I thought that was the FreedomBox logo at first. I was confused why Billy’s dad would be mad at the kid making a freedombox to run federated systems.
It is very similar
What’s wrong with Bluesky? From my perspective it looks pretty dang wholesome. Could someone please elaborate?
It’s genuinely just people feeling the need to “pick a side”, and it’s unhelpful. Just makes the fans look like clowns.
Bluesky’s got the same vibe as early Twitter (for now). That’s awesome. Mastodon / “the fediverse” can take some time to streamline onboarding so when Bluesky gets sold to Mussolini’s ghost Mastodon will be ready to take the reins.
It failed lemmys rigid purity test.
If the internet has a future, it’s on the Fediverse. We work around capitalism to avoid enshittification, or we let it defer our future further.
In the meantime, the Fediverse needs to get shiny and intuitive. The sign that something is cumbersome and hard to use is people saying “it’s not that bad”.
People may disagree with how BlueSky is organized and architected, but I get why they decided to do what they did. User experience.
Their architectural decisions mean that people don’t have to worry about instances confusing people, and the org structure means is easy to staff a proper dedicated experience team that can be working, planning, and testing before big expensive decisions are committed to code.
Bluesky is apart of the Fediverse and the quicker ActivityPub sites accommodate that fact the quicker we’ll have an open internet.
This pissing fight between ActivityPub sites and Bluesky is dumb and doesn’t further an open internet.
Not directed at you but to a lot, go put time into making Mastodon compatible with atProto instead of bitching.
Didn’t BlueSky come up with their own federation system because… Fuck you?
I mean, what was wrong with using the ActivityPub standard?
I can’t find the source but if I recall bluesky relies on running feeds through central servers and it has patents on its methods so I would say bsky federation has some asterisks. They have done a great job insulating users from the structural elements which reduces confusion.
You forgot one main thing, 🤑🤑🤑🤑.
Filing as a B corp wouldn’t be my first choice if I was trying to prioritize getting rich.
That is how it usually starts. It start innocent but the moment you see potential money or the funding runs out you either become like OpenAI, Google or go obscure worst bankruptcy. It does not help that their protocol is basically how search engine works today. They control the flow of information and funded by venture capital.
Yeah probably. If you told me in 2013 that reddit would go to shit in 2023 I would not really do anything different. Knowing bluesky will go to shit wouldn’t really change anything (if I was a fan of the Twitter format) either.
Heres the thing with federation
It will always be more complicated, and lead to smaller segregated communities. This mitigstes the network effect social media services rely on
The consumer lockin then monetization lockdown cycle always sheds users. I think eventually most federated systems will gain users, albeit slowly.
This only works if a new centralized network doesnt take its place, Blueskys existence kinda proves thats not always the case
The proof is that mastodon user base is steadily going up. There hasn’t been a giant spike in a while but the barrier to monetization is too high for it to shed users from that. Its more like how wikipedia has outlived google as a resource despite wikipedia not being particularly better now than soon after it started.
bluesky has made better choices - the starter packs and user lists are great for new users. They managed to add quote tweets but let the quoted person opt out of dog piles. It looks like they added options for custom algorithms too.
Bluesky will be enshittified but mastodon should be taking notes if they want to pick up people next wave.
The bluesky system is just way better. The local/fed feeds on masto are just wasted.
The block lists for various types of assholes are also a marvellous invention. It’s so nice to block all of MAGA at a click
I haven’t had to block a maga in a decade. my admin already took care of that.
What if we’re wrong and BlueSky just gets better? I mean, with some of the corporate trappings of old Twitter, but still user-friendly, big userbases, vibrant subcultures and banning troublemakers?
I mean even if it repeats “the Twitter mistake” that’d still be another 13-14 years to go. Who knows where short-form social media will be conceptually in that time and whether any competition in the space is even still relevant.
It will, but it still has that countdown timer over its head.
The future is the fediverse, some yet-to-be-invented non-corporate equivalent, or offline.
the concept of more than one website is so challenging for plebs.
use both and please don’t bridge bsky to the fedi.
Bluesky has useful tools. But (almost) all lists were made by the community of Bluesky users. Curation was made by users.
Curation was made by users.
Right, users not corporations make social networks, so the community not for profit corporations should own those social networks.
Can we not all see this as the same old pattern of predatory rent seeking behavior applied to online communities just seasoned with even more jargon and condescending handwaved half explanations?
I think Twitter is so, so awful but used, so the bar is in hell. Most things are an improvement compared to Twitter. And ppl use to praise corporations before communities (if they remember communities at all), so, in this case, Bluesky takes all credit.
Mastodon may or may not be good (I don’t use it), but the fact that it segments off users into different groups means it will never be a twitter replacement. The fact that twitter is essentially “public” and all sorts of people from different areas interact was basically the whole point of it.
Bluesky seems pretty nice so far and it has real momentum. Mastodon seems more along the lines of what Google+ turned into.
Mastodon doesn’t silo its users, that’s what federation is for. Everything you post on the public timeline is essentially public for everyone that’s on a federated instance that hasn’t gotten blocked.
I would argue siloing is easier on bluesky - block list manager drama can definitely have a similar effect to user admin drama. The thing mastodon does poorly is discovery. The fed and local feeds are nonsense on Masto. Imo it should be replaced with local admin/user curated topical feeds and top cross server topical feeds.
Mastodon requires far more effort to create a new feed than bluesky, and that’s the major problem.
I’m just dreading the inevitable monetization. These spaces are fun in their alpha state. But it’s just a matter of time before there’s a “Let AI help you spam Shrimp Jesus to your friends” button and a “Pay $5 to override the Block function” feature.
Why must you malign shrimp Jesus so
what do you mean?
sure, but what are you talking about? your post could apply to anything
Can you explain what you mean?
People who genuinely think like this (as in, that users going to Bluesky is somehow bad, surprising or something only stupid people do) are the very reason systems such as Mastodon cannot work. And sadly they naturally pervade such systems, at a development, administration and user level.
I will have to agree, what I see is people on the fediverse always talking about how others should join it and complain when people have the free will to choose other options. So far, it’s been painful to find a Mastodon instance, because the whole thing doesn’t feels intuitive, it’s hard to differentiate them, and all the topics that go on the honepage are just politics and people mentioning other platforms.
Mastodon is social media where no one comments or likes anything.
It’s like a modern art masterpiece.
You’re hanging out with the wrong people.
maybe when I first started 15 years ago it was like this.
now I have a community that will follow me on whatever bullshit instance I create because I got a clever domain name.
Had to look up bluesky. Posts are called skeets 🤣
That’s news to me 😂
Mutuafuckaaaaa
Pronounced “shiits”
It’s almost like the average person doesn’t care about the fediverse and decentralisation and only wants muskless twitter. Nooo clearly the normies are idiot sheep
I mean, the reason Musk is an issue is because Twitter is a privately owned, for-profit company. The issue is top-down leadership. Bluesky is absolutely doomed to the same fate.
Bluesky is a for-profit corporation backed by Venture Capital and run by Crypto assholes.
Jack Dorsey launched the initiative in 2019 as a proof-of-concept for a federated Twitter, which never happened. After dumping Twitter, he re-launched it as a standalone social media service and flagship ATProto instance, before jumping ship and letting it be run by committee. He now endorses Nostr, because BlueSky wasn’t friendly enough to Nazis.
The current BlueSky CEO, Lantian Graber, started her career running shitcoin/scamcoin exchange (SkuCoin), manufacturing ASIC mining rigs, and developing for Zcash. She masquerades as a progressive techie, even as all of her past experience leans Libertarian/Anarchocapitalist, and all of her other ventures’ websites are plastered with GenAI slop.
Bluesky is growing faster than ever expected, and with virtually zero real federation going on. It’s going to fail catastrophically when the new user base realizes they signed up for the same shit they were trying to get away from.
It isn’t that hard to realize that a FOSS product developed by a nonprofit (eg. Mastodon) is the correct answer, not more centralized, corporate, for-profit social media…
Bluesky is Decentralized, people are moving to Bluesky because it is easier to use and has better UI and UX. The reason people are moving to Bluesky and not mastodon has nothing to do with Decentralized, it is because it is simply user friendly. I used both and I think currently that Bluesky is definitely better. One of the biggest issues is the app, many users use their phones and The mastadon apps are awful in comparison to bluesky.
https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-host-a-bluesky-pds
Bluesky is not decentralized if you have to use their relay to access the network from your PDS
That’s exactly the thing, mastodon has all of these nerd things attached to it that most people won’t care about, whilst BlueSky doesn’t
Yeah, Bluesky has both federation and ease of use, which is why many prefer it over Mastodon. Instead of making someone search for a server to join, Bluesky gives you a default server which makes it easier for less tech savvy users.
bluesky does not have functional federation by any reasonable measure.
It is currently early access, but should be opened to everyone later. There is also a bridge that links Bluesky and Mastadon. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation
A bridge is a tool for connecting things don’t connect, it is not federation.
The relay layer/app view forces you under the control of a centralized system at a fundamental level with bluesky, the only thing meaningful about that kind of federation is hosting costs for processing and storing post data are offloaded onto the user.
…Which when you think about it is actually pretty fucking insulting to the fediverse and what is trying to be when bluesky pretends it is aiming for true federation and decentralization.
This, right there. What FOSS fans fail to understand is that some apps feel like a jigsaw to use for people less experienced in technology. Some people barely have an idea about how browser cookies work, and they are expected to understand the concept of manually picking up a server to create an account on, and you would still not be connected to everyone.
People are also expected to understand the concept of manually picking a brand of toothpaste. My point is that if we can’t even expect a little consumer choice (the same consumer choice we have in the real world), then we deserve all the monopolization and centralization we get.
Also, selecting a Mastodon server isn’t like some scary technical choice. It’s like a vibe check and a signup form.
If the reason people only want bluesky is because it’s Elon-less Twitter then they are stupid and wrong (or just ignorant). But then they can move to the next thing in 5 years when the enshittification happens.
Yup, there it is.
Friendship ended with Mastodon
My new best friend is Bluesky
goodbye forever
Lol
Mastodon is gatekept to hell and back, the technicalities of federation are exposed to the user for some reason (you already lose half your potential user base right there), infighting between instances means that you won’t see the entire discourse of a post depending on which instance you’re at…
And besides all that, bsky is not as “corpo” as mastodon fanboys make it out to be. They’re on track to open up to privately hosted instances as well, and you can already run most of their backend stuff yourself.
As much as I like the ‘decentralized’ stuff, the technical part of federation should NEVER be exposed to the end user if you want the platform to be mainstream. I still don’t understand why a lot of federated projects think it’s a good idea to expose that to the end user.
Dude, do you even email?
Whenever Lemmy or Masto gets a flood of new users, a portion of them never make it past the instance selection and totally bail.
The user experience was designed by people who literally respond to user feedback by telling users to commit new code to the project.
It’s clearly designed by engineers who assume other users will be just like them.
This of the core of the problem. Github energy.
Fine for a hobby. Not good enough for a public-facing product.
Now take all of these replies. THIS is what they don’t understand. All of these replies tell exactly how I feel about this.
The project was started as an architectural thought experiment, not with the goals and limitations of the end user.
If bluesky ever becomes actually federated, won’t it have the same problem?
Probably not. Currently it seems on track that you’re always first on their main instance. If you’re technically inclined you could then start hosting a federated part yourself (or joining one), but this does not change that the actual entry experience is exactly the same as on Twitter, hence why transition is so insanely smooth and painless.
The way sign up currently is, probably not. It would still default to bsky.social and your average person isn’t going to think about it.
But then it’s not federated. It’s all on one giant monolith of a server. Perhaps the traffic is shared between machines, but that’s not the same thing as federated.
Below is how account portability work between servers, it is easy to migrate between servers.
Account portability
We assume that a Personal Data Server may fail at any time, either by going offline in its entirety, or by ceasing service for specific users. The goal of the AT Protocol is to ensure that a user can migrate their account to a new PDS without the server’s involvement.
User data is stored in signed data repositories and verified by DIDs. Signed data repositories are like Git repos but for database records, and DIDs are essentially registries of user certificates, similar in some ways to the TLS certificate system. They are expected to be secure, reliable, and independent of the user’s PDS.
Each DID document publishes two public keys: a signing key and a recovery key.
Signing key: Asserts changes to the DID Document and to the user’s data repository.
Recovery key: Asserts changes to the DID Document; may override the signing key within a 72-hour window.
The signing key is entrusted to the PDS so that it can manage the user’s data, but the recovery key is saved by the user, e.g. as a paper key. This makes it possible for the user to update their account to a new PDS without the original host’s help.
A backup of the user’s data will be persistently synced to their client as a backup (contingent on the disk space available). Should a PDS disappear without notice, the user should be able to migrate to a new provider by updating their DID Document and uploading the backup
What other server is there?
I think a lot of the attitude I saw on mastodon about this like a year ago was one of suspicion that they wanted an open network but didn’t use the fediverse standard
I assume the main reason is that ActivityPub is a mess and quite overcomplicated for bsky’s needs. Being permanently tied to it seems like a big risk. There’s no reason why they couldn’t make a compatibility layer later and hook into it.
Which AFAIK isn’t a standard, so… 🤷
ActivityPub is a W3C standard, though.
Oh I dis not know that! Interesting! Thanks for the correction.
I feel like you guys are addicted to letting perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, Bluesky being corporate run will probably be an issue down the line, but if it becomes mainstream then people will be used to seeing .APP.INSTANCE and feel more comfortable with the fediverse interface, which I know at least for me was a big hurdle. Like seriously, the fact that the next big thing is federated, even if in name only, is a big step forward.
Bluesky is such a huge improvement over twitter and so many people are just ignoring that. Yes, the app is centralized, but you can still host your own data if you choose. Plus, the customizable feeds, algorithms, and moderation lists are all great.
Yeah I’m a huge believer in federated systems but I believe that a lot of ‘normies’ going to bluesky is a huge step in the right direction. Even though most don’t know anything about the tech behind it and migrate because twitter has become a bot infested right wing hell scape, they still are one step closer to being fully integrated to the fediverse.
Bluesky’s ActivityPub support is also leagues better than Threads because of Bridgy Fed. At least a Bluesky user and a Mastodon user can follow each other and have a back-and-forth conversation.
I fully expect this to go away as soon as bluesky overtakes other platforms in users.
Yeah exactly! I’ve even used the bridge yesterday since I’m on Mastodon, and my girlfriend just migrated to bluesky after hearing about the exodus. The process is really easy and only takes a bit of time for some of the DMs to get sent, but otherwise I have no complaints!
please don’t bridge bsky to fedi.
Why not?
Because how else would we feel superior?
because I asked nicely
Well you can nicely ask your instance admin to block Bridgy Fed
Expecting perfection is a huge problem in all aspects of life. People just want instant perfection and aren’t willing to work towards it. Then there’s just apathy and that leads to stagnation or worse regression.
Ohhh that’s your profile pic, I was really confused how you got verified haha
Oh no I’m definitely verified.
Half a loaf is better than no loaf
the irony of a bsky supporter complaining about being judged because it’s not perfect.
Imo sorry, but you are literally the reason why the fediverse has a bad name. Stop gatekeeping stuff or asking others to do so and just defederate if you don’t like it.
I genuinely have no idea what you’re implying lol
I think he accidentally called you perfect.
That’s the only interpretation I’m getting from it
