If Mastodon wanted to be preferred, it should have been better. I moved to Mastodon over a year ago when the Twitter sale first happened. It was not great then and it’s gotten slightly worse since. I created a Bluesky account two days ago and it already offers exactly the experience I missed from Twitter before Elon.
Would it be better if Mastodon was good and the federated FOSS option was superior? Sure, absolutely. But, that scenario isn’t even close to the case we are presented with.
Can you give actual examples?
I feel the only thing that Mastodon ‘misses’ is some feed to get you addicted.
Seconded, some specific examples would be helpful.
I’ve got a bsky account too but I get way more engagement on my fedi accounts. I’ve been building up my follows for 15 years on the fedi so bsky never had a chance to catch up. it probably never will.
15… Years? On the fediverse? How’d ya manage that without time travel?
The fediverse is older than mastodon.
Friendica and GNU Social/StatusNet date back to 2010. That’s nearly 15 years ago. Diaspora is also from around the same era, which IIRC was aiming to be something more like a decentralized Facebook (with groups and stuff) rather than just status updates like Twitter.
Huh, didn’t realise it was that old. TiL I guess.
I’ve been a heavy Mastodon user for two years, and I honestly don’t see why so many people on Lemmy give it so much shit. Certainly not in favour of the likes of Bluesky.
I get WAY more engagement with my posts on there than I ever did on Twitter. And maybe I’m just at an age where I don’t give a shit about celebrity, but I couldn’t care less that all the Big Names have gone to Bluesky and Threads. It’s great not seeing the same people being shared into my TL all the time.
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.
Community owned centralized systems are the answer.
Feed the butterflies,
Tupence a bag…
bluesky is federated and decentralised too… i don’t understand why people are having problems with it? maybe they just don’t know?
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.
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.
Half a loaf is better than no loaf
the irony of a bsky supporter complaining about being judged because it’s not perfect.
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
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.
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.
please don’t bridge bsky to fedi.
Why not?
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!
Twitter was a vapid load of crap before Elmo took it over. I see this as a win if it knocks him down a peg or 44 billion.
He paid 44bil for him and his corrupt buddies to oan the US.
Worth every penny
I think the hate for BlueSky is proof that it’s important enough to work. Buhbye elon
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don’t understand what anyone uses twitter, bluesky or mastodon for anymore. I used twitter to follow companies (like CoffeeStain) or YouTubers/Artists.
Bluesky has some of that, meanwhile mastodon is just a circle pit of yelling and also the same stuff I see on Lemmy.
I don’t understand what people use it for. There’s no information to follow like company game accounts for games I play, and when I tried to do goofy shitposts like old twitter i got a grand total of 0 likes.Sic cat pics
Isn’t Bluesky federated?
It calls itself federated, but it’s false advertising.
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.
there is a critical ‘relay’ component that only they control. so you can setup your own ‘node’, but only connected to their instance.
only 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” 🤷
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.
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.
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.
you pick a server with bluesky
Jack Dorsey has nothing by to do with Bluesky and hasn’t for a while now.
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
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
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.
This post is a request for attack surface area.