Jon P (moved)
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jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Jon P (moved)
@jdp23-alt.bsky.social
1.6K followers 1.8K following 11K posts
My primary account is now @jdp23.thenexus.today
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jdp23-alt.bsky.social
One of the places Christine and Bryan were very much in agreement was that the architectures are very different: ActivityPub based on message-passing, AT Protocol on a shared-heap architecture. Here's an excerpt from whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net...
Christine makes the distinction between "message passing" systems (email, XMPP, and ActivityPub) and "shared heap" systems (atproto). Yes! They are very different in architecture, which will likely have big impacts on outcomes and network structure. Differences like this make "VHS versus BetaMax" analogies inaccurate. The "shared heap" concept goes deeper than just the relay and AppView network roles. atproto is a global self-authenticating network: a single gigantic heap. Accounts have global identifiers (DIDs), which they use to publicly publish data (repos and records). That data is published into an intertwingled ocean of public graph data: records with AT-URI references to other records. Applications are indexes or "views" of that global data graph. Details like the firehose and relay are simply mechanisms for accessing and synchronizing this public graph data. Other data transfer mechanisms, such as batched backfill, or routed delivery of events (closer to "message passing") are possible and likely to emerge. But the "huge public heap" concept is pretty baked-in.
September 3, 2025 at 5:13 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
I like the first three variants a lot, but please not Lemmy! lolsob

Here's what I heard people want in a Facebook group alternative (though of course an MVP would have less). There's a surprising amount to the moderation stuff, but when I was moderating groups I used all this functionality
Nonpublic discussions: “Facebook Group” alternative. User view: Join / leave group. Post / reply / like / etc. See posts in home feed. See recent posts in group. Search posts in group. See group members. See and add events to group calendar. Invite people. Report posts to group mods. Moderator view: Set group guidelines / code of conduct. Request info on application form. Invite / approve / reject members. Hide / delete posts, remove members. Mute members for a time period. Pin posts. Screen posts / replies before publishing. Lock threads. Labelers and/or domain block / allowlist . Send announcement to members.
September 2, 2025 at 4:01 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Hopefully one clear takeaway from the whole situation is that both the ATmosphere and the Fediverse need to start planning more seriously for the possible impact of governmental action that affects a large chunk of the network.

Now's a good time to be thinking about some very hard questions.
What happens in the ATmosphere if the fascist US government decides to target Bluesky for its supposed wokeness – and what happens in the Fediverse if the anti-LGBTQIA2S+ US government decides to target it? What happens in the Fediverse if regulators in multiple countries decide to target Mastodon for ignoring their laws? What happens in either of these networks as jurisdictions around the world add more hostile legislation – age verification, ID checks, and other surveillance and censorship requirements – and authoritarian governments ratchet up their efforts to target dissent, LGBTQIA2S+ people, immigrants, and other marginalized groups? Politically, how do we organize and push back against this hostile legislation?
August 28, 2025 at 10:44 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
In an appendix, I briefly covered why age verification laws are so bad, including the section headings from @internetsociety.bsky.social's excellent amicus brief for the Texas Age Verification law www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23...
Existing Age Verification Technologies Are Often Ineffective and Present Privacy and Security Risks The Ineffectiveness of Current Age Verification Methods, Combined with the Technologies’ Security and Privacy Risks, Unconstitutionally Burden Adults’ Access to Constitutionally Protected Speech and Render [the Law] Both Under and Overinclusive Implementing [the Law] With Current Technology Will Necessarily Prevent Some Adults from Accessing Some Protected Content Altogether The Security and Privacy Risks Associated with Current Technologies–Including That Sensitive Browsing Activity Will Be Deanonymized–Also Burdens Adults’ Access to Protected Content [The Law] Will Also Fail to Achieve its Purpose of Protecting Children Because They Can Easily Circumvent Current Age Verification Technologies
August 28, 2025 at 10:44 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
it's certainly a valid point about the current state. Here's how I phrased it in privacy.thenexus.today/decentraliza...
So while I agree that today's actually-existing Bluesky and ATmosphere are still largely centralized in some important ways, and that the combination of AT's architecture and Bluesky's initial dominance could well lead to de-facto centralization, my perspective is that focusing only on that ignores the ways that they already are meaningfully decentralized.
August 25, 2025 at 8:45 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
It's interesting to think about this in light of the new draft Community Guidelines Bluesky is getting feedback on. bsky.social/about/suppor...

Here's an excerpt from their Labeler Guidelines ...
Do: Keep labels straightforward and non-abusive. Provide labeling guidance that is impartial and based on clear, observable content and behavior. Apply labels impartially, ethically, and consistently. The less bias you have when applying a label, the more trust that users can have in your labeling service. Be upfront about what you're labeling, why, and how, to help users decide whether to rely on your judgments. Consider proportionate interventions when applying labels. Use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. In general, it's best to start by labeling content before labeling an entire account. Should you choose manual moderation, accept reports against the labeling parameters you have designed, assign labels, and review appeals in a timely manner. Do not: Use labels in a way that is abusive, harassing, or targeting of specific accounts, groups, or protected characteristics. Design labels that use profanity, spurious allegations, derogatory terms, or harmful tags. Label maliciously (i.e. knowingly mischaracterizing content as harmful or problematic when it plainly does not go against your stated policies or guidelines)
August 15, 2025 at 2:24 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Common Sense Media is an industry-funded non-profit so I was surprised (and pleased) to see them doing this analysis. Oh but wait. Here's their first key takeaway and , overall risk analysis. Sigh.

@bookjockeyalex.bsky.social‬
Key takeaways: AI can be a powerful assistant for teachers and administrators to increase productivity and boost creativity. Common Sense AI Principles Assessment. Our assessment of how well this product aligns with each AI Principles . Low risk: keeps kids & teens safe. Moderate risk: bee effective. Moderate risk: prioritize fairness. Moderate risk: put people first. Moderate risk: be trustworthy. Low risk: use data responsibly. Low risk: be transparent and accountable. Minimal risk: support human connection.
August 6, 2025 at 4:24 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Their CEO Satya's latest memo to employees is another example of the reality distortion field. "It weighs heavily that I laid off so many colleagues, teammates, and friends who have helped us to succeed. But I want to express sincere gratitude."

PR and comms apparently thought this was just fine!
Before anything else, I want to speak to what’s been weighing heavily on me, and what I know many of you are thinking about: the recent job eliminations. These decisions are among the most difficult we have to make. They affect people we’ve worked alongside, learned from, and shared countless moments with—our colleagues, teammates, and friends. I want to express my sincere gratitude to those who have left. Their contributions have shaped who we are as a company, helping build the foundation we stand on today. And for that, I am deeply grateful.
July 25, 2025 at 11:21 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Totally agree. And it seems to me this is also the sense that @roopikarisam.bsky.social is using the word "community" in her Digital Humanities 2025 keynote - roopikarisam.com/talks-cat/dh...
But I’ve been starting to think that we need some more strategy, to ask: What kind of work can endure in this moment? What kinds of infrastructure are worth building — or protecting — now? What do we need, not to scale, but to survive? And, through these shorter-term questions to keep in mind the larger one that I have been asking at talks over the last six months: When we are in the position to rebuild, what will we need? The first time I raised that question was at the Greater Boston DH symposium — I know some of you were there — where I has a mechanism for the audience to share their answers to the questions. There were many wonderful ideas: data, each other, tacos. But ultimately what rose to to the top, the largest word in the word cloud that the responses were generating (because it’s digital humanities so of course there was a word cloud), was community.
July 19, 2025 at 8:49 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
I've been thinking about how to help people with similar perspectives find ways to get involved with projects relating to decentralized social media ... would love to talk to you as you're exploring, both in terms of what you're looking for and also what structures/resources would help.
Mutual aid. Organizing. Sharing, contextualizing, and making meaning of news and health information to counter propaganda and information overload. The use cases for alternative social networks – not controlled by techbro white supremacist CEO's working with their cronies in authoritarian governments – practically write themselves in today's world. And with so many talented social scientists, designers, systems thinkers, and developers directly impacted by DOGE, MAGA, et al, there are a lot of people with the right skills for these new networks to make rapid progress.
July 17, 2025 at 5:14 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
#LateNightBlackLight
The Oracle of Transfeminist Technology Mirror card, with a black mirror on a white background that looks pink in the black light. Around the card, yellow-orange rays of light, on a blue background
July 6, 2025 at 8:20 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
DMs I guess but as I was just saying today at FediForum ...
Social networks are not good for secure communications. Use Signal! Make sure you check who's in your group chat!!!!!
June 8, 2025 at 6:23 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
It looks even cooler under black light …
7 cards laid out on a cloth, with the white backgrounds looking purple
May 21, 2025 at 4:53 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
BTW I totally agree about the importance of compensating people for their time. Here's how I framed it in privacy.thenexus.today/steps-toward... ... and Free our Feeds gets a lot of points from me for directing money to IndieSky
And, yes, I'm bringing up funding repeatedly. It's important! I don't mean to minimize the importance of volunteers, who may well wind up doing the bulk of the work here: as moderators, as members of open-source software projects. People want to be safer online, and want to be able to invite their friends and relatives to communities where they won't be exposed to hate speech and harassment, so many people will help out in various ways. That's good! Still, paid positions and project-based funding are important as well. Unless people are paid for their work, participation is restricted to those who can afford to volunteer.
May 11, 2025 at 3:13 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
They talked some about this in their latest update at free-our-feeds.ghost.io/free-our-fee...
We are supporting the development of fully independent infrastructure that enables the development and running of social apps that can serve tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. We want to see a social internet built on open protocols and interoperability – and it’s not just about having a great microblogging service like Bluesky, we want to see all kinds of social apps, search, news services and much more emerging from the community. The community is full of talented developers who've already built amazing services with very little, if any, funding. But we're up against incredible odds and we can't win only on volunteer work of tiny bits of funding. People should be paid, services need to be resilient and products should be well-resourced. We need to be ambitious. And that will take $30m, as a start.
May 11, 2025 at 2:10 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Oops I meant CryptPad Rich Text is okay ... CryptPad Docs probably is too but I find its interface (at least as configured on cryptpad.fr) even more annoying. But maybe that's just me, here's the two interfaces, which do you think would be more approachable for the folks you're working with?
A document with the title Tech and Social Stack for Organizing and three other icons at the top, followed by a row with 5 tabs (three on the left with small black text and an icon, on a white icon, two in the center with bkack text on a blue background where the color contrast is not great), and 4 buttons with icons on the right. Below that there's a row of buttons, another row with four pulldown menus, and then the document itself which has three columns -- contents on the left, comments on the right, and a blank area in the middle with a couple of icons) A document, at the top a title and three icons. Below that a row of tabs (one on the left, two in the middle with dark blue text on a white background) with four buttons to the right. Below that, a menu bar with white text on a dark blue background. The Home option is selected Below that are two rows of icons, and five pulldowns maybe, two with words in very small type followed by three in large, medium, and small type and the labels Headin, Heading, and Heading 3. Below all that a ruler, a couple of icons on the left, and the top of a scrollbar on the right.
April 22, 2025 at 2:40 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Post a fictional character who you think would be an antivaxxer.

Hard mode: No villains
Fox Mulder from the X-files
March 20, 2025 at 4:15 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Maybe. Here's the current text for the setting, there may well be ways to improve it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is what people *want*. I'm just saying this is the current behavior.
Note: Bluesky is an open and public network. This setting only limits the visibility of your content on the Bluesky app and website, and other apps may not respect this setting. Your content may still be shown to logged-out users by other apps and websites.
March 8, 2025 at 2:28 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Similarly, from the "To Save Tech, Listen to Black Women" SXSW panel @digitalsista.bsky.social @safiyanoble.bsky.social and I proposed in 2018 ...

But no.

It's almost like tech doesn't want to get beyond its history of aiding hate, racists, sexists, nativists, and anti-LGBTQ+ bigots
Listening to Black women is a path for the tech industry to get beyond its history of aiding hate, racists, sexists, nativists, and anti-LGBTQ+ bigots, and move in the direction of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion within the industry.
March 3, 2025 at 5:42 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Pretty clear message though ... clicking on this link on the HIPAA landing page (which is still up for now) gives "Page not found".
Civil Rights. HHS enforces federal civil rights laws that protect the rights of individuals and entities from unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability, age, or sex in health and human services.
February 3, 2025 at 9:27 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Testing out a simple tarot card reading AT Proto app ...

King of Swords
King of Swords
January 21, 2025 at 8:44 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
And it's similar dynamics on the AI side. Speaking of which here's WA State Sen Bob Hasegawa (a huge champion of strong privacy and AI legislation) highlighting the AI Bill of Rights at a committee hearing! Unfortunately Gov. Inslee opposed Sen. Hasegawa's ADS bill, so it didn't go forward. Sigh.
An Asian man wearing a tie, speaking and holding up a document. Below, text identifies it as the SB 5356 Procurement / Automated System hearing
January 15, 2025 at 9:08 AM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
And this part is just as true now as it was in 2017, so the opportunity for differentiation is still there -- and even more urgent! Details TBD ... let's hope we figure them out quickly.
Policies against racism, sexism, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, and Nazis are extremely appealing positioning these days. Not for everybody, of course: anti-safe-spacers, people with simplistic views of “free speech”, trolls, harassers and Nazis all have problems with it. Still, there’s clearly a large under-served market who’s sick of the norms on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and elsewhere. Creatrix Tiara’s Mastodon 101: A Queer-Friendly Social Network You’re Gonna Like a Lot on Autostraddle, from November 2017, is a good example.
December 17, 2024 at 4:20 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
... and to highlight what you get from decentralization. So, I'll rephrase: "decentralization makes many things more complicated."
The fediverses' decentralization is a huge strength. As well as leading to all the flexibility and variety, it creates an alternative to big tech companies' dominance. But decentralization also makes many things more complicated. It sucks that Apartheid Clyde and Mark F***ing Zuckerberg can prevent everybody on Xitter and Facebook from using them communicate with people on other social networks ... but at least it's simple to understand. The fediverses' approach, where people on different instances can often (although not always) interact (at least to some extent) with each other is a lot better ... but "although not always" and "at least to some extent" are doing a lot of work, and only give a small taste of the complexities of software incompatibilities, differences in norms, boundary violations, and a lot more.
December 17, 2024 at 3:51 PM
jdp23-alt.bsky.social
Totally agree that Blacksky's the most promising thing happening to ATProto -- it's a really different approach to online community than I had see so far. And I also think it's relevant to the decentralization discussion privacy.thenexus.today/decentraliza...
Rudy Fraser's Blacksky, for example, runs three feed generators, a moderation service, and a work-in-progress personal data store (PDS), and is considering implementing their own relay as well. And as Moody notes, the vision for Blacksky "extends beyond any single platform". "Fraser envisions Blacksky's open-source technology, as enabling other marginalized communities to build safe spaces online. Already, he's hosting other communities on Blacksky's infrastructure while letting them maintain their distinct identities. "Every time the culture moves to a new app, there's a Black Twitter, there's Black TikTok, a Black People Reddit section," Fraser notes. "What if you keep your community and the interface changes?"" That sounds pretty darn decentralized to me!
December 16, 2024 at 6:32 PM