It's a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.

I definitely wish they would've extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.

It's the WordPress competitor.

Truth Social is such a freaking dumpster fire. It would be the absolute worst candidate to be used by governments. Some politicians? Sure. Actual departments? Ehhhh

Let me think...

• Flohmarkt is like Craigslist or eBay
• Honk - Ultra-ultra minimalist
• Vocata - a general C2S-enabled server that allows you to throw any kind of Vocabulary you want at it. Could be useful for mocking up client apps.
• Wordforge - federated novel-writing
• SkoHub - Some kind of federated knowledge discovery system?
• GreatApe - an OBS-like federated video thing that you can have live audiences with.

That's just what I could find from scrounging around, I know there's more.

1. There were a variety of price points, including $1.99 tickets for people who couldn't afford more. General Tickets were 40 bucks, but quite a few people spent more to sponsor the cheap tickets to help out. Only corporate attendees paid $250 per person.

2. The demos were recorded and uploaded, extensive notes for each breakout session were written, and some of us did live-blogging for the entire day while attending. The general format of an unconference is pretty grassroots, conversational, and informal.

3. It's the third event of its kind, bringing in a wide variety of people building different parts of the Fediverse, from Trust & Safety to standards bodies to developers and advocates. There's a lot of awesome things happening as people try to grapple with some of the biggest challenges the network has ever had.

Good to know, I was wondering about that!

It's less expensive than you would think. Object Storage is actually really, really cheap in a lot of cases. I host a PeerTube instance, and while it does cost me money every month, the cost is decently offset by recurring donations, as well as the savings that Object Storage brings.

Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights. We don't have to agree on every point (or at all), but I've decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/03/economic-musings-on-federated-networks/

While I think you're correct about it ultimately being their project, and that users are in no place to demand or expect anything, this thing takes on whole other dimensions once a project is all about building a social platform. Particularly one where volunteers host part of the network themselves.

It's one thing to look at some random demand to write everything in a P2P architecture because DNS is too centralized. When I worked on Diaspora, I literally saw people demand stuff like that, and laughed it off. I'm trying to build a platform that exists today, not some pixie dream bullshit compromised of academic circle-jerking.

But when it comes to basic table stakes for participating in a network that already exists, things change a bit. This is especially true when you're connecting to a global network that has:

• Hate Speech
• Targeted Harassment Campaigns
• Child Pornography
• Extreme Gore and Violence

Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense to say "you know what, admins are going to want to filter this shit out, maybe it's reasonable for them to have some tools and fixtures that are part of core."

Unfortunately, these devs are the kind of people who scream angrily when someone says "Hey, this thing doesn't actually respect local image deletes / GDPR stuff / content deletion on account deletion". To me, that's fucking insane.

It's technically possible, just really, really hard. One example of a successful migration was the transition from calckey.social to firefish.social. It was a massive, extremely difficult undertaking, though.

A big problem involves how user identities are tied to instances. If there were a way to decouple that, I think a lot of the pain goes away.

Yeah, they didn't want their money going to the Taliban, and it's a little shaky as to whether the Taliban's Ministry of IT would take a stricter content enforcement on their ccTLD. For a while, it was only possible to renew domains, not buy new ones.

Still, I stuck with the title because the Taliban is still the reason.

For all intents and purposes, the dev did state their intentions on releasing the code "when it's ready", and was super active in working on it. Not releasing, and relying on one server running a specific upstream branch were definitely mistakes, 100%. But, I think the dev legitimately believed they would hit that target, which was a prerequisite for releasing.