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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @jscholes @Jage I will be surprised if Bluesky can last even ten years. The fediverse, though, will probably just plug along literally for ever. In the same way that IRC does; nobody uses it, but it all still exists. But unlike IRC, ActivityPub is flexible enough to modernize. So I doubt it'll ever have the hypergrowth that Bluesky has. But every year, a few thousand more will join. And it'll slowly eat everything else, in the same way that HTTP ate pretty much everything.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @project1enigma I suspect that some kind of CSAM scanning will get built into the relays. But of course, that means even more resources are required, in order to scan all images in Realtime.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @Jage Personally I'd rather try to build a home and identity on something that can't be ripped out from under me like Twitter was. Moving is difficult, annoying work. Not just because you need decent apps for the new thing, but because it can take years to figure out what the new thing even is, and longer for everyone you care about to go there.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @jscholes Yes, it was a huge problem for Lemmy, with people taking over accounts and communities and posting child porn, specifically to discredit the software. rblind.com doesn't host external images for that reason. However, it was obvious exactly what was happening, and it could be cleaned up fairly easily.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @Jage They talk a lot about AtProto and how decentralized they are. And Twitter promised to be open with the API too, remember? That sure didn't last. Yet Bluesky has some of the same people involved with it (like Jack) as Twitter did. And they'll be just as willing and able to sell everyone out at some future date.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @Jage Agreed. And that's why I dislike bluesky. They're using the word decentralized in ways that I believe are deceptive, and make it difficult for people to understand just how bluesky and the fediverse are different.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @Jage Yes, but I'd like to not use them. My issue with Bluesky is that it's pretending to be decentralized in the same way Mastodon is, when that's just not true. And I suspect a lot of people are going to get a nasty surprise when the corporations eventually sell out Bluesky for a buck. At least Discord isn't advertising itself as decentralized, or pretending that that sort of thing could never happen.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @jscholes Yes, but for that data to hit your server, you'd have to be following the person who posted it. So the odds are much higher that you either wanted it, are willing to risk it, or will at least find out about it. If you're running a bluesky relay, it gets everything anyone anywhere ever posts. Doesn't matter if you follow or interact with them or not.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply @Jage But on Mastodon and the fediverse, you have hundreds of servers to choose from. If someone doesn't like you or want to provide you an account, you can go elsewhere. With Bluesky, you're only ever likely to have a choice of one or two places you can go, because the expenses are so high. And those places will all be run by large corporations, with all of the attendant problems (advertising, selling your data, etc.).
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply For some comparison, my single-user instance is currently using about 3 gigs of ram, and 2 gigs or so of SSD. And that's huge! I have compute to throw at it, so I joined all of the large relays, I follow several hundred people, and I turned all of the configuration nobs as hard as I could to optimize for speed, rather than limiting resources. If you want to host yourself a home on the , your resource usage is going to be significantly less than mine. But unlike with , you'll be controlling all of the infrastructure you need.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
criticism of bluesky as I come to understand it more deeply The primary reason will never be decentralized is because the resource requirements are way too high. Yes, you can host a (personal data server) if you like, and that will provide you control of your own personal data. However, you're still dependant on someone else to host a relay, in order for your PDS to become part of the network. Hosting a relay seems to need upwards of 3 TB of SSD storage, and a ton of memory. And once you get that done, you need to host an app view, in order to make use of all of the data on the relay. While that's not quite ready for primetime yet, when it is, it ain't gonna be cheap. Based on what I can understand, an app view needs to index all data on the bluesky network, in realtime. This is the kind of architecture that only our VC funded big tech masters could actually afford to deploy. So if, when you say "decentralized", you mean that Google, Microsoft, and Apple could each afford to run a shard of the network, sure it's decentralized. But if you mean that Joe and her homelab could run any useful portion of the network, it is in no way decentralized, and never will be. Even if compute prices come down to the point where small organizations could afford to deploy this sort of thing, you've still got the logistical nightmare that the relay hosts all of the data. From everyone. NAZI's, pedophiles, if you run a relay, all of that data is going to be passing through your server. Content labels and blocklists mean you might never see it, but if you run a bluesky relay, it still exists.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@alexhall That’ll do it. If a post has both formatted and text only versions, tweesecake grabs the formatted version, but then can’t actually display the formatting.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@alexhall Are you using tweesecake? It’s fine on Mona and the web.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Interesting look at the state of open source health apps: rblind.com/post/3338992
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@lynn It sure was! Back when all the cool kids were writing custom forum software in php5.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@lynn Nah, write an interpreter in php for another language. I’ve had the misfortune of seeing two of those. One that started as someone’s custom config file format and slowly became touring complete, and another that started as someone’s custom bbcode style markup language and also mutated into its own programming language.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Got one of those coughs that's been lingering for a couple weeks. It won't get better, it won't get worse, it just clings on! Yuck. Not sick enough to take time off work, but not well enough to be happy about it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@adam Well, thanks for the info anyway. Place to start I guess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@adam Soon I’ll be forced to switch. Work is talking about making it mandatory for vpn access. Not sure I want to trust my janky solution for the thing that pays me.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@adam Every time we get one of these outages I check for IPv6. I’m always disappointed lol