My impression is that AT_Protocol lends itself to decentralized computing resources moreso than decentralized control or authority.

In the fediverse, instance owners have pretty strong control over their instance, the content it hosts, the people who can use it, etc. Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.

The key difference, to me, is that if someone doesn’t like how the main Mastodon instances are running, they can make their own and have a completely separate network from those bad actors without rebuilding the world. With Bluesky, there’s not really any exit door like that.

I was just playing with setting up an account on friendica.world, and so far that shit is pretty rough.

I’ll go play with Signal and see how I feel about it. Thanks for the suggestion!

Yea, part of the challenge is that the average age in my hobby (kite flying) is somewhere around 50. So I’d need something with a low barrier to entry.

I like the concept of Friendica because its the most parallel to FB, but it doesn’t seem to be a very popular platform and it has little/no mobile apps :/

I’ve thought about trying to host my own Friendica instance, but haven’t gotten there yet.

Have you had much success in migrating a hobby community to the fediverse? Any tips on what approaches worked well?

Just tried it, good suggestion! It seems like it’s trying its best to do what I want. Filtering seems to fail sometimes when the page loads more content, but it still helps I think. It’s amazing just how much junk can be filtered out when it works:

This is literally an idea I had when I was 16 years old. I was pretty dumb when I was 16.

I’m heavily into sport kites. These are controllable kites with 2 or 4 lines. It’s an outdoor activity that can get fairly physical depending on what you are up to. There’s a very small community, mostly focused in coastal areas, but it exists all over the world.

Once you get some basic skills, most people shift toward flying to music as a ballet individually or with a group as a team. If you get good enough, there are travel opportunities where kite festivals pay for all or part of your travel expenses to perform at festivals. I’ve been all over the US and to 11 countries across the world to fly kites in my 18 years in the community.

Past that, there’s also kite making that is a nice extension of the hobby. I build my own sport kites, and build them for others on occasion. There are open source sport kite plans out there, I’ve got a few on my website (https://watty.us), but there are even more at https://kareloh.com.

A good starting place to get into the hobby might be https://sportkite.org, or some Facebook groups like Sport Kite Pilots Lounge.

“Zillow was found to be price fixing”, you say this as if there was some legal investigation. There wasnt. There were a bunch of salty realtors cherry picking data and confusing correlation for causation. The fact of the matter is, Zillow overpaid and underpaid for houses, and eventually lost millions of dollars during COVID era market swings, recognized the risk of the business and shut it down after only 3 years.

The ibuyer business was intended to take on all of the burden of buying and selling houses to make it easier for consumers to move.