you are in control of which social media you use

I don’t use or support Bluesky.

You are currently spending your energy defending a company

I’m not defending anyone. I am just looking at a stated claim (Bluesky is as bad as Twitter because they verified ICE) and evaluating if it has merits. I don’t think it does.

If a newspaper you enjoy reading

The “newspaper I enjoy reading” is the WWW. The reason that I don’t buy newspapers is because I want to keep the power to curate the information that I receive. As long as I am reasonably in control of the information that I can access, I see no point in complaining about it.

If you want to make a parallel to Reddit: despite it being 99% filled with crap that I don’t care about, I could use it just fine and ignore all the drama. But when they decided to change the terms of the API and they were trying to force the specific channel to use to access it, then I immediately “stopped enjoying it” and went on to work on a solution to be back in control.

So, you would be OK with a newspaper accepting ads

What I am “OK with” has no impact whatsoever in “what actually gets to happen”. I rather not waste my energy on the things that I can not control.

Banning ICE would not let them post Nazi propaganda

It would. They would just do it from unverified accounts. Worse still, they would be able to post it and completely deny it if confronted about it.

the corporate overlords of bluesky will let them post propaganda for free.

Spammers also get to send millions of messages every day for “free”, but we mostly ignore it because we are able to filter them out. Sure, it would be great to completely get rid of spam and the phishing industry… but there is no way to completely get rid of them that does not involve increasing the surveillance aparattus and given more power to a centralized enforcer, so if I have to choose between spammers and corporate-controlled communicatioins, I will take the spammers any day.

I don’t know how else to say it: you keep falling into the same non-sequitur.

No, I don’t expect them to ban anyone from the government. And, no, I don’t think it would be wise to do it: verifying the account does not mean they are supporting it, it just means they are making sure that whatever crap ICE is saying can not go around without accountability.

If you don’t want to see their shitty posts, now you can simply filter it out. And thanks to verification, you can share your filters to others. That’s how decentralized systems work. Bluesky does not control who I get to see. ICE or any other institution can not buy its way into manufacturing propaganda. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than any of the existing alternatives.

but one implies that the other will not be done.

This is false.

Labeling the account as verified and excluding/not excluding from the AppView are two separate actions.

It’s a good thing they get verified. It means they can not take back anything they post and they have to take accountability for the account.

Do you think it would be better if they didn’t verify it and let them spread misinformation and propaganda with plausible deniability?

It could be an optional feature.

By default, users and communities share the namespace so they can not have the same name. But if you as an admin want to let users and communities with the same handle (the “as:preferredUsername”), then you need to add two CNAMEs that point to the same domain of the backend, and add these to lemmy.hjson, so that the backend can know how to generate actor ids.

Of course, this still wouldn’t let mastodon users to find the actors by querying “username@myserver”, but at least they would be able to know they can find “@username@people.myserver” and @username@groups.myserver".

But we are not going to get “niche” users if we don’t get large numbers of users. Niche interests will only come up here when the population is so large that even the long tail ends up with critical masses.

Those defending “quality over quantity” miss this exact point.

I think this is yet-another reason to have a separation between users and communities at the instance/domain level.

Setting up a server should require one top-level domain and two subdomains:

• https://myserver.com/ would be for webfinger and the actual backend.
• https://groups.myserver.com/ would be the subdomain for the AS2.Group actors
• https://people.myserver.com/ would be the subdomain for the AS2.Person actor

I sound like a broken record, but none of this would happen if the devs took a good look at RDF before throwing everything into objects/classes and ORMs.

I’m working on something that aims to be compatible with Lemmy’s API, and my models are based on the context definitions first. This means that it becomes impossible to have communities and users with the preferred_username, because they are both actors.

That might work, but it’s never a good idea to write your code against a specific implementation. Plus, it seems that in this case the Lemmy devs shot themselves in the foot: why allow to create two different types of actors with the same name?!

I am not so sure Mastodon is at fault, here. Going to https://lemmy.world/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3Avinyl%40lemmy.world, this is the result:

{
  "subject": "acct:vinyl@lemmy.world",
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/vinyl",
      "template": null
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/vinyl",
      "template": null,
      "properties": {
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Person"
      }
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
      "type": null,
      "href": null,
      "template": "https://lemmy.world/activitypub/externalInteraction?uri=%7Buri%7D"
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/c/vinyl",
      "template": null
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/c/vinyl",
      "template": null,
      "properties": {
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Group"
      }
    }
  ]
}

So, lemmy is just providing two different actors for the same subject name and saying they refer to the same account.

Looking at the list, only AndStatus and Evan’s CLI tool speak activitypub natively. Everything else depends on an application API.

Please, use the lemmy test instances

• https://voyager.lemmy.ml/
• https://enterprise.lemmy.ml/

If you don’t, you will end up having your instance blocked.

One use case: get posts from sports commentary that are on Bluesky and cross-post them to relevant communities. Half of reddit’s NBA posts is just someone taking tweets from NBA reporters and posting there for discussion. With the bluesky integration, I could see this being done very easily.

create a Lemmy instance that mirrors reddit, rather than have bots post reddit posts onto main Lemmy instances, create an instance that mirrors specific subreddits on request, including the comments of their posts, and allows Lemmy users to comment and reply back, where those comments are also propagated to reddit so that replies and discussion are mirrored also.

I guess you were not here during the alien.top debacle…

This is exactly what I was doing with Fediverser, and I was really close to implement full two-way bridging, but instead of supporting the effort the great minds of Lemmy decided that the any sort of automated content was spam and unworthy of attention. Instead of looking how the system for onboarding users would make migration 10x simpler, I had to deal with skeptical admins and users who covered their noses at anything or anyone trying to fight Reddit on their grounds.

They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.

The problems regarding Reddit-the-corporation are orthogonal to the problems of Reddit-the-online-space. Which types of problems are you referring to here?

You do understand that I am describing a whole different client, right?

There is no “Lemmy Feed”, just “posts sent from individuals to a group” vs “posts sent from individuals that are broadcasting without any specific audience”

How this presentation layer would work would be entirely up to the developer/user. I can envision people that might prefer to have a separate threaded-view for group posts like we have in most forum sites, but I can also envision people that will prefer each post appearing in a “feed”, like what Facebook does for groups. I can also envison such an application providing a “image gallery” for people tthat want to see only pictures, like Vernissage does.

My point is, it would be completely up to the user how to see the data.

How? My server would be able to talk with any of the existing projects and talk native ActivityPub. It can even bridge to other protocols without forcing them to change anything on their side.

I am not sure whether “represent” is the right word here. What I mean is that all posts have a “recipient” (the audience).

For Mastodon, you have public posts where the recipient is literally a “special” audience, called https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public. If you want to see a private message to alice, you just change the “audience” to contain only the https://example.com/alice actor URI.

To post to a community, it’s the same logic: if you are posting on fediverse@lemmy.world, then the message has “https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse” as the audience. This message is then sent to lemmy.world and processed.

In ActivityPub terms, there is no such thing as a “Mastodon posts” or “Lemmy communities”. You just have “authors” and “audiences”. In effect, it would mean that you emulate a “post to a community” by writting a post with the community as the “audience”, and anyone that follows the actor that represents the group (equivalent to the Lemmy Community) would find the posts.