What is hard to understand about the Free Our Feeds BS is what Cory Doctorow @pluralistic, who normally is quite outspoken about these tech bro efforts to coopt legitimate social technology, is doing supporting it? And also why, despite numerous requests to explain his rationale he has been silent on the subject.

What gives Cory? Why are you lending your name to #FreeOurFeeds?

@mastodonmigration @pluralistic

I'm wondering if the Free Our Feeds project is flawed in concept because of what Christine Lemmer-Webber has written about the fundamental characteristics of deploying the full AT stack and the associated costs.

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113821963645421468

@joeinwynnewood @pluralistic

Agree that this is a real concern. Hopefully they are doing a real independent analysis of the feasibility and not basing their plans on Bluesky marketing hype.

@mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic Stepping in for a second here:

_This is the actual BlueSky theory in action_.

BlueSky is at best semi-decentralised; I do prefer ActivityPub's approach.

But semi- is better than not. And the theory ATProto people are following is that it's more realistic - more _stable_ - to have a smallish number of large-organisation-run Relays that people can choose between than it is to have every instance be a Relay.

If that's your theory, dedicated nonprofits getting Relays up _is_ a way to fight billionaire capture.

Is it going to be effective? I don't know. But it is the theory, being put into practice. If it's going to work at all, this is how.

@moira @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic

Understand the theory. Don't understand why it falls to an independent publicly funded entity to prove the theory.

We would be at an entirely different point if Bsky had three working relays and a solid story about how all the code was safe in some sort of trusted open source regime. Further, that these Free Our Feeds folks had engineers on board who validated the feasibility of establishing and running the thing.

more...

@moira @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic

But that's not what is being presented. The technical side of this pitch does not add up. Maybe Bsky can operate with more relays, but it is not at all clear, and it certainly should not be attempted by an outside group until the technology is proven and much more mature.

@mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic Wow hard disagree.

Setting up a nonprofit to be one of the feed providers is _the_ best way to keep it out of billionaire hands, _if_ you're going to work within their theory and their protocol.

The other options are very wealthy individuals (bad), for-profit corporations (bad), or government funding (right now in the US, _also bad_).

BlueSky right now is _pretty likely_ to have interop problems with a second relay. But... (1/2)

@mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic ...having more spec-compliant stacks trying (and often failing) to talk to each other is _literally_ the way that the internet has resolved protocol implementation incompatibilities for decades, from the InterOP days with duelling TCP stacks to SMTP to IMAP to ... well, ActivityPub. To everything not dominated by one (1) vendor.

Now is the _best_ remaining time to be doing this, because the later you go, the more deviations from spec you'll find and the more difficult it'll get - and the harder it'll be to get a less-friendly-talking BlueSky to bother listening to you.

In other words, waiting is _much worse_ if you want a standard to be a _standard_, and not a proprietary API.

(2/2)

@moira @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic

Hmmm... sorry, but not understanding you. Unless the in house developers can prove multiple relays work in a loaded production environment with their technology, it is very hard to imagine an outside organization doing it.

@mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic The idea that their Relay isn't internally a fleet of coordinated - even mirrored maybe - Relay instances is... untenable. That's just not how server load balancing works. Literally no one would do that at the scale at which they're operating, and more importantly, want to operate, and I'm not even sure anyone even could.

Therefore, we already know it can work _within_ a single stack.

The next step is to build another, separate stack. And if you want that to be independent - _actually_ independent - you want that done by a separate organisation.

Just as was done for every other meaningful internet protocol.

@moira @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic

Don't think that is how it works or what is meant by another relay, but admittedly not an expert on this stuff. Perhaps check out Chritine's paper on the AT Protocol.

@mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic I'm not saying it's the same thing. But it is the step you take _before_ taking the next step.

There is not one company in the world that is going to go build an entire new separate stack of its own protocol handling backbone solely for compatibility demo. How do I know? _Because I've worked this job_. You go buy _other people's versions_ and test against _them_, because that's the only thing that doesn't completely waste your time!

And right now there _isn't_ another stack, so people are trying to raise money to build one.

(1/2)

@mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic

People _have_ put up mini-second-Relays using the exact BlueSky code base, for experimentation purposes. At a tiny fraction of total traffic, it worked. The only real way to find out if it's going to work at scale, though, is to try it. And it probably won't at first, and then you _fix things_ until it _does_, or you figure out it's not gonna.

Expecting BSky to build a new second Relay stack to "demonstrate" anything before anyone else tries that is just nonsense. They have better things to do.

(2/end)

Yeah. People are putting up larger-scale relays as well -- @edavis.dev recently mentioned experimenting with a non-archival relay for < $30/month (not bad at all!). Rudy Fraser has also posted about looking at doing a non-archival Relay for Blacksky. So I agree with your view -- there are llkely to be a few bumps in the road but there don't appear any barriers to solving the technical problem of running an independent whole-network Relay.

What's still an open question is the economic motivations for anybody other than Bluesky to running a whole-network Relay. The Free our Feeds approach of trying to get the community to pay for it as a public good is interesting. From Bluesky's perspective, it's great to have them be an independent organization -- and if the reports they're on track to closing another round of funding are accurate, it's very timely.

Of course Free our Feeds approach of having most of the "custodians" be AI-focused doesn't encourage confidence. Neither does the heavy involvement of Mozilla. So we'll see how it works out in practice.

@moira @mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic