Seriously i have zero idea what is going on with bluesky. I never used it. Why are people saying it’s centralised? I also heard that a lot of people are joining it.
Nothing is wrong with it. Fediverse bros are just salty that it’s getting all the traffic instead of mastodon.
I mean, as long as Twitter goes down, who exactly gets to do the killing blow among all the individual blows doesn’t truly matter now, does it?
Depends on your perspective. Would it be fine for Meta Threads to replace it? Threads supports ActivityPub, so in some ways it likely interacts better with the fediverse.
If we agree that Threads isn’t a suitable replacement, then clearly there’s some criteria a replacement should meet. A lot of the things that make Threads unpalatable are also true of Bluesky, particularly if your concern relates to the platform being under the control of a corporation.
On the other hand, from the perspective of “Twitter 2.0 is now a toxic, alt-right cesspool where productive conversations can’t be had,” then both Threads and Bluesky are huge improvements.
Plus is gets the idea into people’s heads that you aren’t married to a platform.
I wish, but I wager most people will immediately get married to Bluesky.
Supporting ActivityPub doesn’t excuse being owned and operated by META.
Will Bsky eventually shit itself like Twitter did? Sure, maybe. That seems to be the normal path nowadays. And when it does, I’ve still got my Masto account that I try to keep active as well. But at the very least, Bsky is a different company. I can have a bsky account without being dragged into an entire META ecosystem designed to put their chosen content in front of my eyes.
Even at it’s worst, the fact that Bsky is it’s own thing and not owned by a mega corporation puts it automatically about Threads, regardless of ActivityPub.
Xitter wont die, it will just become even more of a far-right bubble for fake news and manipulation without resistance, just like Elon wants it to be.
Trump will close his own shit down again or rebrand it to Truth X? 🤣
Well, there are some things wrong with it though?
It’s possible to criticize both Mastodon and Bluesky for their respective issues
The issue is that BlueSky is a for-profit company.
B-Corp. But as long as they don’t show any kind of sustainable business model compared to their costs, ye the result doesn’t differ much
It’s possible to criticize both Mastodon and Bluesky for their respective issues
Sure, they’re both Twitter-like and hence inherently unsuited to having a discussion for starters.
Mastodon doesn’t have low character limits, it’s not terrible for having a conversation
Nothing is wrong with it as long as everyone realizes that it isn’t really resistant to enshittification as the network stands now and isn’t meaningfully federated or decentralized yet
The problem is that bluesky pretends to be a fediverse platform but only as an aesthetic, the founders don’t understand the fediverse at all and they have made no real attempt to federate outside of lip service.
Fediverse is a specific type of federation.
what? so there’s nothing wrong with centralized commercial services? please explain what’s good about ANY centralized commercial service.
Fedibros.
….She said on Lemmy, a platform provided for free and free of ads by volunteers.
Every day I’m more persuaded that in the main, Lemmy got the dregs of Reddit during the exodus, who are the nastiest most argumentative, most poorly informed shitheads the internet has to offer.
Yeah, it’s just like old Reddit before the normies all got there! I love it!
Anyway, that’s enough about yourself…
Feels like you never truly where on Reddit if you felt it was a beacon of warmth and friendliness. Did you ever share an opinion contrary to the prevailing opinion on there?
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The most recent and largest exodus was people protesting their apps going away. Imagine a person for whom site moderation leading to embracing Russophobic snuff films, excusing Nazi tattoos, genocide denial re: Palestine, and general censorship of the left were not reasons to leave but “my apps and app freedoms” moved them.
So yes these are people obstinately fighting over something they just made up but it sounds right to them and matches the vibes of their parasocial bubble. They might literally die if they spoke casually and acknowledged faults.
its centralized because only a single board controls it, and it doesnt federate with literally anything but itself.
Someone could create an instance if they wanted right? The code is on GitHub
Maybe there’s more to it though, I dunno.
Caveat: Neither do most web pages.
right but most ‘websites’ dont go around calling themselves federating or decentralized.
https://lemmy.ca/comment/12906744
I talked about it in this comment, which should hopefully still be recent enough to be accurate
It’s still too soon to tell what they will do. It’s totally possible that they will take the necessary steps to be properly decentralized by transferring control of the registry + protocol to an independent non profit.
Right now I feel that they don’t have much of an incentive to do that, since the vast majority of their users won’t care.
I would love to be proven wrong
As a follow-up, if you have people on Bluesky you want to follow, go for it :) Community is important
There is also a mastodon bluesky bridge that some people use to access both
ATProto Federation is hypothetical at best. Bluesky remains centralized for all intents and purposes.
Founders are all cryptocurrency dorks. The CEO got her start in selling shitcoins and peddling AI slop. Not a lot of confidence in their ability to lead a successful social media company.
It’s a for-profit company, and so far their actual profit-generating function has yet to be determined. Maybe it’s ads. Maybe it’s subscription fees. Maybe they just end up selling all your data off to their 1,000+ data broker partners. Nobody knows yet, but it isn’t going to remain free and open permanently.
ActivityPub is already fully federated with dozens of different services, and thousands of different instances. Every instance has its own leadership, and most are run by generous sysadmins, donations, and volunteers. It can’t make top-down decisions, it can’t go out of business, and it can’t be bought.
Maybe it’s ads. Maybe it’s subscription fees.
It’s subscription fees. They’ve already announced it. It’s literally on their blog, and they’ve talked about it in their Twitch (they didn’t do a VoD so here’s a link to a YouTube video) and Reddit Q&As.
“In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames. Bluesky will always be free to use — we believe that information and conversation should be easily accessible, not locked down. We won’t uprank accounts simply because they’re subscribing to a paid tier.”
Maybe they just end up selling all your data off to their 1,000+ data broker partners.
I don’t really see how they could, seeing as pretty much everything (including Likes) is already public.
The problem I see with BlueSky is, what’s the difference between Bluesky and Twitter?
Did any learning take place? “Okay, clean sheet design, let’s do it again but better this time” what did they do to keep Bluesky from going the exact same direction Twitter did?
I’ve been using it a couple of weeks and loving it. It’s just the way Twitter used to be - fun, quality content, from the people you choose to follow.
No algorithm trying to feed you recommendations. No paid-for blue ticks. No hate-filled bile being ignored or endorsed by those in charge. If someone’s trolling you block/report them and they’re gone, just like that.
At the moment it’s more or less everything Twitter should be. It may or may not last, but for the moment it’s great.
twitter’s recommendation algorithm keeps serving me absolute bangers and i actually kinda like it :/
Ha, fair enough - if it works for you, then ok :-)
The moderation and blocking on BlueSky set it apart from Twitter.
It doesn’t promote and endorse literal Nazis. Why y’all pretending like this isn’t a big difference?
It’s slightly more than a green(blue?)washed Twatter.
The fact it’s getting such a stellar rise over Mastodon is imho a bit sus - people behind it have coin & reach (political), I’m sure monies are being pumped into the bluesky sensationalization, like influences & media articles.
Twatter has/had a lot of monetization potential & now is even more of a (really incredibly direct) political-tool, there are bound to be interest groups that would benefit from cutting it a bit. But all of them want more monies, so they ofc won’t help fossy things.
Having used both, here my view on why BlueSky is outstripping Mastadon:
- It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).
- There’s no messing around with instances to negotiate - you go to bsky.app
BlueSky.comand it just works. Hard to overstate how important that is in retaining people who take a look at a new platform. - There are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t feel empty like I have often found Mastadon.
- There are a lot of relatively influential people on it, media people, authors and actors and comedians, who have largely shifted as a single mass (probably due to the three above reasons) - so for non-famous people there’s a sense of being in touch with what’s happening.
- It’s riding a wave of positivity about itself, which Mastadon never had - this touches on your point about media coverage of it, but whether that’s really due to money being paid to news orgs or just due to journalists seeing what they are doing as being important for others to know about is open to question.
I think the various high profile organisational defections to BS have been a big part of it too. I only looked at BS for the first time when I saw the story about the Guardian newspaper quitting Twitter.
I took a look, created an account and was posting and following people within seconds, it was just really, really smooth. Again, that was not the case (for me) with Mastadon, where it took a while to figure some of it out, and it all just felt a bit fiddly and complicated.
Much like Lemmy in fact, after leaving Reddit - but again there was enough of a swell of new people shifting as a mass that it felt like it was worth the hassle.
- It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).
Yup, pretty much. I tried Mastodon and found it very unintuitive, but BlueSky was immediately understandable as a former Twitter user. I don’t really use either that much, but I’ve spent way more time with BlueSky.
Honestly, it’s the same with Lemmy. I tried a lot of Reddit alternatives, both federated and centralized, and I landed on Lemmy because A) It has the only decently-sized user base and B) my preferred Reddit app, Sync, moved to Lemmy. Lemmy is similar enough to Reddit on it’s own that transitioning over wouldn’t have been difficult, but having Sync just made it that much easier.
This is the only take based in reality. Nobody (except us) cares about openness, federation or business models. What matters are ease of use and adoption.
Of course that doesn’t mean that the other takes are missing the mark in terms of history possibly repeating itself in the future. But if it does, that just means that (as is to be expected) the people don’t make momentary decisions with a bigger (collective) picture in mind. Design needs to address individual needs first and foremost especially when it comes to social media.
Nobody joins a platform to beat corporate ownership of people’s digital lives. BlueSky manufactured adoption by starting out as an invite-only cool kids club. Having to pick a fediverse instance is an entry barrier. There will always be a lot less money to throw around when you’re trying to create something under the umbrella of freedom and openness. I don’t see how these movements could ever win, even if they provide an arguably better product.
- There are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t feel empty like I have often found Mastadon.
Mastodon isn’t empty. People just have to follow folks to actually get any content. Now, Bluesky definitely does the onboarding better in that regard, but this almost certainly comes down to people not knowing that they have to follow accounts to get content.
Well possibly - I do follow people Mastadon though, and it still feels quiet to me. I probably need to spend more time finding people to follow.
In order to get a similar experience to Twitter, you need to follow a lot more people on Mastodon than you did on Twitter, because you never get that algorithmic backfill (and, in fairness, because there are fewer people using it).
It’s funny. People tell me they like that Bluesky has “no algorithm.”
Yes, so the ease of the whole onboarding process & communities/groups that migrated there.
No arguments on the first one (tho stupid on both sides).
What my brainhole is telling me is that the second argument feels a tad too big seeing how Mastodon basically didn’t grew in the same timeframe. What they call “content” and “community” creation feels driven, the “wave” as you put it.
(But again, this is just imho & ‘a feeling’, I have no sauce, not even that much personal experience)
Its funny bluesky.com is not the bluesky website that most people are thinking of.
Hah, neither it is, my bad! I just assumed and didn’t bother to check. Will fix that.
There’s nothing from a user experience currently that makes bluesky bad, it’s just that since it doesn’t seem to actually support decentralization, there’s nothing to stop it from eventually getting just as bad as twitter over time due to profit incentive. Misskey/mastodin are the only microblogging platforms that are truly immune from corporate manipulation and enshittification, which would mean it’s a long term solution (that while imperfect, can only get better).
It’s simply not a part of the fediverse and it’s centralized to a single instance. It’s not any different than Twitter, except no one interesting uses it.
One of the best reasons to want ActivityPub (or similar software) to become the primary way that social media sites are populated with information is that it divorces the particular front end you use from the content that is displayed. Meaning that if, in the future, someone writes a new front end that is better/faster/whatever it doesn’t have to (most likely fail to) fight the network effect to have enough content to be worth using. So you don’t have a David vs Goliath situation for every new, innovative social media site to get off the ground. Never mind Mastodon or Lemmy or Misskey or Mbin. Maybe ten years down the line there are a host of newer and better fediverse sites that are usable right off the bat because they have the same content available that these current sites have. Look at what a trial it’s been to get any new social media site off the ground (Bluesky included). It’s in every user’s interest to remove individual sites’ ability to squash competition via the network effect.
Bluesky’s model of decentralization does not allow for this so far as I know.
JWZ » “I prefer to meet people where they are” says reasonable-sounding white dude holding court at a table in the back of a Nazi Bar.
It’s Bluesky. The Nazi Bar is Bluesky.
“Now that Dorsey has bailed as a board member and principal funder, Bluesky’s DNA is basically [TESCREAL / Effective Altruist] people. It gets worse. Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.”
It’s another oligarch owned platform?
Basically.
It’s corporate social media.
You’ll get ads. You’ll get your privacy invaded. You’ll have an algorithm pushing content toward you. Eventually, they’ll open the floodgates to fascists because pissing you off keeps your eyes glued to ads.
BUT, it’s also familiar, and that’s more important to people than having to do leg work, though personally I prefer Mastodon and it’s really not that hard to use once you’ve spent a few days there and gotten used to it.
Yep i like mastodon. I’ll stick with it surely for long.
It claims to be decentralized but normal people can’t reasonably spin up a server like you can for Mastadon.
Which means, if it goes to shit by whoever is holding the power behind it, then it will go to shit exactly like Xitter.
With Mastadon, you can easily make an instance and jump to different instances that haven’t gone to shit.
I don’t have strong opinions about BlueSky (I have an account, I prefer activitypub but it’s whatever), but to me I will view it as centralized until someone who is not BlueSky runs a second relay server that is federated with the BlueSky run one.
And based on the writings of one of the creators of activitypub, Christine Lemmer-Webber, there are some hurdles to that happening: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
