nate

@crimeschneck Personally I’ve decreased my Lemmy usage a lot due to its echo chambery-ness. I avoided the political subs since day one, both since I’m personally not a big politics junkie and because I’m not in alignment with Lemmy’s specific brand of politics, but things also extend to other topics as well.

A lot of the enjoyment of using Lemmy is getting news/articles and seeing what people think, but even in the tech spaces the range of tech news is somewhat limited and the top comments are almost always in line with Lemmy’s specific tech thoughts (regardless of my agreement, I’d like to see interesting thoughts/commentary, if I can predict the theme of what’s said it becomes less interesting). Sorting by new did help a little, even if a dissenting but well thought out idea was downvoted to oblivion I could still read it - but the value of link aggregators to me is articles + strangers thoughts, and if all the strangers have the same thoughts then I might as well stick with RSS.

My 2c anyways.

@erlend_sh Cool to see things being built with AT. For what my thoughts are worth, I think that having Frontpage posts showing up on Bluesky would be benificial. It’d probably make it feel like it has a lower barrier to entry and increase interactions/discussions across the different communities.

P.S. replying here with Friendica which is taking advantage of similar cross compatibility.

Also, just a curiosity, how good is AT’s cross compatibility without workarounds? Obviously if you guys are considering I assume it works, but I’ve been curious how well things play together. Nostr has NIPs to solve the issue, and ActivityPub is a little tempermental, but with AT’s repo style accounts I’ve wondered how well everything interacts across different implementations.

@haui_lemmy @Blaze Yeah, it’s very centralized at the moment. The idea of AT is that you can host your own Relay as well as PDS, so if I didn’t like Bluesky I could make Nate’s relay and have my relay pull the posts from the PDSs of the people I follow and sidestep Bluesky entirely. Though Bluesky was only opened up very recently so Bluesky is the only relay I know of ATM.

@Blaze AT (Bluesky’s protocol) is a little bit different then activity pub. There’s two types of servers, a PDS and a relay. A PDS is basically a git repository of all your posts/interactions, it’s super lightweight and doesn’t do anything but host them and provide it to any server that asks for it. The PDS basically does the profile hosting portion of a Mastodon server, and is very similar to a Nostr relay if you’re familiar with that.

A relay accesses data across a bunch of PDSs and provides it as one big network to the relay’s users. It’s basically the equivalent of the federated portion of what a Mastodon server does. It’s also doing what a Nostr client does (although Nostr does that on the user’s device) if you’re familiar with that.

Any relay can pull data from any PDS, so theoretically it’s very decentralized since anybody could host either a PDS and/or Relay. Bluesky was opened up very recently though, so there’s not many non-Bluesky-hosted PDSs on the network yet and most are small and experimental. There’s also no relays other than Bluesky that I’m aware of, although it’s only been open for ~6 months so I expect that’d change soon.

@SorteKanin I know above he mentioned creating an account and then using it on anther platform like creating one on lemmy and then using it with something like Mastodon or Writefreely. If that was all he was asking about then Nomadic Identities would make that possible, though yeah if I just misinterpreted what he asked and we’re talking completely disassociated (private key only instead of Zot’s private key underneath a domain based username) then yeah nomadic identities wouldn’t be quite what he was looking for.

@matcha_addict There are very few drawbacks (assuming it’s implemented in a way that doesn’t break things). That’s why it’s part of two of the big three social protocols (Nostr & AT/BlueSky) and Activity Pub might get it soon.

I’ve written about and participated in discussions about implementing identities not controlled at the instance level and discussed bridges that connect activity pub to other protocols. The one major drawback people tend to bring up is moderation, but moderation is not effected like some people think it could be. Just like a PGP key doesn’t force Gmail to host a user’s email and a domain doesn’t force Dreamhost to host a blog, even if identities are separated from instances an individual instance can still ban a user from participating in that instance or prevent other instances from interacting with your instance. The only difference is that if an instance goes down or bans a user the user can pick up and move to a different instance instead of having their account nuked. As somebody who lost a profile due to a SQL database breaking it would have been really nice to have been able to continue.

Also, in the thread here I heard a few people talking about it negating communities. We already can communicate with remote servers, I’m not fully sure where the argument that independent-from-instance-identities will break communities comes from. If something like nomadic identities are implemented, which again, they may be, your account will still be largely focused on one instance.

Say you’re an arborist and join an arborist Mastodon community. You’re still a part of the community, and your account is centralized there until you say otherwise. Yes, you can reply to a lemmy post or peertube post by authenticating on one of those instances, but you can already do that (there’s just a lot of jank since Activity Pub’s monolithic servers often have a hard time understanding each other). Yes, say you reply to a lemmy post about beekeeping that would show up in the local insatance timeline (assuming remotely authenticated posts are allowed to show up in the timeline), but again not only can you already do that, but it’s not like you’d expect an aborist focused instance would have ONLY aborist focused discussions.

Lol, I hope I was coherent. I just misinterpreted a bottle of bottle of lime infused liquor as 30 proof instead of 30% ethanol so I consumed a little more than I expected. Anyway, regardless, personally consider identities separated from servers/instances a very big pro, with very little drawbacks (if implemented in a way that does not break existing implementations).