What's your take on Bluesky?
What's your take on Bluesky?
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?
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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.