Bluesky opens up federation, letting anyone run their own server | TechCrunch
Bluesky opens up federation, letting anyone run their own server | TechCrunch
Social network Bluesky, a competitor to X, Threads, Mastodon, and others, is opening up its doors with today's news that the network is now opening up
I'd like to preface this by saying that my prefrontal cortex is mostly lard and anxiety medication, so sorry if I sound stupid here.
Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?
Bluesky is a "public benefit corporation", whereas Mastodon is proper open source if I understood correctly.
To me "public benefit corporation", just sounds shady. Why should BlueSky be trustworthy? Because of Jack Dorsey?
I know musk turned Twitter into a bizarre fever dream hellscape, but I don't recall it being sunshine and roses under Dorsey's leadership either. The platform would pester me for my phone number to "prevent spam" (they really said that shit with a straight face). White supremacists openly just said awful shit. The video player was ass.
But, I'll be optimistic. Hopefully this won't be Twitter 2: Judgement Day. I hope it will be a good tool for whistleblowers and breaking news. Ideally, it will have a symbiotic relationship with other federated networks instead of a hostile pain in the ass.
Bluesky has a much better community of artists on it. A ton of comics twitter relocated there. And that’s the content I want so I’m on Bluesky. I’ve tried to get Mastodon to serve me content I’m interested in but it just falls short for me.
In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
Also Dorsey only owns like 2% of Bluesky now iirc and had mostly cut ties with it in favor of his Nostr thing because he’s butthurt Bluesky is full of liberals.
In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
In addition to content itself there is also ease of finding it and how it's presented. People on here tend to hate algorithms but honestly Mastodon never clicked for me because (when I checked it out) you were stuck with a chronological feed. I dabbled with it but like you I could never get it to serve me content I wanted the way I wanted. Algorithms can be dangerous yes and I don't condone Twitter's and Facebook's outrage baiting, but Mastodon currently just seems to demand too much work out of me.
bluesky has book twitter/romance twitter too, which is great.
it also has a huge trans community on it.
Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?
Bluesky's model of federation fixes the whole "if my instance goes down I lose everything".
Your Identity and your data is portable, which means that each server on Bluesky is "merely" a service provider.
From Wikipedia: In business, and only in United States corporate law, a benefit corporation is a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society. Laws concerning conventional corporations typically do not define the "best interest of the corporation", which has led some to believe that increasing shareholder value (profits and/or share price) is the only overarching or compelling interest of a corporation. Benefit corporations explicitly specify that profit is not their only goal. Their activities may or may not differ much from traditional corporations.
they're both open source.
bluesky was just made by former twitter users who wanted the twitter experience without musk.
mastodon was made to be the opposite of twitter.
they're both good; i prefer twitter but things like bridgy-fed help bring the best of both worlds and let mastodon and bluesky talk to each other.
Mastodon not being Twitter has been part of my ongoing description of it when asked. If you liked Twitter because you might rub elbows with important people, watch the drama in real time, or go algorithmically viral for a sick burn (or alternately something cool), you're not going to get any of that on Mastodon. If you want microblogging to subscribers, it's got that. If old school "people actively shared me" virality is enough, it's got that. But it's not going to replace Twitter, because Twitter was a culture and an algorithm as much as it was a microblogging site.
If Lemmy had more people it could be almost a 1-for-1 Reddit replacement (still a little confusing with multiple communities of the same name/topic). Mastodon can't do that for Twitter.
It notes that Bluesky users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join, as aspects of how your experience differs from others is in your control thanks to other features, like custom feeds and composable moderation. The latter means moderation is not tied to your server. While server operators can set rules around the content they host, communities can use blocklists and soon, independent moderation services, to introduce additional layers of moderation. That means there’s not as much pressure on server operaters to block other servers (defederate) because of the content they host, since users will have their own tools to manage their moderation preferences.
This is a nice bit of tech.
users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join
So... I guess the big brains that gave us Twitter reasoned that people randomly join communities where they don't agree with the rules? This argument makes zero sense.
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
- On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
- On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can't stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated "public squares" according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn't blocked you).
- On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it's not, so this doesn't happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it's clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
- Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.
Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
Nostr might be more private and autonomous, but it's full of crypto shams.
Cue the "OMG it's so complicated!" comments by people who somehow managed to sign up to email, but this is suddenly too hard.
Why? You realize that you reserve more rights by not including a license than by including one, right?
I can't tell if the Bluesky team is bad at business or planning some sort of eventual rug pull. They're certainly a for-profit corporation without any evident way to generate profit, and their words and theoretical design all sound like they're not easily compatible with profit, but multiple profit-focused entities have given them a lot of money for something that, if implemented as envisioned, will not make them any richer.
My only guess is some form of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish where the core server is better than the rest of the network, but the network exists to assuage fears about another social network implosion or protect from potential antitrust issues while not being a real threat, but it feels like a complicated way to make Twitter 2.0 and get rich.
As long as there's a profit motive involved, enshittification seems like the expected conclusion. We could just be at step one. From Doctorow's description of the enshittification cycle:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
they're a public benefit llc not a for profit corporation.
Public benefit companies are for-profit, they just can't be sued for not maximizing it.
What happens when the LLC runs out of money to run / administrate the server?
Bluesky's official app sucks ass, that's already enough of a reason for me to not use it for the time being. It really is terrible, shitty web view banking app level of terribleness and speed
There's no native iPad mode. 😩
Thankfully there is an app that's iPad native named, uh, Skeets.
bluesky should abandon atproto and use activitypub
but why atproto solved several things activitypub doesn't do (and refused to implement).
And yet, bsky still lacks basic functionality that Masto had years ago.
Like what? What did it solve that activitypub refused to?
I am using another great fediverse Twitter clone called Catodon.social which has a MUCH nicer UI than either Mastodon or Bluesky. I want all corners of the fediverse to do well. It's the future of social media I think.
Phanpy.social is a great frontend for Mastodon that looks even better on a phone.