Arthur Besse

cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 45 Posts
  • 177 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • as i wrote in another thread:

    Content addressability is absolutely essential for building something that will last, and BlueSky gets that right. Decoupling the many responsibilities which an ActivityPub instance operator has (especially for identity) is also essential, i think, and while BlueSky’s identity solution is less than ideal it’s much better than ActivityPub and I expect it to improve.

    If you’re interested in the topic you probably want to also read the followup post from the same author (after reading the reply linked there from someone on the BlueSky team).

    Christine’s analysis is by far the best I’ve read on the topic, but I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that people will actually build things using ATP in a manner more like ActivityPub (where there doesn’t need to be a global view). It’s also possible/likely that ActivityPub will eventually evolve to adopt content addressability (Christine actually built a proof-of-concept of doing that years ago, linked in her blog post, but there doesn’t appear to be any recent progress in that direction), and decouple identity from responsibility for data availability, and adopt something like BlueSky’s composable moderation.

    Given their respective advantages over the other, i’m pretty sure that both ATP and AP will make changes which make them more like the other in the coming years.




  • Reading through it, I’m not seeing much in favor of ATP

    See the “BlueSky’s strengths” section, particularly the last paragraph of it. Content addressability is absolutely essential for building something that will last, and BlueSky gets that right. Decoupling the many responsibilities which an ActivityPub instance operator has (especially for identity) is also essential, i think, and while BlueSky’s identity solution is less than ideal it’s much better than ActivityPub and I expect it to improve.

    If you’re interested in the topic you probably want to also read the followup post from the same author (after reading the linked reply from someone on the BlueSky team).

    Christine’s analysis is by far the best I’ve read on the topic, but I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that people will actually build things using ATP in a manner more like ActivityPub (where there doesn’t need to be a global view). It’s also possible/likely that ActivityPub will eventually evolve to adopt content addressability (Christine actually built a proof-of-concept of doing that years ago, linked in her blog post, but there doesn’t appear to be any recent progress in that direction), and decouple identity from responsibility for data availability, and adopt something like BlueSky’s composable moderation.

    Given their respective advantages over the other, i’m pretty sure that both ATP and AP will make changes which make them more like the other in the coming years.
















  • That “underdog” you’re talking about is owned by the 11th largest private equity firm in the world, and they really don’t contribute much to the free software project Matt runs which their entire business is built on.

    Matt is certainly screwing up with his handling of the dispute, and it’s sad to see because i think his commitment to free software ideals has generally been a benefit to society over the last two decades.

    From where I’m sitting (i’ve spent at least a couple hours reading about the dispute over the last few months) he’s actually not wrong about the trademark thing. And he’s also not wrong about pineapple on pizza 😂 … but putting either on the login page is not a good look. 😢