#solarbird

[spider-jaysart]

Supersons in TTA style!

(Click for better quality)

[frameacloud]

An important note:

Bluesky is NOT part of the Federation. It runs a completely different protocol. And that sounds very technical (and it is) but it's REALLY, REALLY important for VERY REAL WORLD reasons.

Allow me to explain.

Natively, Bluesky runs AT Proto. Fediverse servers run ActivityPub. They can't talk to each other directly. There has to be a translator, a gateway, a bridge between them.

Currently, there is a bridge (that will hopefully stay up); and I use it and recommend it. The existence of that bridge makes it look like Bluesky are part of the Federation - even if they aren't.

There's two reasons all this actually matters in real life. The first is technical, the second is a direct consequence of the first.

First: there is no actual federation/distribution of social media in the ATmosphere. There simply isn't. Literally everything running AT proto (which at this point is mostly BlueSky) has to go through Bluesky's Relay, and has to use the one centralised Authenticator.

Relay is an important concept in AT proto. It's basically message delivery. Without it, even on "your own instance" of Bluesky, all you can do is view your own messages. You can't actually talk to anyone, and no one can talk to you. "Your own instance" is just a database of your own posts, and locally stored replies. Actual communication is Relay's job.

(There are reasons they chose to do it this way. It's how they kept a unified search: literally every post in the entire ATmosphere has to go through Relay, and so Relay can index everything together. Works great, too.)

Now, it is theoretically possible to set up more Relays. They could be controlled by other people. No one has done this past a couple of small test servers, but it has been done on that smaller scale.

But a large one would be incredibly expensive. The nonprofit startup set up to try to get one going is raising literally millions of dollars to fund it, because that's what it'll take, and it has no native revenue source because, well, you know - it's back-end stuff nobody will see.

Setting up a second relay is incredibly expensive. And that's a big problem, because at best there will be only a few of them. Each will be run by a large corporation of some kind, be it profit or nonprofit.

They know this, by the way; they accounted for it. The idea was that you'd choose a Relay like you choose an ISP. But christ it's expensive.

Account authentication is even worse - it's centralised, and can't be decentralised. Literally can't be, not even in theory. There is one authenticator, and that's it. They've launched a semi-independent organisation to do it, but it's still just gonna be the one, forever. If it goes down, no one can log in, no one can talk.

By contrast, neither of these are concepts in the actually distributed Federation. There is no central authenticator in ActivityPub, and all instances all do their own delivery themselves.

There is no one point of failure. Bluesky has two.

And that's what gets us to the second point:

If they want to shut you down completely, they can. Same as on Twitter, same as on Facebook, same as always.

And thanks to them honouring account shutdown and content takedown demands from Turkey's authoritarian government against political opponents this week, we know they'll do it.

Legally, they kinda have to.

If the ATmosphere was genuinely distributed, this wouldn't matter so much. Sure, maybe they'd kick dissidents off of Bluesky Corporate's servers, but those dissidents could move their account to someone else's servers and keep going - servers whose owners don't have to respond, legally, to an authoritarian government's takedown order.

They could keep talking, keep coordinating, keep doing their opposition thing.

But not on Bluesky. They can't.

Because it all goes through Bluesky.

Aaaaand I just noticed I wrote all this in a bloody ask, instead of mail. Nice work, me. Sorry about that.

Thank you so much for explaining this, Solarbird! I was kind of confused about the whole thing, and you have way more understanding of all of the stuff about the Fediverse, as well as about technology and politics in general. I'm posting your ask so that other folks can see this correction too.

[tinierpurplefishes]

solarbird replied to your post:

I just finished season 4 of She-Ra, and I’m pretty...

   I saw a review that said “YOU ARE NOT EMOTIONALLY READY FOR SHE-RA SERIES 4” and they were correct   

Yeah, that pretty well sums it up. Right in the feels.

[tinierpurplefishes]

my dash did a thing

[whisperwhisk]

solarbird replied to your post “okay on the one hand Wakaba deserves a big hug and a transplant to a...”

i cannot _wait_ 'till you get to the black rose saga.

that’s exactly what I just watched! hence freaking out about Wakaba

[tinierpurplefishes]

[shadesofmauve]

solarbird said: Grass pollen is ABSOLUTELY the worst.

Considering that it was only a prick test and they wiped the allergen off with alcohol after about fifteen minutes, applied hydrocortisone cream three times, gave me a zyrtec, and that spot is STILL itching like hell five hours later?

MY BODY AGREES THAT IT IS THE WORST.

(Seriously. Apparently I'm also a bit allergic to my cats, which I'd figured, but those spots were intradermal and never bothered me at all. Not so concerned about the cats,  here).

songscloset said: Oooh, good stuff to learn!

Honestly, I am the freak that would test EVERYTHING if it didn't cost so damn much, not because I'm a hypochondriac but because I like having SCIENCE done to me. Did I ever tell you about the time I decided to treat a facial rash different ways on each half of my face? SCIENCE!

Also apparently the allergist looked at my nose cells but the nurse forgot to ask her to let me look in the microscope. I did ask. :P

[shadesofmauve]

solarbird replied to your photo “I’m not going to meet the inspection deadline, but it’s progress!”

Those are huge tiles. What are they, stone or what?

Porcelain! 12 x 24 are apparently The New Thing, tile-wise. ‘Cause y’know, I’m all about trends. :P (Color was the deciding factor for me, but I do think the big ol’ tiles are cool -- and less grout is good grout). 

You have to be a bit careful of lippage, but there’s only one spot I’m really worried about, and it was on the first course -- when I didn’t know what I was doing AND the mortar was too soupy AND there was nothing to brace the wiggly tile against. This afternoon went way easier.