social.growyourown.services is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Single-user Mastodon instance for the Grow Your Own Services site

Server stats:

5
active users

I've had a lot of people ask how BlueSky compares to Mastodon and the Fediverse. I've tried to make the answer as simple and easy to understand as possible:

🦋 BlueSky is designed to give corporations and wealthy people full control of the network. All of its traffic has to flow through expensive-to-run corporate relays.

:Fediverse: The Fediverse is designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.

@FediTips people flocking to bsky thinking it's going to be different has me shaking my head. Just look at their investors. Blockchain, lovely.

Fedi.Tips

@effariwhy

Most of BlueSky's board is blockchain people. Their CEO's CV is mostly blockchain and cryptocurrency companies.

@FediTips @effariwhy One day we'll purge anyone who has ever worked on a crypto project from working on anything ever again

@FediTips @effariwhy Do you have a link to the current status as a source?
I only know this article (in german) from November: "Bluesky: How is a ‘decentralised ecosystem’ financed? Bluesky was launched as a non-profit organisation, and controversial names emerged in the latest round of financing"
derstandard.de/story/300000024

DER STANDARD · Bluesky: Wie finanziert sich ein "dezentrales Ökosystem"?Gestartet wurde Bluesky als gemeinnütziges Unternehmen, im Rahmen der neusten Finanzierungsrunde tauchten umstrittene Namen auf

@w_b @caos @FediTips @effariwhy I was like. I'll take a quick look at that.

Firefox read mode said that the estimated read time is 55 to 70 minutes.

I might as well start.

@w_b @caos @FediTips @effariwhy

So... BlueSky Direct messages all go through a central server. And are not encrypted E2E anyway.

I don't like that.

Never thought about it but DMs in Mastodon are not E2E either.

I'm just learning about ActivityPub. How difficult would it be to E2E DMs?

Could you provide encryption keys on both ends. And make it to where something like the users pass decrypts DMs?

@txtechnician @caos @FediTips @effariwhy

End to end encryption has been a problem in email that still is not solved. The problem is the key distribution.

I don't know how Signal, etc. do it but it would seem publishing the public key in the user profile would solve e2e for at least DMs.

@w_b @txtechnician @caos @effariwhy

Social networks in general aren't good for privacy, as far as I know none of them have E2EE. It's much better to use encrypted messaging systems such as XMPP with OMEMO, @briar etc.

There is discussion of how to bring E2EE to Mastodon at github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i but it hasn't been updated in some time.

Pitch The UI now warns us that: Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon. Would it be possible to use zero-knowledge encryption such that...
GitHubsupport zero-knowledge encryption for toots/DMs · Issue #19565 · mastodon/mastodonBy KiaraGrouwstra

@FediTips @w_b @caos @effariwhy @briar oh man. I think that encrypting toots. Is Overkill. But I do see the need to encrypt private messages.

I mean the difference is obvious. One of those is meant to be public. The other one is meant to be private.

@caos @effariwhy

BlueSky is not a non-profit, it is owned by Bluesky Social PBC which is a for-profit corporation.

In October it announced that it had partially sold itself to Blockchain Capital, and the same announcement said they had appointed a blockchain/cryptocurrency expert to their board:

social.growyourown.services/@F

This is in addition to their CEO being a blockchain/cryptocurrency person:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Grab

AFAIK the board only has three people, so a majority are from blockchain.

en.wikipedia.orgJay Graber - Wikipedia

@FediTips @caos I really wanted to like bsky, but all the crypto connections give me major side-eye

@FediTips @effariwhy I don't think blockchain and cryptocurrency is automatically something bad, I just don't see it's place in a decentralized social media network.

@voxel @FediTips @effariwhy I don't think we've come up with a single use for blockchains that isn't zero-sum speculation though. Every cent "made" by anyone on Bitcoin was lost by someone else, it generates no value. And destroys value in production.

Yes, the technology itself isn't harmful. But we haven't found a non-harmful use for it yet.