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 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.
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.
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.
Even if the corporate is a public benefit corporation with open source foss code both for server and client?
public benefit corporation
They’re still for profit and corporate leadership and values can change. I wouldn’t trust it.
Ya isn’t OpenAI a public benefit corporation that has been gradually losing its values and becoming more corporate?
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
That’s how OpenAI used to describe themselves, too.
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.
I do, and I think it’s just kinda “okay”. The main thing I like about Bluesky right now is 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.
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 actual fediverse.
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.
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
You mean the same illusion of decentralisation that the fedi offers?
🧐
Where AP is largely mastodon centric
Centric is not centralised though is it?
identity is tethered to an instance?
But not a central instance or indexer?
Where a user is at the whims of an admin?
Like they have a choice, because it’s not centralised
With the networks being so small those admins have more of an impact on everyday users than Musk.
So decentralisation then?
You called others indoctrinated but that’s how you come across and spewing fallacies
Have a good day
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?
Meh. It’s basically just the twitter experience, with the same problems it had. Bigots everywhere, and you can’t get rid of them, only hide their content from yourself…
Bigots everywhere, and you can’t get rid of them, only hide their content from yourself…
I’ve not been on bluesky, and don’t doubt it’s worse there, but tbf we have a growing problem with bigots and trolls on kbin/lemmy too, and we can’t do much more than block here either…
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.
Venture capital backed project. That’s enough for me to avoid when non-corporate options exist. Tired of for-profit corporations ruin open source.
There’s tangible reasons to avoid it, but the VC thing is enough for me.
What were the reasons? Is their protocol really better than ActivityPub? Couldn’t ActivityPub just adapt to have the same benefits?
From what she said, ActivityPub could have adapted to what they wanted, but probably don’t want to. On Bluesky you kinda loose the community feel of your instance that you have and that many people (me included) like.
I elaborated more on the “problems” she listed in another comment here if you want to read more without listening the episode
That doesn’t seem like a benefit at all. Just seems like Bluesky wants to be the central authority in their own little network.
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.
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 think it’s cool that there’s only one comic everyone uses when referencing fragmented standards 😂
There’s a relevant xkcd for almost everything. And an iconic xkcd for many, many things.
love bluesky;; it has a really great trans community on it. plus both artist and romance book twitter moved over to it so i’ve been having a blast. i go between bsky, threads, and mastodon. i love how threads brought in activitypub support i just wish that bsky would bring in the atproto bridge natively. i’d love to follow bsky users on mastodon like i can threads users
I’m using it in addition to Mastodon for different communities.
Bluesky has a lot (but far from all) of the old WoW community I was a part of on Twitter. So that’s what I mainly use it for.
Mastodon on the other hand I use for pretty much everything else: other gaming, privacy, tech, AuDHD posts, infosec, linux etc.
Different horses, different courses.
Not a form of communication that resinates with me. Not the target audience.
I mean i have a Bsky account, I don’t really use the platform since it doesn’t seem all that active in comparison to others available.
From my understanding they created it as a escape from the changes they disliked on twitter, but like in my opinion the privacy settings on it are far too simplistic to be able to function properly as a service. I find myself checking basically every other service instead.
Seems pretty active to me.
I’ve started an account there for cursed images of the govia logo but haven’t gotten around to doing anything yet
