Oddbean

Good essay by @Cory Doctorow about why he’s not joining Bluesky because although ATprotocol is open, the Bluesky network and service is not because there is no way to use it without any services run by the company. https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

Nice article, but lost me at the ActivityPub bit. I know it’s not the main focus of the write-up but it’s important to get right. He assumes that the person who runs your ActivityPub server will give you a chance to migrate to another server, which isn’t always true. > If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server

That and you can't migrate your message history. The latter isn't fundamental to the design, since your new server could import the posts and old server could 301 permanent redirect each historical post. Though you'd have to redirect every piece of the thread which seems like a hard problem. But the former is fundamental, at least as long as ActivityPub uses internet domains as the root of identifiers. Whoever controls the domain controls you. Even having your own domain and hosting your own instance doesn't fundamentally fix that, since your registrar controls it, but it helps.

Great article as usual by @Cory Doctorow, thanks @rabble. > I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will. nostr:note1fqc7s04wk3xrxzsruj8ug9dpvsm50jsezv3dspa9utj49pas4uhs0wxc03