deadsuperhero

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 an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they're both flawed:

1. Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.

2. We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn't match ends up not being used.

3. Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it's simply per-instance.

I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it's not as efficient as it could be.

Hah, nah, I'm just mean to myself. 😅

Bridgy Fed isn't a crawler, though. It doesn't scrape anything, index anything, or store anything. It's simply a translation layer.

This dude wrote a platform that speaks like four different protocols and translates back and forth between them. You can use it to bridge your Fediverse account to natively talk to people on Bluesky, or Nostr, or IndieWeb.

This podcast episode is a reflection on the guy's experiences, insights, and thoughts on doing this work. He also weighs in on the weirdness of making not-exactly-compatible systems talk to each other, some of the really weird UX of interop that surprises people, and some thoughts on where the network is going.

Really smart dude, well-spoken, co-founded Google AppEngine back in the day.

I would absolutely love to do this, but haven't figured it out yet. Part of the challenge is that some of this music is on different websites / storefronts. I might try to build something for this, though.

Wow, nice! Have you thought about submitting your work to Radio Free Fedi? It's an amazing service, basically operates as an Internet radio stream. All of The Mixtapes are assembled through tracks discovered via RFF.

Sadly, it's more complicated in the Fediverse, because Actor identities are tied to specific domains. If a user moves accounts, they basically send out an update that says "this profile is dead, follow this new account instead", and users automatically switch upon receiving it.

There are three problems:

1. If your server goes down before you initiate this switch, the change can't actually federate out to your followers. You basically have to build up your follower list from ground zero.
2. Mass migration is slow, spammy, and inefficient. If we had thought to incorporate some kind of decentralized identifier and relied on that, rather than @[email protected], switching your account to something else could theoretically be more seamless.
3. Doing this for hundreds or thousands of users is not only a headache, but can be a real strain on servers. It's one thing when a single person does this switch for 3,000 followers: the update is gradually trickled out across accounts, and after a while, the new account is at parity. Doing this with thousands of accounts with thousands of followers is extremely painful.

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.

Actually, that's probably my fault, I had to edit the graphic on a phone, and don't have the steadiest hands.

I'll fix it when I get home.

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.

Trust and Safety tooling, apparently.