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Returning to the (FOF) initiative discussion (for background see links below)...

@pluralistic has a new piece (pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap) that extends his "fire exit" analogy and discusses how it is not corporate ownership, VCs or profit motive alone that causes enshitification. It also requires captive users, and FOF will make it so Bluesky users are not captive. It all sounds good, but it's not realistic because the assumptions behind it are based on vaporware marketing.

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pluralistic.netPluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital (20 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

@pluralistic

Somewhere in the 1980s software companies discovered that they could announce products with fabulous features long before they were developed as a means of getting potential customers to delay purchase decisions for their competitors actual real products. The term 'vaporware' came to refer to these schemes. Over the years vaporware has evolved to be used for all sorts of clever market manipulations and you could say that most of Silicon Valley now runs on vaporware.

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@pluralistic

Sometimes vaporware products actually get made with a small subset of the promised features, but more often they just continue to get delayed serving their market manipulative purpose. One thing about vaporware products is that there is no shortage of complex and detailed descriptions of what they WILL DO.

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@pluralistic

Enter Bluesky and the AT protocol. We are told it is a simple matter to make Bluesky distributed. All we need to do is make another 'relay'. Seems easy, right. But Bluesky hasn't done this yet because [insert reason here]. Enter FOF, who figures, well Bluesky won't build a second relay with their technology, we will do it!

Do you see the problem here? Maybe, building complex undeveloped, unproven, untested relays is a huge engineering challenge. Maybe it's impossible.

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@mastodonmigration @pluralistic

There are multiple relays currently in production, somewhere between 5 and 10. It costs lower than 50 dollars per month to run your own non-archival relay, with the cheapest I've seen is someone running it for 23 dollars per month (single consumer)

there are also alternative software implementations of the relay, cerulea is one done in rust for example

relay is not even the centralising aspect of atproto, other aspects are

@mastodonmigration @pluralistic

it really is not, and it is very clear that you dont know how atproto works, and what the actual risks to the system are

atproto has clear failure points, and relays are very much not one of them lol

@laurenshof @pluralistic

Love this kind of techmansplaining. You are correct, no idea how atproto works, and don't care. Not being specific in the use of the term 'relay'. Have no idea what that is, and don't want to know. Not getting drawn down into the marketing lingo.

What would be convincing that it could be distributed is if it were actually, you know, distributed.

Not interested in tech vaporware buzzword salad or theoretical papers. Where do you sign up for this distributed network?