of waste it includes, I suspect this might just make things worse.
I like NLNet model. NLNet isn't a government agency. NLNet is a nonprofit foundation that is responsible for distributing certain government grants, such as NGI Core Zero, which are themed for particular goals.
I definitely wouldn't want FOSS projects to apply directly to a government agency.
OSTIF scope is really narrow. It's mainly for patching security related bugs/vulnerabilities in existing large projects. And AFAIK it has a significantly smaller source of funding, relying on corporate donations.
It's not comparable to the projects that NLNet funds.
As an alternative perspective—the government currently spends ridiculous amounts of money* on proprietary software, often having chosen the vendor before the bidding process even begins, shaping the RFP to suit only the chosen vendor. The resulting software produced in these contracts remains entirely proprietary even though it was paid for by taxpayer dollars, so the company that built it is effectively guaranteed a perpetual stream of taxpayer funds since only they are legally able to maintain it.
I would love to see a world in which these gargantuan vendors are put out of business because the government is only allowed to buy software whose source code is released to the taxpayers who funded it.
* EDIT: To quantify "ridiculous":
> Each year, the U.S. government spends over $100 billion on information technology. Most of that will be used to operate and maintain existing systems, including aging—or "legacy"—systems.
The context from the GP comment already made it clear which government, I don't think we need to re-clarify which country we're talking about at every level of the conversation:
> We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.
Mentioning the American govt once doesn't make 'the goverment' instead the American government. This is specially discussions about such general topics and this particular case THE GOVERMENTs of france and Germany e.g. pay people to make open source.
And what about the fact that I close with this quote?
> Each year, the U.S. government spends over $100 billion on information technology. ...
I get that people outside of the US wish that US residents would not assume that everyone on the internet lives in the US. I get that it's a real problem. But picking this comment on this thread to make your point just comes off as pedantic because there was no ambiguity within the context of this subthread.
This entire subthread formed in response to someone saying that they wrote their US senator about the complete lack of funding given by the US government to open source. Even if you discount the fact that I linked to a US government website to cite my numbers, no one (besides you?) was actually confused which government I was referring to.
First of all, I do donate to multiple projects monthly.
Secondly, why should I (a tech enthusiast) foot the bill for software that benefits all of society?
Thirdly, an organization like NLNet is much more equipped to determine value to the European Union of funding an open source project, than a random European tech enthusiast is.
Lastly, it's pretty amazing what NLNet does with its VERY limited funding. NGI Zero Core, for example, is $11 million euro over 3 years. With that they fund a huge number of open source projects.
Why would I donate to open source? The company work for and my Country’s government spend amounts of money I can barely comprehend. Yet, they use an absurd amount of open source tech.
A better question would be how can I convince the company I work for or my government to spend money on open source?
Government should definitely be involved in investigating collectivity money to create value for everyone, and has a spending power that, frankly, is semi idiotic to compare to what a single guy can do “you should use your money” does not make practical sense
I guess? Just from looking at the way tauri and capacitor present themselves, capacitor might benefit a lot in dev experience from focus on android and iOS, whereas tauri's primary claim to fame is on the desktop, where it picks up the local descendant of KHTML across a wide range of operating systems.
Certainly feels great to have your livelyhood kicked to the curb by some rich american megacorporation throwing a tantrum.
The worst part is that probably 40 percent of the development time has been trying to wrangle my way around weird rendering quirks in safari, never again. My next site will have a banner suggesting safari users open the site in firefox..
Norway as an independent actor is too small to carry any weight in this matter.
Our best bet is to hedge our interest as an extended member of the European Union, and even there we have a limited say.
I'm not afraid of "losing" in a crash. I just don't want to have my retinas blasted to shit every time I drive at night by trucks hauling their drivers' insecure masulinity.
> Our modeling finds that even if Focus incentivizes 800,000 heat pumps with electric resistance backup (10 times the number of heat pumps as it did furnaces in the past four years), the state will still be able to meet its electricity demand with currently operating power plants, even on the coldest days. Depending on the efficiency of the heat pump, in-state winter generation capacity would still exceed peak demand by 1,400–4,300 MW on the coldest day.
