whats so annoying about the perpetual myth here on fedi is the idea 'oh selfhosting gotosocial is cheap and this is ridiculously expensive on bluesky', not only because its wrong, but because it misses the much more interesting question of considering it is possible run a selfhosted singleperson appview on atproto, why is barely anyone doing it?
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@laurenshof "why is barely anyone doing it?"
I kind of saw it as the same problem the metaverse has (has had?), that corporations are not interested in interoperability.
ATProto does appeal to developers and some smaller organizations, so that's a plus for them, for sure.
Eg, Meta picked AP for whatever reason. Maybe they thought they have a higher chance of influencing it?
Regardless, I think most people who want full control over all of their data are likely sticking with the fediverse.
ATProto devs are willing to make some trade-offs with the benefit of having access to a larger, more mainstream audience, while not having to worry about costs too much, early on.
@stefan what part of "full control over all of their data" do you think is appealing for people to use the fediverse that makes it not appealing to use the atmosphere? what are the unique properties of the fediverse here?
@stefan like on a technical sense i dont see a difference, and i think you could make a good case that 'owning all your data' is even easier to do on atproto than it is on activitypub.
but culturally there seems to be a huge difference, people who value 'owning all your data' seem to gravitate quite strongly to the fediverse over the atmosphere
@laurenshof "owning all your data' is even easier to do on atproto"
Yes! I've said on a few occasions that I absolutely love the concept of a PDS. Unified core API for all ATProto apps, free database for your own app, if you're a developer. Love it.
Now, as a user, yes, I could host my own PDS.
But the data still flows through Bluesky the company's infrastructure. (Unless you use something like https://reddwarf.app.)
Now, you say, easy fix, pick any of the many community-hosted services. There are so many now!
And yes, but here's the rub.
And this is not to disparage all of the ATProto community, but I personally, and I suspect others feel this way as well, find portions of it, well, let's say it's not my crowd.
I think part of the reason is that the Fediverse makes it much more visible what instance you're on.
I don't know how I'd tell on BSky if you were on BSky, EuroSky, or something else.
There's also lots of "we'll host it for you" offerings here. I've not seen any for AT.
I imagine it's less about the protocol and more about the people. Bluesky is much more corporate and people naturally associate corporations with privacy violations and selling data
@laurenshof There's one explanation I keep hearing in podcast interviews and reading in articles talking about people investing time on atproto: "It's easy and simple to just use Bluesky's infrastructure".
like the implication of bluesky haters is that it is a problem of technology (fedi has good cheap software and atproto only has expensive large scale problem), when the effect is is much more in the direction of social arrangements and cultural attitudes on both networks
like i think its very bad that atproto is so incredibly strongly reliant on bluesky pbc! but i want to know why that is, and the atmosphere can change that, and what the fediverse can learn from this as well, to be even better than atproto!
and im pretty sure that a simple 'gts is cheap and the bluesky appview is expensive' is not the answer to that why
Certainly an interesting question. One possibility is that the primary value for most people of running your own instance here is to have control of your data, and over there you don't actually need to run an appview to accomplish that (just a PDS). So what then is the primary value of running your own appview there?
@jdp23 yeah i think thats a major part of it. also kind of shows that we havent really managed to get a good answer to the question of what it actually means to have control of your own data on networks whose primary function is to then send out that data to thousands of unknown and untrusted other computers
agreed. a few more things that might factor into it:
self-hosting GTS (or Glitch or Hometown) lets you run software that many people find better than vanilla Mastodon. And for a group of people, local-only posts provide within-community options; these are only available by self-hosting. Other microblogging appviews don't in general provide significantly more functionality than Bluesky (although I guess Anisota's an exception), and there isn't yet any within-community communications (although Blacksky and Northsky are both working on this, and of course there's also permissioned data coming down the pipe). So historically, there's less functional incentive to do it.
Bluesky is (for most people) "a better Twitter", and global search and hashtags are a key part of Twitter. A self-hosted appview that doesn't directly support that functionality is affordable, but either gives up that functionality (making it less attractive) or gets that functionality from something like Constellation (meaning that in reality it isn't self-contained, so doesn't fully accomplish self-sovreignity).
Mastodon by contrast is more "Twitter-like for people who don't like those aspects of Twitter", and even on larger instances you're not getting true global search / hashtags, so it's not as big a deal.
@laurenshof my suspicion is that bsky was de facto centralized for too long otherwise we would have a lot of PDSs instead of Mastodon servers
And now it's just common sunk cost fallacy...
ActivityPub is just perfect for forums yet the threadiverse is kinda empty and we don't have federated trust levels and so on; another data point for the thesis that a lot of people are here only thanks to Twitter.
I wonder how much not being a ietf or w3c standard also influenced.
@laurenshof@indieweb.social my guess is that this centralization is completely on purpose and the possibility to theoretically be a federated network was made to appeal from people who were escaping from Twitter and thought fedi was too complicated
@scudo no im pretty sure the problem is in reverse, and much funnier: the devs actually want there to be meaningful competition on the network and to not have the network be centralised, but don't know how to make that happen
![gabboman the wafrn dev [SINGLE INSTANCE EDITION]](https://media.gabboman.xyz/1764776490819_e536f6b79c3beea6716621b8e437c4430a427641_processed.webp "gabboman the wafrn dev [SINGLE INSTANCE EDITION]")
@laurenshof@indieweb.social
Wafrn is kind of an appview.
The machine I am using is 4gb ram, 100gb ssd and 2 cores.
It costed me 20€ a full year.
