Yeah I in general think that Graber is very good at giving good answers in interviews!

Honestly even if bluesky does become enshittyfied, which is a very real possibility, the work they’ve done on AT proto so far will probably be extremely useful for whoever takes a crack at a more decentralized internet next. There are a lot of clearly smart and passionate people who are given space to research and experiment with different ways of doing things and I think that’s both very valuable and interesting

I agree that the interviewer shouldn’t have implied that they are decentralized today! I don’t know if bluesky even say that they are decentralized themselves, on their website it says that they’re “building an open foundation for the social internet” which is more accurate but maybe they mischaracterize themselves somewhere else.

So first of, the part of my comment that you quoted doesn’t make sense because what I’m saying is that bluesky theoretically allows for decentralized relays but it’s impractical in practice. Your analogy doesn’t really apply to that.

I do think that it’s misleading to call bluesky decentralized today (at least without any caveats). The goal of the project however is to eventually create a more meaningfully decentralized social network and they have tangible plans for moving in that direction so I think it’s unfair to dismiss this aspect of bluesky completely.

I think that it’s fair to want the interviewer to ask more critical questions and in general be more precise with their phrasing but

repeat that PR talking point

is a very cynical and uncharitable take on bluesky and decentralization. Cynical takes aren’t necessarily wrong but they’re not necessarily correct either.

The AT protocol is by its own account an ongoing project with problems that still need be solved before it is able to provide a social network with all the properties that they’re interested in.

I don’t think that it’s accurate to say that bluesky is “completely” centralized (it is less centralized than most social media) as much as it’s de-facto centralized. One reason for this is that it’s prohibitively expensive to self-host relays. This is something that the AT protocol devs have plans for addressing, so it’s possible that this de-facto centralization is a temporary stage in the evolution of bluesky and AT proto.

It is of course possible that they are lying or that they will be unsuccessful despite best intentions but taking for granted that it’s just a “PR talking point” is, once again, very cynical in a way that I don’t think is completely motivated.

Well it’s not like everyone who uses Chat GPT is going to become delusional but if you start going down the path Chat GPT is going to make it a lot worse

I don’t know that it’s the “algorithms”: a lot of people just use their following feed on twitter and although it changed a while back that was the default feed on bluesky for a long time. I think that there is a fairly large portion of bluesky users who mostly just look at following and still don’t really like mastodon.

Imo, a big reason why bluesky has been a more successful twitter competitor than mastodon is cultural: mastodon has been around for years before musk bought twitter, and a big selling point was that it wasn’t like twitter, for example that its “less toxic”. A large part of mastodons userbase never liked pre-musk twitter that much and will tell you of for acting like you would there. Bluesky on the other hand has a large portion of users who liked pre-musk twitter and are happy to follow pretty similar social norms as they did in pre-musk twitter.

This is to some extent reflected in the functions of the different sites as well, for example you can’t quote retweet on mastodon which iirc is deliberate because qrt dunking is “toxic”. Bluesky has quote retweets (although they allow you to untag yourself from a qrt).

Yeah I agree, I think looking towards the future is a better idea in general. I’m on lemmy but not tumblr myself

Fresh memes!

My theory is that the primary reason why the fediverse isn’t more popular with young people is cultural. For instance, I don’t think anyone in generation z would use the term “fresh memes” :)

But yeah I also think that tumblr has a nostalgia advantage. It represents the internet before it “turned bad”, while the fediverse represents a possible future for the internet. Both have different appeals, but I think that nostalgia wins out for a lot of people.

“algorithm” just means “set of instructions”, it is a bit unfortunate that it’s become the default term for talking about this kind of thing.

I think that youtube wants to maximize watch time, if you just watch subscriptions you might get “done” at some point but with the home feed you can just keep watching forever

People have scrutinized what chatgpt for example is allowed and not allowed to say by its programmers. I think the difference here is that there is lower hanging fruit to grab because the Chinese state has a different relationship to censorship than a lot of other states.

I also associate Sinophobia with being prejudiced against Chinese people or Chinese culture, however being critical or skeptical of the Chinese state is actually perfectly reasonable. I’m also very critical of the US state and this isn’t because I’m “americaphobic” or some nonsense.

Please explain how this is Sinophobic.

It can be hard to bootstrap yourself up from zero followers. I’d recommend posting something just so that people have an idea of the kind of thing they can expect if they follow you from checking out your profile. But you probably won’t get much engagement from your own posts at first, so it will probably be more fun to just reply to other accounts.

Bluesky has a feature where you can set up customized feeds to filter for any kind of content you want. The person who saw your post might have seen it in the “newskies” feed which just contains every first post that any account makes for example. So one way to get engagement can be to write posts that show up in a certain feed that people follow, like there exist some feeds that are based around certain topics that usually trigger based on your post containing certain keywords. Most people just use the following feed though, I think.

Bluesky is funny because they genuinely have some great user based moderation tools but on the official moderation side they’re really bad in all honesty. The sum of these two parts are a better experience than most websited on the internet at the end of the day

Twitter has historically been used as a platform by a lot of different fandoms and the network effect is strong enough that they haven’t managed to leave en masse until now

No, the podcast can absolutely missrepresent the thing that it’s sumarizing. The podcast also adds commentary, and I think it’s especially this commentary that I find unreliable.

I think that it is impressive, but not necessarily that useful? In particular, you can’t really trust what they’re saying to be accurate so it doesn’t actually give you that much usable information.

Very cool, but I’m not sure what I would actually use it for.

Yeah thought that might be the case! It’s just a thing that a lot of people have misconceptions about so it’s something that I have a bit of a knee jerk reaction to.

There are a couple of reasons that might not work:

• Maybe we’ll asymptotically approach a point that is lower than human-level cognitive capabilities
• Gradual improvements are susceptible to getting stuck in a local maxima. This is a problem in evolution as well. A lot of animals could in theory evolve, say, human level intelligence in principle, but to reach that point they’d have to go through a bunch of intermediate steps that lead to worse fitness. Gradual scientific improvements are a bit like evolution in this way.
• We also lose knowledge over time. Something as dramatic as a nuclear war would significantly set back the progress in developing AGI, but something less dramatic might also lead to us forgetting things that we’ve already learned.

To be clear, most of the arguments I’m making aren’t really about AGI specifically but about humanities capability to develop arbitrary in principle feasible technologies in general.

Another possibility is that humans just aren’t smart enough to figure out AGI. While I’m sure that we will continue incrementally improving technology in some form, it’s not at all self-evident that these improvements will eventually add up to AGI.