Interesting to look back at this five months later ... here's what's currently happening today in terms of decentralization the ATmosphere.

• @rudyfraser.com announced today that Blacksy feeds and moderation service are now powered by our own atproto relay -- and it's an independent implementation, not using Bluesky's reference code. It's really worth reading the thread, which has a great analogy for how a relay enables custom feeds.

• @edavis.dev has configured deer.social (a third-party app) to to point to a self-hosted bsky appview which reads from a self-hosted relay which subscribes to a self-hosted PDS which is where this -- as he says, "Bluesky independent from Bluesky".

• @bnewbold published A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month, updating his post from last summer. The network size has increased by close to an order of magnitude since his first post; the cost of a realy

• #FreeOurFeeds is donating a $50K to the AT Community Fund to support the #IndieSky working group. The notes from last week's Ahoy IndieSky Europe give a sense of the energy here -- and also link to a bunch of other projects that sure look decentralized to me and discusses the prospects of Eurosky.

Of course, like I said in the article,

""Decentralization" means different things to different people. As the links in the Appendix highlight, people who are focusing on the (very real) concentration of power in the ATmosphere today, or the potentially-centralizing architecture of AT, find it more useful to describe Bluesky as centralized."

And the power concentration -- or "operational centralization" as Bluesky folks were calling it at the ATmosphere Conference -- is still very real. Bluesky still runs almost all of the infrastructure for the ATmosphere, and it's by far the most popular app, and most other apps (as well as Bluesky) use the Bluesky AppView, Relay, and labeler.

Then again, that's clearly in the process of changing, and it'll be interesting to see how it looks six months or a year from now.

@laurenshof @fediversereport @cyrus @cwebber @rysiek @jonny @possibledog @oblomov @rwg @Kye

#bluesky #ATmosphere

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/we-now-know-the-full-extent-of-trumps-reciprocal-tariffs-theyre-huge-232020114.html

So it seems the stonk guys were hoping he was just kidding. Instead he did exactly what he said he would do and “unveil[ed] a sweeping set of taxes on imports that almost nobody in the investing universe saw coming.” The invisible hand was covering its invisible ears and singing “na na na I can’t hear you!”

(one path from this depressing bluesky thread https://bsky.app/profile/karlbode.com/post/3lltt6jlmg22r ) #uspol

> From talking with people I still don't get any sense that the public truly understands the rolling, concussive systemic failures coming due to the dismantling of all corporate oversight, regulatory autonomy, labor rights, consumer protection, and the social safety net

> this summer will be...hot

> like they're maybe mad at DOGE cuts and know the health care system is shaky, but I don't get the sense they understand that the entirety of functional governance and corporate oversight has been disassembled

> like that trick with the tablecloth getting pulled quickly, but total failure

> more avoidable disasters like plane crashes, more mass fatality food recalls, collapse of U.S. healthcare due to medicaid and staffing cuts, mass protest suppression violence, failures of U.S. postal delivery, worse/nonexistent disaster response, significant spike in corporate fraud...

> a dramatic spike in preventable disease due to CDC cuts, extremely sharp declines in life expectancy due to medical research cuts, far greater global instability due to erratic destabilization of foreign policy (including new entirely pointless wars), huge surge in homeless resulting in chaos...

> “Chaos” meaning crime.

> Desperate sick starving people aren’t just going to sit quietly and watch their children die. They will try to take what they need by force.

> This will not be confined to big blue cities either.

> crime, random violence, yes

> …leading to more police (poorly trained, poorly supervised), and quasi-police (brownshirts, militias, sadists), and oppression and targeted violence and intimidation against minorities and queers and libs, and then the oppressed organize their own militias, and then hey presto, civil war

> Yep. Vast areas of the country are ripe for warlordism.

a beautiful history of the first and most effective educational television show

heartwarming, but also, it feels like a eulogy now

(rip teaching preschool kids how to be good humans and good citizens and good Americans)

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/1239646567/throughline-sesame-street

Overton politics

The U.S. war budget is obscene, bloated by corruption, greed, and imperialist ambitions. For decades, out of control spending has been eagerly supported by the leaders of both political parties, urged on by industry lobbyists.

◼️ In 2024, the United States spent nearly $1 trillion on its military budget, equivalent to the next 12 largest budgets combined.

◼️ Today, just five prime contractors receive 86% of the Pentagon's spending, compared to 51 contractors being allocated 6% of defense spending at the end of the cold war.

◼️ The U.S. military is the world's biggest single source of institutional carbon emissions, wrecking Earth's climate and environment.

LEARN MORE ➡️ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/largest-defense-budgets-in-the-world/

#USA #War

First they came for the pro-Palestinian, and Chuck Schumer didn't say anything, because he's not pro-Palestinian.

https://newrepublic.com/post/193321/democrats-letter-ice-international-students

"If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then #AIart, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group...the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it's hurting somebody"

https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/

since a popular Apple pundit recently expressed the opinion that Apple seems to be ignoring “personal preference” on this:

I have contracts with my consulting work that require me to actively guard client information against accidental ingestion into *any* kind of LLM/ML model, even locally-hosted

and since they haven’t been very informative about what on my hard drive is exposed to their LLM, I need to keep Apple Intelligence off on my Mac in order to honor the contract

This isn’t just “personal preference”, Apple is making it difficult for me to use their operating system for my professional work

Unelected President of Kong

As always in #uspol, what’s controversial here is not that an American bomb leveled an entire apartment building in #Yemen killing 53 people (both Republicans and Democrats believe such operations are permissible), only that the plans to do so were discussed on an unsecured chat #signal #signalgate

@luciledt

can but usually won’t

https://beige.party/@possibledog/114190079385731633

@FinchHaven

i was literally touching grass when i used *hyperbole* to make a silly joke, silly

Half of the posts on this network are scolding people to add alt text to the other half

#Mastodon

@eowyn @neil

which is why i said “suggest”

there are many ways to implement a “community captioning” feature, i’m just asking if it’s on the roadmap

@eowyn @neil

sure, but you won't (99%+ of the time)

why not let helpful replyers edit it for you, wiki-style? that'd be much more effective than scolding

oh dear lord Schumer just literally said he wants to wait until *after* rule of law dies and *then* wait for the people to rise up (???) and *then* he'll join them

https://bsky.app/profile/allinwithchris.bsky.social/post/3lkoz4ozghk2y

what exactly would "the people rising up" look like anyway? is he not noticing the street protests already happening? is he waiting for a rousing musical number where millions of people just magically start singing La Marseillaise from their office windows?

And even after that magical hypothetical decisive moment, he didn’t even say what he would *do* then! **He has no plan.** He’s still just reacting daily to stuff that’s been happening for weeks and weeks. Watch the video and weep at his weakness.

#uspol

@neil is "allow community to retroactively suggest and add alt text to images inside original toots after publishing" on the #Mastodon roadmap yet?

https://bsky.app/profile/davidoatkins.bsky.social/post/3lkgn6kbj422d

They are breaking America, on purpose, to replace our pluralistic egalitarian society with religious sexist racist eugenicist antiqueer antieducation antiscience anticreative anarcho-capitalist warlord feudalism. It’s nuts but true. 🤬

Anxiety