To anyone bemoaning BlueSky’s lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.
It’s a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary “relay” as an alternative to Bluesky’s that can still communicate across the same protocol (The “AT Protocol”) while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.
They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).
I feel like the reason the reason why it’s taking off so much is because it’s not federated.
It’s like people hear the term federation and they get afraid. I know it’s not that simple but still.
In other words, people don’t know what they actually need.
I don’t personally think it’s because of that. Sure, federation as a concept outside of email has a bit of a messaging problem for explaining it to newbies, but… everyone uses email, and knows how that works. This is identical, just with it being posts instead of emails. Users aren’t averse to federation, in concept or practice.
Bluesky was directly created as a very close clone of Twitter’s UI, co-governed and subsequently pushed by the founder of Twitter himself, who will obviously have more reach than randoms promoting something like Mastodon, and, in my opinion, kind of just had better branding.
“Bluesky” feels like a breath of fresh air, while “Mastodon” just sounds like… well, a Mastodon, whatever that makes the average person think of at first.
So when you compare Bluesky, with a familiar UI, nice name, and consistent branding, not to mention algorithms, which Mastodon lacks, all funded by large sums of money, to Mastodon, with unfamiliar branding, minimal funding, and substantially less reach from promoters, which one will win out, regardless of the technology involved?
Exactly, it’s just packaged in a way that consumers are more familiar with with the backing of major celebs
People are not afraid of the term “Federation.“ They literally have no clue what it is.
It’s the instance concept I find consistently to be an issue. It’s an extra layer/barrier to entry. You don’t just create an account. You have to understand what an instance is and then determine which one you’re joining and what that means for your moment to moment usage of the platform.
Yeah I was confused on if it was connected, if I was explaining it to myself id say that the fediverse has interconnected forums that all serve the same content and can be accessed by making accounts on different websites or apps.
Lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected forum/threads side of the fediverse.
Mastodon, sharkey, plaroma, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected microblogging slide of the fediverse.
They all have different features, like mbin has account reputation, piefed has topics which let you sub to multiple related communities at once, etc., but the content is shared between those that serve the same type of content.
Since they’re all built ontop of the same protocol ppl can always come in and build on top of it or make hybrids while still letting everyone access the same content. Like mbin having both microblogging (tweets) and threads, letting you post and view both from the same account/website.
And it legit takes 5 minutes to sign up for 5 instances and see the differences, mine showed the same content for the most part, only lemmy.world was missing the piracy community, other than that it was all the same and any nervousness I had about it went away after seeing the feeds being the same.
Is this 30 million accounts created? Active user numbers would be a lot more meaningful.
As an illustration, if you have a platform that’s gaining 100,000 users each month and losing 100,000 other users each month, it’s basically going nowhere. But it will eventually reach this “30 million users” milestone too if all it means is account creations.
Active user numbers is probably less than 1 million, but still, 30 million accounts created is quite likely pretty good.
It’s something, but there’s really no frame of reference to know if it’s good or how good. Because companies rarely talk about this number. Twitter might have billions of accounts created if we look at all time.
Actives are what count.
As a former mastodon believer, Bluesky is so much better. I’m sorry but the kind of content I wanted on mastodon was never there. Bluesky feels good. Things change, for sure. For now though? This is the best we have for a replacement for Twitter.
I never actually used Twitter, but recently made accounts on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed.
Pixelfed has been my favorite of the three so far… I’m finding that the image-based focus means my feed is mostly fun stuff, that leaves me feeling happy, not gloom and doom of news, snark, etc.
I’m not sure how long I’ll use Mastodon, but I’ve been finding hashtags and users that I’m interested in following and interacting with, and the keyword filters have allowed me to limit (but not eliminate) the depressing stuff.
Bluesky pissed me the fuck off since I couldn’t find a way to follow hashtags, only users, and the Lists thing was just not what I wanted either. Bluesky’s filter is disappointing compares to Mastodon’s too, since Mastodon allows you to hide filtered words behind a content warning or hide them completely, while Bluesky seems to only hide them completely.
Bluesky has the network effect, at least for some domains of content. Mastodon has about 50% coverage of my domain of interests, but that’s probably way less for many people.
Mastodon has the guaranteed lack of enshittification via decentralisation. Bluesky is promising it, but it seems far from guaranteed, and if it doesn’t happen, I’m betting it’ll enshittify about 4 times faster than twitter, because everything does these days…
So Bluesky is probably a better bet in the short term for general users… I’m glad people are escaping twitter at least. But I’m sticking with Mastodon, 'cause fuck going through all that again in a couple of years.
I dont like either, but then again I couldn’t get into twitter. The microblogging is not for me. I made accounts on mastodon, bluesky, pixelfed et al just to improve the numbers
I tried to figure out Mastodon a few months ago. I’m with you.
Someone asked me to follow them on Mastodon. I couldn’t find them in the app. He sent me the direct link and it opened up a browser on my phone, refusing to recognize the app.
I finally added them directly from a browser by by remembering which server I was in, log into that, visiting their link again, adding them from my logged in server, and then it finally appeared in the app.
And if I’m dealing with thet level of monkeying around, how many others are? How the hell are we supposed to contribute and add content and find social circles when we’re fighting with the UI?
Lemmy seems to have figured out how to not make a sucky experience with multiple servers.
On Mastodon I have no trouble interacting with other users there. I have 2 accounts running on different instances - one global and one local. No trouble at all finding an account on either of them.
Yep, if even tech-savvy folks struggle with following people via links, the average user is going to feel totally lost. It’s these minor UX issues that keep holding federated platforms back.
I find Lemmy to be a better reddit alternative than Mastodon is a twitter alternative.
The lack of an infinitely scrollable algorithmic feed in Mastodon is definitely better societally, but let’s be real, the algorithmic feed is just way more fun to scroll in blue sky.
I think I might use both
6 more months before it monetizes…
Then a rapid decent into profit maximisation at the expense of user experience.
Im one of them
Man does not learn
Activitypub or gtfo
I tried Mastodon two times in the past. I love the idea of federation and really want it to work. There’s just too much friction though.
First you have to choose an instance. If there isn’t a sensible default preselected when you download an app you already lost almost all non-technical people.
But I’m a technical, motivated individual, so I managed. Next I wanted to follow some creators I know. I couldn’t just look them up, I had to find them on twitter or other places and manually copy their name@instance or whatever into mastodon.
Cool. Now I can press follow and it’ll follow, right? Wrong. I press follow and nothing happens. I find out It’s pending? I’m guessing both instances have to accept federation between them?
Let’s follow some more creators I know. What do you mean I can’t follow someone because their instance is straight up blocked by my instance because their instance mods think everything anime-related is for pedos? So I can’t follow creators from both instances because they don’t like each other? So I need to find an instance which isn’t blocked by anyone, doesn’t block anyone? Or host my own one person instance and hope other instances accept my federation?
At this point you already lost 99.9% of people. I want mastodon to work, but it straight up sucks.
Time for the fediverse to reflect on this lamentable failure to capture the zeitgeist. The future could have been glorious. Instead we have infighting, defederation, owner class privilege with their delegates (moderators) as the first class citizen. And of course, hiding the structures of power has already begun in the name of harmony, so no, you can’t have frictionless account migration. Don’t step out of line if you don’t want to lose your fediverse relationships and history…
What… are you talking about?
I’ve come to realize that bluesky already had all lot of what I’m happy to not see on masto. Good that there is a place for it to exist without me.
That content is also probably what the majority of people like about it.
Something similar is going to happen with lemmy if reddit keeps caving in to Elon
Na, we are a reduct… it’s a miracle we are on indexed web*
*/j
I never had a twitter account, not because of political beliefs but because the core of that social network is bullshit and the internet should be better than that.
It’s literally just Shower Thoughts: The Website.
I really don’t understand the appeal.
It is a decent format for businesses, organizations, musicians/comedians/touring acts etc. to announce events and goings on to the general public. For discourse, it’s complete garbagepuke.
Which of those are not “advertising” of one sort or another? Twitter was a dumb idea to start and I still just don’t see any appeal.
FB had my friends (now is a stupid cesspool of echo chamber idiocy.
Insta was photo-based FB Lite.
Fark>Slashdot>Digg>Reddit>Lemmy was/is about community and sharing of ideas and thoughts. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses, but the anonymity gave everyone an equal opportunity to participate.
The early days of Twitter seemed to be 10,000 people yelling in a room and nobody listening. Then celebrities took over and companies followed. Enshittifying it early on in the process.
What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.
Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it’s probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.
The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.
What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?
I’m not familiar with Blue sky, do they advertise as federated or how exactly do they claim to differ from a regular platform like original Twitter?
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture
And reading an article from TechCrunch,
“The social network has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design and community-specific moderation.”
“Is Bluesky decentralized? Yes. Bluesky’s team is developing the decentralized AT Protocol, which Bluesky was built atop.”
“However, the launch of federation will make it work more similarly to Mastodon in that users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will.”
So it definitely is pitching that is it decentralized and federated. Maybe the argument is that it “will be”, but at the moment it is not and at the moment it does not look like it will be an actual possibility.
Now people leaving Twitter is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s possibly just kicking the can down the road. In a few years we’ll likely have articles complaining about missing “Old Bluesky” and how “new Bluesky” has the exact same problems that “Old Twitter” had.
Weird, I had a bluesky add-on on my experimental friendica installation and have not noticed any messages other than the ones people I followed participated in.
I have since deleted it, so cannot figure out what they have done differently.
Sounds like the protocol equivalent of regulatory capture.
I guess it could allow multiple funding models. Instance A is ad supported, instance B is a paid service. Not exciting for us self hosters, but there is possibility there.
another trash platform its just matter of a time, use mastodon and fediverse to don’t migrate again in few years
Mastodon and the fediverse are nerd shit with massive usability issues. Even I gave up on Mastodon and I would consider myself far more willing to put up with shit than the average user will ever be. The mass will - never - migrate to the fediverse and in many ways, especially looking at moderation issues, that is probably a good thing.
I love Mastodon. It’s easily my favorite & most-used social media platform right now.
But I’m also a huge damn nerd.
I honestly can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone that isn’t also a huge damn nerd, because they just won’t find stuff they want.
“You want sports? We don’t have much of that, but check out the Proxmox server in this guy’s basement!”
🤣 I love Mastodon as well… I also have a Proxmox server in my basement.
@RxBrad @mostlikelyaperson yeah, feel the same…
Well when I first start using facebook it was the same, the normies follow after if the platform is worth it
It’s sad but I agree. Lemmy works well, especially if you use third-party apps such as Voyager, but Mastodon… is so badly thought. I can navigate it because I’m a technical person, but normal people will never be able to understand how to use it, what are instances, why it asks me to type my instance when I want to follow someone, etc.
It’s interesting what a bubble lemmy users are in. There is a reason it is not taking off and did not replace reddit for many people that tried it. It’s way too daunting and confusing for the average user, same with mastodon.
Good, I don’t need the mass. Social media is cancer anyways.
And how many users does Mastodon have?
Roughly 10 million.
I would consider 1/3 a notable contender. Granted, only ~1 million of those users are active daily, but that’s still very significant for a FOSS alternative.
EDIT: Source
About a million active users each month
Edit: Damn, 10 million users, 1 million active daily, see other comment. My source was this, the one from the other comment is certainly more trustworthy https://adamconnell.me/social-media-platforms/#%3A~%3Atext=larger+social+network.-%2CStats%3A%2Cat+the+end+of+2022
which is less than bsky, but more than lemmy.
I think a lot of people get sucked into the idea that more is better. But that isn’t necessarily the case. I don’t think any of us really want to talk to a million different people anyway. We just want to talk to a suitable subset.
But with less people, the chance of you finding the subsets that interests you or fit your interests better is much lower, and that’s one of the main issue.
This is the saddest, most insular cope I’ve read all day.
Federation is too confusing for the average bear. the success of bsky is the best thing for getting people off twitter
Does it have anything to do with crypto and decentralisation? I heard it did but it doesn’t seem like it does at all. Disappointing
I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.
Pass
While I understand that, I’m in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.
Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It’s the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.
But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I’m not going to fight it. I’m having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I’ve written the media address of environments I’m familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.
Good take. Bluesky is a good stop-gap.
I’ve also been thinking, if Bluesky never federates and enshittifies in a similar way to Twitter (which it will do much faster, just cause it’s a different era), then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…
Unfortunately that’s standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There’s zero benefit to them.
Let’s not call disabling the right to sue a “business risk”. That’s like calling the right to stop paying for the service a “risk” - it’s riskdiculous.
Let’s not call disabling the right to sue a “business risk”.
…and why not?
That’s like calling the right to stop paying for the service a “risk”
But…that’s what it is? I promise if they could remove that risk with a few words in the TOS, and it was legal, they’d all be doing that too.
The right to take legal action for harm done is imperative. It’s importance is diminished if conflated with a legitimate business risk (like research and development). It should be illegal to deny it.
I agree. But we weren’t discussing hypotheticals, we were discussing reality.
By “business risk”, they just mean bad for the business, ethics aside
Yes that’s what they mean. I tried to persuade against meaning that.
And we should just accept that?
Doesn’t matter if you should or not. Point is you accept it or you don’t use any service whatsoever.
Looks like there’s a viable alternative here.
Really? Who are you going to sue here? And how much money do you think you can sue them for?
Oh no, there’s no money or profit motive here. I guess that’s terrible.
That’s not what I asked.
I don’t think forced arbitration has really been tried in court. I remember Disney kind of trying, but it was completely unrelated (e.g. argued that arbitration agreement from Disney+ applied to issues on physical Disney properties).
In order to hold up in court, the contract needs to reasonably benefit both parties instead of only the contract issuer. So there’s a very good chance a court will dismiss the forced arbitration clause, especially if it’s just in a EULA and not a bidirectional contract negotiation.
That said, I tend to avoid services with binding arbitration statements in their EULA, and if I can’t, I avoid companies that force acceptance of EULA changes to continue use of the service.
Well I know someone tried it against Valve and they ended up removing the requirement.
Arbitration of what? It’s a free service. What money could they possibly owe you?
You’re not thinking evil enough, honestly. Two examples off the top of my head, each being fairly innocent mistakes: If you enter your phone number for 2FA, it’s not going to be public-facing. It’s their responsibility to keep that information private from internal and external threats. Ok, so what if it leaks… right? Oh, it turns out the hacker SIM swapped your phone number for the 2FA, and did a password reset on your account via support chat. Still no big deal, its just social media… Except you’ve been giving updates to all your patreon backers on your project that’s shipping soon. It suddenly vanishes off the internet, replaced with a crypto scheme, and all your supporters just flooded your bank with chargebacks. Your attempts at getting your account back are met with silence and your supporters are now furious. Was any of that your fault? No. You get $100.
Let’s try another example: Bounty programs are used by companies to collect bugs and other possibly exploits so they can be fixed. “Too expensive, nobody will know if there’s a bug anyway.” So the app on Google Play store gets installed by 30 million users with a critical flaw… if a very specific image is opened in it, the phone bricks. All the news sites cover the bug, pushing the image to the front page. You open the app and… Your expensive phone just died. Were you at fault for that? No. You get to join the arbitration group and get an individual settlement of $12.
Think more evil. Don’t stick with the “I have nothing to lose” because you almost always have something to lose. The fact these terms were even thought of and written means you do have a financial investment in the platform.
That’s why 2FA via phone number shouldn’t be a thing
If the mods or admin do something that causes you injury, such as ignoring requests that will prevent harassment.
…how would them ignoring requests cause injury??? We’re still talking about bluedky, right? The online twitter clone without musk as it’s main selling point?
If someone was doxxing you on bluesky, for example, and in the doxxing, you got attacked/injured by someone who recognized you/went to your house.
Then the person liable to you would be the person doxxing you, not Bluesky themselves unless Bluesky themselves was the party that doxxed you and in that case I don’t think a court would hold you to the arbitration.
We’ve seen Disney try but then withdraw an attempt to enforce arbitration when a lady died from an allergic reaction in their* restaurant and their partner had signed up for Disney+ free trial. It’s not unimaginable a court would hold you to it since we’re already in Upsidedown World where forced arbitrary is legal.
That is an ass pull if I’ve ever heard one.
Let me make sure I understand your comment correctly.
You’re saying that if you post information publically, on a platform whose whole concept is that everything is public, and someone uses information you posted there to identify you, stalk you, break and enter, and then assault you…that it’s the fault of the service you used to post that identifying information?
That’s the arguement being made?
No, I believe the argument they’re making is if someone else posts your private information on BlueSky (think Kiwifarms doxxing gay people and sending that info to Christian hate groups), and BlueSky moderation doesn’t take action against the account posting the info, and then somebody uses that information to find and attack you, then BlueSky is culpable in the attack because they could’ve done something, but didn’t.
A better example, I think, would be the recent issue with known transphobe Jesse Singal and his followers, who came to BlueSky around a month ago and immediately began posting bigotry and false info. When reported to the moderation team, they did nothing about it (he actually got banned by the auto-mod and then manually unbanned during that period, but that’s another story). If he were to do something like my example, posting a trans person’s private information online and telling his followers to harass them, and BlueSky did nothing to remove the posts or his account, then they’d be legally culpable for enabling anything that might happen to you. But under arbitration, you can’t sue them for it.
This is correct.
Ah, THAT explaination at least has legs. All these other responses I’m getting are these abstract “mouse trap if everything goes exactly like this”, sort of explainations.
Although, I still don’t think financial recouperation is the path I’d take. I would be pressing legal charges. Like, criminal acts go to prison type charges.
I find this weird. If someone were to send your private information to someone via physical post, is the post company responsible for that too?
Would you say it is a one in a 30 million occurrence, roughly?
It was an asspull example but there are similar cases in the past. Forced arbitration of any lawsuit you present for any reason is bad, be it as simple as their software accidentally bricking your phone or as major as an attempt on your life being ignored by the platform.
You have nothing to hide. Just sign away all your rights.
They can break data protection laws and stuff…
Ok…and why would they pay YOU that money? Wouldn’t it be companies and governments they pay?
If a company violates my rights and causes issues for me due to leaking data, then obviously i can sue them for damages.
I’ve gotten settlement money from it before
During signup, they make it sound like it’s a federated service. It is not. Dumped it when it was explained to me.
Funny, someone shared an article in another post about all corporate money going to Delaware, https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2022/06/delaware-is-everywhere-how-a-little-known-tax-haven-made-the-rules-for-corporate-america/
Off topic, but I pointing this out reminded me of visiting some ancap circles to see the crazy stuff they discuss. At one point there was a question about how externalities would be handled in their system of private courts and such. When ever I do read some terms and conditions there is almost always something in regard to arbitration. Predictably they were not happy about someone pointing that out and explaining that it is for the benefit of corporations not the customers.
Mastodon has around 1 million active users³ Bluesky has around 3.5 million active users²
Bluesky doesn’t have a decent way to see active user count, but it is likely higher than 3 million
Mastodon retains 10%, Bluesky retains 10% also, but I can’t confirm it
Edit: Using unique likes, it shows about 2 million active users on each day¹
Source:
Try hosting your own instance and sorting through the content of 30m people for the one post you want. lol
This is so true. It costs more money for the server power required for something like that to be pulled off.
There’s a comment in this thread going all crazy complaining about it being costly to host anything on the protocol to stop Bluesky from dominating it and everything. But im like “uhh yeah, servers and storage costs money”.
It’s just so weird how everyone thinks hosting popular sites should be free.
