Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.
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What I don't get is why anyone would ever choose commercial social media again given there are Activity Pub clones for practically everything now, where you aren't the product. So many people learned nothing from the ongoing Twitter debacle and the zillion Facebook privacy scandals apparently.
Try using Mastodon and Bluesky at the same time. Bluesky is a twitter clone and perfect replacement. Mastodon is an excellent micro-blogging platform, but has none of the features people actually liked about twitter. People love recommendation algorithms and quote tweet dunking. That's the core of what it's all about. Mastodon is glorified RSS, which is great if you miss those days.
Perhaps open federated systems should have recommendation algos too, just optional and open
It would be cool to download different algorithms people created to see how it feeds
Follow a few interesting hashtags and you have your recommendation algorithm, but one you're in control of.
Have you seen the average person recently? They like to be spoon-fed content in a passive way. Look at Instagram Reels or TikTok.
Mastodon is fine for geeks like us, but the average Joe would find it dead and boring. Bluesky managed to fill that hole left by Twitter.
In that case, I wish the "average person" a lot of fun on corporate internet. Meanwhile we'll have more fun on the federated indie internet.
fuck people liking shit .. and fuck people going back to american corporate tech... yes, I'm mad like that.
Honestly I have used Blue Sky and Mastodon and Mastodon feels a lot more elegant to me, personally.
Fediverse software tends to be kind of hostile to convenience features people have grown accustomed to. Recommendation algorithms, for example. Lemmy is on the cutting edge for having a "Hot" sort.
I know Mastodon has historically been pretty hostile to even more basic things like being able to search posts.
I get why they think like that, and I honestly agree with some of it, but it inevitably creates a culture shock for outsiders coming from corpo media. I think that plus the network effect means the fediverse will always be kind of niche.
Is Activity Pub integrated into Lemmy yet?
I thought it was built on activity pub.
I'm gonna go over to my Mastodon account and try to reply to you. One sec.
@60d @heavyboots It is supposed to be but I'm not seeing any mastodon replies showing up on Lemmy yet so I thought I'd give it a try. The fact that I can see your reply from mastodon and reply to it proves something 🤔
Cool! Yea I'm not on Mastodon. Replying on Lemmy via Voyager.
Wow, the delay is real LOL I replied from Mastodon but it hasn't shown up here so I'm replying from vger.app and will see what gets here from where and when :-D It's cool that it's possible though, even if it's not super practical.
EDIT to say that this comment showed up on Mastodon basically immediately but my Mastodon comment still hasn't shown up here 1-2 hours later?! Weird??
@60d Nice, so it definitely works but there is quite a delay so not perfect. But here I am replying again from mastodon after checking that it did finally show up on Lemmy!
The delay is real, lol.
Don't you have to follow someone on Mastodon to see what they post? Are you already following 60d?
@sqgl Apparently not. I just searched for their username on Mastodon, saw their comment and hit reply. I noticed later that Mastodon does have a note below the comments saying something along the lines of All replies might not display, go to Lenny to see more.
EDIT to add that this time, this reply from Mastodon showed up immediately on Lemmy 😂the way I do it is open up lemmy on the browser and you can copy the fediverse link and paste it into mastodon to search for it, but federation is a whole thing so not everyone who sees something from their instance sees everything from every instance depending on who is federated with who, so with mastodon and lemmy it gets a little weird. Ive seen some tools that help pull more content that otherwise your instance wouldnt automatically get itself so that you can see more replies etc but I havent messed around with that
Thanks. I use the app Boost for Lemmy but do not have that icon you circled.
I find you on Mastodon as Mr Pistachios but zero posts and replies are show. That is your deliberate setting?
oh yeah I only see that icon from the browser where I mostly use it, and stuff really only shows up if your instance pulls the data which is normally doesnt do for mastodon stuff, and no way to follow specific accounts so not much use anyway
@60d @heavyboots
Kinda? This is @andrewrgross tooting at you from Mastodon, but I had to search for your address to find this comment. And I couldn't find it from a different server. So... yes, but actually no.Still, I find it fascinating the degree that they're connected. I'm gonna go see if this showed up on Lemmy now.
Your toot is here. Can you see my reply in Mastodon?
@60d
Yes!I just "favorited" it and clicked reply. I believe the reply shows up as a reply, and the favoriting action looks like an upvote.
It's kinda silly. Like... is this useful? Unclear. But the ability for me to interact across two very different platforms seems like a technical achievement to me.
@60d
Also, I just took a screen cap and I'm embedding it in a reply toot. If this works, you can see what this conversation looks like in Mastodon. I'm interested to see if this shows up in Lemmy.
Yup, I can see the screenshot and the up votes, so it was already more integrated than I thought. Cool!
There really are dozens of us!
This thread exchange made me smile, and I had to show it to one of my partners while giving the rundown about Activity Pub.
This shit is so neat.
Thanks, I think it's fun too. Interesting to see the current level of integration between platforms. Thanks for also giving me something to smile about 😊
@60d hasn't it been?
Commercial software has advertising: people whose job is to advertise it. That means TV and web ads for Bluesky, influencers talking about it. It also means a team of software engineers building parts of the system specifically to draw people in, whereas non-commercial software often rejects that (lack of infinite-scroll on Lemmy's default UI, for example).
Activity Pub also requires a different mind-set that doesn't exist elsewhere on the internet today. You need to decide which instance to join, or maybe to host your own instance. But it doesn't really matter, because you can federate with other instances. But you have to drive some of that federation, so it does matter a little. It's pretty complex and confusing and its a problem that only exists in this one niche of software.
Bluesky gives you an infinite feed that feels like you're connected to the entire Internet without you doing any work. I think the AP service are doing really well, considering what they're up against.
They just follow the herd. I wonder who directs the herd...