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.
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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.
Its barely been around. How many services did activitypub have the first year? Atprotocol already has tools twitter didnt have to combat the bad shit. The block tool is way more powerful and theres block lists, theres custom feeds instead of toxic for you page that pushes ads and inflammatory posts.
You just can't compare these two directly - ActivityPub which is a W3C backed non-profit free protocol and software collection to Bluesky which is a single for profit american product with some open source components that could be decentralized. But even if you do, it's still underperforming despite being found directly to leech of users of an existing failing product (it's even the same founder lol).
Again, you can like Bluesky and atprotocol but to say it's on even remotely equal footing either in ideological or real sense to be "fighting activititypub" is just laughable any way you look at it.
Well, 1 effective server. I would sure hope it actually runs on more than 1 for redundancy/latency reasons.
The server isnt effective by itself. Marketing and money to pay developers is. In comparison to mastodons completely open source approach, the proprietary bluesky software is a step back to the old ways. Its a public benefit llc which I can appreciate but it feels like someone wanted to show people that proprietary is always better. I‘m not a fan.
Didn't it just open for public registration too?
Yeah a couple of days ago
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.
I‘m in this minuscule minority with you. Fuck corpos.
There are many of us!
amen!
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.
How would Bluesky be falling to enshittification if it can be federated just like Mastodon?
Everyone always says Mastodon can't be ruined this way because you can always move to another Mastodon instance. Wouldn't that also be the case for Bluesky, once federation kicks off?
There's a for profit corporation behind it and they have investors. They'll find a way when they decide they need ROI and increase profits. They still haven't even disclosed how they'll monetize the platform afaik so they're just living off of investor capital thus far. First step of enshittification is when they monetize the platform. How it works when federated depends on how it's designed (I have no idea), but what happens to the network if Bluesky Social PBC goes under?
The issue, at least for me, is proprietary software. The protocol is open and the company seems to be non profit, both big plusses, but there is no reason whatsoever to make the software proprietary imo. Federation (depending with whom) is only good if one can use non proprietary software, otherwise they control you again.
But the AT Protocol is open, isn't it? Anyone can go ahead and create non proprietary software that lives on this protocol.
I understand your concerns regarding Bluesky specifically being proprietary, but as soon as someone creates an open source atproto server, you will be able to interact with Bluesky users without using proprietary software. It will require Bluesky to federate with instances using such software of course.
I agree that this would be a solution. Bluesky adding a bridge for ap would be 100.000 times easier though.
Why would anyone start anew? We have similar platforms already. One big downside is that someone buying into at protocol would need to start anew and bluesky is already so big that any instance needs to submit to their rule or wither.
Edit: any new instance would have to submit to their rule.
an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX
And yet, they have the one thing that matters: the users.
Are these users in the room with us? Because having 5m users for a centralized social network is laughable.
Bluesky so far had zero impact on pop culture especially outside of the US. It's just trolling, bullying and though vomit that got exported from Twitter.
Hi, yes, I'm here. The user. Of both, in fact.
Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren't relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.
Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the "fediverse".
Social networks are absolutely our friends.
Like it or not but it's a part of our society that is here to stay. To imagine a world where we suddenly abandon social networks is just delusional.
Also this might be an unpopular opinion but social networks are net good for the society despite the problems they've cause they've helped us solve many more.
I can be friends with a social network if I know my admin and I'm in a small instance. That's the power of federation.
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.
