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Bluesky is like Twitter but with about 1/10th the idiots, and no mechanism that the idiots can elevate their racist, moronic hot takes above other comments.
Bluesky will follow the same enshittification trajectory Twitter did, it is just the beginning of the rollercoaster where the coaster is slowly brought up to the top to be launched… and everyone is exclaiming “wow I haven’t even thrown up yet!” as if that was any indicator of how much they were about to throw up…
Yes but Twitter was fine for well over 10 years so it’s fine. Like I don’t understand this attitude that we can’t enjoy something now because at some point in the future it may theoretically be not as good.
I don’t think it will go down the same path as Twitter, since Bluesky is open source and available on Github other devs will have the possibility to improve it or create a better version of it but with the more users joining it might necessary to monetize it to better cover the costs. I would love to see everyone switching to the Fediverse but it’s not very intuitive for the average end user with the instances and the fact that you need to target a user and an instance to follow it
*an incomplete subset of Bluesky is opensource
what do you mean by incomplete subset ? The code is available on Github and can be compiled
The entire appview layer is proprietary in practice and in spirit.
can you please be more specific ? What proprietary parts you found ? Did you read the code ? Again code is open source and anyone can read it and modify it, there is no proprietary, the license used is MIT not another weird license that limit the code from being used for other purposes like commercial stuff
The code isn’t available for the parts that aren’t open source? Just because a component of a system is open source doesn’t mean the entire system can be called open source.
That is a dangerous conflation to make in public discourse about this as it warps the conversation in artificial ways.
Make NO mistake if the entire system was actually open source they would have no way to lucratively monetize bluesky, and that is precisely what they will do.
The CEO of Bluesky has gone on record saying they haven’t ruled out monetizing through forcing ads on a system. Do you not understand that is functionally impossible to force ads on a fully open source system?
how can you be so stunningly naive
Maybe it will, but for the time being it hasn’t. The experience is so vastly better than Twitter, that it’s a no brainer to jump over. It also helps to have a decent competing platform that people like to suck users and influence away from the platform that Musk turned into a cesspit.
What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.
Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it’s probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.
The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.
What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?
Weird, I had a bluesky add-on on my experimental friendica installation and have not noticed any messages other than the ones people I followed participated in.
I have since deleted it, so cannot figure out what they have done differently.
I’m not familiar with Blue sky, do they advertise as federated or how exactly do they claim to differ from a regular platform like original Twitter?
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture
And reading an article from TechCrunch,
“The social network has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design and community-specific moderation.”
“Is Bluesky decentralized? Yes. Bluesky’s team is developing the decentralized AT Protocol, which Bluesky was built atop.”
“However, the launch of federation will make it work more similarly to Mastodon in that users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will.”
So it definitely is pitching that is it decentralized and federated. Maybe the argument is that it “will be”, but at the moment it is not and at the moment it does not look like it will be an actual possibility.
Now people leaving Twitter is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s possibly just kicking the can down the road. In a few years we’ll likely have articles complaining about missing “Old Bluesky” and how “new Bluesky” has the exact same problems that “Old Twitter” had.
Maybe the argument is that it “will be”, but at the moment it is not
Hey, I have a couch you should buy, it isn’t comfy right now but trust me, im a random stranger and I promise you on my word that after you buy it one day soon I will come back and fix it up so it is the comfiest couch ever!
Also maybe like somebody could make a non-profit to add features to the couch my business already sold customers on with marketing hype!
Thanks for you detailed and cited response. Very clear!
And that’s the kicker. Bluesky can never be meaningfully decentralized.
I guess it could allow multiple funding models. Instance A is ad supported, instance B is a paid service. Not exciting for us self hosters, but there is possibility there.
Sounds like the protocol equivalent of regulatory capture.
Good with some competition. We need much more in that area.
I’ve come to realize that bluesky already had all lot of what I’m happy to not see on masto. Good that there is a place for it to exist without me.
That content is also probably what the majority of people like about it.
why are people frothing over Bluesky? this is just Twitter but owned by a different oligarch
No clue. Never found those platforms to be useful, just toxic.
Same here… even when Twitter was not even in the sights of fElon I found it to be super toxic. I signed up because “it was the best way to get the news” and left in about 4 days
Because it isn’t just Twitter. Nobody can buy the network, the same way nobody can buy email.
- Anyone can host a server.
- Anyone can make an app.
- Anyone can make an algorithm.
- Anyone can make a moderation service. Users can freely pick a server, app, algorithm, and moderation service.
Yeah, no, not anybody can host a server. Sure, you can host a PDS, but the AppView still wasn’t open source last time I looked, and hosting a relay requires tens of terabytes of storage, not to mention the bandwidth to keep up.
Meanwhile, people host actual activitypub instances on repurposed routers and their car entertainment system…
Ngl thanks for the detail, I went and had another look so correct me if I’m wrong.
- Anyone can host a open source PDS like the Bluesky PDS.
- Anyone can make an AppView to view these PDSs.
- Someone with many resources needs to host a relay.
- Also it seems that Bluesky is able to gatekeep access to its federation of PDSs on a per AppView basis? The details are a bit confusing.
So if we wanted to undermine Bluesky’s currently - hopefully temporary - centralised state, we would need multiple community modified PDSs, a widely rehosted open source AppView webapp & iOS/Android clients, a very expensive relay that is community controlled via non profit or something, and then we would be federated with each other and the bluesky infrastructure too?
Sounds like a lot of work just to recreate the user-end functionality of ActivityPub :/ Very confused why they felt the need to invent ATProtocol? I have heard some vague praise of it over AP but I think I’m not technical enough to really properly make that comparison. It’s nice that ATProtocol gives you ownership of your data though.
Perhaps Mastodon/ActivityPub-apps need to improve their onboarding process and user experience. Maybe include the custom feeds feature for Bluesky too. Something has to have gone wrong for Mastodon to have failed where Bluesky succeeded.
Yeah, why would I use BlueSky when I could just use my favorite platform named Threads?
Tap for spoiler
Just kidding
They have an addiction to that kind of socials.
Because they learned nothing
another trash platform its just matter of a time, use mastodon and fediverse to don’t migrate again in few years
Mastodon and the fediverse are nerd shit with massive usability issues. Even I gave up on Mastodon and I would consider myself far more willing to put up with shit than the average user will ever be. The mass will - never - migrate to the fediverse and in many ways, especially looking at moderation issues, that is probably a good thing.
Good, I don’t need the mass. Social media is cancer anyways.
I love Mastodon. It’s easily my favorite & most-used social media platform right now.
But I’m also a huge damn nerd.
I honestly can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone that isn’t also a huge damn nerd, because they just won’t find stuff they want.
“You want sports? We don’t have much of that, but check out the Proxmox server in this guy’s basement!”
🤣 I love Mastodon as well… I also have a Proxmox server in my basement.
@RxBrad @mostlikelyaperson yeah, feel the same…
Well when I first start using facebook it was the same, the normies follow after if the platform is worth it
The masses will either eventually migrate to ActivityPub, or have their entire digital lives consumed by oligarchs. It’s just a fight between finally deciding that maybe ease-of-use doesn’t mean “good,” and losing every ounce of your identity and ability to express your thoughts and feelings.
It’s sad but I agree. Lemmy works well, especially if you use third-party apps such as Voyager, but Mastodon… is so badly thought. I can navigate it because I’m a technical person, but normal people will never be able to understand how to use it, what are instances, why it asks me to type my instance when I want to follow someone, etc.
It’s interesting what a bubble lemmy users are in. There is a reason it is not taking off and did not replace reddit for many people that tried it. It’s way too daunting and confusing for the average user, same with mastodon.
It’s interesting what a bubble lemmy users are in. There is a reason it is not taking off.
Yeah, we don’t have millions in VC or private equity funding to dump into marketing and to smooze with the tech press enough for them to actually do their jobs as journalists and cover the fediverse with a modicum more of nuance then “Mastodon is just for nerds, even the Mastodon CEO says so! Use Bluesky, it is corporate and its marketing promises what the fediverse already has so in that sense they are equivalent and lets be honest that means you should use Bluesky.”
And how many users does Mastodon have?
About a million active users each month
Edit: Damn, 10 million users, 1 million active daily, see other comment. My source was this, the one from the other comment is certainly more trustworthy https://adamconnell.me/social-media-platforms/#%3A~%3Atext=larger+social+network.-%2CStats%3A%2Cat+the+end+of+2022
which is less than bsky, but more than lemmy.
I think a lot of people get sucked into the idea that more is better. But that isn’t necessarily the case. I don’t think any of us really want to talk to a million different people anyway. We just want to talk to a suitable subset.
But with less people, the chance of you finding the subsets that interests you or fit your interests better is much lower, and that’s one of the main issue.
Roughly 10 million.
I would consider 1/3 a notable contender. Granted, only ~1 million of those users are active daily, but that’s still very significant for a FOSS alternative.
EDIT: Source
Does it have anything to do with crypto and decentralisation? I heard it did but it doesn’t seem like it does at all. Disappointing
This is the saddest, most insular cope I’ve read all day.
Federation is too confusing for the average bear. the success of bsky is the best thing for getting people off twitter
It is the path of least resistance because it just goes in circles
Whenever I see how they keep getting brought up, I’m always reminded of that Dilbert ep about how people just fall for blue logos that are easy on the eyes. They don’t even have to know what it is… just the fact that the stupid logo is blue is enough. lol
Can I get the icon in cornflower blue? https://youtu.be/4NomQYQK1bE
Activitypub or gtfo
I tried Mastodon two times in the past. I love the idea of federation and really want it to work. There’s just too much friction though.
First you have to choose an instance. If there isn’t a sensible default preselected when you download an app you already lost almost all non-technical people.
But I’m a technical, motivated individual, so I managed. Next I wanted to follow some creators I know. I couldn’t just look them up, I had to find them on twitter or other places and manually copy their name@instance or whatever into mastodon.
Cool. Now I can press follow and it’ll follow, right? Wrong. I press follow and nothing happens. I find out It’s pending? I’m guessing both instances have to accept federation between them?
Let’s follow some more creators I know. What do you mean I can’t follow someone because their instance is straight up blocked by my instance because their instance mods think everything anime-related is for pedos? So I can’t follow creators from both instances because they don’t like each other? So I need to find an instance which isn’t blocked by anyone, doesn’t block anyone? Or host my own one person instance and hope other instances accept my federation?
At this point you already lost 99.9% of people. I want mastodon to work, but it straight up sucks.
Time for the fediverse to reflect on this lamentable failure to capture the zeitgeist. The future could have been glorious. Instead we have infighting, defederation, owner class privilege with their delegates (moderators) as the first class citizen. And of course, hiding the structures of power has already begun in the name of harmony, so no, you can’t have frictionless account migration. Don’t step out of line if you don’t want to lose your fediverse relationships and history…
Time for the fediverse to reflect on this lamentable failure to capture the zeitgeist
We haven’t failed, the wise ones among us understand companies like bluesky grow cancerously, and that cancerous growth is neither desirable nor emulatable (especially in pace) in a healthy system.
I agree that defederation is vastly overused, and simple account migration should be a priority.
What… are you talking about?
What a bunch of dumbasses
Sorry to hear that, but at least some of them are not on Xitter.
Sounds disgusting
It didn’t say anything except share some stats. What part of that was disgusting?
That that many people are willing to hop on another VC funded platform.
The average person doesn’t care about that and large scale development cost money. It doesn’t really bother me either if it’s being run respectfully and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt until it’s not.
I agree with you, the number/the rise of users on such platforms makes me feel sick. There literally is a built, proven, & running alternative. The difference is what, “the onboarding process” which instance to choose if you wanna post & vote?
Always reminds me that George Carlin was right
You mean the alternative where a random person decides what people you’re allowed to interact with?
Are people running megacorps not random persons deciding what you can view or not, but with extra wealth concentration?
And the beauty of federation is that the process is (and is evolving ever more into) a bit more democratic with easier transitions or irrelevancy of what your home fedistan is.
With megacorps you don’t have even the theoretical option, you can just move to an entirely new platform.
This is why we need social networks where you can choose your moderation independently of your instance. And Mastodon is not that. I’m not sure if Bluesky is.
Why would Bluesky be?
It has a responsibly to its owners to maximise profit.
So they will block & force-promote just like any Twitter or Facebook.And what is self-moderation? The block function? Or like choosing your interests (like subscribing to tags/channels/instances)?
Nice. Glad to see people leaving xitter en mass.
I feel like we’re going to have a similar issue a couple of years or decades down the line with Bluesky. People would be better off on the Fediverse instead.
People are atleast getting used to the @username@instance thing through bluesky… That would make mass exodus to fediverse in future easier (if that ever happens)
No, this time will be different, I swear!
And that’s fine. What the exodus to Bluesky is doing is making it easier for people to stomach switching to similar platforms, so if Bluesky also went to shit, the inertia is much lower for people to abandon it.
the issue with that is the fediverse isn’t the easiest thing to sign up for. and the fediverse needs explaining pre-sign up for most people.
listen I have both bluesky and mastodon so I get you. but for now, bluesky is at least not the platform of an angry nazi man child. (at least not yet).
1/10th the US population! Fantastic!
Another corporate social media platform, what could go wrong?
I can’t wait for them to bring in ex CIA/IDF types to “clamp down on disinformation”.
What do you think the closed beta was for? It was so they can get in and get on the moderator roster
It is less than ideal.
I only hope that it gets people used to the idea that you can leave a platform and the sky wont fall down. Sooner or later these guys will try a federated service and learn that protocols > platforms (in this case activitypub).
Something similar is going to happen with lemmy if reddit keeps caving in to Elon
