ElectroVagrant

edit:
trial transmission semi-successful, tadpole legibility is...adequate, could be improved. further may be spawned with more interesting mutations to better identify proper specifications

Chameleons can hold things, octopuses can hold things, they can both blend in with their environments.

They have a lot in common, besides the whole aquatic-terrestrial separation, but that's no reason to think some of them couldn't get along. What do you think?

Original title was standard YouTube clickbait, "The Myth of Self-Improvement", whereas I think my adjusted title better describes the content of the video.

As Bluesky begins to open up more and more, it's felt more pertinent to try to wrap my head around it. To help in this, I decided to write out my rough understanding of it from its documentation, in the hopes that it may help others and myself with any corrections from misunderstandings.

As Bluesky themselves note, the architecture is laid out in Personal Data Servers, Relays, & App Views. The intent is that each of these may be deployed and/or developed independently of Bluesky, with some caveats to each.

First & foremost, which is somewhat glossed over, is the notion that ordinary people will have the knowledge or interest in deploying their own Personal Data Servers. This isn't really touched on from what I've seen in their documentation, despite it being touted as such a major benefit of the architecture.

Second, which is recognized in their documentation, is that due to the high volumes of data involved, there are likely to be fewer Relays deployed instead of many. See the following:

The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers. Small bespoke Relays could also service tightly or well-defined slices of the network, like a specific new application or a small community.

This inarguably undercuts much of the benefit of it as a distributed network given that Relays are what may enable much of the transfer of data across the network.

It is noted that this may be avoided via server-to-server networking, so we'll have to see how that shakes out given it's mentioned almost as an afterthought.

Third, data portability across a distributed network is absolutely an achievement, but it must be scrutinized. Their language concerning PDSs itself indicates they expect them to be as prone to ephemerality as existing fediverse instances, see:

We assume that a Personal Data Server may fail at any time, either by going offline in its entirety, or by ceasing service for specific users.

Data portability then is reliant on a few crucial details:
Clear communication of the need to safely store recovery keys and backups.

Retention of recovery keys in some way (people never lose recovery keys, right?).

Device safety/stability to ensure access to your Authenticated Transfer client's backed up data, and sufficient storage for said backup.

From that last section note the following about PDSs, "...or by ceasing service for specific users", and then see their documentation on PDS Entryways.

Bluesky runs many PDSs. Each PDS runs as a completely separate service in the network with its own identity. They federate with the rest of the network in the exact same manner that a non-Bluesky PDS would.
[...]
To enable this, we introduced a PDS Entryway service. This service is used to orchestrate account management across Bluesky PDSs and to provide an interface for interacting with bsky.social accounts.

What's noteworthy here is that in creating Bluesky Social, they've essentially created a model that I foresee others building on the AuthTransfer protocol emulating. Many everyday people won't be spinning up their own PDSs, in the same way that few people spin up their own fediverse instances. Essentially instead of PDS Entryways, what may emerge may be AuthTransfer Entryways/Gateways for whatever variety of apps may eventually be built on it.

Similar to different fediverse platforms, you may then eventually see AuthTransfer platforms that pair together Entryway services with an App View as Bluesky itself is presently doing. Arguably this may make the AuthTransfer network no more decentralized (they go back & forth on describing their approach as decentralized and distributed) than the ActivityPub network is.

Lastly, regarding custom feeds and composable moderation, there is something on a protocol level here that those using ActivityPub may look to and improve on (and may already be doing so).

In some cruder ways, however, these are already in play on the fediverse. Custom feeds exist here on Lemmy via different communities and instances. More topic-focused instances (on Lemmy as well as other fediverse platforms) in particular can collaboratively produce distinct local and federated/all feeds. To a limited degree similar may be said of "composable moderation" with community moderation and user/instance blocking.

Mastodon even permits the sharing of one's mute/block lists, albeit admittedly somewhat clunkily.

Altogether the AuthTransfer protocol definitely makes some interesting improvements, but not without some awkward tradeoffs that they seem to be trying to talk around instead of speaking more plainly about.

Addendum, as I wasn't sure if I was about to hit a character limit:
The idea of regular people spinning up a Personal Data Server is already pretty laughable, but it's accentuated by the idea that they might also go out of their way to pay for a domain name to sort of establish(?) their identity across the AuthTransfer network. Many will likely simply have names like around here as @name.atentryservice.tld.

Also there's a kind of weird disconnect throughout the documentation from the idea of people perhaps wanting to operate multiple handles/identities for different platforms, or different purposes on the same platforms. A lot of thought seems put into owning/maintaining a singular identity, but not as much to multiple identities.

Image Description:
A rainbow llama with a black cowboy hat, and a black lute with a violet outline and strings against a radial purple background.

Text along the top: “We'll be your valentine”
Text along the bottom: “…And use that to become others' valentine too”

Blank version if you wanna make your own spins on this:

TL;DR:
Posting and voting is important, but with Active sort being the default across many instances, commenting is just as if not more important in helping surface various posts.

Although the instance I'm posting from hasn't updated yet, I've taken a look through other instances of the new sort options, and I think they're nice additions.

However, in doing so, and bouncing between different sorting options, I've noticed something pretty obvious but nonetheless worth recognizing imo. Since the default sort across many instances is Active, commenting feels like it has as much importance, if not maybe more, than voting alone.

You can find a number of posts here & there expressing some frustration at the state of content across Lemmy instances, and to a degree it's not unfounded; yet what's also helping surface much of the content exasperating others, and keeping it at the top, is much of the commenting to each of those posts. At least, under the Active sort setting, as that's basically its intended purpose (that is, to display posts with active conversations, not uh...surface stuff exhausting to some people).

I realize we can get around this individually by changing the default for ourselves (I personally tend to keep mine set to New), but I think it's worth considering from the outside looking in what kinds of posts we're surfacing and keeping at the top with our conversations. Posting a bunch of varied stuff is one thing, but if you see a post that catches your interest, it might be worth not just upvoting and moving on, but adding a comment here and there to try and help others see it.

Well, so long as the Active sort setting remains the standard across instances anyway.

By now I imagine many may take this as a given already, but I thought it worth noting considering some of the frustrated posts, and that I haven't really seen as much talk about the importance of commenting in relation to surfacing content under Active sort. That's part of why I keep my sort set to New and try to chip in comments to different posts without comments in different communities that catch my interest, even if they've already seen several votes.

TL;DR:
Posting and voting is important, but with Active sort being the default across many instances, commenting is just as if not more important in helping surface various posts.

Image description:
Text in the upper left with an expressionless head to the right with a hand putting an earbud in for them saying, "Gonna really listen to others today"

A pair of hands is now putting on what look to be blinders over the head's eyes with text to the mid-left saying, "Give them my full attention"

Lastly at the bottom, the head is now shown wearing a VR headset with earbuds in and text on the bottom left saying, "I feel so immersed in our conversations now"

Blank version below if you wanna make your own variations!

Image description:
A green gradient silhouette of a turkey against a radial gradient lime green background.

Top text: "i found the meaning of life"
Bottom text: "in like, a dictionary dude!"

been having fun with this silly stuff lately~

edit:
oh dude, i think like...will this work:

yo, gobble up with your own toasted turkeys dudes. lmao