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0 pointsjrm42y ago0 comments

I'm confused, your first word is "no," but your answer seems to suggest "yes, usk would be able to have considerable influence"

Which is to say, neither storage nor indexing -- but moderation -- the ability to have control over that would be the most important thing.

"Usk" buys (or otherwise leverages money to be able to put his thumb on the control of ) bluesky's moderation. Data storage just gives you the ability to leave? What am I missing?

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Karrot_Kream2y ago

Posts on AT are content-addressed. The feeds, as they're called now, just return content links. If "Usk" buys a feed provider it's trivial to move to another one. If you're curious why running a feed is more expensive than simply storing data, it's because you need to ingest the actual data for these links before figuring out what to serve in a feed. This storing, indexing, and aggregating is expensive.

danpalmer2y ago

Yeah this is my point. With X users are in a tough position because the platform sucks but they still have a huge amount of sunk cost in it. With Bluesky/AT, that doesn't exist in anywhere near the same way.

jrm4OP2y ago

I guess the question I'm really trying to get at is "What is the worst that hypothetical Usk can do?"

I think I have a handle on it for Mastodon; the answer is "not much" or it's going to be pretty hard. While the deeply decentralized nature of Mastodon makes it harder to find a good "feed," it strongly protects against this; he'd literally have to seek out the individual instances and start trying to control them, one by one.

But it looks like Bluesky is closer to Twitter (I ain't callin' it X, idgaf) than Mastodon for purposes of what matters to a bad actor. Instances dropping off the map doesn't matter if you have a hand on the control of the relatively centralized recommendation algorithm?

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