It should be pretty obvious that a decentralized network that many use specifically to not be connected to centralized networks houses mostly people who do not wish to have their posts bridged to B...
They also assert that Bluesky doesn’t federate (it currently doesn’t, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it’s clear that it now does.
I’m not surprised about the skepticism there though. These are just promises, and we all know that a for-profit entity will happily sacrifice any promies if it means they make more money that way. Also depending on how exactly that federation will work it might be practically useless as well.
Scepticism is welcome, especially for companies founded by billionaires, but I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that federation will be killed off. They started out with no federation at all, then moved on to federating with the sandbox, and I’m quite certain they’ll open up real federation in time. There’s surprisingly little development power behind Bluesky, though, and its recent surge in popularity will no doubt have slowed down nice-to-haves like federation.
The AT Protocol is designed very differently from ActivityPub, making it quite difficult to federate and join the network as a small player, unless you’re only providing content. Following users requires a significantly more beefy server than you would on ActivityPub. On the other hand, ATProto solves a lot of problems Mastodon has (no two servers showing the same list of replies, for one). This leads to a situation where feeding content (and thus producing value) becomes attractive, but consuming content (and thus taking eyes away from the main server) becomes more of a challenge, presumably one left to either bridges like these, based around ActivityPub-based servers like Mastodon.
I think it’s very difficult for a company to take Bluesky’s network, set up their own server, and out-compete them. There’s only one category of company that I would expect to be capable of this, and that’s “billionaires looking to revolutionise things”, which is exactly what Bluesky is all about. It’s possible that Threads will try to integrate with Bluesky, but I don’t think that would take away anything from BS. In fact, I think it would only drive up BlueSky’s value to see Facebook invest in another company’s technology like that.
All of the above makes me quite confident that the Bluesky team will be able to deliver on their promises, in time. They’re not federation-first, and I don’t think they ever claimed to be, but that doesn’t make them anti-federation per se. I do have my doubts about some of the weird cryptocurrency/web3 stuff sprinkled into the protocol, but for now none of that seems to play a central role.
I’m not surprised about the skepticism there though. These are just promises, and we all know that a for-profit entity will happily sacrifice any promies if it means they make more money that way. Also depending on how exactly that federation will work it might be practically useless as well.
Scepticism is welcome, especially for companies founded by billionaires, but I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that federation will be killed off. They started out with no federation at all, then moved on to federating with the sandbox, and I’m quite certain they’ll open up real federation in time. There’s surprisingly little development power behind Bluesky, though, and its recent surge in popularity will no doubt have slowed down nice-to-haves like federation.
The AT Protocol is designed very differently from ActivityPub, making it quite difficult to federate and join the network as a small player, unless you’re only providing content. Following users requires a significantly more beefy server than you would on ActivityPub. On the other hand, ATProto solves a lot of problems Mastodon has (no two servers showing the same list of replies, for one). This leads to a situation where feeding content (and thus producing value) becomes attractive, but consuming content (and thus taking eyes away from the main server) becomes more of a challenge, presumably one left to either bridges like these, based around ActivityPub-based servers like Mastodon.
I think it’s very difficult for a company to take Bluesky’s network, set up their own server, and out-compete them. There’s only one category of company that I would expect to be capable of this, and that’s “billionaires looking to revolutionise things”, which is exactly what Bluesky is all about. It’s possible that Threads will try to integrate with Bluesky, but I don’t think that would take away anything from BS. In fact, I think it would only drive up BlueSky’s value to see Facebook invest in another company’s technology like that.
All of the above makes me quite confident that the Bluesky team will be able to deliver on their promises, in time. They’re not federation-first, and I don’t think they ever claimed to be, but that doesn’t make them anti-federation per se. I do have my doubts about some of the weird cryptocurrency/web3 stuff sprinkled into the protocol, but for now none of that seems to play a central role.