Free Our Feeds: "it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app"

Let's take social media away from billionaire capture.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390

https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v
tldr, it's a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
Mark Ruffalo, Actor
Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker
Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan
Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’
Brian Eno, Musician
Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist
Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist
Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian
Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep
Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords
Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA
...
Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.

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28 comments

So I presune these people didn't have google to search something less stupid than funding another silicon valley tech startup to counter the problems of a silicon valley tech startup.
- They are exactly the people that have always been advocating for this stuff all along. They are doing their thing. Nothing to be surprised of
  
  Why they ignore the established fediverse instead of boosting the effectively centralized bluesky and its questionnable at protocol
  
  I wouldn't say the fediverse is established. It's a very small and niche phenomenon compared to mainstream social media. By now it's clear it's not going to ever grow to an impactful size. It's here to stay, but it will stay as a minor, geeky thing.
  
  I think the fediverse will continue to grow, and it would mostly be because of projects like Loops and Pixelfed and other new services. But I think that Bluesky has a lead on us and it will continue to grow, mostly because bigger players with money can afford to actually build on the AT Protocol, which has higher hardware requirements.
  Eventually, thanks to bridges and multi-protocol platforms, there will be a multi-protocol network, with big players who have money using AT Protocol, and people who want to start a server on a lower budget using ActivityPub.
  
  There's no evidence to support what you're talking about. Mastodon, Misskey and Lemmy monthly active users flatlined a long ago. They are not growing and there's no evidence they will resume to grow in these conditions.
  A multi-protocol network might not be unlikely, but it will still be very asymetric, with AP as a secondary actor. Power shapes technology, not the other way around.
  
  I agree that there needs to be some more "killer apps" for the fediverse for it to really take off. Luckily there are some people working on that. Loops and Pixelfed seem to be some recent highlights and are growing fast. And there are other apps that are being worked on that could change things.
  One of the problems is that ActivityPub is somewhat limited to what Mastodon has implemented. A lot of other platforms want to implement some cool features, but none of those are supported by Mastodon. This limits the rest of the fediverse since they have to cater to the lowest common denominator.
  It is one of the main reasons why Hubzilla still uses Zot6 as its primary protocol, and uses ActivityPub to communicate with everyone else. Hubzilla has features that the rest of the fediverse does not support, such as nomadic identity, privacy, and access control. And related to that, Bluesky also has features that ActivityPub does not support, or if ActivityPub does support it, is not implemented by the larger platforms.
  I think this is the primary reason why the fediverse is falling behind. People look at what Mastodon has implemented and think that ActivityPub is weak compared to Zot6 or AT Protocol.

28 comments