The catch is that being government contract you, the guy doing the actual work, are beneath three or four layers of companies and bureaucracy and you get over engineered yet somehow too vague specs and projects that take 6 months just to get approved. But hey, the pay is good, and it’s for one of the better causes.
My other EU client, a much smaller non-tech company for whom I host their servers, has recently wanted to know if we depend on any US services, to reduce their exposure.
I believe you can get decent work just by advertising yourself as an expert in migrating code and data out of the US.
That said, the job and economy situation is a big question mark and appetite to invest has lessened dramatically so YMMV
Could you elaborate perhaps a bit more on this on actually why the appetite for investment has lessened? I'd be curious to know more, thanks!
The only exception to this rule I would say is AWS GovCloud, which also might be one of the only chill teams to work at across Amazon. It turns out having "only one way to do it", a system proved through a rigorous vetting process and a thoroughly worked-through contracting process leads to a pretty fantastic work environment for practitioners.
Trying to reimplement that piecemeal is for tougher men than me though. I think I'd rather sit on hot nails.
AT Protocol achieved what Solid envisioned without the inane complexities of rdf and json-ld, which were the biggest learning blockers to people actually adopting Solid.
"To use this system, you must understand that we cannot make any guarantees regarding the security and privacy of data that you may store in a solidcommunity.net Solid pod, or concerning the system's functionality and availability."
Unless I'm missing something else...
(They are not self-hosting; Eurosky is doing it.)
decentralization is not about the number of app instances but how easy it is to switch from one to another. on that metric bluesky is already better than fediverse.
The fact that the PDS in practice owns your identity in the vast vast majority of cases is such a dumb trade off that it’s honestly laughable. Should Bluesky decide to splinter off of the network there would be like 50000 people left.
Stop telling people that it’s decentralised in any meaningful way and be honest about it instead. That’s the issue. The dishonesty and tricking users.
1. People who have no idea what decentralized is.
2. People who would try to figure exactly how decentralized something is.
If you are the latter, you would instantly question the data model of Bluesky and of Mastodon as well. If you are the former then that just sounds like a buzzword.
I've been meaning to move to my own PDS for a few months now. Still haven't. Whenever I decide to get around to it, it'll be fine.
But I do think it's always worth pushing back a bit on this idea:
> "The way Bluesky is funded is at odds with the idea of decentralisation because the platform relies on venture capital and operates under a shareholder model."
Large decentralized infrastructure like the internet, DNS, email, and the web was largely built by VC-backed companies.
The most important open source project, Linux, is funded by major tech companies through the Linux Foundation, with $311 million last year.
Corporate incentives do create conflicts, so it makes sense to be paranoid and skeptical. But the idea that companies can't contribute to open and decentralized systems is exactly the wrong lesson to learn.
We want more VC-backed startups working on open social networks and protocols. It would be great if many of them were in Europe.
The poor need the rich to start a company as banks are prevented (by the rich) from lending to them.
The rich like VC as it's a tax write-off, they invest in VCs and get even more richer.
Most startups fail, the VC's investors get any leftovers and poor founder walks off empty.
>What about when things go wrong?
In general, if you lose money on an investment, you can offset that “capital loss” against a capital gain you have from something else.
no. the banks hold the poor's money, and it needs to do so without risk because the poor need their money. lending money to start companies that are completly unsecured is too risky for banks, they lend money to buy houses which is secured debt.
Really ?
It turns out that commercialization is most of the work of creating a globally decentralized system. Which doesn't mean the non-commercial work wasn't critical.
What organizations do you think created the switches, routers, servers, software, fiber optic backbones? Who created the new protocols?
It was companies like AT&T/Bell Labs, Cisco, 3Com, Sun, UUNET, Netscape, AOL, the major telecoms, and a thousand other companies we don't remember.
Something like 1% inspiration from academia and government, and 99% perspiration by people working inside companies.
3Com, raised $1.1M from three venture capitalists in 1981.
Sun, a Kleiner Perkins portfolio company.
UUNET, raised from Accel, Menlo, and NEA in 1993.
Netscape, backed by Kleiner Perkins.
AOL, backed by Kleiner Perkins.
The ironic thing is Twitter is actually the square of public debate and Bluesky is just a echo chamber just like Reddit. Just try having a debate on these platforms. You will literally get banned, your post deleted or muted.
https://bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com/post/3mky5taqg3222
Plus news organizations are punished for including links in their content.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/do-links-hurt-news-publish...
Threatening violence? Yes you’ll get banned. Otherwise nobody cares.
Not really. You can be banned for stating that transgender people are not the gender they identify as. They consider it “promoting hate based on identity.”
Might you get banned on bluesky for saying that?
Few years ago, I replied to a comment asking if a crime in a news story was punishable by death. I replied that yes, the law allowed the death penalty and linked the law in the state where the crime happened. (I also added a parenthetical that I oppose the death penalty.)
I got a two week ban for inciting violence.
I imagine some automod type of tool flagged my comment, no human could have been stupid enough to think I was inciting violence.
Meanwhile Luigi Mangione threads…
I was banned from Reddit for saying that a (well recognised as terrorists) terrorist group should be destroyed. That is a fairly mainstream opinion.
Other people are banned from Reddit for disagreeing with trans ideology to the same extent as today's supreme court decision. The court decision isn't particularly surprising and neither is people saying the same thing on Reddit.
On the bright side that was the impetus for me to finally stop giving my valuable attention to that site.
And you think that "asian people like this brand of car" is something so obviously impossible to be banned for that you would denigrate a stranger with zero evidence, under your own name. I'm honestly shocked by people's bravery sometimes; if this is a professional account, people reading it who know you might think less of you (and will never mention this to you.)
If you're banned from a subreddit for X, which famously happens for often the thinnest of reasonings, you're effectively out of the online community around X. For some subreddits this even has real-world implications. You don't have to be the least bit spicy to do this. Often you just have to have commented (at all) in a different subreddit that a mod doesn't like.
When I hear someone uses bluesky a lot, I cant help but feel suspicious of them
Like if someone is talking about "white fragility" and being intolerant towards white people, or being xenophobic about American culture, would that be likely to result in them being flagged for intolerance also?
Asking because while I don't mind the concept, I find in practice most of the time platforms add these filters and rules as a way to enforce ideological consensus.
If I were truly able to decide what I see I would see every single post as a new user. Then I would have the optuon to opt in to lists, banning / hiding other users etc.
Instead, I'm forcefully opted-in to not seeing what someone else decided I shouldn't see from the start, and I must find the way to opt out.
1. "Censored" by whom, and for whom?
2. "Censored" for which "right of center" views?
P.S. I should also mention that I can see the posts on that account, even if they all have flags for intolerance by the default moderation service (a service you can opt out of by the way).
From what I see, Bsky is a single instance of one of the most politically aligned social media in existence; in practice, you can achieve that with any proprietary implementation, you don't need ATProto. I honestly thought that the protocol was engineered to prevent an echo chamber, but in reality it powers an enormous standalone echo chamber that is not moving anywhere, so I was wondering what's the difference.
(There are a few other far-right mastodon instances, but then there are pockets of the far-right on bsky, too)
When Bluesky was taking traction, the cultural expectation among its audience was already for the platform to heavily shape the narrative. Paradoxically, AFAIK the Bluesky devs themselves are pretty serious about it being an open standard, though I'm basing this on what I heard. So I mostly believe people that the echo chambering you mention is structured in a way that it's technically not centralized. Though in practice, it's way easier to amplify left wing messages on closed websites like YouTube, Facebook, X (I'm basing this on algorithmic recommendations I'm getting and experience of people I know) than the other way around on Bluesky. But this is just the weight distribution of the audience.
Even then non-left supervised Mastodon ecosystem is something of a deep cut. I mean you're right it exists and now I recall hearing about some drama years ago, but not a part of the front and center info about them, for any common person. So I'm not fully buying the contrast you're trying to build here.
Bluesky moderators take down abusive and harmful posts. There is a daily uproar on the left about how they do this to "kiwifarms but leftishly" behavior under the guise of being "anti-trans". If right-wing centered posts are getting taken down, it is because they are abusive and harmful.
Bluesky popularized subscriber lists, like blocklists. A large portion of the network mass-mutes or mass-blocks anyone on the big right-wing block lists. This is user behavior, not the platform censoring right wing people.
Like, if you want to consume tedious transphobic ‘jokes’ on bsky, you can. Personally, I’m kind of bored of their one joke, and opt not to.
Given that Twitter has been taken over by a far-right lunatic, one might reasonably expect the alternatives to lean a bit left.
Bluesky came at the right moment to pick up lots of people fleeing Twitter after Musk's overbearing edgelord enshittification of Twitter.
Now, Bluesky's robust moderation tools allow users to subscribe to user-curated block lists. Users are empowered to decide they don't want to hear certain viewpoints. You don't want to see cat videos? Subscribe to a block list.
Right wing folks mostly don't care to try Bluesky because they have Twitter, but those that do try don't get much traction because no one sees their posts. Trolling and rage-baiting become unsatisfying when you're talking to yourself.
Nothing, except make it more available.
This is why I often argue against (or at least want to point out the dangers of) the ATProto/Bluesky model.
It's an absolute boon for people who want heavy surveillance, government or otherwise.
The looseness and "unreliability" of protocols like Mastodon ironically make them safer.
There's another protocol in the works that should be useful for syncing private data: