@cwebber@social.coop at 12/13/2024, 7:14:36 PM

Three weeks ago I wrote "How decentralized is Bluesky really?" dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent

Shortly thereafter, @bnewbold wrote his response: whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbt

I have written my (final) response blogpost: dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-blue

And as last time, 🧵. Buckle up.

So first of all, thank you @bnewbold for not only encouraging me to write my first piece, but being so extremely lovely in your response. I genuinely mean that.

And I'd like to go meta for a moment before we get into everything I have to say, because the discourse has been interesting.

I tried really hard to be fair and not mean in my writing last time. It is, genuinely, the way I prefer to behave. Nonetheless, I was expecting a lot of negative pushback, maybe from the Bluesky staff, but especially either from Bluesky's team or fans or actually even the fediverse.

These days, one kinda gets the sense that "civil discourse" is dead, and maybe even undesirable. Everyone else is unpleasant, and if you even try to be thoughtful, you're going to be taken advantage of or actually dragged for it, so don't bother.

This exchange has made me feel hope that's not true.

I was critical of both Bluesky and the existing fediverse in my writeup, though I was more critical in my analysis of Bluesky. Nonetheless, Bluesky's team by and large were encouraging and thoughtful and expressed appreciation that *I* was attempting to be thoughtful. Grateful for that.

Communities on both Bluesky and the fediverse were also receptive, much more than one would expect. This was nice to see.

I did get a few criticisms that I was too harsh or even too nice, but not too many. In the aggregate, reception was positive.

As with last time, I'm doing these threads on both Bluesky and the fediverse. This time I'm putting the links to each of you earlier in the thread. Feel free to see what the other side is saying:

bsky.app/profile/dustyweb.bsky
social.coop/@cwebber/113647109

I'll also say that I've been doing this in an incredibly stressful time, *on top of* a mountain of work.

We're doing a fundraiser btw over at @spritely. If some of the things I talk about resonate with you, maybe look at our work and consider donating: spritely.institute/donate/

It's difficult to know how much I should talk about @spritely. The previous analysis wasn't about it, but it came up a little because our work there aligns directly with where things should go. For the most part, neither piece is about it. But it will come up more later on this time.

Anyway, for the most part the reason it'll come up more later is because @bnewbold specifically put an ask for me to talk about it in his piece. So it will, but later.

In the meanwhile, what I'm trying to say is that I'm a very tired and overworked woman and these are my words, not my work's.

So the title of the piece I just wrote, yeah? It's "Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization" dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-blue

But the reason for that title is that I thought it was kind of funny that I was replying inline to a lot of @bnewbold's blogpost like it was an email thread

Of course whenever I get some email subject like "Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Fwd: Re:" I'm like oh god I really don't want to read this thing and I thought, maybe I shouldn't name this blogpost that

But @mlinksva told me that he thought it was funny and perfect and to keep it and so I did

And so here we go, oh god again, not another reply in the email thread right?

Well for my part this is the end, I am not *blogging* about this again, not on my blog

Well not unless something *extremely* saucy and impossible to ignore happens

Otherwise else this is it. THIS IS IT I PROMISE

Also last time I hid three easter eggs in the thread, and I did that just because it was getting so *long* I thought it would be funny if I got replies that said "I found the egg" and at the end said "congrats you found all three eggs you collected the egg triforce, you can defeat gender ganon"

This ended up turning out to be an interesting metric, one I was too lazy to *formally* measure, but I guess someone else could

Friends I gotta tell you people loved the eggs in both places but the fediverse did way better on collecting the eggs

Congratulations fediverse, you beat gender ganon

But one way or another people did, after all, seem to actually read deep in the blogpost and especially deep in the thread, which leads to a question, why am I doing this to myself, why am I re-articulating what's already a long-ass blogpost into a long-ass thread?

WHY AM I DOING IT AGAIN

Well the last blogpost was 24 pages printed and took me 8 hours to summarize and this one is definitely shorter, it's only..

oh shit it's 20 pages oh fuck

okay I've been awake since 4am and getting this post ready since 5am working 12 hour days lately haha it's no problem

I'm gonna need more tea.

One more meta thing before we get into it. I want to say up front: working on and building systems is deeply personal, and deeply emotional.

We are talking about systems people pour their lives into. Trust me I know.

It's worth doing a critique, but it's also worth acknowledging the human aspect.

So anyway. We are going to get into it. And the further we go, the more serious my critiques are going to get. Just because I'm being nice doesn't mean my analysis won't be harsh at points.

Nonetheless let's try to be decent to each other. We all deserve that. Thanks. 💜

If you can't tell, my narration style buries the lede quite a bit. So lemme tell you what you can expect up front:

- Some fluffier bits I thought were good framing
- A dive-into-literature analysis of the terminology "decentralization" and "federation" and whether Bluesky is either

(cotd...)

- A defense and analysis of my claim that Bluesky's approach explodes unsustainably ("quadratically") as you try to decentralize it
- "Actually what I'm worried about portable identity isn't what you may think"
- Public content vs community expectations on Bluesky

(cotd ...)

- A comparison of Bluesky, ActivityPub, and @spritely's values and design goals (invited by @bnewbold specifically in his post! good idea)
- Stepping back and concluding: "Where to from here?"

So yeah. That's a lot to get through. Let's get going.

Oh yeah and just like last time I WILL NOT BE READING NOTIFICATIONS until I get through this

Sorry, it's impossible. I'll never get through it otherwise. So see your comments on the other side!

So yes, definitely burying the lede, we are now at "Interesting notes and helpful acknowledgements"

Bear with me, we'll get to the deeper analysis, but this does help frame things I promise

So first of all, @bnewbold was very nice:

> I am so *happy* and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public. Her writing sheds light on substantive differences between protocols and projects, and raises the bar on analysis in this space.

Aw thx 💜

WHOOPS I FRAGMENTED MY THREAD CONTINUE HERE: social.coop/@cwebber/113647312