surely that corporation won't be evil
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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It's great that Bluesky is gaining traction, but how sure are we that it won't turn to shit before other relays come online and make it actually decentralised?
It 100% will, it has already started
Well, Mastodon is still up and running. And people can always migrate.
I'm sure it will.
We aren't sure. It's still a billionaire owned social media. For some reason people are too afraid of the freedom actual decentralized social media gives them and they want a billionaire behind the scenes running everything and coralling them to the correct opinions.
It's not fear of the freedom, it's choice paralysis. People want to go to one website, sign up for one account and then be part of a network with absolutely zero research beforehand. I like the fediverse, but the barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.
Internet services getting shitty and then dying is nothing new. Look at MySpace, Digg, or any BBS. people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They'll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing
barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.
I just don't buy that argument. Email is prolific and virtually no one knows how it works. IMO it comes down to marketing budgets.
I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.
Instead, for-profit ventures are motivated by money to come up with new ideas and push them into the mainstream with their marketing budgets. Then later, the fediverse copies those ideas, often with half-baked approximations that are hard to scale (usually due to bandwidth and/or moderation costs).
people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They'll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing
I'm hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse's future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won't fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it's the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as "old reliable".
I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.
Strong agree. Email is prolific because it is the proto social network infrastructure, and it has interoperability at its core. You have someones email, you can write them. Theoretically it doesn't matter what email you send it from, you can send an email to any address in the world. There are limits to this these days, because of things like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, which have been introduced because of shortcomings in the open protocols, but in its purest form, there are no barriers.
If ActivityPub had been around at the same time as email, it would be considered infrastructure the same way email is today. The online world would look different, but don't neglect that industries are still finding ways to make money from email. There might not have been platforms like the social media silos we have today, but there might be an industry trying to milk ActivityPub for money.
I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.
I too subscribe to this hope. I always end up writing emails to people I haven't been in touch with for a long time, and aren't sure about which phone number, social network, or physial address they are currently reachable on. Which reminded me of this post:
https://my-notes.dragas.net/2023/09/25/25-years-later/
Email just (still) works. Can't ask for more than that.
Yes. This is the best explanation of why people choose the platforms they use.
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I don’t believe it has anything to do with people’s fear. More money means more marketing power. It’s that simple.
“But none of my friends are on there.”
Make new friends then.
Right, so we just trade in our relatives for some new ones.
That's the attitude that puts people off.
At some point you have to jump ship and follow what fits you and your needs/wants in terms of security, morality (in the context of Meta and its complete lack of ethics), etc. You can try and get folks to try other platforms but most of them will inevitably fall back to what they know and never leave. I’m not going to keep Facebook around on the off chance that one relative needs to reach out. The relatives willing to actually make an effort can already text or call me and vice versa.
This whole billionaire social media prison is not something I’m willing to keep destroying my mental health on over some “blood is thicker than water” bs.
Yeah I get that, it's why I don't use FB anymore. I keep WhatsApp for close family though. They're is no other option. And dont tell me to use text. Doesn't cut it.
Oh, no I get it. I went to Chile a few years ago and it made me realize how truly big the WhatsApp community was in South America. It was on billboards, buildings; it’s become a necessity.
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I'd say that we're sure it will. It has begun making the same shady practices like redirecting all out going links through go.bsky*app 🙄
Ah yes, to prove they drive traffic to places, they funnel all outgoing links through themselves for tracking.
is it really shady when they stated up front they're doing it so posters and journalists can see where their traffic is coming from?
Well, if they tell the truth then it's fine. But no way to know what they do with this redirect (to my knowledge at least).
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My tenuous understanding from an article I read about the AT protocol but barely remember is that it can't be fully decentralized. I think you have to use bluesky for user authentication. And I think it said the hosting hardware requirements would be significant to the point where it's not very feisable. I welcome corrections/clarifications.
Point is, assuming that's reasonably correct, true decentralization isn't possible. And by it's nature as a big corporate owned site, enshittification is inevitable.
Yes, apparently their protocol sends everything to every node, so it would overwhelm anything but a very powerful and expensive server. The Fediverse's ActivityPub protocol is more efficient and only sends traffic where it is needed.
This was true for a while but they're updating the sync protocol to support sharding etc. people are running full network relays off a raspberry pi
The authentication parts uses a standard w3c developed format called DID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier it's basically a more general form of a url that must point to a specially formatted file. There are several did methods. atproto supports did:web which stores the doc at a user-set http URL path, and also did:PLC which stores the doc in a special database controlled by bsky. They plan (hopefully) add more methods in the future.
But yeah, the currently supported did:web authentication method is fully independent of bsky inc
It's federated in name only.
I blame ActivityPub. W3C didn't get their shit together when they invented the standard and now we are paying the price.
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What else is there though? Mastodon by design is counter-culture, so why then are people surprised when "culture" in turn does not like it?
As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person's followers could get confused. Throwing out right or wrong, famous people worry about stuff like this, which would require a level of coordination and communication across the Fediverse - i.e. a type of "centralization" (even if accomplished via possibly decentralized means?). I'm not sure if I am remembering correctly or not, but I thought there was even a fix submitted to the codebase, which has sat for YEARS without being reviewed or approved. If not this feature though, other features have definitely followed this pattern.
TLDR 1: you snooze, you lose.
TLDR 2: ideological purity ~~tests~~ beatings will continue, until moral improves.
TLDR 3: FAAFO means, it turns out, that if you entirely ignore everything / most things that the users that you hope will use your platform ask for, they might just go elsewhere, where they feel welcomed.
Is Mastodon behaving similarly to an incel culture, demanding that people like what a "nice" ~~man~~ platform it is, rather than do the work required to make people actually happy with what it offers? And if not (due to other reasons, perhaps funding), then what is the functional difference really, between that vs. whatever it is doing?
So yeah, Bluesky it is then. If we want something better, we had best get to actually building it.
As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person's followers could get confused.
Tbf, you can basically do this now - throwback to the start of paying for Twitter verification...
On Mastodon, the simple answer is you use the verification to prove it's you by using rel=me links.
It's not perfect, as you'd expect, but in an age where everything is suspect anyway...
On bluesky/atproto, your handle is a hostname and is only recognized valid if you control that hostname. Basically the same as rel=me except it's a .well-known file instead of a html tag
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Aah, rather choosing the next company which can turn into corporate bs than using federated Mastodon. I don't get people.
It's not the users, it's the developers / investors. I've tried so many times to get into Mastodon, but it sucks compared to Bluesky. It lacks content and polish, so it's no wonder everyday people choose Bluesky over it.
The real conundrum is why isn't there a for profit company with big money behind it, investing in ActivityPub. I guess you could point to Threads? But insert your "not like that" meme of choice.
Fwiw, apparently Bluesky did initially look at activity pub, but found the protocol lacking, which is why they invented ATProto. I don't know the details though.
What do devs/investors have to do with content? The users are creating the content. And then, there's not really an algorithm rooting you in. You are free to follow the people you're actually interested in, how it is supposed to be.
I also don't have any polishing problems myself. It all just works, there are nice apps, etc.
Why would you want to have a for profit company with Mastodon? That's what would probably ruin it in the long run, as they would go for their interests, instead of interests of users and the platform itself. Of course it's hard surviving by donations and so on, but I think that's the way it should go.
Because you need network effect. Which means you need big money for marketing, content moderation and development costs. That includes algorithms, which maybe you don't want, but most people do.
It's not that I want a for profit company, I just don't think Mastodon will every achieve critical mass without one.
because mastodon had an opportunity for a migration from twitter and they spent it attacking journalists who started posting on there
Even as a Lemmy user, I still don't know how the Fediverse works completely. You're just lying to yourself if you think understanding Mastodon is easier then just making a blue sky account.
Do you understand how email works? You dont have 1 centralised email server. You pick one and thats your email address name@emailserver. It then talks to other email servers unless its blocked emails from that server.
In principal, Mastodon and Lemmy are exactly the same.
I keep seeing this analogy and unfortunately that's not how email servers work so it never really helps honestly. The servers are the To: fields, not the From: fields. And there's also no real analogy about privacy. With most email providers the intent isn't that everyone reads everyone else's email. So frankly I really don't know what insight this is supposed to provide if it doesn't behave like email.
And there's a big safety difference. With something like Bluesky you have to trust the server admins to behave. With ActivityPub you have to trust each and every user of the service. Which is why server admins get shirty about whether they will forward messages to or from other servers. That whole situation doesn't really exist with email. It's not like you have create a Hotmail account because Gmail has decided to defederate with Google or whatever.
In the office that I work in, I'd be surprised if I'd need more than one hand to count how many people would understand this.
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Much less people on mastodon, while most accounts I used to follow on Twitter have migrated to Bluesky or at least use both it and Twitter now.
But that's not a problem of Mastodon. It's the problem of people not switching here
Centralisation makes things easy.
If it takes more than 1 minute to onboard to a new service, and especially if you have to overcome any learning barrier (such as what 'instances' are and how to choose one) then the vast majority of people will immediately throw that option out and won't even consider it.
People like bluesky specifically because it gives them something almost identical to what they had before.
~~I thought the title was hyperbole at first, but I just checked the Google Play charts, and it's not even in the top 200 under the Social category anymore. Less than a month ago it was in the top 5. Talk about a rapid decline...~~
Edit: See below
I went on Twitter to download my data pre-deletion (still nothing) and Billy Bragg was on there. What the hell?! That’s practically on a par with guesting on Joe Rogan by now.
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