So recently I've gotten very into the ideas behind Bluesky's AT Protocol Protocol Overview | AT Protocol, which is a protocol for federated social networking that allows for seamless account migration between different hosts. I'm much more optimistic about this project than other similar ones like the AP protocol/mastodon, mostly due to the sociological impact of this account portability that I discuss a bit here: AT Protocol, AT Fields, and the Liberation of the Social Graph (substack.com)
One thing that I'm hoping this would solve is the low engagement the forum currently has. Rather than forcing people to use this site to interact with its content, I was thinking that using the AT protocol would allow people to interact with CASPER Forum community content through a shared symbolic identifier in their posts such that they could post from their preferred AT protocol based app, and see all the content in a CASPER Forum feed through that app as well. The website would instead be used to aggregate and organize all these posts as a kind of archive/search tool that you could link to your bluesky or other AT protocol based account if you wanted to post through it.
This, I believe, would greatly increase engagement with the kind of economic research we're all about, and overall make these discussions more accessible.
What are your thoughts?
Sounds like this requires everyone to register and pay for a domain name and related infrastructure. That doesn't sound like an improvement over AP for the 99%. For people like me who already have their own domains it is interesting, and having a domain is the first step towards becoming a first class netizen.
One way to achieve something similar is with .onion domains and petnames. I know one of the AP authors is leaning towards this. This has potential because .onions don't cose anything and you get anonymous communication for free.
Also if you want to get more federated then migrating to lemmy may be an option. But all this is perhaps beside a deeper point, namely that web forums, OStatus, ActivityPub etc are all just poor imitations of Usenet 🙂
Sounds like this requires everyone to register and pay for a domain name and related infrastructure. That doesn't sound like an improvement over AP for the 99%. For people like me who already have their own domains it is interesting, and having a domain is the first step towards becoming a first class netizen.
One way to achieve something similar is with .onion domains and petnames. I know one of the AP authors is leaning towards this. This has potential because .onions don't cose anything and you get anonymous communication for free.
Paying for a domain name is optional - hosting services like the bluesky app let you use theirs for your username. Having recently gotten a bluesky account I found it was much easier to get into than mastadon, and much more functional in terms of following accounts and getting a timeline together. However they have recently started their own domain registration service as a way to make money, and I suspect that selling server space could be a next step as well so you have ownership of that side of things as well, as well as possibly doing the payment processing thing substack is doing once they create the foundation for private content. It's a much cleaner monetization model than ads and whatever the hell twitter is using now: Our Plan for a Sustainably Open Social Network - Bluesky (blueskyweb.xyz)
Basically, to just use the app is totally free, and unlike the AP protocol isn't so hyper dependent on particular hosts creating communities.
So user data stays on your local machine and is pushed to various servers via some decentralized protocol?
So I start a thread here and people can see it if they're subscribed to CASPER on Bluesky (or other social media)?
Seems like it's one of those things where you don't know if it's a good idea until you try; I'd give it a shot and prepare to pivot if it's not having the desired effect.
@madredalchemist Yeah I really want to give it a try, unfortunately been tied up with work the past few weeks, hopefully will be able to return to this soon.