@ruisan I actually know very little about this app. I just starred it on GitHub and wanted to share it.

@Joris @joshisanonymous I use Matrix. It seems Quiet takes a different approach since it's serverless and peer-to-peer. Matrix can be a hassle to set up. I have my own server, and it's definitely a love-hate relationship.

@hamishtpb

@hamishtpb Still, you can fork it, make a "libre" version, or host it wherever you want. You can nitpick as much as you like and still criticize society while living in it, it's your choice. I've got over 800 GitHub repositories spanning almost 20 years. Open source isn't Big Tech just because the repo happens to be on GitHub. It's still community-driven, transparent, and free to fork anywhere.

I'm just so tired of people saying, "You're doing good things the wrong way". You need somehow to be absolutely perfect in everything you do.

@hamishtpb Repository != product.

Quiet is an alternative to team chat apps like Slack, Discord, and Element that does not require trusting a central server or running one's own. In Quiet, all data syncs directly between a team's devices over Tor with no server required.
https://tryquiet.org

#OpenSource #P2P #Apps #Chat

@Lach Yeah, P2P works to some extent. The Nostr blockchain concept is also quite interesting. But in my opinion, the Fediverse thrives because we share resources to a certain degree. Not every post is hosted by every instance.

@Lach "Only a handful"? As far as I know, there are tens of thousands of instances in the Fediverse. You can host your own server on the Fediverse with a Raspberry Pi if you want, or you can start a WordPress blog anywhere and use that. Or you can start using Ghost or Writefreely without any technical knowledge. The same definitely doesn't apply to Bluesky.

@smattymatty Their problem is they wanted their own from the begin with, to control. They claim that Fediverse and ActivityPub community have been "suspicious" towards them, but also "it’d have been a difficult collaboration if we chose to use AP, especially since we weren’t willing to compromise on some of the decisions". I see it they never even wanted to try.

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/255#issuecomment-1287953987

@zotheca It's not just populism when it comes to self-hosting and independence. The amount of data in the Fediverse is huge, yet you can still host everything from a USB stick if you want to (need S3 or NAS for storage, but anyway, it's simple).

I see Bluesky as false marketing in many ways. Decentralization, by definition, should mean as much as possible. We all know what happens when Cloudflare or AWS goes down - that's not decentralization if only a handful of large services exist. So I completely disagree with the idea that "a few is enough".

RE: https://toot.cafe/@thereisnocat/115906352914274869

@zotheca So I've heard. But there are challenges.

https://mementomori.social/@thereisnocat@toot.cafe/115906353041503398

About Bluesky and federation:
Edit: There might be some mistakes, and my information could be outdated, but the point still stands - Bluesky wasn't built on 100% federation from the start.

I've been wondering about Bluesky's decentralization again. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to self-host Bluesky in its current form. I cannot 100% self host "my own Bluesky".

Their main selling points for building their own protocol were easier migration and better discoverability, but right now there's no simple way to migrate my Bluesky account to my own instance. And hosting the centralized parts yourself isn't really possible, or if it were, not affordable, they haven't made that feasible, by design, it seems.

Even if you self-host a PDS, Bluesky's Relay only indexes up to 10 accounts from it. You can run more, but they won't federate, the central infrastructure decides what gets seen. They control this (source: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation#:~:text=For%20a%20smooth%20transition%20into,for%20everyone%20in%20the%20ecosystem.). You can self-host a PDS (Personal Data Server), but you still depend on Bluesky's centralized Relay and AppView. There's no production-ready alternative infrastructure from what I gather.

It feels like I'd be renting a room in a hotel that someone else is running anyway, when I want my own hotel.

If Mastodon gGmbH vanishes tomorrow, my instance keeps running and federating with everyone else. If Bluesky PBC vanishes, the ecosystem would need to scramble to stand up replacement infrastructure that doesn't really exist yet.

ATProto keeps getting evaluated on its promises while other systems get evaluated on their merits. The "portability" selling point depends on infrastructure that isn't mature enough to actually catch you if Bluesky falls.

I trust W3C, the builders and fathers of the World Wide Web, ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

#Decentralization #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #Mastodon #Fediverse #Bluesky #Servers

People have been telling me for years that Mastodon is dead. Oh no! Anyway...