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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.
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
Half a loaf is better than no loaf
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.
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.
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
Community owned centralized systems are the answer.
Feed the butterflies,
Tupence a bag…
Twitter’s already served its purpose. People slagging it off because it’s losing money really don’t understand that it won a country.
Seriously, seizing the means of mass communication means you own democracy, you own the governement, you own everything. Twitter, while it remains how the cultural elites communicate, is worth basically 30 trillions.
I think the hate for BlueSky is proof that it’s important enough to work. Buhbye elon
Its got faults but it’s currently where the big batch of users seems to be going and since some of my interests are pretty narrow that means a lot more to read and see in those interests (or it exists at all). That’s kinda hard to ignore tbh. Its not right wing infested and I’ve already got elon, musk, trump and a bunch of other stuff auto filtered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If bluesky ever becomes actually federated, won’t it have the same problem?
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?
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.
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.
Dude, do you even email?
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.
Had to look up bluesky. Posts are called skeets 🤣
Mutuafuckaaaaa
That’s news to me 😂
Pronounced “shiits”
Isn’t Bluesky federated?
It calls itself federated, but it’s false advertising.
Nope. It’s unambiguously not federated. It maybe could be, if you take their words at face value
I think there might be some adapters bridging the distance… But the short answer is no, the long answer is not really
Pseudo-federated from what people are saying. Something about the user accounts being centralised but the data being decentralised. I don’t understand but it’s something funded by the previous owner of Twitter and full of other corporate money, so I wouldn’t trust it.
Jack Dorsey has nothing by to do with Bluesky and hasn’t for a while now.
Holy shit, Dorsey is eve fucking dumber than I could have ever imagined:
The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky, the decentralised social network he helped start, and encouraged users to remain on his first site, now owned by Elon Musk and called X.
Dorsey confirmed he had cut ties with Bluesky on Sunday, telling a user on X that he was no longer on the social network’s board. The announcement was apparently unexpected, since Bluesky still listed him as a board member until late on Sunday evening.
…
“Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Dorsey tweeted. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”
there is a critical ‘relay’ component that only they control. so you can setup your own ‘node’, but only connected to their instance.
nly a single instance of the relay exists and they are not releasing that code and a few other pieces. it federates only with itself.
That pretty much sounds centralised. But I guess people don’t care if they don’t have to worry about “picking a server” which is “too complicated” 🤷
you pick a server with bluesky
That’s exactly what people want: no brainer alternative without the fediverse’s fragmentation
i think the new paradigm of the distributed fediverse is going to take a long time to propagate to the masses. its going to be lots of platforms advertising their corner of the 'verse and the features they permit… but we really need to get the idea of the ‘fediverse’ into their heads that its content accessible by any of those platforms.
the thing ive noticed is no one cares about ‘sites’ anymore… the kids all want ‘apps’ which is drivin me bonkers. spent decades building mobile-friendly, dynamic viewports only for them to get ignored cuz kids dont want to type in a URL/domain.
OT, but most of my students in their 20s can barely use keyboards. It really stresses them out and they get mad about it. Papers are either copy-paste then AI filtered a few times, or speech-to-text with a quick grammerly scan. Drives me bonkers too. Just to say, I’m sorry your work isn’t appreciated.
“The Digital Native generation are technological geniuses because they can usually intuit which icon to click. Let us praise them and give them as much screentime as we can.” - All the news pieces and academic articles from 2000-2010ish
My impression is that it hasn’t been users that have pushed everything into apps, it’s been publishers. This is all a part of a general trend where software has become much less about what it can do for the user, and much more about what data it can extract from a user for the publisher. Websites generally have a lot more protections against such data scraping, meanwhile you can put who knows what code into an app.
If you look at how RSS fell from use, there were two major issues. On the user side, users had to go out to find content as there wasn’t an inherent way to search for content within the system. On the creator side, creators had to deal with advertising themselves to users and they had to handle the monetization by themselves.
Social media created the algorithm to find content and developed some revenue sharing with creators.
If federated media takes off, it will probably look like Threads or Truth Social, where control of a front end monetizes development of the platform.
In theory, yes. In practice, it’s a bit different. At the very least for now.
well, until they release all the code, and allow full federation its not a federating platform. end of story.
I believe it’s sort of tacked on and not exactly federated at the moment. Also it’s corporate run
In theory, yes / kind of.
In practice, no, not really.
It uses a different protocol (AT protocol) than the Fediverse ActivityPub protocol, which is what lemmy and mastadon and pixelfed are all built on, so it is not natively interoperable with ActivityPub based Fediverse.
To do that you have to use bridging software of some kind.
Also, as others have pointed out… even if you do make the approximate equivalent of your own instance, a PDS… all of these still go through ‘Relays’, which BlueSky controls.
So… it is technically federated in the sense that it allows for anyone to make their own instance/PDS… but ultimately it is actually totally centralized.
Instead of a web or weave of many to many connections of independent admins/maintainers, the structure much more resembles a top down hierarchy that is ultimately all controlled by a profit driven corporation.
If the Relays go down, everything goes down.
If BlueSky decides they don’t appreciate your instance, they have unitary power to delist or block it, from everyone.
As compared with the Fediverse, where many different instances and communities can all pick and choose for themselves which other instances and communities they do and do not federate with, and where an outage particular to one community/instance only bricks that particular community/instance.
Bluesky Social has pledged to transfer the protocol’s development to a standards body such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the near future.[11]
Let’s see it then. I’m concerned when the opportunity to profit arises that perverse motives will occur.
Absolutely agree. An aspirational goal to an open standard is not an open standard.
seriously.
please show me a single, fully independant instance of their platform that federates.
you cant, because it doesnt exist.
I mean, ATP has only been around for two years, mastodon has been around for 8 years with 6 years of development on AP.
Development takes time, I feel like “show it to me now or it’s a lie” is a poor take.
The code for their instance isn’t open source, so it’s legitimately impossible to host another relay. So until that changes, yes, it’s a lie
Isn’t this the source for the relay? https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/tree/main/cmd/bigsky
And even then the readme says:
A note and reminder about Relays in general are that they are more of a convenience in the protocol than a hard requirement. The “firehose” API is the exact same on the PDS and on a Relay. Any service which subscribes to the Relay could instead connect to one or more PDS instances directly.
And the PDS source code is here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
EDIT: The PDS source is actually here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages/pds the other link is for self hosting.
Jumping from one frying pan into the next.
lucky for us, we aren’t running out of jumps.
After initially hesitating, I decided to join Bluesky after having previously tried Mastodon and permanently leaving Twitter. While I was initially reluctant because Jack Dorsey had sold Twitter to Elon Musk, I still created a Bluesky account. I later came across Jason Koebler’s article on 404 Media, which validated my choice. His arguments aligned with my own reasons for preferring Bluesky over Mastodon. Link to the article: The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet.
404 is just mad because we mocked them relentlessly for not using content warnings on their goatse posts.
I just looove how ppl believe that switching from one VC-funded centralised corpo platform to another VC-funded (slitghly less) centralised corpo platform is a good thing /s
Just because it’s (partially) OSS doesn’t make it good. The corp still hold all the power and might sell out, but at least they got free volunteers to program for them so the C-level could get more money!
(Now don’t tell me that Bluesky is “federated”. They still hold all the power over site rules and moderation. The only little concession you get is that you are allowed to host your own data)
Apparently virtue signaling about pseudofederation is enough for libs to “get hope for the future of the internet” while they happily lick the boot of yet another centralized “trust me bro this isn’t going to eshittify itself, not this time” corp
Nice profile picture!
uuu thx
I just loooove how pppl believe that whether something has VC-funding or is federated has any effect at all on how people pick software and systems to use.
I mean, users don’t even not care, because “caring vs not caring” assumes that the metric they can care about or not mentally exists in their context for judging a decision. Which it does not. Which is a very important part so many software designers of user-facing software forget, to users a short-form posting instance is a tool. A hammer. You use the one you got. Once it becomes defunct, you get a new one. You pick one that all your friends use, because hey, must be great if everyone uses it. Does it have some downsides? Maybe, but frankly it’s a hammer who cares?!
The only little concession you get is that you are allowed to host your own data)
Nah, that’s not even a concession. You just pay for a portion of their server costs at no gain in influence.
Problem with Masto though is that the technological leadership is really bonkers, hardly anything meaningful happened over the past 2 years with lots of serious issues not getting fixed
This post is a request for attack surface area.
