As I mentioned above, I don’t feel strongly about Bluesky winning, I just don’t like misinformation. (I also have other things I care about more that take up what little free time I have for tech stuff already, so I’m not going to undertake something major just to prove a point.) If there’s really a fundamental problem with AT Proto and how it can be used, Doctorow’s post should have made that explicit.

I did find a (more recent) post that goes into detail about what’s lacking, and I’ve edited my original post accordingly.

Here’s a post on how to set up a relay: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)

…how is it Bluesky’s responsibility to set up an independent server? If they’re the ones that set up the server, how can it be independent?

Doctorow’s complaint only makes sense as a critique of Bluesky itself if he’s talking about the technical aspects of AT Proto. If what he really means is just “nobody has bothered to actually deploy and maintain a fully separate relay instance”, that’s not a problem with Bluesky, it’s an ecosystem issue that he could help by encouraging people to do that work, rather than discouraging them from learning about the platform.

I honestly don’t have much stake in this fight, I’m just frustrated that, as far as I can tell, Doctorow, an intelligent person with a nontrivial following, appears to be spreading misinformation about what is or isn’t possible with Bluesky.

What is actually missing from AT Proto to be usable in the way Doctorow describes? He writes:

Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.

But according to the source code repo, federation features are fully available, including independent servers. There’s even a guide for setting up an independent server: https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting

Edit: looks like I’m probably not missing anything, and the protocol is fully capable of what Doctorow wants, it just doesn’t have any other large instances yet: https://social.coop/@bnewbold/113420983888441504

Edit 2: I found a post that seems much more honest and informative about the actual limitations of AT Proto. In particular:

Relays cannot talk to Relays. If Bluesky Social, PBC decided to show ads (or do something else you don’t like), it would be very hard for you to switch to a different Relay and still be able to interact with all the other folks who stayed at the Bluesky Social, PBC Relay.

But that doesn’t really address the original question, does it? You don’t have to pronounce all the letters in a name, so the fact that you can’t pronounce a newline isn’t sufficient to demonstrate that it can’t be part of a name.

But differently spelled names are legally distinct.

I found something about some recent-ish LG TVs having a default mode that shows static, but I couldn’t find a clear answer on why, and the way to disable it is to enable “Cable DTV”, which seems to suggest that it might actually be trying to get analogue signal by default…?

That noise is horrible; why would someone simulate it rather than just show a blue screen?

Wat

But the human portion has normal human proportions (though potentially scaled up a little). Why would being on a giraffe’s body change that?

For what it’s worth, she was “quickly” released on bail (the article doesn’t say how quickly), and the prosecution is not seeking further jail time but rather for the mom to sign a “safety plan” (although not signing could indeed lead to a year of jail time).

Your point is correct, but “the kid has no parent at all” isn’t (currently) true.

That only applies to humans. So Jesus was certainly cut (and uncontroversially), but if God the Father has genitalia, he may not be; same for the holy ghost.

Pretty sure the official position in most sects, including Catholicism, is that God is not “male”, but singular male pronouns are nevertheless the only “correct” pronouns for “Him”.

I think this is asking about where to keep projects, not how to organize them internally.

For blue checks it’s now much higher

No Claude? It’s pretty good in my experience, and I follow someone on twitter who does absolutely wild things with it.

Right, but saying “I hate the Prius” is not mockery.

Oh, gotcha.

His point is that it’s fine to hate certain cars but that you still shouldn’t mock the people driving them. I think that’s kind of a dumb line to draw, but it’s not hypocritical or inconsistent.

…he’s talking about two different drivers.