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?
What do I think of bluesky? Same as I think about everything in this day and age:
eat billionaires.
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.
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
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.
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.
Even if the corporate is a public benefit corporation with open source foss code both for server and client?
public benefit corporation
They’re still for profit and corporate leadership and values can change. I wouldn’t trust it.
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.
Its not FOSS anyways, its Source Available
That’s how OpenAI used to describe themselves, too.
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 tight 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 didn’t go into any real technical detail.
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
Not a form of communication that resinates with me. Not the target audience.
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.
I do, and I think it’s just kinda “okay”. The main thing I like about Bluesky right now is the experimental “threaded mode” which makes following conversations a lot easier for me. I’ve always been 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.
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.
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.
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 actual fediverse.
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 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 federated but not really decentralized. I don’t know if it’s planned down the road to be interoperable with servers that don’t rely on its master server for identity or not.
