Do you want a mainstream corporate app to be federated?
Comment on Skyrocketing bluesky engagement since opening to the public
sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Wake me when it’s federated
atrielienz@lemmy.world 4 months ago
tonarinokanasan@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
To some extent I feel like the inverse of this would be “do you wish Gmail wasn’t federated?”
atrielienz@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Can you explain?
A lot of don’t want twitter or anything meant to take twitters place run by corps to be federated because the whole point of any platform of that kind is to make money off ad revenue. That’s why people on Lemmy seem to be trying to FOSS all the things.
tonarinokanasan@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Something like 80% of email goes through Google and Apple. But, email is just about the most successful federated protocol we have. Also, I believe that these companies would have become huge regardless, and I’m glad that they are dominant while using an open protocol instead of something they can exert much more control over.
In an ideal world, I believe the goal for federated social media is that you don’t care what platform other users you interact with are on, and they can freely move to other platforms without compromise. It’s scary if a big corpo controls too much marketshare and can break compatibility with other apps. But, if the protocol is truly open, there can’t be any barrier to corpos launching services on the protocol either.
I tend to agree when everyone is worried about an already existing major player joining federation (e.g. FB with threads). But bluesky is a new entrant to the space; they will have to fight the existing giants for market anyway. And if they’re starting small, then them being federated means that as soon as they start to get credible traction, any other company would be able to launch their own app in the same space. If the scare of big players is that they’ll choose to one day stop playing nicely with federation, then it will definitely be easier for them to say “you can no longer chat with a few random FOSS weirdos” than to say “you can no longer chat with this other major app”.
tl;dr, for me the goal isn’t to have a protocol that can only talk to other people who care about FOSS; it’s to have a way to talk to everyone. Eventually, that means that I hope we do hit a critical mass of “big players” buying in, even if they’re motivated by profit.
sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Yes
atrielienz@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Having the most users is great until you realize that’s how Twitter became… Well. Twitter. Before Musk it was still a shit show, with a whole lot of alt right BS going on. It’s gotten worse since he bought it but this is the late stage for platforms like this.
psychothumbs@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s in sort of a weird intermediate space - it does have a federated protocol, but currently the main bluesky server is the only thing on it.
abrahambelch@programming.dev 4 months ago
Yeah so effectively not federated. Pretty sure they’re not actually interested in federating anyway
airportline@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
It’s supposed to happen relatively soon I think bsky.social/about/…/11-15-2023-toward-federation
agitatedpotato@lemmy.world 4 months ago
As I understand it thats just federation within their own protocol, however I have seen on Mastodon a group of devs working on bridging the protocols. My canary in the coal mine for Bluesky is how the treat that dev team and so far it seems they’re just letting them do their thing.
sucricdrawkcab@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They started moving people to the Federated server last year to test things. I didn’t see this article but people were openly talking about moving over on Bluesky. So thanks for posting this because I always see people say it’s not getting Federated on Lemmy, but see people on Bluesky say it is, confusing.
psychothumbs@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It seems like the people running it are pretty ideologically committed to the federation concept, I’d be surprised if it was never implemented. They seem to hope it will resolve some of the moderation problems that plagued twitter.