I cannot stress enough how people need to take their privacy seriously. I also cannot stress enough that a majority of people either do not care or do not know how to even begin protecting their data.

We can have all the Tor, the Signals, the guides for degoogling- but if it's not getting into the hands of the public in an easy accessible manner- it's not going to fix the issue. The real problem is apathy and intimidation when it comes to tech.

Bluesky is the closest we've come to a successful decentralized town square, we're not even going to discuss mastodon (not having an easy mobile app means it will never move outside of certain circles). We're getting there slowly. But I see things moving nonetheless

@medus4.com It's not private or decentralized though is it?Everything is public and there's a central point of censorship for governments to target in the firehose, no? The PDSs and custom domain names are a great start though.

Hey @mauve.moe - there are multiple people running firehose (relay) instances. It’s an optimization (pulls from all the PDSs) and not hard or expensive to run. And pretty hard to censor because we can just host more relays. All public, we’ve got to work on private data sooner rather than later.

@bmann.ca Do all these relays work with the main bsky app? I was under the impression the appview pulled from the main one and the app pulled from the appview. Also how else are they managing to comply with government takedown notices in the app?

The relays work with other front ends, clients, and other ATProto data types that are building their own stuff. deer .social and zeppelin are two examples. Bsky the company has been filtering at the app layer - data is on the PDS, relay is a cache. Other clients still display.

@bmann.ca Good to know ty. And yeah the atproto network is pretty decentralized. I just wasn't sure about the main bsky app.

Yeah it’s a company with legal obligations in many jurisdictions. They might make parts of their client apps pluggable but mostly people have been running clones of the codebase.

@bmann.ca Excellent resources, ty for your patience explaining things. 🙇