I just received my invite code today and took a quick look around the app. Like Mastodon I do not prefer microblogging platforms. And that’s all I know about Bluesky.

So, what can you tell me about this project?

  • It’s a microblogging service (similar to Twitter), ran by a small dev team and backed by Jack Dorsey (of Twitter origin). It’s been in “invite-only” closed beta forever so it has never really gone super mainstream. Some communities have kinda made their way over there but for the most part it seems threads and mastodon will run away with things in terms of being heirs to Twitter (imo). Bluesky is building their own platform (AT) that will allow others to stand up their own “bluesky” instances that federate with each other, similar to how mastodon works on the Fediverse with ActivityPub. Not sure what the progress is with that but am skeptical it will ever actually be a popular choice given the success of AP/Fediverse and the fact that threads and other large platforms (Wordpress, Tumblr, etc…) have already implemented or committed to building in AP support.

      • They chose not to after researching options. Pretty sure they decides account portability was a key feature needed and AP doesn’'t do this. As in taking your account and all your posts and data witj you to a new server. I assume there is a technical reason why this would be very difficult to add to AP/Mastodon otherwise they could have just added it themselves.

        • It’s nothing to do with that, they made the AT protocol because is structured in a way that ensures that bluesky (the company) will always control the network. They wouldn’t be able to keep control with ActivityPub, it’s the same reason Threads will never implement it.

          All the stuff about account portability is a distraction. Think about it: where would one move an account to anyway? Another BS node? Why? Unlike Mastodon instances there is no functional difference.

              • This line is self contradicting

                So the storage layer is “neutral”, accounts are “portable”. That to me means that node operators will have no agency in the system. Discoverability/search/recommendations are done in a separate layer, and the way the system seems to be designed (nodes have no say, they just provide the data) effectively places all the power with these “reach” algorithms.

                3rd party feeds and recommendations and discovery already exists. They are also not dependent on the continued existence or openness of the bluesky servers. You can control your own experience and it’s easy to find and switch between feeds. Having more subscribers to your feed doesn’t make you more powerful in the context of network effects. If people stop looking your feed they’ll dump it.

                Also, node operators have full control of what they forward to clients. They can absolutely apply moderation filters, and this is one of the expected means for such nodes to market themselves to their communities - “we have default feeds and moderation which suits your community”.

                So it’s a winner-takes-all system that strongly avantages whoever starts building their dataset early and can throw as much money at it as possible.

                Nonsense, the network uses relay servers which acts as open CDN servers and the firehose feed is open AND 3rd party hosted feed builders already exists (and they’re open source so you can copy them), you don’t need to waste duplicate work on building datasets. This network is cooperative. It has absolutely no winner-takes-all effects, it explicitly encourages division of labor and mix-and-matching multiple 3rd party services.

                Another pretty good sign that BS’s decentralization is actually b.s. is the fact that the Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) used by BlueSky are currently “temporarily” not actually decentralized. The protocol uses something imaginatively called “DID Placeholder”. If I were a betting man I would bet that in five years it will keep on using the centralized DID Placeholder, and that that will be a root cause of a lot of shenanigans.

                Then use web-DID which already is fully decentralized

                Jack is not involved with bluesky anymore, he’s in nostr land now. He doesn’t have majority on the board and isn’t influencing development.

                There is no way to opt-out from “reach” algorithms indexing one’s posts, as far as I can see in the ATproto and BS documentation. So fash/harassers would be able to choose an algorithm that basically recommends targets to them.

                Moderation tools like this is in the works, it’s not complete yet. Mute/block filters already exists, and label services for moderation are being worked on

                A whole lot of directly false nonsense and irrelevant arguments and ignorance of what the devs are working on

    • AT is not truly decentralized like activitypub. It’s similar to crypto where the majority stakeholder (in this case, bluesky the for profit company) controls the network. There are not “instances” run by community leaders, just free hosting.

  • It’s just Twitter run by the old CEO. There’s some promises that it’s going to be decentralized at some point, but no real motion towards that yet AFAIK. Anyone on the Fediverse should just pick Firefish or Mastodon over it.

  • A twitter replacement made by one of Twitter’s founders that completely missed its shot to be relevant by not releasing during the early chaos of the muskrat’s rein. And then when they finally did release, it was iPhone only, so everyone shrugged and ignored it.

  •  psudo   ( @psudo@beehaw.org ) 
    link
    fedilink
    10
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I heard it was pretty much twitter with even less moderation, but it’s a smaller so you’re slightly less likely to run into open neo nazis, but only slightly. I only have hearsay to go on, as it never really interested me, but most of the people I know that went to it have stayed.

            • The guy you replied to was me. It’s wild you take fact that bad actors are pressured to leave and try to make seem like that’s being welcoming of them??? That makes absolutely no sense.

              Personally I don’t even get to see any of them, I mostly see mentions after they are driven out. As much as the moderation there could stand to be improved, I doubt even your instance can actually match your standards of if you can’t make absolutely sure not a single bad actor makes their way in, you are actually enabling them. The thing about Nazis is that they lie and play coy a lot, and the more that instances grow, the harder it is to identify all of them. it’s not like all of them show up wearing swastikas.

              • the more that instances grow

                If an instance grows beyond it’s ability to quickly identify and ban Nazis then it’s bad at moderating itself and will probably be defederated from by instance admins that are good at moderating.

                If the users are driving out Nazis as you say, then it kind of implies that the admins are either OK with them being there, or didn’t get to them quickly.

                • So now you are just repeating yourself.

                  Even though the userbase is effectively driving them away, you are trying your hardest to try to spin that as a bad thing, ignoring the growing challenges of moderation at scale for an idealistic perfection that is not nearly as unblemished in practice as you want to pretend.

                  I don’t know what’s your beef with BlueSky, but this level of self-righteousness is just tiresome. And we are not even talking about actual Twitter which is overrun with nazis, This is not a problem in BlueSky. I’m starting to doubt that they are the actual reason for all this fuss.

                  If you don’t want to be there, that’s up to you. But I’ll probably stick with it, many people that I’d like to follow are there.

  • There was a mass migration of furries to Bluesky recently, they now have a sizable presence there. Enough so to make you wonder if that’s what it’s intended for, unless you just stick to the “For You” or "Discover* feed.

    I’m sure Jack Dorsey had this envisioned the whole time

  • A lot of people here are being cynical about it, and to be fair I totally get being suspicious of corporate platforms, but these places are at least half as much about the userbase than they are about the owners. So far it seems to be a much more chill place even compared to Lemmy. People there talk much more about things they are passionate about than having endless toxic arguments, and the general atmosphere there seems pretty open to diversity, as far as I see.

    But if you don’t care for microblogging I don’t think that will change your mind.

      • It depends what you’re using it for. If you want to old school mid to late 00s twitter that was just random anonymous people microblogging random thoughts and sharing links and pics then you’ll be happy to be back home.

        If you followed twitter because it was a way to get direct contact and access to industry professionals, celebrities, reporters, breaking news, specific niche communities that just dont exist or barely do on mastodon, then you will be unhappy with it. Mastodon will get you uh, George Takei, Zach Weiner, and the technologyconnections guy.

        For example of the difference and why many people just dont care for jumping into mastodon I’ll use My wrestling feed as an example. On mastodon it is mostly one guy who’s enthusiastic about womens wrestling(seriously if he stopped my feed would die), one news reposting site(which honestly isnt a bad thing cause wrestling news is awful), and a handful of other people. Twitter has lots of memes and clips from the fans after episodes air, lots of links to primary sources and news sites, and the actual wrestlers interacting cutting kayfabe online promos, promoting themselves, and interacting with fans.

        This applies to a number of niches, hobbies, and fan interests on twitter. Bigger isnt necessarily better but the size and adoption of twitter is a huge strength.

  • i like bluesky a bit more because of the interface - it’s twitter without the anti trans harassment (so far) or elon. plus it’s where most of my romance book community ended up.

    i do like the trans community on mastodon a bit more though, even though i think the mastodon interface is a bit lagging. and it wins in interface over threads but it loses in terms of the fact that threads got more of the mainstream users that i follow.

    i like the ability to use your own domain name as a handle though. i wish threads and mastodon would take it.

    and the lists feature on bluesky is fantastic. i still use all three though and i hate elon for making it so i have to now that he’s just made social media so fractured

  • It’s alright, just basically Twitter 2. It’s useful for some things. A lot of creatives chose to migrate there, which is nice so that I can network with fellow Twitch streamers and keep up with news on the platform. As much as I like Mastodon, I just wasn’t getting that there. It’s also nice that a bunch of artists I used to follow are there.

  •  airportline   ( @airportline@lemmy.ml ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    4
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I’d say that it is the Twitter clone with the best chance at replacing Twitter. It already feels like Twitter (in a good way).

    It’s still invite only but everyone has an excess of invite codes at this point.

      • They’re not cryptocurrency fanatics. None of the project relies on cryptocurrency tech. Even Jack himself deleted his account and ran off to nostr.

        Bluesky uses a model with user identities based on cryptographic keypairs, posts held in a personal account repository (git-like), and posts use content addressing (hash ID of posts), and everything is portable so you can move your account between host servers without breaking any references.

        Federation is up in the sandbox environment with 3rd party implementations participating.

        It’s more robust against enshittification than your average Mastodon server

        • First of all, “enshittification” refers to monopolistic business practices, not… account portability or whatever you’re trying to say. It can’t be engineered away. Mastodon (the company) is nonprofit, BlueSky is for-profit. Furthermore, unlike Mastodon, there is no functional difference between BS servers, so the “freedom” to change is a moot point when bluesky (the company) controls everything.

          Also the CEO cut her fintech teeth on cryptocurrency. Saying she’s not a fan of crypto is just plain wrong.

        • It’s more robust against enshittification than your average Mastodon server

          I’m very skeptical of that. What makes Mastodon so robust against enshittification is that it’s hard for a single or small set of players to have so much control that they can act as gatekeeper to extract money from the user base.

          Blue Sky is a for-profit corporation. How do they plan to make money? Who controls access to the network? These are genuine questions.

          • Blue Sky is a for-profit corporation. How do they plan to make money?

            🤷

            They use domain names for handles, they do have a partnership with one registrar for integration for users who want custom domains for handles (commission model). Other than that, to be seen.

            Who controls access to the network?

            Once full federation is live, nobody. Anybody could create a relay server (BGS, shared cache server like a CDN), and anybody can run a PDS (account hosting server).

            3rd parties already run feeds on their own servers and 3rd party clients exists, and the sandbox network for federation testing has 3rd party PDS servers too.

            For user account lookups, if you use the web-DID type then you’re not dependent on bluesky servers at all.

            Account portability and the ability to mix and match services and switch quickly are the biggest enshittification protection mechanisms. You can’t really lock in users in this model. You can’t even prevent users from ditching your PDS account host if they kept a backup of their data and held their own keys.

            • @Natanael enshittification is about power, and ATproto is designed to look decentralized but enable secondary centralization where it matters for power dynamics in the network, in a way that the Fediverse very much doesn’t:
              https://rys.io/en/167.html

              (shameless plug, I wrote that, but it dives somewhat deep into the “why” of what I said above)

              tl;dr it doesn’t matter which PDS you use if everyone is still beholden to the same entity that controls the “reach” layer in BS.

              @SkepticalButOpenMinded

              • https://slrpnk.net/comment/3996311

                You’re missing details

                The Mastodon fediverse have stronger network effects because big servers can enforce policies on other servers to stay federated. It’s complicated for users to move servers.

                In Bluesky you have plenty more options, including using 3rd party moderation, using clients which can pull censored posts from other servers and cleanly render them into threads, and you can move servers much more easily even if the server operator don’t want to let you.

                The “reach” layer is a mix of relay servers (BGS) and 3rd party feeds (which already are operated independently)

            • Thank you for the response. Alas, the monetization question is key to enshittification. I’m left unassuaged.

              Let’s take a concrete example. There are a bunch of neo-nazis inciting real violence on Blue Sky. People will die. Does anyone have the power to do anything about them? Or can the neo-nazis " mix and match services and switch quickly" to escape any consequences? It’s a dilemma either way. On one fork, BS has no control, which means bad actors run free. On the other fork, BS does have control, which suggests they’re not as enshittification resistant as it may seem.

              I know and am happy with how Activity Pub (Lemmy/Mastodon) deals with both forks, as imperfect as the system is. What about Blue Sky?

              • Yeah, with no strong central control the best you can do is to persuade PDS account servers and client developers to put in good moderation filters by default, so that the average user won’t have to see that stuff assuming they land on a client/server which filter it. You can’t stop it from existing in the network, but you can coordinate ways to inhibit reach. And users who need even better tools can deploy them without having to move.

                On the other hand, the work on private profiles haven’t started yet, and you can’t currently prevent yourself from getting visible to others.

                On Mastodon the options are essentially just finding a server with a good moderation team and importing block list files manually, as well as keyword filters. And that’s pretty much it. The server features and moderation quality are part of the same bundle.