why are people frothing over Bluesky? this is just Twitter but owned by a different oligarch
Yeah, why would I use BlueSky when I could just use my favorite platform named Threads?
Tap for spoiler
Just kidding
Because they learned nothing
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.
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
They have an addiction to that kind of socials.
To anyone bemoaning BlueSky’s lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.
It’s a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary “relay” as an alternative to Bluesky’s that can still communicate across the same protocol (The “AT Protocol”) while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.
They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).
This is such a half-assed dog and pony show.
They have millions in investment, why do they need someone else to fund this? Why don’t the bluesky team directly and materially support them?
This is a core aspect of Bluesky’s marketing and they asking other volunteers to help make them rich.
Until there’s overt advertising its unlikely to enshittify the normal way. That doesn’t mean it won’t, just that a different capital process is at work. Wikipedia has outlived most of “web2.0” because its funded by donations and run by volunteers.
Until there’s overt advertising its unlikely to enshittify the normal way.
Trust me we will be deep into that territory so fast it is going to make your head spin.
Wikipedia has outlived most of “web2.0” because its funded by donations and run by volunteers.
Private equity and VC funding can’t directly buy Wikipedia and dissect it because it is an at least somewhat functional non-profit organization. That is the only reason.
What would a comparable example be?
Twitter
deleted by creator
Twitter was ad driven and was enshittifying before musk bought it, and sold because they were a public company.
Jay Graber will likely get bored and sell it off or monetize eventually but twitter is definitely not the model here.
I feel like the reason the reason why it’s taking off so much is because it’s not federated.
It’s like people hear the term federation and they get afraid. I know it’s not that simple but still.
In other words, people don’t know what they actually need.
People are not afraid of the term “Federation.“ They literally have no clue what it is.
It’s the instance concept I find consistently to be an issue. It’s an extra layer/barrier to entry. You don’t just create an account. You have to understand what an instance is and then determine which one you’re joining and what that means for your moment to moment usage of the platform.
Yeah I was confused on if it was connected, if I was explaining it to myself id say that the fediverse has interconnected forums that all serve the same content and can be accessed by making accounts on different websites or apps.
Lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected forum/threads side of the fediverse.
Mastodon, sharkey, plaroma, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected microblogging slide of the fediverse.
They all have different features, like mbin has account reputation, piefed has topics which let you sub to multiple related communities at once, etc., but the content is shared between those that serve the same type of content.
Since they’re all built ontop of the same protocol ppl can always come in and build on top of it or make hybrids while still letting everyone access the same content. Like mbin having both microblogging (tweets) and threads, letting you post and view both from the same account/website.
And it legit takes 5 minutes to sign up for 5 instances and see the differences, mine showed the same content for the most part, only lemmy.world was missing the piracy community, other than that it was all the same and any nervousness I had about it went away after seeing the feeds being the same.
Yeah but people don’t want to set up 5 accounts to understand alt-reddit. They want to download a clean app that takes seconds to set up and just go. Friction is friction.
Not everyone likes to tinker and poke and prod
Not only do I don’t mind multiple instances, I welcome it. It’s a feature for me, not a bug. But having to create multiple accounts is a no-no and what keeps people away. People say you only need one but that’s not true if you want to be active in multiple instances.
If the fediverse had a way to unify account creation, that would be a game changer. It’s pretty much what’s holding the fediverse down, be it Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc. It’s frustrating because without that limitation I could see the corpos being given a run for their money.
I think maybe I mis-conveyed my point. I love the way this is all structured. The problem is that it is not accessible to laymen at first glance. I tried the “it’s like email” approach and people’s eyes still just glaze over. They want to download an app, create their account, and jump into the action. Anything beyond that requires a lot of buy-in unless they are already somewhat technically inclined.
As I said in another comment, I find the simplest thing to do is just set up the account for them, pick out an instance for them and tell them what it is, and then once they’ve stuck it out and get their bearings then open the door a little wider and explain Federation, the nature of different instances, etc. My only goal is just to get them on at all.
they should understand by the 2nd one, I just wasnt sure where I wanted to commit, it became fun by the 2nd one to pick an instance like a club
there really isnt much friction either if you dont cate about piracy otherwise id have stayed on lemmyworld when vyjr reccomended it, they really just need to try it, I complained until I tried it
But even then you have to explain the whole subscribed vs local vs all situation. Then defederation, so they know that there is stuff they can’t access without creating another account on another instance.
No matter how much we simplify it it’s simply not that simple. At least not compared to traditional social media. And we can sit here and call them lazy for not learning how it works or we can do more to try to meet people where they’re at.
What I’ve been doing lately is pointing people a good app like Voyager, tell them not even to think about an instance and just join the one I tell them to join (For instance I tell my queer friends to join blahaj), then as they poke around I started explain explaining more things.
It’s kind of like Linux. People obsess over their first distro and then they realize it’s really easy to swap distro’s. So usually I just tell people to get something very simple like mint or pop and just dive in until they learn what they actually want.
I don’t think 99% of people who have joined bluesky have any clue what federation is or means. They do know what “not twitter” is however.
I don’t personally think it’s because of that. Sure, federation as a concept outside of email has a bit of a messaging problem for explaining it to newbies, but… everyone uses email, and knows how that works. This is identical, just with it being posts instead of emails. Users aren’t averse to federation, in concept or practice.
Bluesky was directly created as a very close clone of Twitter’s UI, co-governed and subsequently pushed by the founder of Twitter himself, who will obviously have more reach than randoms promoting something like Mastodon, and, in my opinion, kind of just had better branding.
“Bluesky” feels like a breath of fresh air, while “Mastodon” just sounds like… well, a Mastodon, whatever that makes the average person think of at first.
So when you compare Bluesky, with a familiar UI, nice name, and consistent branding, not to mention algorithms, which Mastodon lacks, all funded by large sums of money, to Mastodon, with unfamiliar branding, minimal funding, and substantially less reach from promoters, which one will win out, regardless of the technology involved?
Its also, honestly, just really hard to find people on Mastodon.
Exactly, it’s just packaged in a way that consumers are more familiar with with the backing of major celebs
The only thing the Fediverse is missing is way to migrate from 1 instance to another
It actually does exist, at least on Mastodon, but is still very janky (e.g. old posts aren’t moved over due to “technical limitations”)
Automatically makes people unfollow your old account and re-follow your new account, then makes your old instance’s link redirect to your new instance’s one.
Ah yes, “free our feeds” where millionaire VCs are asking for donations
I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.
Pass
Unfortunately that’s standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There’s zero benefit to them.
Let’s not call disabling the right to sue a “business risk”. That’s like calling the right to stop paying for the service a “risk” - it’s riskdiculous.
Let’s not call disabling the right to sue a “business risk”.
…and why not?
That’s like calling the right to stop paying for the service a “risk”
But…that’s what it is? I promise if they could remove that risk with a few words in the TOS, and it was legal, they’d all be doing that too.
The right to take legal action for harm done is imperative. It’s importance is diminished if conflated with a legitimate business risk (like research and development). It should be illegal to deny it.
I agree. But we weren’t discussing hypotheticals, we were discussing reality.
Cruel pragmatism meets naive idealism. A tale as old as time.
By “business risk”, they just mean bad for the business, ethics aside
Yes that’s what they mean. I tried to persuade against meaning that.
And we should just accept that?
Doesn’t matter if you should or not. Point is you accept it or you don’t use any service whatsoever.
Looks like there’s a viable alternative here.
Really? Who are you going to sue here? And how much money do you think you can sue them for?
Oh no, there’s no money or profit motive here. I guess that’s terrible.
That’s not what I asked.
I don’t think forced arbitration has really been tried in court. I remember Disney kind of trying, but it was completely unrelated (e.g. argued that arbitration agreement from Disney+ applied to issues on physical Disney properties).
In order to hold up in court, the contract needs to reasonably benefit both parties instead of only the contract issuer. So there’s a very good chance a court will dismiss the forced arbitration clause, especially if it’s just in a EULA and not a bidirectional contract negotiation.
That said, I tend to avoid services with binding arbitration statements in their EULA, and if I can’t, I avoid companies that force acceptance of EULA changes to continue use of the service.
Well I know someone tried it against Valve and they ended up removing the requirement.
While I understand that, I’m in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.
Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It’s the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.
But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I’m not going to fight it. I’m having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I’ve written the media address of environments I’m familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.