The Nexus of Privacy

A newsletter about #privacy, #technology, #policy, #strategy, and #justice.

Posts by Jon (npub19q4…kzch).

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Last Notes

2025-10-07 02:03:34 GMT

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Probably. Somebody ran a full-network appview for a while at $200/month; the biggest expense was 12TB for storage. Blacksky runs their Relay on a $66/month instance and PDS is $260 or so, and both are very overpowered for currrent usage -- Rudy estimated that the PDS could get to a few hundred thousand users before upgrading.
In any case the architecture's optimized for large all-public networks. Those costs aren't bad at all for 100,000 active users -- it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be much cheaper than running a simlarly-sized fedi instance. Then again those costs are likely to be unsustainable for a community of a few hundred people let alone anything smaller. It's still an open question if and how things will evolve on the lower end; Blacksky's architecture (with a single AppView supporting multiple communities) gets part of the way there, and there's experimentation with partial AppViews, but we'll see how it works out.
And @npub15z3…0xrp fedi is still generally at the prototype level too, so at this point the only options are something experimental or a fascist corporate social network. Today, AT Protocol is much better than ActivityPub for large flat public social networks, and that's something a lot of people are interested in. Also, the migration story there is also a lot better there than here, at least for now there are a lot fewer compatibility issues (although it's hard to know whether that will be the case); and the architecture lets new projects get up and going quickly by tapping into existing account base and initially reusing a lot of Bluesky infrastructure (which creates longer-term challenges but can still be a very sensible engineering tradeoff). As a result there's a sense that things are moving much more quickly over there than here.
Which isn't meant to diss fedi, there are exciting things happening here too -- including Bonfire, GtS, Fedify, Ghost, NodeBB etc etc etc. But it's not like any of these are polished products yet, the onboarding is still very very challenging, and fedi's existing userbase is very much a two-edged sword. The best situation would be if the two ecosystems learn from and complement each other, and that's happening to some extent -- wafrn is a great example, and Blacksky's approach to community-only posts is very much inspired by fedi's local-only posts. But doing that will require open-mindedness (in both directions) as opposed to a superiority complex, and also progress on anti-Blackness, so we'll see how widely this happens.
@npub1uhk…w03u @npub1mlk…nu5a @npub16d5…u6mu

2025-10-06 20:19:34 GMT

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It's not at all for naught -- any more than the early NodeBB fedi integrations not having all the functionality you wanted means that it was for naught. It just takes a while to implement stuff, especially on a shoestring ... and people who aren't tracking things closely had a misimpression of where the value is for being on a non-Bluesky PDS.
@npub1mlk…nu5a @npub16d5…u6mu

2025-05-02 05:45:52 GMT

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Yeah a wiki wouild be great.
[It Has Been N Days Since a Techbro Asshole Made a Fedi Scraper/Indexer](https://cathode.church/fedi-scraper-counter.html ) has some good summaries for scrapers.
[Here's the single best post about some of the 2023 Threads drama I know of](https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/110574102504926859 ).
[Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ!](https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism/ ) is a much deeper dive into the Threads brouhaha (ha ha) with a ton of quotes, and [Footnote 9](https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism/#nda-meeting ) goes into detail on the June/July Universeodon et al subplot (although alas the tweet from Freeze Ze Peach apparently got deleted at some point).
There's summaries and links to some the 2017 drama in [Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy](https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#dogpiling-weaponized-content-warning-discourse-and-a-fig-leaf-for-mundane-white-supremacy ) ... also there's some later stuff in the section "The Patterns Continue"
@npub1trl…vm7z @npub17pm…kws7

2025-01-21 19:22:03 GMT

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A good report as always, and agreed about the importance of @npub1d43…jl5u's release.
With @npub1gq5…qcul , it's important to highlight that the moderation story is a disaster waiting to happen. @npub1xsv…q6he himself has said that he still needs to implement key functionality like moderation roles and a dashboard, and that he doesn't have a moderation team in place. Others have pointed out multiple unfixed bugs related to reporting.
A high-profile Pixelfed fiasco (or worse, blatantly illegal content) could not only destroy the reputation of Pixelfed, but the sharpnel could have an impact on fedi as a whole -- especially at a time when regulators in the UK are clarifying enforcement of the Online Safety Act, and anti-LGBTQIA2S+ fascist oligarch who run social networks that compete with fedi are in power in the US.
It would be great if Dan changes his stance -- turning off open registration on pixelfed.social until he has the moderation situation under control would be an easy first step that could make a big difference.
And also, we really need to think about what we can collectively do to limit the damage to fedi as a whole.
@npub1l2k…6m2l @npub1dkd…ra7u
#fediverse #pixelfed

2024-12-02 22:13:54 GMT

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The Appendix of [Decentralization and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere](https://privacy.thenexus.today/decentralization-and-erasure-blacksky-bluesky-and-the-atmosphere-2/ ) is a roundup of various articles and posts on the question of whether or not Bluesky and the ATmosphere are decentralized and/or federated. There are lots of interesting perspectives here, including from @npub17m8…rsw8 on @npub1l2k…6m2l, [@cyrus](https://wetdry.world/@cyrus ), @npub1urx…v0z4 @npub1a6y…aeng, @npub1afm…5gp4, @npub1ljm…w8tm, @npub1mrh…6rd6, @npub1zgt…lpat, @npub1jhf…35pm, and @npub1f6r…5a2x. Every single one of those posts was worth reading, and I really appreciate the time everybody's put into it.
That said, it's still very strange to me that as far as I can tell none of you mentioned what seems to me an actually-existing example of decentralization on Bluesky today.

2024-11-16 21:25:04 GMT

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85% (maybe more) of the people who checked out Mastodon in 2022 didn't like it. Nothing significant has changed since. Maybe it'll improve, but what is gained by encouraging people to have a bad expereince now?
Unless things change significantly, Mastodon's very unlikely to be the destination a year or two from now.Fortunately it's not the only software in the fediverse, but oh wait you can't move your data from Mastodon to anything else. In fact you can't even move your data from one Mastodon instance to another!
And that's not even getting into. racism. Does telling Black people should move to a racist environment now -- and one that hasn't addressed its racism over the last 7 years -- because you think they'll have to in another year or two is going to persuade them?
@npub1nvx…45ma @npub1pnw…qhcz

2024-10-31 05:49:06 GMT

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A tale of two prototypes
https://privacy.thenexus.today/a-tale-of-two-prototypes-2/
The next installment of [Mastodon, two years later](https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-two-years-later/ )
Contents:<li>Mastodon 2017 and Glitch 2017</li><li>A BDFL gets to do what he wants</li><li>Flash forward seven years ...</li><li>Seven years later, is Mastodon significantly closer to being a good Twitter alternative?</li>
#fediverse #mastodon #GlitchSoc

2024-10-14 05:08:44 GMT

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The Social Web Foundation and the big elephant in the federated room
(Part 3 of the series)
https://privacy.thenexus.today/swf-and-the-meta-elephant/
Contents:<li>Intro</li><li>Let's talk about Meta</li><li>Meanwhile, back in reality ...</li><li>SWF could potentially be a useful counterweight to Meta (although I'm not holding my breath) </li><li>There are many different ways to engage</li><li>SWF and the Schism Within the Fediverses</li><li>To be continued!</li>
(originally publshed with a different title, but it didn't work well as a link preview so I changed it)
#fediverse #swf #SocialWeb

2024-09-09 21:27:02 GMT

I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!
And what better way to do that than with a long post about it?
https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/
#bluesky #fediverse #activitypub

2024-05-15 02:15:49 GMT

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great thread. It would be great to know more about the word fediverse was getting used in 2012, the [The Federated SNS (Fediverse) Historical Timeline](https://codeberg.org/ddfon/federated-sns/src/branch/main/fediverse-history.markdown?ref=privacy.thenexus.today#fn:user-content-coined-fediverse-twitter ) likes to a [Twitter archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20221210085942/https://twitter.com/search?q=%28fediverse%29+until%3A2013-01-31+since%3A2006-01-01&f=live ) that doesn't show usage really picking up until early 2013. But then again that's usage on Twitter ... what about actually on the (proto-)fediverse?