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Is there anything in Bluesky’s design that prevents the company from attracting a critical mass of users and then restricting federation, or cutting it off entirely?
No.
I don’t think there are any other Instances aside from the default bsky.social right now. It’s only federated in theory and essentially a closed platform until that changes. Pretty sad that it gets all the attention instead of Mastodon.
I’m not even sure what the word is to describe that mentality. The closest I think of is “willfully ignorant”, but that’s not quite it.
Basically people like you are blind to the reason as to why bluesky and not mastodon is getting all the twitter runaways.
And you’re blind to it, not because you’re incapable of seeing the reasons. You’re just unwilling to accept that those reasons ARE the reasons it’s happening this way.
Basically the 95% of society don’t give a shit about federation. It’s not a selling point, it’s a scary confusing distraction. Many of them probably went to sign up for mastodon, as they had heard of it…but then they found out:
“There are thousands of mastodons, and if you sign up on one, you can’t sign up on the other, and you can only talk to the people on your mastodon…oh, bluesky is just one service. You sign up, and you’re done. Oh, it’s even asking me if I want to connect with mastodon. So that means I never needed to connect to mastodon! And this one is just like twitter. I know this. The other one is scary. This one is what I like.”
And then you come in, correcting every wrong aspect of what they just said. You start using terms like fediverse, and instances, and federate, and they just give you blank stares.
They don’t give a shit about that. At all. At allllll. At allllllllllll.
I’m going to include a picture here. I took a picture of my wall while I was watching a hockey game. You’ll notice their twitter handles. But those handles are also accessable all across the net. That’s how the fediverse should work.
TonyBrownpxp. You’ll notice they don’t put the X logo in that graphic. They just put the handle, and assume the audience knows what to do. Now, Tony Brown isn’t a celebrity. He’s a hockey announcer for a Cleveland based AHL hockey team, the Cleveland Monsters. AHL is the farm system for NHL. So this is minor league hockey.
Hardley someone who anyone would instantly know the name Tony Brown. However, if you’re watching hockey, and you see the handle @TonyBrownPXP with no other context, as shown in this photo, you know how to contact them.
But, if he were to say, have a mastodon, it would have to be @TonyBrownPXP@mastodon.social
And furthermore, if @TonyBrownPXP@mastodon.world exists, that means you can’t just throw @TonyBrownPXP on the screen with a mastodon logo, because which @TonyBrownPXP IS it???
And so now your screenis just FILLED with text, all because handles aren’t handled universally on the fediverse. I’m personally signed up for 3 diffeeent fediverse services, all using Lost_My_Mind, but on 3 different instances. What if a 2nd person signs up Lost_My_Mind on a 4th instance? I have no way to prove that’s not me. And I don’t think anyone gives a shit enough about me to investigate if it WAS me. So anything they say, would in the minds of humans, be assosiated with me.
And while I won’t call TonyBrown a celebrity, it’s the same for celebrities, and guys like him. He encourages fan interaction during hockey games, and he refuses to call it X. He always says “Send your thoughts or questions to me on twitter, or I guess they call it X now, which is a stupid name, but send your questions to @TonyBrownPXP and we’ll address the best ones during game breaks and intermission!”
Says almost the same exact thing, almost word for word, always with the snide diss of twitter, every game.
Now I’ve never signed up for loops, or pixelfed, or peertube, or a lot of services. But when I signed up for the fediverse, it should have had me pick a username. Lost_My_Mind. Ok, now when I sign up to any service, Lemmy, or Pixelfed, or peertube, or anything else, Lost_My_Mind should be my handle.
And if someone ELSE tries signing up for Pixelfed, on a different instance, they can’t use Lost_My_Mind. Even though I don’t have a registered pixelfed account. Even though I don’t have an account on that other instance.
I’M Lost_My_Mind. Not you on another instance. But that’s not how the fediverse works. And because people don’t understand, or give a shit about any of that, they just go with what they know.
Right now, we’re in the early days of the fediverse. The experience should be centralized, while the underlaying services and protocols should be decentralized. Because right now, the whole thing isn’t decentralized. It’s fractured.
Basically people like you are blind to the reason as to why bluesky and not mastodon is getting all the twitter runaways.
Bluesky absolutely provides a better, more cohesive and centralised experience than most of the fediverse microblog alternatives.
That’s why it’s getting more people
But the reason it can do that is because it’s centralised, with federation tacked on. And that centralisation means it’s most likely going to go through the same cycle of enshittification as twitter, facebook, reddit etc. Twitter was great to use back in the day. Reddit was great to use back in the day. Then they got large captive audiences that couldn’t leave because of the network effect, and instead of trying to make the platforms attractive to new people, they started to bleed their existing customers for value at the expense of their user experience, because those people had nowhere else they could easily go.
Bluesky will go down that same path if they get a critical mass of users and stop being the “alternative” to twitter.
Mastodon and the fediverse will always be an alternative at best, because they can’t compete with the experience of using a centralised network. But the Fediverse platforms don’t suffer from the vulnerability of centralised networks and their path to enshittification. And for me, that’s going to keep me here.
The only way I’ll move to Bluesky is if they truly embrace decentralisation to the point where the platform/network could exist without them.
I’m with you.
I think GP has one or two good points about shortcomings of the existing distributed platforms, but I also think these things can be addressed. For example, a centralized system’s single namespace for usernames brings advantages for both identity and usability. This would be harder for a distributed system to implement, of course, but it’s not impossible.
But if the atproto team actually releases a way to selfhost a relay server as well (and not just a data server), in theory if bluesky enshittifies you could always fork the app, selfhost your PDS and Relay and migrate, while still being able to interact with the people in the “mainstream bluesky”.
I know this is a big if, and that at the moment it’s not reality, but the Atmosphere it’s at leaat 10 years younger than the Fediverse. So I’d say let’s not call it shit yet and just see how it evolves…
It’s not shit yet. Right now, it’s good. Honestly, better than the fediverse in core usability.
The issue is whether it stays that way. And yeah, if they open up the way you’re talking about, I’ll probably move over myself, because that’s the protection against enshittification. But if they don’t open up, if they stay centralised, and just play at federation, then the writing is on the wall for how it ends, because it’s happened countless times before. And I won’t invest my time or effort in being part of that community only to lose it
Look, I appreciate you pushing on the UX aspects of the fediverse here. But let me ask yout something. What’s your email address? Is it Lost_My_Mind? No? Oh, because it’s got an @whatever.com on the end? Why is that? Why don’t we have one global, centralized namespace for email usernames such that there’s only a single Lost_My_Mind in the whole world?
You do realize Bluesky also tacks on
.bsky.social? (Though with a dot instead of a second @)And even without other instances, ATProto already allows people to sign up using domains they own.
The closest you can get to using Lost_My_Mind as you Bluesky handle is by aquiring a domain like
lost_my_mind.com. And that still wouldn’t prevent someone else from signing up usinglost_my_mind.net.And that’s before pointing out that Impersonation and mistaken identities isn’t a solved problem on twitter, either.
Bluesky is succeeding because its a smooth and familiar experience that obfuscates away the complexity of how it works.
Absolutely nothing about how the ActivityPub network works conceptually prevents it from being an equally smooth experience, given the work were put in.
Your first six paragraphs hit the mark, but the following rant about the “username univerasility problem” ain’t it.
Not quite true. You can host your own personal data store (PDS), run your own labelling service, and you can host your own feeds.
The big relays and app views are the only thing that aren’t really supported by the official app yet.
Mastodon is fine, but I burned out on it pretty quick. There’s not an intuitive way to find new content on there. I’m sure the content is fine, but Bluesky can get you up and running really quickly.
I’ve found tons of new “content” on Mastodon by following hashtags related to the things I like.
Personally I like the fact that I’m not being fed some corporate algorithm.
I like the fact that I’m not being fed some corporate algorithm.
Bluesky’s entire appeal for me is that you can choose (or even create) your recommendation algorithm. Not only it’s an amazing idea, it also works really well
for now. feels like lots of potential for enshittification though.
Sure, that’s definitely nice in theory.
In practice, however, because the client is closed source and there’s no way to self-host and instance, BlueSky users will eventually find themselves at the whims of the people/person who controls the software. What’s to stop some Elon Musk type from buying BlueSky next and then adding things to your algorithm without your consent?
That’s why I’m very skeptical of BlueSky’s pseudo-federation, as it feels like people are just making the same mistakes (with regard to corporate social media) over and over again. Unlike Mastodon (which I understand is less popular right now and thus the network/peer effect is weaker for people), the users have very little control over BlueSky as a platform, and that feels like a mistake.
With all that said, priority numero uno should simply be to get people off of shit like X.com and TikTok, which aren’t just at risk of becoming toxic playgrounds of oligarchs, but already are. If people choose BlueSky as the next corporate platform to go to, it’s a small step in the right direction, but it’s worth proceeding with caution.
Mastedon and the Fediverse need to get their shit together and make it easy for hyper casual basic people to use and understand.
Bluesky doesn’t have any of that.
Despite being “open source”, if you want to run your own Personal Data Sever, to join the network you’ll need to join Bluesky’s AT Protocol PDS Admins Discord server:
That would effectively lock participation behind Discord’s terms and conditions. No thanks.
(But thanks for sharing that info. :)
Using discord for this is such a bonehead move.
I don’t know how old this document is, but I created my own PDS this weekend and it’s not have to join their Discord server to do so.
Bluesky is centralised and funded by VCs. It plays at being decentralised because people can bring their own hardware to the party and plugin to the Bluesky network, but if Bluesky (the company) turns it off, then Bluesky the platform/network ceases to be usable. They also started without allowing federation with their core network, so they can easily disable it again at any time.
Bluesky is not decentralised in any meaningful way, which means its at risk of the same bullshit that has driven most of us away from reddit, twitter, facebook etc
Nothing is truly decentralized. If your Lemmy instance shuts down your account is gone too.
It’s not centralized, it’s also not a federated network like AP. It’s just a different design.
I just… I could never comprehend twitter (or Mastadon, or bluesky for that matter).
The whole structure of the conversation feel like people shouting into an open auditorium. And everyone is shouting at once.
I just do not see the appeal.
I’m with you 100%. The Twitter product has always been a clunky pile of bullshit for me. But somehow it became the default public space and choice of celebrities, etc and I think that has been 98% of its appeal.
About 15 years ago, I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. I joined Twitter because I like to try new apps as early as possible. It turned out to be a great place to talk about live music in my city, amongst other things. I met all my friends on Twitter.
At that time in my city, it was very much the town square that Elon wants it to be now. It was a place to discuss events in realtime; especially sporting events.
I suspect the advantage for Twitter was that you could communicate with people you didn’t know directly like celebrities, authors, politicians, etc. Not just write to them, but they write back because sending off a short message is much easier than making a call or writing a letter. Sometimes that is an unhealthy parasocial relationship but, it doesn’t have to be.
Kevin Smith basically started writing the movie Tusk in a collaborative way with Twitter.
Anyone try the bridge? Seems a bit convoluted.
Anything that gets people off Twitter is a good thing. And it means more potential mastodon users later on ;)
Yeah it works fine. My mastodon account has gained 40 followers from bluesky even though I have a bluesky account too!
Nice. I went and followed via Mastodon but I cant seem to follow anyone other than the default users. Im using https://fed.brid.gy/ is there a better bridge out there?
I’m trying Bridgy Fed, but it’s too janky. My Bluesky friends and I are able to follow each other and see each others’ posts. But, I tried to respond to a Bluesky post and Bluesky never saw my reply.
Bridgy Fed is pretty straightforward. You just follow the account and away you go.
It doesn’t make your bridged posts particularly attractive-looking (essentially you appear as a bot under a subdomain of a server), but it’s searchable and discoverable in the target network.
I’m now mostly using Blue Sky, but I bridge to Mastodon, so all my posts form part of the content that’s available to fediverse users. For little old me that’s not all that important, but if every big organisation or journalist or celeb did that too, that’d do a lot to build vitality into the fediverse network.
I won’t be joining in until I can actually run a real instance on my own.
I don’t plan on doing that, but the important part is knowing that I could.
Instances are run through a central “relay” which is controlled by Bluesky HQ, so it isn’t decentralized like, say, Mastodon is.
I know.
ATproto has some interesting advantages, and eventually the idea is for anyone to be able to host any microservice component of the network, including relays other than the one run by Bluesky.
The relays don’t need to be centralized. They are indexers that provide functionality to others parts of the ATproto network.
The problem is that there isn’t really any incentive to do so… Any additional instances or new apps running ATproto can just rely on the one big indexer provided by Bluesky, instead of running each microservice component themselves.
Would the relays be connected, though? Or would each one be an entirely different ecosystem?
No.
But they don’t need to be. They’re essentially just indexers.
If two relays index all the same content, then any services using either will be “interconnected” in the sense that any users can see each other and interact with each other.
Each relay host can choose what parts of the network they want to index, and as far as I can tell, any services could use multiple relays if they like.
Oh my god! That’s terrible! 20 million people!?
What have they ever done to Bluesky!? Why would Bluesky go out of its way to hit so many people!?
Interesting choice for the thumbnail picture. That was pre-butterfly logo. That picture is several months old.
Can I interact/follow bluesky user from mastodon? I run mastodon instance, don’t want to run bluesky as well.
The urge to act like an asshole on another platform is just too much…
Twitter was a cesspool long before trump, and it was made such by the same people trying to distance themselves from it now.
“Ohh… I wasn’t a cunt on Twitter, I’m one of the people moving away from it”.
Except on Bluesky you create your own algorithm. You’re not rage-baited by an algorithm that exists to “maximise engagement”, and although spam bots exist on Bluesky, they have virtually no reach.
Right-wing crypto funded.
I don’t know about that. The big issue, for me, is that it isn’t actually decentralized.
They posted about the crypto investor (who is also on their board of directors now)
It is, however, de-elonized
Yay, I finally jumped on the bandwagon at the right time!
What percentage of those are bots?
I just “secured” my handle there. It’s unlikely I’ll become a frequent user/poster, but who knows…
No need to secure a handle, you can use a domain name you own as your handle.
Such a letdown, I had hoped that with the downfall of Twitter people would finally kick their addictions to vapid trash media.
The amount of artists and creatives I follow on Bluesky aren’t vapid trash media.
I had hoped that with the downfall of Twitter people would finally kick their addictions to vapid trash media.
And yet, here you are
