Bluesky opens up federation, letting anyone run their own server | TechCrunch
Social network Bluesky, a competitor to X, Threads, Mastodon, and others, is opening up its doors with today's news that the network is now opening up
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I'd like to preface this by saying that my prefrontal cortex is mostly lard and anxiety medication, so sorry if I sound stupid here.
Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?
Bluesky is a "public benefit corporation", whereas Mastodon is proper open source if I understood correctly.
To me "public benefit corporation", just sounds shady. Why should BlueSky be trustworthy? Because of Jack Dorsey?
I know musk turned Twitter into a bizarre fever dream hellscape, but I don't recall it being sunshine and roses under Dorsey's leadership either. The platform would pester me for my phone number to "prevent spam" (they really said that shit with a straight face). White supremacists openly just said awful shit. The video player was ass.
But, I'll be optimistic. Hopefully this won't be Twitter 2: Judgement Day. I hope it will be a good tool for whistleblowers and breaking news. Ideally, it will have a symbiotic relationship with other federated networks instead of a hostile pain in the ass.
Bluesky has a much better community of artists on it. A ton of comics twitter relocated there. And that’s the content I want so I’m on Bluesky. I’ve tried to get Mastodon to serve me content I’m interested in but it just falls short for me.
In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
Also Dorsey only owns like 2% of Bluesky now iirc and had mostly cut ties with it in favor of his Nostr thing because he’s butthurt Bluesky is full of liberals.
In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
In addition to content itself there is also ease of finding it and how it's presented. People on here tend to hate algorithms but honestly Mastodon never clicked for me because (when I checked it out) you were stuck with a chronological feed. I dabbled with it but like you I could never get it to serve me content I wanted the way I wanted. Algorithms can be dangerous yes and I don't condone Twitter's and Facebook's outrage baiting, but Mastodon currently just seems to demand too much work out of me.
Agreed. I have tried 3 different servers (two niche topic and now one of the really big ones) and followed a bunch of hashtags and people and also filtered a bunch of keywords (to try to cut back on the mountains of fucking explicit furry art and similar) and for the life of me I just cannot get Mastodon to serve me good stuff consistently. It's frankly boring as shit over there.
Yet every time I open up Bluesky, it's tons of stuff that is relevant to me. I've also noticed that the few quality artist accounts I did find on Mastodon seem to favor their Bluesky accounts in terms of how frequently they post and engage with others.
I think Mastodon is a lot more appealing if you're into Linux or dev sorta topics but for like a professional level art community, it's terrible. Same for topics like graphic design.
Also the fediblock stuff going on throughout Mastodon doesn't get enough discussion. There's a cabal of chronically online, ban happy people that collude together on their provate Discord server to defederate Mastodon instances for the stupidest shit. The people who run matsodon.art are a big part of the problem and are legitimately out of their minds. Go look at their instance block list. It's absurd. And any time you hear about instance drama on there there's a good 50% chance they're involved somehow.
Before I hopped onto Bluesky, I was one of those fediverse evangelists trying to get my friends onto it. Except, I couldn't give a solid answer to the fediblock problem, and my friends definitely saw right through it or were confused about it. And I can't blame them. They don't want to worry about federation, or whether one instance will be blocked by the other over some drama. Meanwhile since Bluesky has been opening up more, I've only seen the fediverse grow more toxic towards Bluesky, to the point where it's exhausting to be part of.
Yeah the tribalism is real boring. I have no bandwidth for it.
honestly i find bluesky's feeds wayyy better than the algorithms but even what's hot: classic and the discover feeds tend to be 90% interesting to me
Yep the power to choose the algorithm you want to use is so nice.
bluesky has book twitter/romance twitter too, which is great.
it also has a huge trans community on it.
Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?
Bluesky's model of federation fixes the whole "if my instance goes down I lose everything".
Your Identity and your data is portable, which means that each server on Bluesky is "merely" a service provider.
Are you saying its like the identity server model like matrix uses? Isnt that kind of model horribly complicated?
I don't know how the matrix model works to be honest, but I think it's a totally different use case.
If you're moving around between servers it means that each server has to validate the users. The matrix solution was to add identity servers that tell the server you're logging into who you are. I imagine something similar would be necessary to hop servers on nostr and bluesky. Its possible the connected servers share user identities but that has its own array of problems.
Can you not just backup the instance on Mastodon?
I mean as a non-admin. Users on Mastodon are at the mercy of the instance owner. On Bluesky (and nostr) they are not.
Then users need to spin up their own instance, right? Then all their posts stay backed up if they choose?
Seems like a mediocre problem to get bent out of shape enough to move to a centralized platform.
No. A better analogy would be like phone number portability. You can "own" your number, and if you want to change your company you can take the number with you.
Completely impractical for most people but this advice gets unironically thrown around all the time. And evangelists still wonder why regular people think the fediverse and particularly Mastodon are convoluted af.
What are you calling centralized here?
I think people are confusing centralized with federated. Federation has benefits but Mastodon is not decentralized. There is duplication of data but it’s not the same.
From Wikipedia: In business, and only in United States corporate law, a benefit corporation is a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society. Laws concerning conventional corporations typically do not define the "best interest of the corporation", which has led some to believe that increasing shareholder value (profits and/or share price) is the only overarching or compelling interest of a corporation. Benefit corporations explicitly specify that profit is not their only goal. Their activities may or may not differ much from traditional corporations.
they're both open source.
bluesky was just made by former twitter users who wanted the twitter experience without musk.
mastodon was made to be the opposite of twitter.
they're both good; i prefer twitter but things like bridgy-fed help bring the best of both worlds and let mastodon and bluesky talk to each other.
Mastodon not being Twitter has been part of my ongoing description of it when asked. If you liked Twitter because you might rub elbows with important people, watch the drama in real time, or go algorithmically viral for a sick burn (or alternately something cool), you're not going to get any of that on Mastodon. If you want microblogging to subscribers, it's got that. If old school "people actively shared me" virality is enough, it's got that. But it's not going to replace Twitter, because Twitter was a culture and an algorithm as much as it was a microblogging site.
If Lemmy had more people it could be almost a 1-for-1 Reddit replacement (still a little confusing with multiple communities of the same name/topic). Mastodon can't do that for Twitter.
