Yeah wholesome mom and pop businesses getting eaten by larger, more specialized and efficient corpos is not a bug, it’s an inherent feature of capitalism. A worker at a specialized firm can manage dozens of apartments for the same salary as your aunt managing just one or two- she stands no chance in the long run. Same for retail stores and most other kinds of businesses really.

The only solution is democracy- having the larger more efficient firm be democratically owned by its workers and accountable to them and through them the community, rather to a cigar chomping investor hundreds of miles away

No, not all investment is the same. look up the difference between rent and profit.

Oh I thought you meant decentralized currency. What you’re describing is just standardized storefront apis though, the vendors don’t need to talk to each other (federate) for it. unless i’m missing something

Surely we’ve learned by now that decentralization and markets don’t mix well

uhh could you clarify for me how the fediverse works? I thought it was like 90% mastodon which is very much the twitter format

Good preview for what’s going to happen to the new York times under the new admin :)

It might, but actual leftists should object to that framing

Not strictly speaking. Bluesky supports did:web as well as did:plc, and with any luck they’ll add more decentralized methods

Bluesky (well, atproto, bluesky is the twitter clone running on atproto as a demo app) doesn’t actually have instances in the mastodon sense, it’s a more modular design for better scaling (because it was designed from the start to replace twitter)

Here’s a good article with illustrations https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

The Atlantic is not left leaning journalism lmao. A good rule of thumb is that if you publish David Brooks you’re not left leaning

unless i’m missing something, activitypub also needs a centralized authority like dns. That’s just how domain names work

Here’s a really good blogpost (and followup thread) outlining the differences of atproto vs activitypub (from one of the original authors of activitypub).

It got a friendly “acknowledged, we’re working on it” reply from pfrazee, one of the lead bsky devs.

https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lbku7vdjjv2l

That the universal ports are worse for some purposes than the old specialized ones. I feel this especially for magsafe and analog audio

no, no, he has a point

Hey nobody said they’re not attractive to men

That post refers to hosting an appview that does all the same things as the official bsky (the service) one, which involves a ton of storage and bandwidth and processing (for everyone’s recommendations, notifications, and all the other moving parts), and is closed source to boot.

Frontpage.fyi is a lot cheaper simply because its used by like 50 people tops.

Because we live in a capitalist hellscape and the companies that implemented these tricks were the fastest growing segment of our economy for like 15 years (esp after the 2008 crash) so the government turned a blind eye. Now they control the world and are able to literally buy politicians

There are already smaller appviews that use the existing hosting/authentication infra, but bypassing the bsky appview aggregation. Nothing with any real scale but for example there is a barebones reddit/hackernews equivalent https://frontpage.fyi/

Things like using surveillance to figure out when your payday is and raising prices (just for you, and just on that day) because you psychologically are more willing to spend in that moment

Unfortunately a lot of our peers are also tech illiterate :(