Bluesky is not decentralized. It’s promised to be decentralized but I wouldn’t be surprised if they never allow open federation.
Oh no it’ll federate alright.
The thing about ATProto is that unlike AP they don’t seem to expect each instance to have it’s own community with it’s own rules and vibes. They seem to be using federation just as a way to “scale up”.
If they can get any non-bluesky-the-company folk to create instances then that’s just scaling they don’t have to pay for and a convenient legal scapegoat for the inevitable consequences of their lax moderation. Why wouldn’t they federate?
If they can get any non-bluesky-the-company folk to create instances then that’s just scaling they don’t have to pay for and a convenient legal scapegoat for the inevitable consequences of their lax moderation.
Yes. This exactly is their whole business model. There has been a very good article about bluesky around for some time about that fyi.
What I want to know is what kind of soulless person bereft of imagination would create a BS instance when it’s essentially just free hosting for a for-profit company.
1 year from now: “Oh, now we’re too big to do that. Sorry not sorry”
The old embrace extend extinguish
From what I’ve heard most of the users don’t care about federation but just want an alternative Twitter.
Which makes sense, that’s what they joined after all. “Federation is coming” Is probably destined to be a broken promise for a while unless it goes mainstream and becomes and expectation. For now it’s just hedging bets
According to their blog post a few days ago, they’re looking at federation in H1 '24, and beginning the move to put governance of the AT Protocol that powers BlueSky to an established standards body like IEFT, though they predict that’ll be a multi-year process.[1]
I hope they continue to move towards federation; the developers at least appear very interested in it even if the community doesn’t, but I’m gonna be apprehensive about getting too excited until it actually happens.
They have a number of big promises with AT Protocol, including fully portable accounts that let you keep your content, even if your home-instance (what they call provider) goes down,[2] but it’s hard to see if this is even preferable while they’re still centralized.
Thanks! Seems interesting, especially to see what federation looks like with their more centralised model.
Personally I hope it goes well. 1. Because I think the Fedi could do with competition. 2. The idea of having relatively centralised services complementing the distributed network makes a lot of sense I suspect, with similar realisations percolating around the Fedi over time, and it might be fruitful to see it succeed instead of the usual Fedi snobbiness around not being a “real” federstion.
Standards bodies is where social protocols traditionally go to die (see Jabber/XMPP).
Fully portable accounts, even fully portable communities, is something possible with Lemmy (not implemented), along with several other interesting possibilities.
How would fully portable accounts and communities be implemented do you think? My vague understanding is that users, communities and content lives at a particular URL and can’t simply change its domain.
Right now, there are several elements:
- Users — Mastodon deals with it by introducing a “Move” action that makes any followers switch from following the old user URL to a new user URL. A server export and import would be required for the user’s subscribed communities, config, and profile data.
- Comments — This is where things get somewhat hairy, but possible; the new home server (instance) would need to re-publish the user’s content as coming from the new user URL. Ideally there could be a similar “Move” or “Takeover” activity that an instance could broadcast for each content item, so they would get reattached to the new user URL.
- Interactions — Other user’s responses, boosts, faves, etc. reference old content URLs, so instances should follow the “Move” and “Takeover” events and fix those accordingly.
- Lemmy Communities/Posts — This one’s actually the easiest: communities are just a special user that boosts any message sent to the community. You can clone a community right now by simply creating a “community user” and having it boost the same messages as the “source” community. Then you can delete the original, or have it de-boost stuff, or keep both boosts, or whatever.
Extras:
- Cross-posting — A “community user” boosts a post from another (it’s a pity we don’t have this yet).
- Splitting a Post — Have the second community user boost a post with just some of the comment threads, while the original de-boosts them. Now there are two posts with maybe comments that maybe follow different instance rules, or fit better with different instance profiles.
- Post linking to a toot or comment — This would need some format change, but wouldn’t be too difficult.
- Upgrading a comment to a post — This would require several of the previous features, but would allow moving off-topic conversations to their right place.
Bluesky already allows you to use your own domain for your handle. Currently they just use a TXT record in DNS to verify it is your domain - but adding another record to specify on which instance this is hosted shouldn’t be too hard.
Yeah, they will pay lip service to nonprofit/decentralized to keep the tech people from shutting it down immediatley, but it will never (can never) be Mastodon.
It’s the same thing Threads did with ActivityPub. I kinda doubt it was ever seriously discussed, just wanted the story around it to be about ActivityPub and not how it was just a boring Twitter clone.
They probably never well because it’s a capitalist apologists safe space.
I just want to be in the most free place where I can talk to people.
So far, this is it. I don’t think the Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon model really promotes discussion. The Reddit/Lemmy model does, by design, expectation.
@BlinkerFluid @hedge I agree with your overall point: social networks where you subscribe to a community seem to get more replies (and longer replies) than ones where you subscribe a person. They also make it harder for influencers to take off – anyone’s post has a chance of generating discussion. They deemphasize who the OP is.
Mastodon’s ability to follow those communities is, IMO, a killer feature that I hope more people discover. (Case in point: I’m posting this from Mastodon right now.)
Case in point: I’m posting this from Mastodon right now.
And I’m reading it on Kbin. Gotta love federation.
I want to converse in a place where most people are civil and tolerant of ideas even if these ideas challenge their view of the world. People don’t have to agree, but I think most people should be treated with dignity and respect. Further, I would love to converse in place where people are rational actors and free thinkers, rather than just simply aligned and regurgitating their group’s thought leaders’ talking points. A place where people have been taught the scientific method, fallacies, how to discern most propaganda and advertising, and also have at least a minimum understanding of philosophy, psychology and sociology.
In other words, I want to converse in a complete fantasyland.
Joking aside, these arts were once taught to all students at most universities. I’m not sure if they are anymore, but the news paints a picture that they’ve been exchanged for more “employable” skills. I hope to see more pushback against those efforts.
Hi, can I join your fantasyland…?
(I was planning on trying setting up a Lemmy instance along those lines, but then life happened)
I agree with this. I’m self-hosting both Mastodon and Lemmy. I’ll use Mastodon maybe once a week, same as I used to do on Twitter. On the other hand, I’m on Lemmy pretty much every day. I like long-form discussions a lot more than Twitter-style posts, and it’s way easier to read through comments on here since there’s proper threading.
bluesky is not that great. I can’t recommend it.
Cool then send me the invite i requested a year ago
Tell me about it! All this “Bluesky this!” And “Bluesky that!”, and I’m still just waiting to be allowed to see what it even looks like for myself 🙄
Pretty sure it’s also been a year at least on the wait-list for me. My guess is that the list isn’t even used, and nobody is getting in without an invite 😑
Update: I’ve now received an invite, thank you! 😊❤️
Need one? I still have one more
sure! 😊 thank you!
I joined the waitlist months ago and all I heat is Bluesky is growing but I still have no news about being able to use it…
I find Bluesky to be a nice clean interface but without the variety of users that xTwitter has or had.
I’ve got a Bluesky account but never use it since barely anyone I know is on it, and I don’t really know how to find people to follow that are actually interesting to me. It was easier for me to get into Mastodon since many more of the people I follow signed up there, and I could import my Twitter follows (until Twitter locked that done. RIP)
I’ve got a Bluesky account but never use it since barely anyone I know is on it, and I don’t really know how to find people to follow that are actually interesting to me.
Hope the below is helpful! 🙂
In a month-ish on bluesky I’ve ended up with a far better experience than ever I could find on twitter, and I sincerely think many folks not finding the same have probably not recognized how core feeds are to the experience. They more or less let you build your own algorithm.
https://www.astrobetter.com/blog/2023/09/18/how-to-get-started-on-bluesky-cross-post/
Point 4 in the linked article discusses feeds.
In addition to other specific feeds you may add for yourself, I recommend the recent-ishly created “For You” feed which tracks what you seem interested in and tries to suggest based on that. (I removed the default “Discover” feed and replaced it with “For You.”) I’ve subbed to about 10 or 12 feeds, but that’s one of four I have pinned.
All in all my bluesky homepage is 99% things I actually want to see, and people I actually want to engage with, and there is plenty of it - despite my feed selections being intentionally niche.
There’s also a browser extension called “Sky Follower Bridge” that will semi-automatically find where folks you follow on twitter have created bluesky accounts so you can just go down the list and follow them all. It’s something to run every few days if you follow a lot of folks, as people continue to move over.
If there are very specific public figures you are waiting on to move over, no solution but patience there, and I have some of those too. However, I’ve been giving out my invitation codes to regular people who I want to see on Bluesky and that has worked out pretty well.
Good luck, and sorry for the unsolicited advice. :-)
Great comment. Thanks for writing it!
Any time, have a great day (or night as the case may be).
I have varied taste. I like to follow news reporters for one.i simply find one I like and see who he or she follows and start from there. Bluesky, though doesn’t have my needed blues music and geology feeds that Twitter has.
Lol, it’s owned by Twitter now, it’s just a matter of time.
It was spun out from within Twitter, initially. It was incorporated independently as a Public Benefit LLC, with Jack Dorsey on its board, intending to make Twitter into an instance of BlueSky.
It’s incorrect to say “it’s owned by twitter now”, as it’s less “owned by twitter” now than it was at its inception.
I’m happy to hear they’re growing but sad because I’ve been on the wait-list for months now. Hard to be excited about the site with no end of the wait in sight.
is bluesky good for sports news? mastodon and Lemmy are lacking in that area but I’ve been waiting months, like a lot of people, just to try it out.
