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?
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.