Bluesky launches a custom feed for vertical videos | TechCrunch
Bluesky launches a custom feed for vertical videos | TechCrunch
With TikTok's future in the U.S. uncertain, it feels like major social media platforms are working overtime to ship features to attract the millions
X is also doing the same thing: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/20/x-is-rolling-out-a-dedicated-vertical-video-feed-for-us-users/
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All centralized platforms will become a brainrot short video shithole in the end. Good. Their decay shall be our salvation.
I seem to be out of the loop, isn't Bluesky decentralised? Am I missing sth?
Not yet. Their AT protocol, similar to the Fediverse's ActivityPub protocol, is open source and is supposedly working towards the goal of enabling federation, but presently Bluesky is centrally-hosted and run. In theory, one could use the existing AT protocol and spin up their own Bluesky alternative, but it would just make another "center" given that current lack of federation.
The optimist in me is hoping that this is just a temporary thing, to show users that the platform works before enabling federation, versus what has happened to the Fediverse early on where a lot of poorly-implemented/poorly-run instances that couldn't handle any significant user load ended up buckling and gave early adopters a negative impression.
But the cynic in me (and the commonly-accepted conclusion others appear to have drawn) considers the possibility that Bluesky no longer cares about decentralization and would prefer to remain a centrally-hosted Twitter 2.0. But there is a push to transfer the governance of the AT protocol to a nonprofit to ensure that its original purpose is protected, so hopefully that or some other initiative like it ends up accomplishing their mission.
Christine Lemmer-Webber (the lead author of the ActivityPub standard) published an article explaining why bluesky is not truly decentralised and how it is different from activitypub.
No that's just hip marketing. There is one instance (and technically a way to host personal data that nonetheless requires creating an account through the main service). The code is open though.
If anyone is interested in decentralized micro-blogging, there is Mastodon, and if you are interested in short form video there is Loops.
Loops is not yet decentralized, but it is based on ActivityPub and planned for open-sourcing and federation after Beta testing. The creator is an established developer in the community, so the claim seems credible.
From what I gather yes and no.
The fediverse is decentralized as it uses a protocol activity pub to allow lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, etc to all talk. Moreover, most of the servers (to my knowledge) are community run. For example lemmy.world.
Bluesky made a new protocol similar to activity pub that could be used in a similar way, but its only used by Bluesky. They have allowed other users to host their own servers, but Bluesky still hosts the main servers (from what information I could find).
It seems bluesky wants to be similar to Fediverse applications, but I would have almost preferred how Threads did it; they actually use activity pub, so from mastodon you could follow threads users and vice versa. The Fediverse community wasn't fond of Threads so most servers defederated (or blocked) the Threads servers.
I feel Bluesky is doing something similar to threads. Its a corporation first that wants you to think its like the community first decentralized social networks. My take is, better than Meta/X, but I stick to Fediverse applications.