Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media
As decentralized social networks become more popular, the way different protocols interact could set the stage for the future of the web.
Mastodon logo looks like a happy comma
I thought that was the intention?
A double meaning icon, since the comma is used in writing on a text platform. I thought it was more creative than all the other soulless corporate minimalism.
The blue sky one looks just like the msn logo
I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be an elephant. The mascot is an elephant too.
The decision was made the moment Bluesky chose to deliberately be incompatible with ActivityPub. They want the AT protocol to exist in their own domain because they know the moment they put the screws to monetize, users will flock to an instance where they don't.
Why would you ever trust a Jack Dorsey thing of any kind?
"From the good people who brought you twitter..." reads like a threat.
I still don't get, why ppl go to blue sky.
Like, he sold his platform before, what says that he would not sell out again?
"I'm now billionaire, I don't need the money anymore..."
...said no billionaire ever, yet people still choose to believe this crap.
I don't know all the details, but isn't it set up to be some type of not for profit corporation to prevent that? Though I guess OpenAI is also not profit, but I was hoping it'd be more like Signal to stave off enshittification
Why does everyone think Jack Dorsey owns Bluesky? He's a largely inactive member of Bluesky's board, because he invested in early development of the AT Protocol. He doesn't even have an account. He's posting about Bitcoin on Nostr every day though, so it doesn't seem that he believes in Bluesky.
It's just like twitter back when he ran things, it's alright, but it's still just late 2010s twitter with a different logo.
I just do not understand using a corpo solution over a better OSS solution. You know where it's going to go in your bones, yet you sign right up for another 10 year run before you change all over again. Like these people were just waiting for another terrible option to show up before they switched.
Fuck, just sign up with Mastodon and get it over with, you putzes. What is your issue with free software?
I mostly use Mastodon, but I 100% get it. The onboarding process is much easier with centralized services (no need for analogies to email), and more importantly, you're not at risk of losing half your follows/followers when server admins have a pissing match. As long as those friction points exist, there will be a market for centralized platforms.
I was impacted by the closing of mastodon.lol and I never recovered either my follow count, or frankly my interest and engagement in the platform since. I'm not alone, either. The 'migration' behavior was half baked at best, giving me what equates to a 301, not much else. There's a lot of work to be done here.
I am the most active on Threads for my brand account, and my personal account on Mastodon is a distant second. I know the people here are gonna throw shoes at me, but my activity is on Threads because that's clearly where the numbers are for my field and the market outside of the total loss that is Xitter.
Mastodon is probably not going to be any bigger than it is now. But you can self host and dictate your fate. In a time of protocols, not products, existing is a great place to be in. Make your own fate.
There's also less complexity for a centralised system, since you don't have a big confusing mess having to learn which server you want to sign up with, how that impacts what you see, and how you connect with other servers.
It's one of the downsides of Lemmy, since people get completely boggled over their heads, and either jump to the biggest Instances that they can find (assuming that the servers are basically completely separate), or give up on it entirely because it's too confusing when you just want something simple and straightforward.
The admin politics is exactly what turned me off to mastodon. It's like the worst people are in charge of everything
It's astonishing! I get why dril or some celebrity would go with BlueSky, but journalists seem to be trying to make it a thing too! It's like did you learn nothing?
dril and journos are just going where the numbers are. Simple as. Its not about what platform is best, they want exposure and reach. Mastodon's design makes it difficult to get both of those things, and that's why I prefer it. I want smaller, manageable groups. If I wanted to hear about "corncobbing from hte master" i'd use Bluesky.
Fuck, just sign up with Mastodon and get it over with, you putzes. What is your issue with free software?
What you are partially seeing here is the fact that there is friction to the very idea of Mastodon not being owned by a massive corporation. People have been trained so well to expect their social media to be run by a massive corporation that even if an alternative social network like Mastodon did onboarding perfectly people are still going to get tripped up and feel confused about Mastodon simply because a bunch of rich people don’t own it.
It is maddening and there isn't much we can do about it other than treat that friction as an opportunity to help radicalize people into being more open in a broader sense to taking back aspects of their life from the control of rich people/massive corps.
It’s the capitalist system we’re born into. It’s time living in a cocoon where these magic products appear to guide you. Then one day you wake up realizing they’ve been drinking your blood all this time. Open source might not lead to your perfect product, but it will be close, and mandatory profit seeking won’t turn the ecosystem hostile against the users. We leave that to the mods and server operators.
Bluesky:
Wow, such decentralization.
This is a fight only if you approach it as one.
And still we all know it's blue sky that will win, and we will be at it again in 5 years after its enshitification...
Maybe. Meta and Automattic (WordPress.com and Tumblr) are betting on ActivityPub over ATProtocol.
I would love to be wrong, we'll see in ~1 year.
Well, 5 years isn't too bad.
Bluesky is trash and not even decentralized
It's federated just as Lemmy & Mastodon are...
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Trash? Well I don't use it, so automatically...
...how? What's wrong with it?
I don't understand getting mad about the bridge since it's already possible for any random person to read your public posts on mastodon. The difference is this developer is public about his work. There are probably already private projects that are scraping/indexing mastodon.
Yeah, I am in the same boat: I really don't understand what the outrage is all about. First off, because Mastodon is built on open standards which are 100% intended to be interoperable. Second because everyone can read a Mastodon feed that isn't private and the same goes for BlueSky accounts. Hell, BlueSky supports RSS for its feeds, so people with an RSS reader can follow BlueSky accounts without the user knowing about it.
Personally I do not trust the people behind BlueSky, but neither do I trust all the admins of Mastodon servers. There are a ton of questionable Mastodon servers out there, operated by people with very dubious motives, if not outright malicious intent.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.
Barrett planned to make the bridge opt-out by default, meaning that public Mastodon posts could show up on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa.
In what one Bluesky user called “the funniest github issue page i have ever seen,” there was a heated debate over the opt-out default, which — like any good internet argument — included unfounded legal threats and devolved into bizarre personal attacks.
As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it’s not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy.
The ideological issues around Bridgy Fed are likely to continue stoking tension across these federated social networks as they increase their connection points.
“I am thinking and feeling deeply that however content moderation works on either side of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa,” Barrett said.
The original article contains 1,176 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Weird blip....
Looks like NCD is literally leaking
I'm perfectly fine with the unwashed masses flocking to non-federated services, it means things will remain sane a while longer over here.
People wouldn't have to flock anywhere if things were more connected ;_;
We did learn a lesson from Facebook. It was fine until the Boomers got involved. Once the masses get in, we're toast.
