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?
Not a form of communication that resinates with me. Not the target audience.
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.
She was saying that on Mastodon (that was the main activitypub platform she was comparing to) the choice of the instance can heavily influence your experience. If I don’t remember wrong her main points were:
- There’s a local timeline and a federated timeline, and even in the federated timeline you see your instance posts and the posts of the instances yours have federated with, not all posts
- A global search is not always the easiest thing to do, and previous attempts of project that would have facilitated it didn’t received much appreciation from the community
- If your instance admin do choices you don’t agree with (for example blocking another instance) the only way to interact with that other instance is to move yourself
- Moving from an instance to another means loosing your posts and replies, that would stay on the original instance
She was not saying that this approach is wrong, in fact many people on Mastodon like this more community-focused and less-global approach, just that it isn’t what they wanted for Bluesky
Personally it basically sounds like decentralization (instance-focused) vs centralization (Blueskys approach).
The fact that individual instances are in control of their user’s experience is a feature of ActivityPub, not a bug. And it is exactly important for users to choose instances that align with their views - this makes the Fediverse democratic in a natural fashion. Or at least, it makes sure people get the experience they want, not the experience the global centralised entity wants the user to have.
I definitely prefer and trust decentralization a lot more. I don’t want a single entity in control.
Not sure what you’re arguing or who you’re arguing with. Different tools, different requirements.
I think it’s cool that there’s only one comic everyone uses when referencing fragmented standards 😂
There’s a relevant xkcd for almost everything. And an iconic xkcd for many, many things.
love bluesky;; it has a really great trans community on it. plus both artist and romance book twitter moved over to it so i’ve been having a blast. i go between bsky, threads, and mastodon. i love how threads brought in activitypub support i just wish that bsky would bring in the atproto bridge natively. i’d love to follow bsky users on mastodon like i can threads users
I’m using it in addition to Mastodon for different communities.
Bluesky has a lot (but far from all) of the old WoW community I was a part of on Twitter. So that’s what I mainly use it for.
Mastodon on the other hand I use for pretty much everything else: other gaming, privacy, tech, AuDHD posts, infosec, linux etc.
Different horses, different courses.
Venture capital backed project. That’s enough for me to avoid when non-corporate options exist. Tired of for-profit corporations ruin open source.
There’s tangible reasons to avoid it, but the VC thing is enough for me.
My take is that they wanted to do things differently after extensive research. People here get their panties in a bunch but they talked about why, it’s as much culturally as it was technically. They wanted to mirror a more web like experience and some of the experiences mirrored on Big Social platforms. It makes sense to not tether user identities to instances, that’s not real freedom, especially when data portability is poor and there’s not true account migration on fedi. Fedi doesn’t really empower the individual and many people are oddly critical of Bluesky individualism, yet that’s how the dominant online experience is and more so mirrors real life. People come from Big Social platforms that are driven by their individual experiences so their transition to Bluesky is more natural than it would be on Mastodon. In neither place do you have people telling people how to use their own damn accounts! But, that happens on Mastodon Overall, they have some cool ideas and concepts, I’m happy to see any ideas and spaces that lessen the strong armed centralised grip of Big Social.
What do I think of bluesky? Same as I think about everything in this day and age:
eat billionaires.
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.
The Activitypub protocol is fine. It could use some minor improvements but there’s definitely no reason for an entirely new protocol.
I never said there was. I’d prefer it if they made AP better instead. And there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Even if the corporate is a public benefit corporation with open source foss code both for server and client?
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.
public benefit corporation
They’re still for profit and corporate leadership and values can change. I wouldn’t trust it.
Ya isn’t OpenAI a public benefit corporation that has been gradually losing its values and becoming more corporate?
That’s how OpenAI used to describe themselves, too.
I don’t know much about their protocol
As far as I understand, Bluesky is basically a central authority in their protocol. I wouldn’t really call that better than ActivityPub.
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.
Can you be more specific? How is AP inefficient? What are the nonstandard extensions that devs have made?
It’s been quite a while since I read about the inefficiency. I think it had something to do with CPU load, and that it’s unnecessarily “chatty” in some ways that causes servers to use unnecessarily large amounts of data. And the extensions had to do with different types of services, where the AP spec is best suited for one type of service (like maybe micro-blogs iirc), and others have to use the spec in weird ways or add things on top of it to implement other features that are important for those other types of services, like more forum-esque type things like Lemmy. Don’t remember exactly what they were, but one thing I read last week was that guy who had to shut his AP project down because he used a method of fetching data, that Mastodon (or whichever service it was) uses but isn’t part of the AP spec, and poorly documented, so he implemented it wrong which had horrendous consequences for him, but that’s a different story.
It’s still funded by ads and governed by algorithm recommendations, right? Even if they had perfect moderation, which is difficult to decide on anyway, it’s still got the same incentives as Twitter, which means it will inevitably become Twitter. They want you to spend more time on it to make more money, so they show you things most likely to get a reaction out of you, which means they’re showing you things designed to get you angry and respond. Mastodon is much nicer for giving everyone equal billing and allowing you to modify that by following people you want to hear from most.
Bluesky has no ads, and a chronological feed.
Huh, interesting. What’s their business model then, and how do they plan to scale?
No ads … Yet.
It was funded by venture capitalists that demand payback.
They are currently in enshittification stage 1 where everything is wonderful and free. The users have not been monetized yet.
That’s not their business plan.
I read their posted business plan, and there is no way on God’s green earth that what they have in their business plan will raise the money they need.
It is worth noting that what they posted in their business plan in July 23 (1) differs quite a bit from what Jay Graber mentioned as their business plan in an interview with The Verge in Feb 24 (2), which again differs on quite a few points from what Jay Graber mentioned in a podcast with The Verge in March 24 (3).
(1): https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan (2): https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/6/24062837/bluesky-drops-invite-system-begins-federation-at-protocol (3): https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview
Thanks for the links!
Just FYI, Lemmy markdown for numbered lists is as follows:
- First line
- Second line
- Third line
Is PieFed markdown different?
Well, if what she says in the interview is the truth they don’t plan to make money with ads, but with a cut on their marketplace of algorithms &co + with custom handles (aka custom domains)
So yeah, maybe it will not end up like Twitter
they have a following feed but they also let users create their own algorithmic “feeds”, too which is really nice.
they also open sourced their moderation engine so third party users can create labelling engines: https://www.engadget.com/bluesky-will-let-users-run-their-own-moderation-services-230017647.html
they also have their own trust and safety and in house moderation teams though (and transphobia usually gets taken down really quickly). they also have moderation lists that people can create that people can subscribe to so accounts on those lists get automatically muted or blocked for you as long as you subscribe to the list. like i’m subscribed to three lists by kairi (@estrogenempress.gay) which keep transphobes, bigots, and anti gay people automatically blocked.
I like that you can create and share custom feeds. I have an account because someone made one for gift article links (no paywall)
That would be nice for the Fediverse. I’d follow that.
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.
I’ve started an account there for cursed images of the govia logo but haven’t gotten around to doing anything yet
I know next to nothing about it, but isn’t it created and owned by the dude who created twitter? I don’t trust it one bit. There must be some trap somewhere.
Only one entity develops bluesky. AP has many implementations and room to grow. My expectation is that there’s a plan to make a change to the protocol once they have enough marketshare that will make it much less open.I know next to nothing about it, but isn’t it created and owned by the dude who created twitter? I don’t trust it one bit.
jack dorsey was initially just on the board of directors, but he didn’t create or own it.
bsky and atptoto is all open source: https://github.com/bluesky-social
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.
That being said, comparing it to mastodon in terms of size at the moment doesn’t make sense.
I wasn’t doing that. I was really talking about where the Twitter exodus went. I’ve said before, my opinion is that those that have left Twitter are gone and those that want to stay are not going anywhere. From what I’ve seen of Bluesky is that much of that exodus hasn’t gone there, or have stayed if they did. Bluesky feels very empty.
So what I was really saying is that they haven’t capitalised on that exodus and I think they are too slow and too late to be able to do that now.
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.
I think they is a really good question. And it’s something that confuses me (but I don’t know much about their financial situation). They are moving slow which isn’t ‘normal’ for a company. We’re used to them moving quickly, gaining market share and a user base and monetising it. So, assuming they are not going this out of the goodness of their hearts, what’s the end game?
Right, that makes sense. From my impression they’ve garnered an off-Twitter crowd of some sort, but probably smaller than masto. Their active user count (which can underestimate total activity) is on track to be about the same or bigger than masto’s, so there’s that.
And yea, the company clearly has some aim of playing a long game, with a small team. So it’s a bit weird. It’s also a bit weird how their product is more of a platform than an app, which requires third party devs to build on it for it to be attractive. All of which, IMO, is interesting enough to be worthwhile.
But yea, as you say, alternative social media momentum has likely dried up. I’ve said the same else where. So it’s hard to imagine what happens to anything that struggles to keep the lights on.
I mean i have a Bsky account, I don’t really use the platform since it doesn’t seem all that active in comparison to others available.
From my understanding they created it as a escape from the changes they disliked on twitter, but like in my opinion the privacy settings on it are far too simplistic to be able to function properly as a service. I find myself checking basically every other service instead.
Seems pretty active to me.
