This is buried toward the bottom of the release notes so I’m bringing it up here:

Added instance-level default sort type

Any admins out there considering changing their instance sort settings or asking people on their instance if they’d like this changed, given that we can individually set sorting anyway? Taking into account the inclination of people to never adjust default settings (I remain deeply curious about this tendency, as an aside), I think it might be worth at least bringing up to one’s instance community.

If they decide they want it to remain the same, all good, and even better, it raises some people’s awareness that they can change it themselves.

Pulling the background link here to save people some clicks: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

With a few quotes to highlight the frustrating situation:

That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. (I looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.¹ Best I could do: as of December 2019, OverDrive controlled digital lending for “more than 95% of public libraries in the US and Canada”.²)

Emphasis added.

Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR. […] The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong. […] Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

[…]

And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America.

Emphasis added.

That still doesn’t touch upon the negative to tethering users identity to instances.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I was trying to point to was that despite the portability of identity, the fact that you may still be highly reliant on the Bluesky relay (or frankly, any large relay), tethers your identity to them as without the relays there’s kind of no point to having a personal server at all.

Moreover, given the reference model provided via the Bluesky App, there’s a good chance you’ll run into similar arrangements on the AuthTransfer protocol where personal servers and appviews are joined together to essentially create instances (or entryway services I think they call them). One of the remaining distinctions from this entryway instance arrangement and ActivityPub then would be which relay or relays your entryway instance connects to.

Lastly I understand what you mean about people bouncing off Mastodon, but at the same time you kinda lose me here. You clearly mention the Fediverse preceding Mastodon yet then conclude with people having a bad experience with Mastodon meaning the rest of the Fediverse isn’t for them…? We’re using another variation of the Fediverse and ActivityPub here, so we’re both aware there’s more to it than that, even in the microblogging space, so I’m kind of confused on this point.

Nevertheless, I otherwise agree, it’s good that people have more alternatives to get away from the trashfire Twitter’s become (arguably even more of).

use[r] identities are not tethered to instances

Tbh while this is technically true, given the current circumstances, identities essentially are tethered albeit in a roundabout way. What I mean by that is, there’s no real point to them* without some relay and appview to work with, and for now, that’s just Bluesky.

That said, I agree that it would be better to go to them than to Twitter (if they’re not even considering stuff like Mastodon), but that’s a low hurdle to clear.

*-A caveat, supposedly it could be possible for personal data servers to connect to each other directly instead of via relays, but I haven’t come across anyone having tried this yet.

Oh! Thanks for the notice! I swear I think the spoiler stuff may have changed at some point, but maybe I’ve been handling it wrong this whole time.

I’ve also not really wanted to use horizontal rules because of it turning things into headings, but haven’t found a better way to put some spacing between the end of lists and the rest of a post’s text. I think I’ve corrected it properly now to be less jank.

Idea is that eventually others will be able to build atop their protocol and set up different “appviews” as they call them as well as relays and personal data servers. As I understand it, “appviews” may be viewed similar to what Lemmy and Mastodon are to ActivityPub, different ways to view data passed through ActivityPub.

Right now I think Bluesky may be the only such “appview” for their protocol parsing data from their relay, but the idea is you could spin up your own personal data server and maybe also your own appview, or choose from whichever may eventually exist, and that would be like your own “instance” connecting you to others via the appview parsing relay data.

So in other words, sort of yes to your first question, and it’s sort of because right now there’s only one AuthTransfer relay at the moment and that’s Bluesky, but the idea is that others could be spun up, allowing more independence from Bluesky as a company.

What would be really great is if companies could calibrate their reward structures based on what’s going to make players happy to log on, rather than trying to trap them into racking up the maximum amount of time in-game.

I haven’t played video games in awhile, so I don’t think I’m burnt out on them, which may make this a matter of differing mentality…But might it not also help to reevaluate whether a game should rely on a reward system/structure to entertain people to begin with?

It seems like these reward system designs are largely unsustainable without constant upkeep, in some part given that the rest of a game built around them often lacks sufficiently entertaining gameplay systems independent of them.

this is too perfect

Linkblocks definitely sounds interesting. I’ve never gotten into social bookmarking (keeping bookmarks on another site/platform…?), but I can see the draw for building knowledge-bases this way.

When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

You highlight the bigger issue here than AI alone tbh. This is why another critical element is becoming literate and teaching each other methods of independent research, using multiple sources to develop an understanding, and not relying on any singular source, especially without careful review.

All the technology in the world can’t help a person learn and understand, who hasn’t yet learned how to learn, much less understand.

Commenting to indicate my shared interest in this (despite the other comments suggesting the unlikelihood of such an option emerging).

love to be null

For the moment, a lot of the fun on some of the federated platforms is behind several steps of effort that many of the corporate platforms have streamlined people out of being accustomed to taking, which is part of why they’ve kept their larger audiences. If a single click/tap is too much, that’s enough to keep some people away from here.

It’s not a matter of laziness either, it’s more of, how much effort do I want to put into something that I’m using for casual entertainment? For many people it’s minimal, but many federated platforms currently don’t really work like that. They’ve arguably thrown the baby out with the bathwater in an overcorrection away from commercial algorithmic feeds since existing platforms have conditioned people to not have to put effort into finding silly/fun content.

The types of people to post won’t be as inclined to post if they find their posts aren’t reaching people because people mostly have to actively seek them out to engage with them at all. The types of people to more passively engage won’t be able to as easily as those posts they might engage with may never reach them because they mostly have to actively seek them out. The end result of a lack of feedback and content for both types of people, despite there being a possibility and existence of both for them, results in this recurring sense of dissatisfaction.

Note that this is written largely with Mastodon in mind, and to a lesser degree Lemmy. In Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks’s cases I think they’re potentially better off in terms of structure and offering different ways to sort one’s feeds, but it’s a matter of more people joining to round out communities and discussion more.

Personally, although the terms have become increasingly blurred over the years, I refer to changing to a new version of software (including an OS, and both ideally with some improvements) as updating it rather than upgrading.

I reserve upgrade more for changes of hardware with some form of improvement over its predecessor. I’d suspect I may not be alone in this, but I dunno how common it may be. When switching to a mix of both, I simply say I’m getting a new [insert specific device depending on which].

Although I’d hesitate to call many new phones an all-around upgrade when they’re either removing features (headphone jack/expandable storage) or getting more cumbersome to hold (can you even call some modern phones a handset anymore?).

You might look into either the OnePlus Nord N20 or N30. N20 had an AMOLED display like the S10+, whereas the N30 has a LCD display but high refresh rate. I’m not entirely sure but I think the processor specs are comparable, storage and RAM definitely are.

I know someone with a N30 and they’ve had good experience with the battery life on it so far, albeit they also aren’t heavily using it either. Here’s a little comparison chart.

Kind of hard to say given the structure of it. Going off the approximate data from FediDB’s charts, we may be looking at around 2 to 3 million more user accounts (around 8 million to 7.25 million), as compared with data from Stats for Bluesky of 5.24 million.

Although I’m not sure how each is measuring this, a better point of comparison may be active users and daily posters. FediDB uses the former, and shows about 940,000 to 920,000 active users, compared to Bluesky’s about 220,000~215,000 to 190~195,000 daily posters. The latter is honestly being kind of generous, as going off the data there posting has been declining. Interestingly liking has stayed somewhat higher, hovering between 240,000 to occasional peaks of 260,000 recently.

According to their CEO just before they opened registrations they had 1.6 million monthly users, so maybe if you run the numbers differently it looks better…But the raw stats don’t paint a great picture, at least as I read them.

Going off Join Mastodon’s servers page (under network health), we see a figure of 942,000 monthly active users, which would suggest Bluesky should arguably have slightly more activity going off the monthly active users figure, but… 🤷‍♀️

I would feel better if stories like this gave us background on the people involved. Who is Mike Macgirvin? I don’t want the person to dox themselves but I do want to know where he came from, what work he’s done before, what companies he’s worked for and what kind of people, organizations or groups he has worked with in the past. What school, university or program did he come out of? How old is he? What nationality? Where does he live and work now?

Did you miss the interview linked in the article? They interviewed Mike Macgirvin a few years back, and it goes into some of the background you’re wondering about.

Nobody was tbh

On one hand, I appreciate this a lot as it’s been baffling to me that this aspect of Zot wasn’t adopted during development of ActivityPub. On the other, I kind of feel like some of this forgets or overlooks the benefits of running fully separate identities.

I recognize that the article points to this easing that process in a way, but it’s pointing more to facets of a single identity, which benefits from some degree of interchangeability depending on those facets. This is clearest in the notion of retaining one’s connections with minimal disruption should one facet’s instance/host go offline for some reason, but also in it being relevant to maintain the same content between facets.

This has sort of also been the issue some see with the idea of federation and the fediverse itself. Some people enjoy the different styles of posting and interaction across different non-federated/linked sites/platforms, yet in some ways federation tends to blur or break those distinctions and try, sometimes clumsily, to blend it all together. For those all in on the idea, that’s a major bonus, but for those not sold on it, it’s a major pitfall.

In some respects I think this may kind of help those wanting to maintain different identity facets around here, but may also create a potential tripping point for those trying to more easily maintain distinct identities depending on implementation.

How do you stay in the know about this kind of stuff? I’m curious about all the cool stuff out there I wouldn’t even know I’m curious to find.

I was going to mention YaCy as well if nobody else was, so I can chip in to this somewhat. My method is to keep wondering and researching. In this case it was a matter of being interested in alternative search engines and different applications of peer to peer/decentralized technologies that led me to finding this.

So from this you might go: take something you’re even passingly interested in, try to find more information about it, and follow whatever tangential trails it leads to. With rare exceptions, there are good chances someone out there on the internet will also have had some interest in whatever it is, asked about it, and written about it.

Also be willing to make throwaway accounts to get into the walled gardens for whatever info might be buried away there and, if you think others may be interested, share it outside of those spaces.