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:

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.

I will use PayPal when making purchases, mostly to keep from giving my payment information directly to yet another company that could handle it improperly.

Not to say that PayPal wouldn’t misuse the information too, but it’s one company that might misuse my information vs many companies, so I’ll go with the one.