This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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".
Twitter, where the response to “I like Hot Dogs” is “Why do you hate Cheeseburgers????”
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 ;)
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.
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?
Not sure exactly what you’re asking, but it’s opt in.
So since I opted in, my mastodon account is shown as a bluesky account on bluesky.
But I can only follow bluesky accounts from mastodon if they’ve opted into the bridge, which seems to be a decent number, but still a small proportion. And the replies to my posts that are on bluesky, will only be visible to me from mastodon if the people replying have opted into the bridge.
I’m not using mastodon much anyways, because there are too little people there who care about what I post, but I use a service to post which automatically posts on mastodon / bluesky (and until last week when i opted out, twitter), so I’ll still be posting to mastodon even though it’s only for a handful of people compared to my 8k bluesky followers.
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.
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?
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:
Using discord for this is such a bonehead move.
That would effectively lock participation behind Discord's terms and conditions. No thanks.
(But thanks for sharing that info. :)
np
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.
Sure, but the network itself is still there and still running, and I can still use it (albeit with some disruption).
The point is though, that as long as it's not dependent on a single instance, enshittification isn't the inevitable end state.
And for me, despite the usability issues of the fediverse instance based method, it's a better alternative than joining and losing another social media network to gradual enshittification and slack moderation
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 in both identity and usability. This would be harder for a distributed system to implement, of course, but it's not impossible.
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
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.
for now. feels like lots of potential for enshittification though.
Don't give the VCs any ideas!
Two different questions.
They are a gateway to federated material as any other (like Lemmy), and those controls are at the platform. They can gatekeep federated content very simply.
There is nothing stopping them from leaving it all open aside from costs though. Hosting is very expensive, and I'm not sure how they plan to support their platform aside from advertising, at which point you may be stuck in a spot where you shut down certain intersections to appease advertisers.
They currently have no plans for advertisement.
On what they're currently planning to bring in money:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24278666/bluesky-working-on-premium-subscription
That could change at any time, but seems likely to be true for now.
I would guess things will be fine at least up until they either IPO or they get bought by a VC firm or some public corp. That's the point in the ensuing to fixation cycle to move to something else (unless something unexpected happens like they really do nicely federate before then or something else that may save the platform).
So I'm guessing probably at least a couple years that it'll be good, and it's 10000x better than Xitter.
Congrats to Bluesky.
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?
Right-wing crypto funded.
I just "secured" my handle there. It's unlikely I'll become a frequent user/poster, but who knows...
Yay, I finally jumped on the bandwagon at the right time!
What percentage of those are bots?
There’s not that many bots yet and people are big into blocking (and you can subscribe to block lists so it’s automatic). I’m sure as it grows, bot traffic will too — it’s seemingly inevitable — but 20 million users isn’t really that much compared to legacy platforms. I think is mostly news because lots of people are fleeing X due to the election.
Seems likely to be very low so far.
Although it's getting enough attention lately that this may change.
Self plug: try out skyname.io! You can turn your handle into your profile page! I’m adding more fun features as we speak :3
Yeah, no thanks. Upon entering, the first thing I saw was a red flashing card with:
LIMITED TIME EARLY BLACK FRIDAY SALE!
11:59:56
USE CODE "EARLYBF" for 25% off
There couldn't be any better indicator than this that this service is BS.
~Oh and the counter resets everytime I visit the site, lol~
