Cory Doctorow explaining why he endorses the “Free Our Feeds” initiative (Lemmy discussion)

During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
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One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn’t agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

Another group – call them the “individualists” – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.

Here’s what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: “If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won’t be very popular.”

We weren’t going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test (“Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what’s wrong with you?”). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples’ lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members’ joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it’s good tactics to make participation in the thing you’re trying to do as joyous as possible.

[…] When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won’t even know you switched networks unless you tell them.

There’s no reason social media couldn’t work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you.

That’s how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren’t stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off.

We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand. Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server’s management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward – even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It’s literally just a minute’s work for each user.

Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by “benevolent dictators for life.” This worked well, but failed so badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn’t make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn’t just malice – it’s also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance. That’s why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems.

There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as “ultimate decision-maker” and handed management over to a nonprofit.

I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven’t delivered on the long-promised federation.

Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They’ve pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they’ve all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company’s investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly.

So what’s the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you’ll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: “People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it’s not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party – there’s no fire exits!”

This is the social media version of “To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music.” Sure, those people shouldn’t be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.

We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.

Yesterday, an initiative called “Free Our Feeds” launched, with a set of goals for “billionaire-proofing” social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I’m one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also good tactics.

Here’s why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won’t be able to. This isn’t a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.
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We can do better than begging people to leave a party they’re enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we’ll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.

After all, there’s no virtue in software freedom. The only thing worth caring about is human freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.

If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse. But I’m not a purist. If there’s a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there’s a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.

  • P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br
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    5 hours ago

    I honestly can’t understand how people enjoy Mastodon that much. I can find some 3 or 4 cool things, but I can’t find much. There’s not only the discoverability thing, but I also wonder how does the timelines can get organised.

  • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    I like this discussion

    But at this point we might have to build a second internet

  • barsoap@lemm.ee
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    24 hours ago

    I’d like to interject here for a second and point out that “Billionaire-proofing XYZ” is both a praxis and narrative we should be doing way more often. Forget about socialising healthcare, just billionaire-proof it.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
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    21 hours ago

    It’s still millionaires saving us from billionaires, which shows how difficult it is to run a relay. If the main Bluesky relay enshittifies and everyone jumps ship Bluesky 2 then that is still a single point of failure, what if the funding dries up or the millionaires get bored? The users would struggle to cover the costs themselves.

    It feels like that amount of money could be better spent on adding features (like independent IDs) as well as building better bridges, even the ability to import a Bluesky profile to Mastodon or the *key forks. Forget adding a fire exit and build some escape pods.

    The whole piece comes across as… apologetic:

    If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse.

    And you get the feeling this isn’t the solution he’d have wanted but it at least looks like some.kind of solution so he’s prepared to support it, albeit grudgingly.

    • flamingos-cant@feddit.ukOP
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      9 hours ago

      ability to import a Bluesky profile to Mastodon or the *key forks

      Building an ActivityPub application (APlication?) that uses AT protocol’s PDSs would be pretty interesting. Compatibility would be a nightmare, but I don’t see a reason you couldn’t have the sign up and data management work like it does on Bluesky (did:plc issues aside) and the server side/relay work with APub.

      And you get the feeling this isn’t the solution he’d have wanted but it at least looks like some.kind of solution so he’s prepared to support it, albeit grudgingly.

      It’s more like the idea of adversarial interoperability he’s talked about in the past, focusing on making the transition to a new platform easier by forcing compatibility between nominally incompatible platforms. The article does imply he thinks that Bluesky will enshittify, so our focus as activists of the good internet should be on tools to make the inevitable migration easier. I just don’t think “Free Our Feeds” is that.

      • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
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        8 hours ago

        Building an ActivityPub application (APlication?) that uses AT protocol’s PDSs would be pretty interesting. Compatibility would be a nightmare, but I don’t see a reason you couldn’t have the sign up and data management work like it does on Bluesky (did:plc issues aside) and the server side/relay work with APub.

        If it is all defined by a standard, you could always have a script that can read the relevant information from a PDS (with you logged in) and import it to a Fediverse account. With bridges you could even keep your following list (followers might be trickier).

        Quick aside: Aren’t PDSs similar to ActivityPods or Hubzilla’s nomadic identities?

        It’s more like the idea of adversarial interoperability he’s talked about in the past, focusing on making the transition to a new platform easier by forcing compatibility between nominally incompatible platforms.

        And that makes sense to a degree. If we can’t get everyone to the Fediverse, we can at least move them to a half-way house where it is much easier to get at the data and so the final move to the Fediverse can be a lot simpler.

        The article does imply he thinks that Bluesky will enshittify, so our focus as activists of the good internet should be on tools to make the inevitable migration easier.

        Indeed, that’s why I like the idea of escape pods, not just fire exits, so people can just flick a switch and get out. Fire exits can get dangerous if everyone rushes for the door when the place burns down.

        I am unsure if it is feasible but I’d like a bridge that I suppose is more like a bot. You post on the Fediverse and it updates your posts there, passes over new posts by followers, etc. and vice versa if you are commited to BS. Then if the main end of your pipe is BS and it enshittifies, you change the direction of flow and are now seamlessly on the Fediverse. As both sides work to protocols it feels like you just need a translator between. I know Friendica integrates with BS to some degree, so it may already be doing that.

        Bluesky also buys us more time to establish topic specific instances. I feel these would make people’s deciding on an instance much easier.

        I just don’t think “Free Our Feeds” is that.

        No, I am not convinced because to make it truly decentralised you’d need a number of relays and it just seems too expensive, at the moment (if BS enshittifies and everyone leaves for the new place then it may only be a stop-gap measure). It feels like a waste of time, effort and money but then the history of the Internet is filled with dead ends but we learned something new each time - I’ve been on FriendsReunited, MySpace, Google+, etc and it’s a pain to start afresh each time, why I’d largely checked out before the Fediverse. I suppose I learned to not do that again and try for a “forever home”.

        I’ve seen people on BS already nervously promoting their mailing lists as they are concerned about enshittification. I think if we are at that stage it needs a better plan.

  • ericjmorey@discuss.online
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    22 hours ago

    People here are satisfied with using the ActivityPub services and content with slow growth of a now sustainable but relatively small user group.

    The people who want to use bsky just want a better Twitter. And bsky has delivered that. If that’s temporary, it’s better for them to use it while it lasts because Mastodon is absolutely not what those people using bsky want. Mastodon to them is technically worse than Twitter but something they may settle for if bsky wasn’t an option.

  • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.

    https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

    • flamingos-cant@feddit.ukOP
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      1 day ago

      Yeah, I do think Doctorow has missed the mark here. @tante put it better than I could:

      It’s trying to raise money (at least 4 Mio and up to 30 Mio USD) for ATProto (the protocol at the core of Bluesky) so “the community” can standardize the thing and “build stuff”. Plus the project wants to run a second “Relay” (which is the chokepoint that centralizes Bluesky at the moment). Edit/Addition: The fact that just running another Relay leads to costs in the millions should make people wonder if this is the right approach for a better social media infrastructure that does not rely on big organizations.

      Okay, but isn’t that what the Bluesky Public Benefit Corporation (the corporation that owns Bluesky and employs the people working on the ATproto protocol) wanted to enable/do? They already got millions in funding (some from sketchy Blockchain companies). Now some diffuse external entity collects more from random people, from “the community”. And not a bit but a lot more. What do the people donating money get for their investment? Stake in the Bluesky corporation? [Checks notes] Nope. Nothing.

      The 9 custodians consist of a whole bunch of AI people, some Mozilla folks (same thing) and the director of the Social Web foundation. […]

      It’s just presented in a weird way with a whole lot of “give us a lot of money and we’ll make amazing stuff happen” and in the end a bunch of AI grifters get some startups “that build upon AT proto” funded.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        Thank you for this, very interesting. I skimmed through it

        But we aren’t actually running networks of 26 users. We are running networks of millions of users. What would happen if we had a million self-hosted users and five new users were added to the network? Zooming out, once again, the message passing system simply has five new messages sent. Under the public shared heap model, it is 10,000,025 new messages sent! For adding five new self-hosted users! (And that’s even just with our simplified model of only sending one message per day per user!)

        Maybe this sounds silly, if you’re a Bluesky enthusiast. I could hear you saying: well Christine, we really aren’t planning on everyone self hosting. Yes, but how many nodes can participate in the system at all? The fediverse currently hosts around 27,000 servers (many more users, but let’s focus on servers). Adding just 5 more servers would be a blip in terms of the affect on the network. Adding 5 more servers to an ATProto ecosystem with that many fully participating nodes would be an exhausting number of additional messages sent on the network. ATProto does not scale wide: it’s a liability to add more fully participating nodes onto the network. Meaningfully self-hosting ATProto is a risk to the ATProto network, there is active reason to disincentivize it for those already participating. But it’s not just that. Spreading things around so that more full Bluesky-like nodes are present is something server operators will have to come to discourage if they don’t want their already existing high hosting costs to not skyrocket.

    • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      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.

        • Jared White@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Exactly. There’s been far too much talk about the theoretical benefits of AT Proto’s decentralization. Until we see it actually happening at small scales manageable by independent operators, it’s nothing more than vaporware. And I don’t understand why some other group raising millions of dollars has to prove it out. You could set up decentralized Mastodon instances that all talk to each other, like, 7 years ago. And that didn’t require millions of dollars.

        • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
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          i’m not aware of anybody who allows public signups and is interoperating with bsky.app yet (besides Bridgy Fed which will create an ATP identity for your ActivityPub identity), but I’m pretty sure it is possible because I follow people there who appear to be doing it for themselves.

          see also my reply to you in another thread.

          • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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            1 day ago

            I just skimmed through it. Damn, and people say that the Fediverse concept of instances is confusing 😄

            Let’s keep it short: once people will be able to register on a version of the platform (whatever piece of the PDS, DID, Relay that means) managed by other people then Bluesky, than trust towards ATProto will be higher.

            As of now, it’s very low.

            Also, see the issue of the ATProto scalability in another comment: https://feddit.org/post/6858224/4156121

            • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
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              7 hours ago

              Damn, and people say that the Fediverse concept of instances is confusing 😄

              It’s a good point. At the moment there us one relay so you don’t have a choice, add more in and the issue with which instance to sign up on (a stick used to beat AP) also applies to AT. In fact, the wealth of Fediverse instances might make it easier as there will, eventually, be a range of topic-specific instances.

  • aasatru@kbin.earth
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    1 day ago

    I feel like a lot of what “Free Our Feeds” is trying to achieve has already been done by @[email protected] with @[email protected]. Supporting Bridgy in order to make all Bluesky accounts open for bridging by default would leap us pretty fast towards achieving these goals, by making any microblogging platform on the fediverse a genuine alternative.

    Instead they need $30 million to develop yet another thing.

    If Bluesky users want to fund this, it should at least safeguard that Bluesky remains committed to leaving AT Proto running. As long as they keep that running, a bridge between the Fediverse and Bluesky remains possible. Which is all I personally need, so it’s all fine by me.

    But what a waste of $30 million it would be.

  • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    I really don’t see how Cory’s view of enshittification doesn’t also encompass the powerful corporation embracing, extending, and extinguishing their own protocol to close any escape hatch. Especially when the key module is so monolithic and expensive.

    They’ll make a proprietary update to their relay that conveniently makes it better and faster for their users while making it harder and more expensive for the alternative to keep up. They’ll add a special feature, but only build it out for their implementation and not figure out how to backport it to the public spec. Little by little Bluesky and the spec will drift. All while the alternative keeps burning money trying for something that, while Bluesky is still in the growth mode, provides no benefit. Eventually they give up or just can no longer be a real alternative, then the VC investors start asking for more and more and more. Corporate money isn’t just going to roll over and say “you got us, I guess our investments were just charity”.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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    One thing about Cory’s books is that there is always some extremely cringe party section with some rather forced romance part screaming “how do you do fellow kids?” even to me, a middle aged guy himself.

    The above is also cringe, even though the argument has some (limited) merit. Look, Cory… just admit some rich friend of yours talked you into signing up for this on the last silicon vally party you attended. We all make mistakes like that some time 🤷‍♂️

      • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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        10 hours ago

        Maybe you should get checked for a stroke you had before already if you can’t parse regular English sentences 😏

    • drspod@lemmy.ml
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      One thing about Cory’s books is that there is always some extremely cringe party section with some rather forced romance part screaming “how do you do fellow kids?” even to me, a middle aged guy himself.

      How is that relevant to this post?

      • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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        1 day ago

        It wasn’t me who used a cringe party metaphor first 🤷‍♂️

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 day ago

    Unless ATProto is fully open and has been proven to be operable for a relay that’s community-maintained, this largely smells like yet another “make the community endlessly chase the tail of corporate” scheme, which tracks well since from what I’m reading the people behind this are a bunch of AIbros and… Mozilla, who apparently enjoy endlessly chasing Chrome’s tail.

    And in the end, endless tail chasing in IT leads to justabout the same thing we saw XMPP Googlification lead: death.

    • drspod@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      also, Fuck anything predicated on being popular. We can exist without constantly competing for a popularity contest.