https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/bluesky-opens-up-federation-letting-anyone-run-their-own-server/
Social network Bluesky, a competitor to X, Threads, Mastodon, and others, is opening up its doors with today's news that the network is now opening up
I'd like to preface this by saying that my prefrontal cortex is mostly lard and anxiety medication, so sorry if I sound stupid here.
Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?
Bluesky is a "public benefit corporation", whereas Mastodon is proper open source if I understood correctly.
To me "public benefit corporation", just sounds shady. Why should BlueSky be trustworthy? Because of Jack Dorsey?
I know musk turned Twitter into a bizarre fever dream hellscape, but I don't recall it being sunshine and roses under Dorsey's leadership either. The platform would pester me for my phone number to "prevent spam" (they really said that shit with a straight face). White supremacists openly just said awful shit. The video player was ass.
But, I'll be optimistic. Hopefully this won't be Twitter 2: Judgement Day. I hope it will be a good tool for whistleblowers and breaking news. Ideally, it will have a symbiotic relationship with other federated networks instead of a hostile pain in the ass.
Bluesky has a much better community of artists on it. A ton of comics twitter relocated there. And that’s the content I want so I’m on Bluesky. I’ve tried to get Mastodon to serve me content I’m interested in but it just falls short for me.
In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
Also Dorsey only owns like 2% of Bluesky now iirc and had mostly cut ties with it in favor of his Nostr thing because he’s butthurt Bluesky is full of liberals.
In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
In addition to content itself there is also ease of finding it and how it's presented. People on here tend to hate algorithms but honestly Mastodon never clicked for me because (when I checked it out) you were stuck with a chronological feed. I dabbled with it but like you I could never get it to serve me content I wanted the way I wanted. Algorithms can be dangerous yes and I don't condone Twitter's and Facebook's outrage baiting, but Mastodon currently just seems to demand too much work out of me.
Agreed. I have tried 3 different servers (two niche topic and now one of the really big ones) and followed a bunch of hashtags and people and also filtered a bunch of keywords (to try to cut back on the mountains of fucking explicit furry art and similar) and for the life of me I just cannot get Mastodon to serve me good stuff consistently. It's frankly boring as shit over there.
Yet every time I open up Bluesky, it's tons of stuff that is relevant to me. I've also noticed that the few quality artist accounts I did find on Mastodon seem to favor their Bluesky accounts in terms of how frequently they post and engage with others.
I think Mastodon is a lot more appealing if you're into Linux or dev sorta topics but for like a professional level art community, it's terrible. Same for topics like graphic design.
Also the fediblock stuff going on throughout Mastodon doesn't get enough discussion. There's a cabal of chronically online, ban happy people that collude together on their provate Discord server to defederate Mastodon instances for the stupidest shit. The people who run matsodon.art are a big part of the problem and are legitimately out of their minds. Go look at their instance block list. It's absurd. And any time you hear about instance drama on there there's a good 50% chance they're involved somehow.
Before I hopped onto Bluesky, I was one of those fediverse evangelists trying to get my friends onto it. Except, I couldn't give a solid answer to the fediblock problem, and my friends definitely saw right through it or were confused about it. And I can't blame them. They don't want to worry about federation, or whether one instance will be blocked by the other over some drama. Meanwhile since Bluesky has been opening up more, I've only seen the fediverse grow more toxic towards Bluesky, to the point where it's exhausting to be part of.
honestly i find bluesky's feeds wayyy better than the algorithms but even what's hot: classic and the discover feeds tend to be 90% interesting to me
bluesky has book twitter/romance twitter too, which is great.
it also has a huge trans community on it.
Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?
Bluesky's model of federation fixes the whole "if my instance goes down I lose everything".
Your Identity and your data is portable, which means that each server on Bluesky is "merely" a service provider.
Are you saying its like the identity server model like matrix uses? Isnt that kind of model horribly complicated?
I don't know how the matrix model works to be honest, but I think it's a totally different use case.
If you're moving around between servers it means that each server has to validate the users. The matrix solution was to add identity servers that tell the server you're logging into who you are. I imagine something similar would be necessary to hop servers on nostr and bluesky. Its possible the connected servers share user identities but that has its own array of problems.
I mean as a non-admin. Users on Mastodon are at the mercy of the instance owner. On Bluesky (and nostr) they are not.
Then users need to spin up their own instance, right? Then all their posts stay backed up if they choose?
Seems like a mediocre problem to get bent out of shape enough to move to a centralized platform.
No. A better analogy would be like phone number portability. You can "own" your number, and if you want to change your company you can take the number with you.
Completely impractical for most people but this advice gets unironically thrown around all the time. And evangelists still wonder why regular people think the fediverse and particularly Mastodon are convoluted af.
From Wikipedia: In business, and only in United States corporate law, a benefit corporation is a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society. Laws concerning conventional corporations typically do not define the "best interest of the corporation", which has led some to believe that increasing shareholder value (profits and/or share price) is the only overarching or compelling interest of a corporation. Benefit corporations explicitly specify that profit is not their only goal. Their activities may or may not differ much from traditional corporations.
they're both open source.
bluesky was just made by former twitter users who wanted the twitter experience without musk.
mastodon was made to be the opposite of twitter.
they're both good; i prefer twitter but things like bridgy-fed help bring the best of both worlds and let mastodon and bluesky talk to each other.
Mastodon not being Twitter has been part of my ongoing description of it when asked. If you liked Twitter because you might rub elbows with important people, watch the drama in real time, or go algorithmically viral for a sick burn (or alternately something cool), you're not going to get any of that on Mastodon. If you want microblogging to subscribers, it's got that. If old school "people actively shared me" virality is enough, it's got that. But it's not going to replace Twitter, because Twitter was a culture and an algorithm as much as it was a microblogging site.
If Lemmy had more people it could be almost a 1-for-1 Reddit replacement (still a little confusing with multiple communities of the same name/topic). Mastodon can't do that for Twitter.
It notes that Bluesky users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join, as aspects of how your experience differs from others is in your control thanks to other features, like custom feeds and composable moderation. The latter means moderation is not tied to your server. While server operators can set rules around the content they host, communities can use blocklists and soon, independent moderation services, to introduce additional layers of moderation. That means there’s not as much pressure on server operaters to block other servers (defederate) because of the content they host, since users will have their own tools to manage their moderation preferences.
This is a nice bit of tech.
users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join
So... I guess the big brains that gave us Twitter reasoned that people randomly join communities where they don't agree with the rules? This argument makes zero sense.
It seems like a nice way to say "Bluesky moderates everything, so we get to curate your feed!"
Curious to see if this is/will ever be compatible with ActivityPub.
Wasn't there a shitstorm recently because someone made a bluesky-mastodon bridge.
(there seems to be a shitstorm when anyone does anything vaguely imaginative with mastodon though)
Is it based on ActivityPub? I don't really know much about it other than Jack Dorsey is involved.
AFAIK, Bluesky started on ActivityPub at first, but then it was decided to make a new protocol which resulted in Atproto. It also started as an internal project at Twitter, was funded by Jack, but then as it got popular amongst a more regular audience, he left when he kept getting pestered with @ mentions and anti-crypto stuff. He hangs out at Nostr now and from what I've been told, isn't really involved in Bluesky's meetings.
There was an effort to bridge Bluesky/Atproto, ActivityPub and also Nostr together - Bridgy Fed - for when Bluesky started getting their protocol federating outside its own network. The issue was, the creator made it opt-out rather than opt-in. The AP fediverse collectively shat themselves, spreading their delusions about Bluesky, one guy called the creator a rapist for using public data and another threatened to sue/fine the creator. It was absolutely bonkers and that incident exemplifies a good part of why people find the fediverse to be toxic, moreso than anything involving Threads.
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
I can't tell if the Bluesky team is bad at business or planning some sort of eventual rug pull. They're certainly a for-profit corporation without any evident way to generate profit, and their words and theoretical design all sound like they're not easily compatible with profit, but multiple profit-focused entities have given them a lot of money for something that, if implemented as envisioned, will not make them any richer.
My only guess is some form of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish where the core server is better than the rest of the network, but the network exists to assuage fears about another social network implosion or protect from potential antitrust issues while not being a real threat, but it feels like a complicated way to make Twitter 2.0 and get rich.
As long as there's a profit motive involved, enshittification seems like the expected conclusion. We could just be at step one. From Doctorow's description of the enshittification cycle:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Cue the "OMG it's so complicated!" comments by people who somehow managed to sign up to email, but this is suddenly too hard.
Why? You realize that you reserve more rights by not including a license than by including one, right?
So you’re hoping judges will collectively reinterpret the definition of fair use under copyright law to exclude the training of AI models? Good luck with that lol
Also, most of your comments wouldn’t be considered copyrightable.
Are you a legal expert? Lawyer? Judge? What gives you any authority on copyright?
I’m not an authority on copyright, nor did I claim to be. I’m just aware of my surroundings.
And again, even if courts suddenly decide that training AI isn’t fair use, you don’t have to attach a license to your comments for it to apply. Content that you produce is copyrighted by default, with all rights reserved. You are exclusively giving away rights by attaching a CC license, not reserving them.
I’m not an authority on copyright, nor did I claim to be.
Didn't read further than this. Your opinion is unimportant on the matter.
You should reconsider that, because you are most definitely giving up many of your rights to your content.
Bluesky's official app sucks ass, that's already enough of a reason for me to not use it for the time being. It really is terrible, shitty web view banking app level of terribleness and speed
I am using another great fediverse Twitter clone called Catodon.social which has a MUCH nicer UI than either Mastodon or Bluesky. I want all corners of the fediverse to do well. It's the future of social media I think.
but why atproto solved several things activitypub doesn't do (and refused to implement).