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.
I want to join a federated network!
federation happens
No, not like that
We believe in open protocols and hate walled gardens!
Except our walled garden!
I feel like the people who got scared of Bluesky joining the AP fediverse don't even actually want a fediverse. They want a bog-standard, non-federating bulletin board instead.
We want an open Federation!
But no Ferengi allowed.
I don’t understand the frustration.
It’s legal to scrape websites and this is doing it in a way that activity pub is designed to support. You can’t be mad another instance is reading your data, that’s what the fediverse is.
I think people will end up finding bridgy annoying frankly, but it seems like a useful tool that takes federated content and lets websites build things that used to be only available by adding Facebook pixel and Twitter links to your site.
Going out on a limb, but the for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset. I personally would block such a service as I don't see these for-profit corporations as part of the fediverse, but as leeches out to Extend, Embrace, Extinguish.
I can absolutely understand that sentiment, but that's not quite how the bridge works.
I've chosen to put my content on mastodon, and my friend prefers bluesky. The bridge just shares content across so now we can interact.
I think that's better than mastodon and bluesky each cutting off their bosses to spite their own faces. Fragmenting the between is why X didn't die a much deserved death after Elon Musk bought it.
Plenty of for-profit companies use open protocols and don't harm them in the slightest.
Almost any website you visit, for example.
for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset
They can already do that without a bridge. And it doesn't "suck up your posts". It works just like any other instance. They have to search for you and follow you. Then they receive posts going forward, but they won't get historical posts.
I personally would block such a service
Good! You can do that and that is a perfectly reasonable solution. That's part of what has ppl upset on the other side of this argument. All of this arguing and vitriol is happening over a service that you can block like any other fediverse actor.
The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?
It seems to me that anything that's being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don't want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don't post publicly.
I guess I just assume that everything I'm posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there's no way to ensure it's not. It's ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there's a conflict between the protocol and the culture.
I think it's about usage rights. People are fine with their post being on their chosen end of the fediverse forever but don't want corporations and news sites to generate a profit by using the posts. That is independent of federation, federation just makes it easier.
The other thing, that I see even more people upset about, is that the bridge requires you to Opt-Out, rather than Opt-In for being included.
It’s totally fine if you want to be included, especially if you have friends on BlueSky. But, it’s just a shitty practice that is all too prevalent in new tech. AI companies are doing the same thing - if you’re an artist, you’re supposed to magically know all of these new, obscure AI startups and somehow find how to opt-out of being included in their training data set. It’s ridiculous.
Same concept here, I would have had no idea this was a thing, if not for people speaking up about it. Some people make a conscious choice to join Fediverse communities because they want nothing to do with big tech and want more control of their data and privacy and who has access to it. Why is such a big deal to respect that?
The situation is not truly comparable, tbh.
Artists very much retain legal rights to the art they create. Hence the current lawsuits against various AI companies. Meanwhile it depends on jurisdiction whether a comment/thought you write on a public-facing website can be considered your legal production for a civil lawsuit. It'd be trivial if it were a closed site with a very selective admission process with some easily evaluated barrier (say, only people who study at university XYZ are allowing on the otherwise private forum of that university), but public-facing it's more ambiguous.
You can still try to sue someone who taking that content, but it's not as clearcut that someone violates your rights as with artists and their art. Meaning that there's less basis for someone wanting this to always have to be explicitly opt-in and get explicit permission. At least right now. This might very well all change as a result of AI lawsuits.
joins decentralized social network
complains about posts being decentralized and shared around the network
Bro some instances block other instances because those other instances don't block all the instances the first instance is blocking
there are understandable concerns: most fediverse server software will respect "delete" requests of one form or another. if i signed up expecting that servers would at least try to delete content, and then i found out my content was being scraped and cached somewhere else that has no intent of respecting the delete requests, that would irk me. i also just dislike reposter bots in general, since it commonly seems like it's spam, with no interaction from the original poster anyway.
I joined a network run by nerdy trans girls not Jack fucking Dorsey
my timeline on bsky is like entirely trans girls and it's great :3
Bluesky just had to go and make their own federation protocol when ActivityPub was standardized years ago for federation.
i mean they literally used at proto because it did things that activitypub didn't do and refused to do.
Remember even large corporations standardising on truly open protocols can be reversed after whatever the situation leading up to it is resolved.
I just remember Jabber/XMPP federation which included Google. Once Google decided they got big enough, they abandoned it. Of course nothing happened to the protocol itself, it is well and alive both on Fortune 500 and selected as official choice for presence protocol on internet2.edu
I am from Mastodon / ActivityPub bubble. Can someone explain me the benefits of Bluesky / AT protocol?
From their website:
Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.
Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).
https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub
Sounds fair to me, although I am also not using either Mastodon or Bluesky.
It's not even a fight. Bluesky lost a long long time ago when they launched an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX and have done absolutely nothing to address this other than add curated feeds which barely work in the first place. Bluesky is so far behind that calling it a fight is just silly.
“Lost”. its still growing, gaining more features, and more users. Its a growing protocol thats in its infancy while activitypub is 6+ years old. Theres such a weird elitism coming from mastodon/activitypub people like can we chill and improve activitypub instead of constantly trying to shit on the atProtocol?
Hmm atprotocol has 1 server and 1 product. How is it competing with other decentralized protocols by not having anything to show? All I'm saying that it's not a real competition yet especially since Bluesky is literally just the worst parts of Twitter without anything done to address the same toxic shit that came out of the original.
Bluesky lost? I'm all for corporate social media losing, but I think Bluesky has a bigger chance than Mastodon to become as big as Twitter at its peak, because of the money behind it. At least for the short/medium term. Long term, when Bluesky inevitably also falls due to enshittification or what not, Mastodon might win, unless it has splintered into a bunch of defederated clusters of drama at that point.
Personally I'll never join another corporate social media platform ever again. But I'm in a miniscule minority.
Yeah I was about to say, I could see an argument for Mastodon having lost (it's momentum, which is the only thing it truly has going for it), but Bluesky? ~every podcaster I follow now advertises they're on bluesky instead of twitter, and most youtubers link to their bluesky, too. At least in the US it seems to have gotten decently popular tbh.
OTOH, we have the BBC and Flipboard being all-in on Mastodon, granted. Which is going to be fun when people get around to defederating them considering how it went for Threads.
an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX
And yet, they have the one thing that matters: the users.
When Twitter was bought by Musk I rushed to create myself a Mastodon. My hope was that most of the interesting, thoughtful people I followed on Twitter would eventually end up on Mastodon as Musk slowly ruined the platform. I kept my Twitter up just to keep tabs on them and grab their Mastodon handles as they shared them.
In the end, around half of them created Mastodon accounts that I follow to this day. All of them are inactive now.
At the same time I noticed more and more of them creating BS accounts. I think around 80% of them ended up in it. They're still quite active in BS to this day.
I open Mastodon and BS once daily. Former rarely has new posts, latter always has.
I really wanted all of them on Mastodon. I don't trust a corpo like BS. But the particular type of crowd I followed on Twitter (progressive essayists/humanities people, game journalists, artists, non-dev hobbyists, etc) seems to have mostly gone to BS, stayed on Twitter, gone to Cohost or back to Tumblr, or abandoned social media. I did find some interesting people active on Mastodon, mostly accesibility advocates, a couple of devs of games I loved and a few non brainrotten IT people. But the level of activity from my spheres of interest seems much higher on BS right now sadly.
I feel like its completely the opposite. Bluesky is just whining and screaming into the void while Mastodon feels like real stuff is actually happening. There are actually working feeds and a news section.
Bluesky has no hashtags or discovery mechanism other than the broken feeds that nobody knows how they work while on mastodon you can literally subscribe to hashtags like you'd subscribe to a community on lemmy. It's not even remotely close.
Mastodon only got bad rap because it started of decentralized and people are just too dumb for that apparently.
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
Well the part of cryptobros is a tradeoff for me.
And if we talk about on the crypto currency, i prefer the libre currency which is closer from libre/free software and very different from bitcoin.
On Lemmy, users are encouraged to use Matrix. A crypted chat.
nostr sounds interesting, any good android clients for nostr?
I recommend Amethyst which has all of the core features and very natural UX (similar to mastodon apps like Megalodon)
Literally backed by Jack Dorsey and crypto bullshit. Fuck off.
The concept is nice, problem is there are too many cryptobros.
I don't like bluesky because I don't like it's owner. I don't like the owner because he thinks everyone is dumb and forgot the fact that nobody pointed a gun on his face to sell Twitter to some Arab dictators.
Jack Dorsey doesn't "own" Blusky, he just gave them grant money in the beginning to kick things off, and is one of the board members.
"Prior to the seed round, Bluesky's website described the company as a Public Benefit LLC owned by CEO Jay Graber and other Bluesky employees. Post-seed round, the company describes itself as a public-benefit C Corp."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(social_network)#Company_history
pretty sure those are the noisy minority. afterall more content drives more people. artificial walls wont benefit anyone...
People care about Bluesky? Like at all? Interesting.
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!
I think not wanting to federate/bridge with Bluesky is a very bad idea. The entire idea is that we should get a Fediverse that is as connected as possible, not split up into many tiny subsets of users.
I'm in mastodon but I wouldn't mind trying Bluesky when there are third party servers.
If this dev won't do it, another will in a proprietary fashion. These people have too much time on their hands.
From what I saw, fedi people were mostly freaking the fuck out while most of the Bluesky users were just making fun of the whole ordeal.
I for one, welcome the presence of bluesky.
I feel very strong against ActivityPub "bridging" with any corporate controlled systems.
I'm not on Twitterdumb or Fakebook and I sure as hell don't want to be. THAT is why I'm here. I briefly thought about connecting with them and then I visited them again. Those corporations are only going to mine ActivityPub for profit.
I'm an admin for #Beamship, all completely funded out of pocket. Why the hell do I want to pay for advertising from them? Why do I want to see the hate cesspool here?
It has been absolutely incredible here and bring them in, would destroy this world. I and our admins have already talked and when that crap comes here, we will block them.
Introducing our team:
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