I recently finished the episode of The Verge’s podcast #Decoder with the interview to Bluesky’s CEO and it seems a quite interesting project. At the beginning I wasn’t looking really into it because of their choice of using a new protocol instead of the existing ActivityPub, but after listening to her and the reasons behind this choice maybe I’ll give them a chance.
What do you think? Do you use it alongside with the fediverse?
It’s waaaay too polite and clean, to the point of self righteousness. Twitter is still more fun, but it leans too far in the other direction.
Lemmy was too self righteous at first too. People acting like we came here because reddit users were bigots… no, it’s because spez is a greedy bastard who ruined the site.
So I think bluesky might become cool like lemmy when people finally relax.
Twitter > BlueSky > Mastodon
Personally I think we should all use the kbin microblog.
As a normie replacement for Twitter, from what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem that bad, especially in comparison to Threads. I’m somewhat reserving judgement until it’s more clear what the platform’s long-term trajectory is. It definitely seems to have way less alt-right shit on it than Twitter these days, which is a big mark in its favor tbh.
But as a primary platform, it’s not for me. I’ve come to love lemmy and the extremely strong community-driven OSS aspect. I’ll be sticking around here for sure. I only interact peripherally with Bluesky.
Ah, this is why I don’t know what Bluesky is. I had no interest in Twitter, so shrugs whatever
Personally I don’t understand the appeal of microblogs outside of making dumb 1-liner jokes. Which you can do on other social media, too. 🤷🏻♂️
Quick, up to the minute updates from sources you want to be sure you hear from. That could be a YouTuber, a musician, a public transit service, or whatever.
It’s a notification service for everything you care about.
I use it alongside.
Eventually with bridges that are surely coming or with their PDS self-hosting architecture, I’ll just post using my own infrastructure as I do with ActivityPub and Hubzilla/Friendica/Wordpress now.We can have more than one place, as long as its still decentralized-- And the only central place within a unified Fediverse should be your own little space within, whether it’s an asteroid or a whole galaxy.
I don’t know much about their protocol, but I find it likely to be better than ActivityPub since AP is kind of a mess. However I’m not going back to corporate social media ever again. The fewer corporate things in my life the better.
Even if the corporate is a public benefit corporation with open source foss code both for server and client?
Yup. PBC is just a slightly different flavor of a standard corporation. Bluesky have investors, they’re burning investor money right now, they don’t know how to monetize the platform yet, and when those investors come knocking for their ROI it’s the same ol enshittification process all over again. No thanks. I don’t care if the backend is FOSS as long as it all revolves around a corporation, especially one with the roots of Bluesky. If there grows a viable and open community and ecosystem out of that, completely self-sustaining without the need for the corporation, using the FOSS code (or perhaps preferably a fork of it), then that’s a different story and that could be interesting.
Its not FOSS anyways, its Source Available
public benefit corporation
They’re still for profit and corporate leadership and values can change. I wouldn’t trust it.
That’s how OpenAI used to describe themselves, too.
The Activitypub protocol is fine. It could use some minor improvements but there’s definitely no reason for an entirely new protocol.
I never said there was. I’d prefer it if they made AP better instead. And there’s a lot of room for improvement.
I don’t know much about their protocol
As far as I understand, Bluesky is basically a central authority in their protocol. I wouldn’t really call that better than ActivityPub.
Well, there are many different aspects to take into account. I was thinking more of how inefficient AP is when it comes to system resources and network usage, and some other things I can’t remember that made me go “yikes” when I read it. Also how it’s used for things the protocol doesn’t really have support for, so devs make their own solutions that are now part of the AP Fediverse even though the protocol itself, that is the backbone of the thing in question, doesn’t support the things that is a part of the thing. It seems a big mess in many ways, and I believe that Bluesky doesn’t have those issues.
Can you be more specific? How is AP inefficient? What are the nonstandard extensions that devs have made?
It’s been quite a while since I read about the inefficiency. I think it had something to do with CPU load, and that it’s unnecessarily “chatty” in some ways that causes servers to use unnecessarily large amounts of data. And the extensions had to do with different types of services, where the AP spec is best suited for one type of service (like maybe micro-blogs iirc), and others have to use the spec in weird ways or add things on top of it to implement other features that are important for those other types of services, like more forum-esque type things like Lemmy. Don’t remember exactly what they were, but one thing I read last week was that guy who had to shut his AP project down because he used a method of fetching data, that Mastodon (or whichever service it was) uses but isn’t part of the AP spec, and poorly documented, so he implemented it wrong which had horrendous consequences for him, but that’s a different story.
It’s federated but not really decentralized. I don’t know if it’s planned down the road to be interoperable with servers that don’t rely on its master server for identity or not.
I do, and I think it’s just kinda “okay”. The main thing I like about Bluesky right now is just the experimental “threaded mode” which makes following conversations a lot easier for me. I’ve always been more of a Reddit kinda guy than a Twitter user so nested/threaded comments are preferable.
Having said that, as far as microblogging platforms go, I find mastodon in conjunction with the smart lists feature on the Mammoth app for iOS to be a much better resource for following news and finding interesting accounts.
My take is that they wanted to do things differently after extensive research. People here get their panties in a bunch but they talked about why, it’s as much culturally as it was technically. They wanted to mirror a more web like experience and some of the experiences mirrored on Big Social platforms. It makes sense to not tether user identities to instances, that’s not real freedom, especially when data portability is poor and there’s not true account migration on fedi. Fedi doesn’t really empower the individual and many people are oddly critical of Bluesky individualism, yet that’s how the dominant online experience is and more so mirrors real life. People come from Big Social platforms that are driven by their individual experiences so their transition to Bluesky is more natural than it would be on Mastodon. In neither place do you have people telling people how to use their own damn accounts! But, that happens on Mastodon Overall, they have some cool ideas and concepts, I’m happy to see any ideas and spaces that lessen the strong armed centralised grip of Big Social.
It’s not X so 👍.
I rarely used Twitter before the Musk takeover, only to follow a handful of authors I like for updates about their books and a few people who did aerospace updates, unfortunately most of them jumped on the BlueSky train instead of the Mastodon bus, and I’m not going to have an X account so BlueSky it is.I feel like Bluesky is always going to be the fediverse with training wheels. And as you pointed out, these folks aren’t using Twitter, so that’s a good start. All we can do is hope one day these people will start exploring the full range of opportunities available to them in the fediverse.
I don’t and I don’t want to, I hate it when everyone makes their own standard which means there is no real standard to speak of. There’s a xkcd exactly for that.
I’m using ActivityPub and that’s what I’ll be using as long as I feel it makes sense.
They could have made ActivityPub better, instead they made an incompatible protocol.
I think it’s cool that there’s only one comic everyone uses when referencing fragmented standards 😂
That’s almost exactly what I was thinking before listening to the podcast.
But there she explained how ActivityPub was missing some of the feature they wanted because of its instance-centric approach and how trying to change that would have been hard (given how sceptical towards changes and everything corporate-related the fediverse community can be), and so they opted for a new protocol since the goals of the two project were with different aims.
Still not 100% convinced tbh, but I can’t deny she has a point…
instance-centric approach
What did she mean by this? Could you be more specific about what she said? I don’t really want to listen to the podcast.
She was saying that on Mastodon (that was the main activitypub platform she was comparing to) the choice of the instance can heavily influence your experience. If I don’t remember wrong her main points were:
- There’s a local timeline and a federated timeline, and even in the federated timeline you see your instance posts and the posts of the instances yours have federated with, not all posts
- A global search is not always the easiest thing to do, and previous attempts of project that would have facilitated it didn’t received much appreciation from the community
- If your instance admin do choices you don’t agree with (for example blocking another instance) the only way to interact with that other instance is to move yourself
- Moving from an instance to another means loosing your posts and replies, that would stay on the original instance
She was not saying that this approach is wrong, in fact many people on Mastodon like this more community-focused and less-global approach, just that it isn’t what they wanted for Bluesky
Personally it basically sounds like decentralization (instance-focused) vs centralization (Blueskys approach).
The fact that individual instances are in control of their user’s experience is a feature of ActivityPub, not a bug. And it is exactly important for users to choose instances that align with their views - this makes the Fediverse democratic in a natural fashion. Or at least, it makes sure people get the experience they want, not the experience the global centralised entity wants the user to have.
I definitely prefer and trust decentralization a lot more. I don’t want a single entity in control.
Not sure what you’re arguing or who you’re arguing with. Different tools, different requirements.
I was on there, but it seems to me to basically full of the neoliberal crowd that left X when Musk took over. Too much snark IMO.
I know next to nothing about it, but isn’t it created and owned by the dude who created twitter? I don’t trust it one bit. There must be some trap somewhere.
Only one entity develops bluesky. AP has many implementations and room to grow. My expectation is that there’s a plan to make a change to the protocol once they have enough marketshare that will make it much less open.I know next to nothing about it, but isn’t it created and owned by the dude who created twitter? I don’t trust it one bit.
jack dorsey was initially just on the board of directors, but he didn’t create or own it.
bsky and atptoto is all open source: https://github.com/bluesky-social
It has some nice ideas, particularly for moderation. I like that they’re thinking hard about these things.
I think its moving too slowly and it’s lack of momentum at the time of the Twitter exodus was lost. Its too late for it to become an alternative to the likes of Twitter, Mastodon etc. and I think it will die.
I hope that once it’s gone it will leave a legacy of those good ideas I mentioned above which other platforms will take learnings from.
All my opinion.
Generally I agree on the loss of momentum. I’m in there and have said the same there.
That being said, comparing it to mastodon in terms of size at the moment doesn’t make sense. The current metric indicate the BlueSky user base is likely bigger than mastodon’s. Not by much and certainly, just like mastodon, no where close to competing with Twitter and threads (if that’s the goal).
But it seems to have a user base roughly on the same scale as the fediverse. Which is something given how slow and behind they are.
Big question is how viable a small user base is for their company behind it and whether the structure of their system is something a community organisation could keep afloat.
That being said, comparing it to mastodon in terms of size at the moment doesn’t make sense.
I wasn’t doing that. I was really talking about where the Twitter exodus went. I’ve said before, my opinion is that those that have left Twitter are gone and those that want to stay are not going anywhere. From what I’ve seen of Bluesky is that much of that exodus hasn’t gone there, or have stayed if they did. Bluesky feels very empty.
So what I was really saying is that they haven’t capitalised on that exodus and I think they are too slow and too late to be able to do that now.
Big question is how viable a small user base is for their company behind it and whether the structure of their system is something a community organisation could keep afloat.
I think they is a really good question. And it’s something that confuses me (but I don’t know much about their financial situation). They are moving slow which isn’t ‘normal’ for a company. We’re used to them moving quickly, gaining market share and a user base and monetising it. So, assuming they are not going this out of the goodness of their hearts, what’s the end game?
Right, that makes sense. From my impression they’ve garnered an off-Twitter crowd of some sort, but probably smaller than masto. Their active user count (which can underestimate total activity) is on track to be about the same or bigger than masto’s, so there’s that.
And yea, the company clearly has some aim of playing a long game, with a small team. So it’s a bit weird. It’s also a bit weird how their product is more of a platform than an app, which requires third party devs to build on it for it to be attractive. All of which, IMO, is interesting enough to be worthwhile.
But yea, as you say, alternative social media momentum has likely dried up. I’ve said the same else where. So it’s hard to imagine what happens to anything that struggles to keep the lights on.
As has already been discussed, there were attempts at bridges for the two protocols with pretty rough outcomes.
I dont really care if bluesky joins the fediverse but I‘m not going to change protocols because its too much work and gives too much control to them having a proprietary protocol and therefore reversing the good the fedi is doing.
They can join imo but thats it.
At the beginning I wasn’t looking really into it because of their choice of using a new protocol instead of the existing ActivityPub
And yet, here we are with another conversation about something in the wrong place.
As for BlueSky and their illusion of federation, what’s to talk about? Anyone can host a server, but all posts need to be indexed by the server of which they’re in charge of otherwise they don’t appear in anyone’s timelines? It’s like the emperor’s new clothes. They wash their hands of moderation and the majority of hosting costs and you feel empowered, only for them to say, yeah, we’re, for example, inserting ads and you need to be okay with that.
Everyday, I read something here about why Facebook or BlueSky are better than what we have. I don’t even think the people that post this stuff work for either company. I just think they’ve been indoctrinated and they don’t realise that they’re attempting to push us all towards the very things so many of us consciously and determinedly walked away from.
I don’t want to be part of a centralised service. Even one that cosplays as federated. I don’t want Facebook to have my data nor do I want to interact with any of their services. I personally chose the Fediverse because I liked the values it exhibited and I enjoy the community. Everyday I get to laugh at things, learn things, share things and just be generally entertained. Can the fediverse improve? Sure; But neither Meta nor BlueSky are the solution. I genuinely wish both would piss off.
And yet, here we are with another conversation about something in the wrong place.
Well, this is is a place to talk about fediverse and ActivityPub, and mine wanted to be the starting point for a discussion about the two protocols and how they compare with each other, if it was actually worth it to create a new protocol or not etc.
I was not pretending that Bluesky is better than the Fediverse, it’s just different and I’m convinced that discussing about how others do stuff can benefit the Fediverse too.
BlueSky and their illusion of federation, what’s to talk about? Anyone can host a server, but all posts need to be indexed by the server of which they’re in charge of otherwise they don’t appear in anyone’s timelines?
As for this, it was my main perplexity after I listened the podcast since they didn’t really entered into the details of how the “multiple servers, one timeline” work. Do you by chance have any resource/link I could read to learn more about that and clarify my doubts?
You mean the same illusion of decentralisation that the fedi offers? Where AP is largely mastodon centric and identity is tethered to an instance? Where a user is at the whims of an admin? With the networks being so small those admins have more of an impact on everyday users than Musk. They’re not hand waving moderation. They have a Trust and Safety team, third party, custom feeds, all of the same user level controls any social platform has and goes above that with their labelling system. Especially, when it comes to illegal content they’re in better position to protect their teams and users than fedi, which directly exposes admins/mods to harm and has no resources to help their mental health. You called others indoctrinated but that’s how you come across and spewing fallacies
