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... the billionaire proof version of Bluesky is ... Mastodon.
I was really confused when everyone suddenly jumped to Blue sky after the election? Why not mastodon? Made no sense to me at all.
Because it's easier to migrate from Twitter to BlueSky.
- Mastodon onboarding sucks: have to select an app, select an instance... and you've lost 99% of the users 😮💨
- Bluesky: install the official app, pick a username and password, get to pick some interest topics, and you're set up with a basic feed.
Extras:
- Starter packs: Users can advertise curated lists of people to follow, making it easier to migrate whole communities.
- Moderation is arguably better with community "labelers" who don't remove the content (doesn't antagonize "freeze peach" people).
- 3rd-party tools to automatically match and add ex-Twitter users who migrated to BlueSky.
Overall, it gets a boost from a faster increase in network effect.
Also auto updating block lists and topic filter lists powered by crowdsourced tagging are very important features these day.
And customized feeds are nice for when you want to add an algorithm (or many different ones) rather than just the usual default list of all skeets sorted in order with no algorithm behind it.
Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I'm a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?
These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn't a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.
But the average person isn't going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.
It's not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and "gateway," but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience ("Oh, my friends aren't on this Mastodon server thing? And we're not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh..."). Twitter and even Bluesky don't require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.
The reality is that most don't really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.
I think beginners would find it a lot easier if "it's like email" was closer to the start. But as it is you have to dig a bit before you get that particular bit of insight.
Where do you sign up? Wherever suits you. Posteo, Mailbox, Tuta etc; there are plenty of others. You aren't limited to emailing those on your server, you can email anyone anywhere. You don't need an account on all email servers to email people on those servers. It's the same with Lemmy. You're on beehaw.org, I'm on lemm.ee, and the next post down (on my screen) is on lemmy.ca.
What if you're on Posteo but all your friends are on Mailbox? Well you can switch to Mailbox if you want but it's not necessary. You can still email each other.
Defederation: if for example everyone on scammersunited.com is a scammer, the admins of your email server might decide to block email from that instance by default. Federation's just a fancy word for people on Tuta to be able to email people on Runbox.
It'd be interesting if everyone "started" in the same place. For example, Mastodon.social. But then eventually, like maybe after 90 days, one was forced to choose a "home" instance to migrate to. Could be through a list of servers presented, or maybe a user has found one through friends, so they just type in the server and it kicks off a migration process. I'm almost thinking like an MMO starting area.
During that 90 days, the user has to (or should) learn about federation, why decentralization is important for privacy and security, what defederation means and blocking options, how and why instances are a thing, how to migrate an account, etc. Maybe even some info on how and why one could stand up their own instance.
And this doesn't have to like a classroom/book setting. It doesn't have to be "read this documentation." Maybe some 1min video clips, brief tooltips, little reminders to read a brief paragraph of two on some Mastodon topic. Gamify it; let people collect badges and achievements.
During all this, users have full access to everything Mastodon users can do. They can interact with anyone on the entry server, plus any server that's federated with it. Or maybe they're an already experienced user and want to go straight to another instance; they can either skip all this and migrate or start straight at another instance.
Though I wonder if that's still too much friction.
Because Mastodon works like what it is - 10,000 websites selectively cross-posting to each other - while trying to pretend it's like a single website. Meanwhile, BlueSky is a single website with the potential to look like it's 10,000.
The internet became 4 websites and a search engime for a reason: most people apparently prefer it that way.
Once again, the problem can be traced back to DNS 😜
As usual, it's computers' fault.
Because the majority of people don’t actually know or care about what the fediverse is. They just wanted to jump ship and BlueSky was the convenient one for them.
We (generally speaking) also dropped the ball in putting a good first impression. When most of my Black friends saw that the Fedi was just as toxic-- if not more!-- than Twitter, they just stayed where they were. Because if it all sucks, what's the point in moving?
I guess so.
In my sphere of things it seemed like people had already moved to Master don so it just seemed baffling to me
Because Mastodon proved to be too hard for them to figure out. They couldn't work out which instance to use. Then they couldn't work out who to follow. Some people need to be spoon fed.
And the name is fucking stupid, let's face it
@skribe And there is no algorithmic feed. It's way harder to "go viral" on Mastodon than it was pn Twitter. It's also way harder to consume "exciting" viral content.
That's a feature, but sadly many don't realize that
Also way harder to propagate mis/disinformation to push an agenda. I personally see that as a benefit and not something I want to see changed.
People want to doomscroll though
There’s absolutely no way BlueSky’s investors will tolerate it not being wrung out for every last cent.
It will be, "but".
The code is dual-licensed MIT and Apache. Meaning it's fully compatible with a privative fork, but also a free federated network could still survive.
For now, it seems like they are planning on developing extra features on top of the basic functionalities, not paywall basic features... but time will tell.
In any case, they seem to be led by people who jumped ship from Twitter before the Muskocalypse, so it's becoming kind of "the old time Twitter". Chances are, as Musk rides Twitter's popularity and inertia until fully turning it into a dystopian dictatorship propaganda machine, BlueSky will emerge to replace it as a slightly better iteration of what Twitter used to be.
This is like listening to the abused house wife who keeps running back to the same unapologetic violent husband.
"He's changed and won't do it again"
"I believe in him .... it's going to be different this time"
"I'll give him another chance ..... again"
"He promised that it will be different this time"
"I know it will work this time"
The more I learn about it, the more I start to suspect that even if the bluesky protocol somehow outlives Bluesky Incorporated it will remain a trap created by a billionaire which by design will never fail to be mostly centralised in its operation. Will this new organization see the danger and make their version federate properly? I'll believe it when I see it.
Which parts of the protocol's design are mostly centralized?
Design isn’t centralised but the implementation and tooling currently are
For one thing the "AppView" as I believe it's called. When I looked at the whole system a month or two ago the documentation wasn't great at giving a clear high-level overview and the details are hazy in my memory. It's at least as hard to figure out as the constellation of protocols used in conjuction with ActivityPub. Among other potential problems the protocol layer that would allow it to be fully decentralized is just missing. If it was there, I think it might look something like ActivityPub added on top of what already exists.
From my browser history here's one attempt to sum it up: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Bsky is gaining ground over mastodon due to clear UX problems that need to be fixed if they want to compete.
Bsky isn’t perfect but it’s miles better than X and any support for better alternatives should be celebrated.
Anyone have the text for this one? It's behind a paywall ironically.
I'm sure someone will come up with a link, but if anyone wants a more general solution: https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
Add-on was removed by Mozilla from the add-on store (AMO).
Why?
install/sideload this add-on by downloading xpi-file of latest release from GitFlic
.RU domain? I'd rather .CN domain... 🙄 (jk, no thanks to both)
I just added on android. Super easy to install... And it works! Thank you for this
I've used this for years. Love it!
Got a more direct link for FF? This one just goes in circles, with the download link in the instructions bringing up the page that links to the download instructions.
EDIT: That was a NoScript problem. I was able to grab the .xpi once I allowed the Russian domain.
The person who posted it in my community copied and pasted the text. Idk if I should remove that post to avoid copyright issues, but here it is I guess.
Technically speaking, what's the relationship between the "AT protocol" and the rest of the fediverse, like mastodon and Lemmy?
The Fediverse has been around for over 15 years now. In order for one app/server to talk to another, they need to support the same protocol. Mastodon and Lemmy (and Pixelfed and many others) use a protocol called ActivityPub. Since they both use it, you can actually reply to Lemmy comments using Mastodon.
Not all of the Fediverse uses ActivityPub though. For example, the original Fediverse apps like Identica and StatusNet used Activity Streams or OStatus instead. ActivityPub didn't exist yet.
AT Protocol is another protocol, created specifically for Bluesky, although there's no reason other apps couldn't use it, once Bluesky actually enable decentralization.
It does have some useful features that ActivityPub doesn't have, like identity portability - you can move a profile from one server to another without having to change username or refollow everyone. AT Protocol lets you use your own domain name as your username, even if you don't host your own instance. With Mastodon and Lemmy, your identity is tightly coupled to the instance you use (i.e. an account on Lemmy.world is always going to have @lemmy.world at the end), which makes it a pain to move to a different one.
It's worth pointing out that while ActivityPub doesn't currently support account migration (although there are proposals in the works for how to do this), Mastodon does have a weak form of support right now.
You can create a new account on another mastodon instance, then you're able to point your old account to your new account.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that. Does everyone who's following the old account automatically refollow you when you do that?
IMO it'd still be useful to be able to use an identity you control, like a domain name. I'll have to find those proposals you mentioned.
Does everyone who’s following the old account automatically refollow you when you do that?
It doesn't port over any old comments/posts, but I'm pretty sure that when anyone @'s you, it's forwarded to the new account.
IMO it’d still be useful to be able to use an identity you control, like a domain name.
That's only for showing a domain on your profile. What I meant is using a domain as your username, so if you own example.com and used that as your username people would mention you by writing @example.com. A DNS record delegates the domain to the right server.
Thanks, this is the first time I've seen this explained!
The rest of the Fediverse runs off ActivityPub.
See: NOSTR protocol
Nostr is great for privacy and for crypto, but not yet suitable for the general public.
Asking an average user to secure a cryptographic key for their identity, when most can barely hold onto a user:pass, is kind of ridiculous... so Nostr is selling a $100 "authenticator box". Not particularly user friendly.
One strong point of Nostr is Bitcoin LN integration, which potentially could work as a source of revenue, but the look&feel is not published enough, while at the same time trying to offer more interaction types (like the marketplace), than what people really want: Twitter's sweet teet.
There’s new onboarding for NOSTR. It’s not that difficult.
Xitter sucks now more than ever and people know it.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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