I’m not going to make a very good case for a position I consider terribly misguided, but in short it’s because trolls on other platforms search for terms related to people they want to harass.

Some people have also raised objections centered around privacy or consent to process data. I find that misguided too; ActivityPub is radically public in that it sends every action to a bunch of other peoples’ computers, and there’s no explicit consent to do any of the other stuff a server might do with posts.

Of course any server owner can just select * from statuses where text like '%search string%'.

Search and discovery are a big deal. It’s much less effort to find people and content, and to be found on Bluesky than on Mastodon/ActivityPub. It takes work on Mastodon, and I don’t think Pleroma, Misskey, and their forks are doing much better (though I believe Akkoma has a decent search function).

This is, in part because there is a very vocal contingent of ActivityPub users who do not want working search and discovery. I think that’s equivalent to saying they don’t want the network to gain mainstream popularity.

It does look like it’s possible to independently host all the components of the ATProto network now, so I’m hoping we’ll see a bunch of services pop up soon such that the network becomes more resistant to enshittification. I’ve seen Whitewind and Frontpage, but I don’t fully understand the federation model and haven’t been able to cause one to display posts from another.

It’s kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn’t seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. What I do think is true is that there’s a chance some AI thing will be a trillion dollar investment, and the most motivating thing for VCs is fear of missing out on a giant score.

A nonprofit open source profit ought to have different motivations though.

That’s pretty much what I wrote in the comment box. The options for the multiple choice questions don’t really acknowledge that as a preference people might have.

Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.

Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn’t great (and some people claim that’s a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is https://fedi.directory/

It’s absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.

It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.

Probably some actual racists and a whole bunch of people who thought it would be funny to embarrass Microsoft by getting it to say the most offensive thing they could imagine.

That’s interesting. This post had suggested it isn’t yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.

Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it’s headed.

ATProto is almost there with the only missing piece being the AppView. I’m not sure if BlueSky is hesitant about releasing theirs as open source, but I don’t think there are any barriers to a third party implementing one.

Apple does have an email service, but I think “Apple Mail” is the name is the client, not the service.

This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.

Yes. I think it’s good not to form opinions about subjects you don’t know much about.

When it comes to voting in an election, it’s possible to make good decisions about candidates without forming opinions about every policy issue. That’s kind of the point of representative democracy.

That’s enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.

It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.

It’s almost certainly the number of candidates. On the other hand, top three out of a much smaller number doesn’t present voters with a lot of choice.

I don’t think many people have read RFC 5322 (I haven’t), but most non-technical people I know understand these things about email:

• There are different service providers, and people can email each other no matter which provider they use
• There are different email apps
• Some apps are tied to specific service providers and others are not

I do lament the overall level of tech literacy.

The average person understands email pretty well. Mastodon doesn’t require much more understanding than that, but could probably use some UX and messaging work.

That’s a bit of a circular reference: “it got popular because it got popular”. The question remains: why did BlueSky reach that threshold and Mastodon did not?