Sometime earlier last year, I took a delve into Nostr. I frequently do this. I'll discover something that's new to me, or I'll explore software, social media, etc., that's new, in-general, so that I can make an opinion about it. I do this, because, far too many people base their opinions on what other people have told them, and this all-too-often creates a snowball effect of incorrect assertions. I like to know what I'm talking about. But, I went into Nostr head-first, and I found that there are quite a lot of Bitcoin enjoyers, there are people with regular normal opinions and ideas (like any social network), and there are some people who are just nasty for no reason (also, like any social network).
I like the portability of Nostr. Take your key, sign-in anywhere. My issue with it, though, is that my data, is not my data. Anyone can take your public key, and log on. See your specific notifications, and navigate around your account as if they were you. They can't really do anything damaging, but that remains a kind of weird aspect of it to me. And then there's the fact that, all of your posts, everything you say and create, it's not stored somewhere that you can back it up. It's across the relays that you use. Scattered like ... tears, in the rain.
Sure, you can host a Nostr relay, and you can do it for cheap. But I don't really want everybody else's data alongside my own. Sorry, I don't need to hold onto your forty-seven different posts about how BTC is skyrocketing alongside my own ramblings.
Plus, this can be problematic if you don't have proper filtering and someone, or people, are sharing things that are ... let's just say, illegal.Then you have ActivityPub, with its many offerings for hosting software. Mastodon being the goliath, and the rest varying in requirements. See, I like Mastodon, Akkoma, Pleroma, GoToSocial, etc, and all that, but the one thing that burns my cheese, is that even with media caching and clean-up processes, you eventually end up paying more than I'd like to. Before I stopped hosting my own Mastodon instance, I was paying around 70 dollars a month for it to continue to be viable.
I would be doing the protocol a disservice, though, if I failed to mention that there are ways you can get around these hefty requirements. Cheaper servers, stricter caching of media, stricter clean-up. I think the Wafrn project is running all by itself on a configuration that's costing the developer around fifty bucks a month?
But, you see, for me, the indie social web, and these protocols, they should be about doing what you want, and also not paying out the ear into the hundreds to, for some, thousands per year.
So, we circle back around to Bluesky, an app I've heavily criticized, and, again, this is all deserved. The bsky team largely do not know what they're doing, and they're making decisions as if they have a board of investors, which really isn't good, if you believe in the decentralized social web at all.
Thankfully, you can host your own PDS. And, in my last post, I was rambling and detailing my frustrations with getting things running properly. Getting things running properly, on my six dollar server.
You can see the fully functional landing page for my PDS, here.
What's a PDS? Why, it's your personal data server! Like hosting a Mastodon instance, except the only data you hold onto, is the data of the people who are actually on your server. Everything else is, well, everyone else's responsibility. Not yours. And you still see all of it. Even though it's not hosted on your server.
I have to admit, it's a bit genius how it works.
Am I worried about saying something Jay doesn't like, and having my PDS muted from the entire canonical Bluesky relay? Yeah. But! But ... there are people out there who are beginning to host their own relays. One of the biggest, being that of BlackSky's relay. You should definitely check out what they're doing, because I think it's going to be revolutionary to the social internet. Contrary to the Default Busky Team, who are fumbling in the dark as if they have no idea what the internet is, or what people generally believe in on their own app. And, then, of course, if you still want to have a connection to ActivityPub, there's brid.gy, which I'm using.
My only biggest concern about hosting a PDS, despite how cool and fun it's been so far, and how actually customizable it is, is that, there doesn't appear to be a "clean-up" process.
Your posts, including their text and media, are forever.
Thankfully, most people only post text content, with scattered image and media. This means it'll likely take years before you amass so much that you have to upgrade your server (if you're hosting just your own data, alongside maybe fewer than ten people).
As for the data being forever, though. I mean, I'm pretty huge on keeping my data, backing it up, never losing anything ever again. But the fact that, eventually, I'll have to spend a little more. That's a little worrying. Not as worrying as vacuuming up the entire fediverse and having to pay hundreds a month to keep posting, but ... a little concerning, nonetheless.
So far mkultra.social has just me, and one of my friends posting to it. And, I think that's fine. Maybe I could take on a few more people, but I am absolutely not currently looking to balloon into a massive thing.
What I can say for sure, though, is I was kind of wrong that "Bluesky" isn't decentralized. ATP is, and you can build anything you can think of with it, including forks of Bluesky.
Forks.
Or, you can make your own AppView, and use that as an integration with your PDS. Again, something that can cost you as little as six bucks! Or nothing, if you have the patience to deal with Oracle (I don't.)
Anyways, I don't really know where I go from here, honestly. I've been an ActivityPub devotee for a long time, and through my regular exploration of social media and tech, I've discovered a few things that could be done differently, and that work quite a bit better. My only hope, is that both ATProtocol and ActivityPub can find some harmony existing together, because one of the biggest reasons I find it hard to separate myself from Bluesky, in-general, is because there are a lot more people on that network posting about things that I want to see, and am interested in, than there are on ActivityPub. And I believe this is partially due to an issue with UX design and perceived complexity of the ActivityPub ecosystem, which is keeping a lot of these people away from the network. So, the internet remains split, splintered, and I flail about, tearing these systems down, and then piecing them back together again.
Source: https://mkultra.monster/social-media/20 ... ral-busky/
