I don't understand the bluesky hype. If it ever is properly federated, I'll try it out, but until then it's just one of these new hip social media sites that appear every few months.
I think the hype is driven by people that just want Twitter without Elon and realized the Fediverse is not that. I know that by saying so I somewhat sound like the people that the article is criticizing, but I think people that want Twitter without Elon are missing a big part of the picture, i.e that Twitter was and is bleeding money fast, so "their" Twitter was going to die one way or the other.
To build a sustainable platform you need to invest in it. People in the Fediverse have done so, but are painfully aware that it is a careful balance and that it can't work with millions of Twitter users switching over expecting a gratis platform with no strings attached.
And this failure to understand these basic dynamics will probably drive them into the hands of yet another venture capital funded fly-trap and the circle will begin anew.
@poVoq@sexy_peach I think a fediverse can house both types.
those who dont want to pay to have an account on a server (which obviouslly costs money to host), then some instances can show ads on their webinterfaces and fund their costs that way. people who dont care about ads can join such instance and have their free account.
those who dont like ads can either donate or pay for their account or join a free server without ads (if available) or host their own server.
IMHO you can't fund a service with meagre normal banner advertisement revenue anymore.
Someone wishing to fund a Fediverse service would have to write a deep data-mining system that displays personalized and targeted advertisement to their users and get sufficient investment to survive until they have a large enough user-base and scale for their data-mining to turn a profit.
Not impossible, I guess, but given the invasive nature of said data-mining they would probably be defederated quite quickly (if found out) as in a federated network you can't cleanly separate whom's data gets mined.
@sexy_peach@koncertejo And that’s the rub, right? #Bluesky is supposed to be #federated but it only federates with itself and it will only federate in the future with entities that use its proprietary protocol (i.e. its vassal states). So, how is this anything but just another walled garden beholden to corporate interests? I do like the idea of nomadic identity, but it doesn’t mean anything until/unless Bluesky starts talking to other services.
No in theory they plan to be federated properly through the AT protocol I believe. It's not compatible with the fediverse, but that's not necessary to be federated.
At the moment though they only have one server and that one doesn't even federate with the AT protocol yet. So at the moment it's just a twitter clone, without any special features.
I don't know if I think that they should talk to other services, I think that if they truly built a very user friendly twitter alternative that is spread out on many servers that are connected and independently run, that would be a huge goal. But I don't at all believe they'll even manage that.
That's why I love the fediverse, we have that going already and even more :)