Submitted 7 months ago by shaked_coffee@feddit.it to fediverse@lemmy.world
I recently finished the episode of The Verge’s podcast #Decoder with the interview to Bluesky’s CEO and it seems a quite interesting project. At the beginning I wasn’t looking really into it because of their choice of using a new protocol instead of the existing ActivityPub, but after listening to her and the reasons behind this choice maybe I’ll give them a chance.
What do you think? Do you use it alongside with the fediverse?
I don’t and I don’t want to, I hate it when everyone makes their own standard which means there is no real standard to speak of. There’s a xkcd exactly for that.
I’m using ActivityPub and that’s what I’ll be using as long as I feel it makes sense.
They could have made ActivityPub better, instead they made an incompatible protocol.
That’s almost exactly what I was thinking before listening to the podcast.
But there she explained how ActivityPub was missing some of the feature they wanted because of its instance-centric approach and how trying to change that would have been hard (given how sceptical towards changes and everything corporate-related the fediverse community can be), and so they opted for a new protocol since the goals of the two project were with different aims.
Still not 100% convinced tbh, but I can’t deny she has a point…
instance-centric approach
What did she mean by this? Could you be more specific about what she said? I don’t really want to listen to the podcast.
At the beginning I wasn’t looking really into it because of their choice of using a new protocol instead of the existing ActivityPub
And yet, here we are with another conversation about something in the wrong place.
As for BlueSky and their illusion of federation, what’s to talk about? Anyone can host a server, but all posts need to be indexed by the server of which they’re in charge of otherwise they don’t appear in anyone’s timelines? It’s like the emperor’s new clothes. They wash their hands of moderation and the majority of hosting costs and you feel empowered, only for them to say, yeah, we’re, for example, inserting ads and you need to be okay with that.
Everyday, I read something here about why Facebook or BlueSky are better than what we have. I don’t even think the people that post this stuff work for either company. I just think they’ve been indoctrinated and they don’t realise that they’re attempting to push us all towards the very things so many of us consciously and determinedly walked away from.
I don’t want to be part of a centralised service. Even one that cosplays as federated. I don’t want Facebook to have my data nor do I want to interact with any of their services. I personally chose the Fediverse because I liked the values it exhibited and I enjoy the community. Everyday I get to laugh at things, learn things, share things and just be generally entertained. Can the fediverse improve? Sure; But neither Meta nor BlueSky are the solution. I genuinely wish both would piss off.
And yet, here we are with another conversation about something in the wrong place.
Well, this is is a place to talk about fediverse and ActivityPub, and mine wanted to be the starting point for a discussion about the two protocols and how they compare with each other, if it was actually worth it to create a new protocol or not etc.
I was not pretending that Bluesky is better than the Fediverse, it’s just different and I’m convinced that discussing about how others do stuff can benefit the Fediverse too.
BlueSky and their illusion of federation, what’s to talk about? Anyone can host a server, but all posts need to be indexed by the server of which they’re in charge of otherwise they don’t appear in anyone’s timelines?
As for this, it was my main perplexity after I listened the podcast since they didn’t really entered into the details of how the “multiple servers, one timeline” work. Do you by chance have any resource/link I could read to learn more about that and clarify my doubts?
What do I think of bluesky? Same as I think about everything in this day and age:
So far my take is: Yet another microblogging platform?
But I’d like to read/hear something about the details… How does the protocol compare to other existing solutions? Are there free server implementations? How do they handle federation, would I be able to just connect to them and do whatever I want? Or do they retain tigbt control over the network?
Exactly what I was wondering the entire time I was listening. None of these questions were asked during the episode. A lot of handwaving and buzzword double-speak. She go deeper into any technical details.
Agree. The episode partially answers some of those questions (of course with a biased answer, since it’s given by their CEO), but I guess that for most of them we’ll just have to wait and see
Meh. It’s basically just the twitter experience, with the same problems it had. Bigots everywhere, and you can’t get rid of them, only hide their content from yourself…
It’s not X so 👍.
I rarely used Twitter before the Musk takeover, only to follow a handful of authors I like for updates about their books and a few people who did aerospace updates, unfortunately most of them jumped on the BlueSky train instead of the Mastodon bus, and I’m not going to have an X account so BlueSky it is.
I feel like Bluesky is always going to be the fediverse with training wheels. And as you pointed out, these folks aren’t using Twitter, so that’s a good start. All we can do is hope one day these people will start exploring the full range of opportunities available to them in the fediverse.
@shaked_coffee I made an account there and followed a bunch of people, but the federation aspect feels faux to me.
My profile there is basically just a redirect.
The thing I like most about Bluesky right now is the experimental “threaded mode” which makes following conversations a lot easier for me. I’ve always more of a Reddit kinda guy than a Twitter user so nested/threaded comments are preferable.
Having said that, as far as microblogging platforms go, I find mastodon in conjunction with the smart lists feature on the Mammoth app for iOS to be a much better resource for following news and finding interesting accounts.
It has some nice ideas, particularly for moderation. I like that they’re thinking hard about these things.
I think its moving too slowly and it’s lack of momentum at the time of the Twitter exodus was lost. Its too late for it to become an alternative to the likes of Twitter, Mastodon etc. and I think it will die.
I hope that once it’s gone it will leave a legacy of those good ideas I mentioned above which other platforms will take learnings from.
All my opinion.
Generally I agree on the loss of momentum. I’m in there and have said the same there.
That being said, comparing it to mastodon in terms of size at the moment doesn’t make sense. The current metric indicate the BlueSky user base is likely bigger than mastodon’s. Not by much and certainly, just like mastodon, no where close to competing with Twitter and threads (if that’s the goal).
But it seems to have a user base roughly on the same scale as the fediverse. Which is something given how slow and behind they are.
Big question is how viable a small user base is for their company behind it and whether the structure of their system is something a community organisation could keep afloat.
What were the reasons? Is their protocol really better than ActivityPub? Couldn’t ActivityPub just adapt to have the same benefits?
From what she said, ActivityPub could have adapted to what they wanted, but probably don’t want to. On Bluesky you kinda loose the community feel of your instance that you have and that many people (me included) like.
I elaborated more on the “problems” she listed in another comment here if you want to read more without listening the episode
That doesn’t seem like a benefit at all. Just seems like Bluesky wants to be the central authority in their own little network.
I was on there, but it seems to me to basically full of the neoliberal crowd that left X when Musk took over. Too much snark IMO.
It’s waaaay too polite and clean, to the point of self righteousness. Twitter is still more fun, but it leans too far in the other direction.
Lemmy was too self righteous at first too. People acting like we came here because reddit users were bigots… no, it’s because spez is a greedy bastard who ruined the site.
So I think bluesky might become cool like lemmy when people finally relax.
Twitter > BlueSky > Mastodon
Personally I think we should all use the kbin microblog.
Plopp@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I don’t know much about their protocol, but I find it likely to be better than ActivityPub since AP is kind of a mess. However I’m not going back to corporate social media ever again. The fewer corporate things in my life the better.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
The Activitypub protocol is fine. It could use some minor improvements but there’s definitely no reason for an entirely new protocol.
Plopp@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I never said there was. I’d prefer it if they made AP better instead. And there’s a lot of room for improvement.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 7 months ago
As far as I understand, Bluesky is basically a central authority in their protocol. I wouldn’t really call that better than ActivityPub.
Plopp@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Well, there are many different aspects to take into account. I was thinking more of how inefficient AP is when it comes to system resources and network usage, and some other things I can’t remember that made me go “yikes” when I read it. Also how it’s used for things the protocol doesn’t really have support for, so devs make their own solutions that are now part of the AP Fediverse even though the protocol itself, that is the backbone of the thing in question, doesn’t support the things that is a part of the thing. It seems a big mess in many ways, and I believe that Bluesky doesn’t have those issues.
shaked_coffee@feddit.it 7 months ago
Even if the corporate is a public benefit corporation with open source foss code both for server and client?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 7 months ago
They’re still for profit and corporate leadership and values can change. I wouldn’t trust it.
Plopp@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yup. PBC is just a slightly different flavor of a standard corporation. Bluesky have investors, they’re burning investor money right now, they don’t know how to monetize the platform yet, and when those investors come knocking for their ROI it’s the same ol enshittification process all over again. No thanks. I don’t care if the backend is FOSS as long as it all revolves around a corporation, especially one with the roots of Bluesky. If there grows a viable and open community and ecosystem out of that, completely self-sustaining without the need for the corporation, using the FOSS code (or perhaps preferably a fork of it), then that’s a different story and that could be interesting.
Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
That’s how OpenAI used to describe themselves, too.