← Feed
@giacomo@snac.tesio.it
Post #4403282
2026-08-03 12:29 UTC
@riverpunk@defcon.social
I'm afraid it's a bit naive, as a description: replace the "Social Web" with the "Market" and you get something Adam Smith might have wrote to describe classical model of market economy:
The Market was designed like this because it prevents degradation. How? Because it has escape bridges built in. If one of the seller "goes bad", you can jump ship without loosing access to your favorite product. When the last monopolist went bad, there were no bridges, so we're all still stuck there. The Market can never go bad, because there will always be a new seller to escape to; a new better option
And to be fair, within the small markets defined by the limits imposed by the slow production and products distribution of his age, the Smith's model provided a pretty good framework to describe "the wealth of nations".
However the steam engine and the industrial revolution changed the dynamics, turning its simple model into a propaganda tool, instead of a valid economical one.
In the same way, your description might be useful as a marketing/propaganda tool (and indeed it's actively used by #BlueSky to pretend an decentralization it doesn't really provide), but not to describe or understand truly distributed social systems, such as #XMPP, the #Fediverse and (maybe) #Matrix.
@akareilly@hachyderm.io @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
Replies (3)
-
@giacomo @riverpunk@defcon.social @akareilly@hachyderm.io @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange This. 💯
If Bluesky centralized services company shuts down tomorrow, then you don't have an effective bridge to move elsewhere. You lost access to everything. In that sense, Bluesky practically is not much different to MySpace or Twitter.
I agree though, it's not the protocols that matter. But protocol design does have impact. There is reasons why XMPP and ActivityPub have better decentralization than Matrix and AT Proto.
Open ##4403284
-
@giacomo I'm failing to see what in particular you're criticizing about my point? I see that you've criticized Adam Smith on fairly reasonable grounds, but I'm really not grasping how that criticism is meant to apply to what I just said.
CC: @akareilly@hachyderm.io @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
Open ##4403287
-
@giacomo @riverpunk@defcon.social @akareilly@hachyderm.io @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange s/Adam Smith/Edsger Dijsktra/g s/market economy/computer science/g
Open ##4403302