What's your take on Bluesky? (feddit.it)

submitted 3 months ago by shaked_coffee@feddit.it to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I recently finished the episode of The Verge's podcast #Decoder with the interview to Bluesky's CEO and it seems a quite interesting project. At the beginning I wasn't looking really into it because of their choice of using a new protocol instead of the existing ActivityPub, but after listening to her and the reasons behind this choice maybe I'll give them a chance.

What do you think? Do you use it alongside with the fediverse?

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[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 44 points 3 months ago

I don't and I don't want to, I hate it when everyone makes their own standard which means there is no real standard to speak of. There's a xkcd exactly for that.

I'm using ActivityPub and that's what I'll be using as long as I feel it makes sense.

They could have made ActivityPub better, instead they made an incompatible protocol.

[-] shaked_coffee@feddit.it 12 points 3 months ago

That's almost exactly what I was thinking before listening to the podcast.

But there she explained how ActivityPub was missing some of the feature they wanted because of its instance-centric approach and how trying to change that would have been hard (given how sceptical towards changes and everything corporate-related the fediverse community can be), and so they opted for a new protocol since the goals of the two project were with different aims.

Still not 100% convinced tbh, but I can't deny she has a point...

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 8 points 3 months ago

instance-centric approach

What did she mean by this? Could you be more specific about what she said? I don't really want to listen to the podcast.

[-] shaked_coffee@feddit.it 19 points 3 months ago

She was saying that on Mastodon (that was the main activitypub platform she was comparing to) the choice of the instance can heavily influence your experience. If I don't remember wrong her main points were:

There's a local timeline and a federated timeline, and even in the federated timeline you see your instance posts and the posts of the instances yours have federated with, not all posts
A global search is not always the easiest thing to do, and previous attempts of project that would have facilitated it didn't received much appreciation from the community
If your instance admin do choices you don't agree with (for example blocking another instance) the only way to interact with that other instance is to move yourself
Moving from an instance to another means loosing your posts and replies, that would stay on the original instance

She was not saying that this approach is wrong, in fact many people on Mastodon like this more community-focused and less-global approach, just that it isn't what they wanted for Bluesky

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Personally it basically sounds like decentralization (instance-focused) vs centralization (Blueskys approach).

The fact that individual instances are in control of their user's experience is a feature of ActivityPub, not a bug. And it is exactly important for users to choose instances that align with their views - this makes the Fediverse democratic in a natural fashion. Or at least, it makes sure people get the experience they want, not the experience the global centralised entity wants the user to have.

I definitely prefer and trust decentralization a lot more. I don't want a single entity in control.

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[-] bizzle@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

I think it's cool that there's only one comic everyone uses when referencing fragmented standards 😂

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[-] Plopp@lemmy.world 25 points 3 months ago

I don't know much about their protocol, but I find it likely to be better than ActivityPub since AP is kind of a mess. However I'm not going back to corporate social media ever again. The fewer corporate things in my life the better.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 20 points 3 months ago

The Activitypub protocol is fine. It could use some minor improvements but there's definitely no reason for an entirely new protocol.

[-] Plopp@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago

I never said there was. I'd prefer it if they made AP better instead. And there's a lot of room for improvement.

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 8 points 3 months ago

I don’t know much about their protocol

As far as I understand, Bluesky is basically a central authority in their protocol. I wouldn't really call that better than ActivityPub.

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[-] aniki@lemm.ee 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

What do I think of bluesky? Same as I think about everything in this day and age:

eat billionaires.

[-] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 19 points 3 months ago

As a normie replacement for Twitter, from what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem that bad, especially in comparison to Threads. I’m somewhat reserving judgement until it’s more clear what the platform’s long-term trajectory is. It definitely seems to have way less alt-right shit on it than Twitter these days, which is a big mark in its favor tbh.

But as a primary platform, it’s not for me. I’ve come to love lemmy and the extremely strong community-driven OSS aspect. I’ll be sticking around here for sure. I only interact peripherally with Bluesky.

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[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago

It's still funded by ads and governed by algorithm recommendations, right? Even if they had perfect moderation, which is difficult to decide on anyway, it's still got the same incentives as Twitter, which means it will inevitably become Twitter. They want you to spend more time on it to make more money, so they show you things most likely to get a reaction out of you, which means they're showing you things designed to get you angry and respond. Mastodon is much nicer for giving everyone equal billing and allowing you to modify that by following people you want to hear from most.

[-] clgoh@lemmy.ca 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Bluesky has no ads, and a chronological feed.

[-] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 months ago

Huh, interesting. What's their business model then, and how do they plan to scale?

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[-] Wiz@midwest.social 3 points 3 months ago

No ads ... Yet.

It was funded by venture capitalists that demand payback.

They are currently in enshittification stage 1 where everything is wonderful and free. The users have not been monetized yet.

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[-] shaked_coffee@feddit.it 4 points 3 months ago

Well, if what she says in the interview is the truth they don't plan to make money with ads, but with a cut on their marketplace of algorithms &co + with custom handles (aka custom domains)

So yeah, maybe it will not end up like Twitter

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[-] h3ndrik@feddit.de 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

So far my take is: Yet another microblogging platform?

But I'd like to read/hear something about the details... How does the protocol compare to other existing solutions? Are there free server implementations? How do they handle federation, would I be able to just connect to them and do whatever I want? Or do they retain tight control over the network?

[-] mark@programming.dev 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Exactly what I was wondering the entire time I was listening. None of these questions were asked during the episode. A lot of handwaving and buzzword double-speak. She didn't go into any real technical detail.

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[-] livus@kbin.social 9 points 3 months ago

@shaked_coffee I made an account there and followed a bunch of people, but the federation aspect feels faux to me.

My profile there is basically just a redirect.

[-] Chainweasel@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

It's not X so 👍.
I rarely used Twitter before the Musk takeover, only to follow a handful of authors I like for updates about their books and a few people who did aerospace updates, unfortunately most of them jumped on the BlueSky train instead of the Mastodon bus, and I'm not going to have an X account so BlueSky it is.

[-] ZeroCool@slrpnk.net 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I feel like Bluesky is always going to be the fediverse with training wheels. And as you pointed out, these folks aren’t using Twitter, so that’s a good start. All we can do is hope one day these people will start exploring the full range of opportunities available to them in the actual fediverse.

[-] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 8 points 3 months ago

At the beginning I wasn't looking really into it because of their choice of using a new protocol instead of the existing ActivityPub

And yet, here we are with another conversation about something in the wrong place.

As for BlueSky and their illusion of federation, what's to talk about? Anyone can host a server, but all posts need to be indexed by the server of which they're in charge of otherwise they don't appear in anyone's timelines? It's like the emperor's new clothes. They wash their hands of moderation and the majority of hosting costs and you feel empowered, only for them to say, yeah, we're, for example, inserting ads and you need to be okay with that.

Everyday, I read something here about why Facebook or BlueSky are better than what we have. I don't even think the people that post this stuff work for either company. I just think they've been indoctrinated and they don't realise that they're attempting to push us all towards the very things so many of us consciously and determinedly walked away from.

I don't want to be part of a centralised service. Even one that cosplays as federated. I don't want Facebook to have my data nor do I want to interact with any of their services. I personally chose the Fediverse because I liked the values it exhibited and I enjoy the community. Everyday I get to laugh at things, learn things, share things and just be generally entertained. Can the fediverse improve? Sure; But neither Meta nor BlueSky are the solution. I genuinely wish both would piss off.

[-] shaked_coffee@feddit.it 9 points 3 months ago

And yet, here we are with another conversation about something in the wrong place.

Well, this is is a place to talk about fediverse and ActivityPub, and mine wanted to be the starting point for a discussion about the two protocols and how they compare with each other, if it was actually worth it to create a new protocol or not etc.

I was not pretending that Bluesky is better than the Fediverse, it's just different and I'm convinced that discussing about how others do stuff can benefit the Fediverse too.

BlueSky and their illusion of federation, what's to talk about? Anyone can host a server, but all posts need to be indexed by the server of which they're in charge of otherwise they don't appear in anyone's timelines?

As for this, it was my main perplexity after I listened the podcast since they didn't really entered into the details of how the "multiple servers, one timeline" work. Do you by chance have any resource/link I could read to learn more about that and clarify my doubts?

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[-] ZeroCool@slrpnk.net 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I do, and I think it’s just kinda “okay”. The main thing I like about Bluesky right now is the experimental “threaded mode” which makes following conversations a lot easier for me. I’ve always been more of a Reddit kinda guy than a Twitter user so nested/threaded comments are preferable.

Having said that, as far as microblogging platforms go, I find mastodon in conjunction with the smart lists feature on the Mammoth app for iOS to be a much better resource for following news and finding interesting accounts.

[-] Fizz@lemmy.nz 6 points 3 months ago

I cant do microblogging its not my cup of tea. Bsky seems like it's full of the people who cared to much about a blue checkmark. If their fedi protocol is proprietary then the whole thing is trash imo.

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[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 6 points 3 months ago

What were the reasons? Is their protocol really better than ActivityPub? Couldn't ActivityPub just adapt to have the same benefits?

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[-] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 3 months ago

Meh. It's basically just the twitter experience, with the same problems it had. Bigots everywhere, and you can't get rid of them, only hide their content from yourself...

[-] DessertStorms@kbin.social 3 points 3 months ago

Bigots everywhere, and you can’t get rid of them, only hide their content from yourself…

I've not been on bluesky, and don't doubt it's worse there, but tbf we have a growing problem with bigots and trolls on kbin/lemmy too, and we can't do much more than block here either..

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 3 months ago

Not a form of communication that resinates with me. Not the target audience.

[-] tutus@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 months ago

It has some nice ideas, particularly for moderation. I like that they're thinking hard about these things.

I think its moving too slowly and it's lack of momentum at the time of the Twitter exodus was lost. Its too late for it to become an alternative to the likes of Twitter, Mastodon etc. and I think it will die.

I hope that once it's gone it will leave a legacy of those good ideas I mentioned above which other platforms will take learnings from.

All my opinion.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago

Generally I agree on the loss of momentum. I’m in there and have said the same there.

That being said, comparing it to mastodon in terms of size at the moment doesn’t make sense. The current metric indicate the BlueSky user base is likely bigger than mastodon’s. Not by much and certainly, just like mastodon, no where close to competing with Twitter and threads (if that’s the goal).

But it seems to have a user base roughly on the same scale as the fediverse. Which is something given how slow and behind they are.

Big question is how viable a small user base is for their company behind it and whether the structure of their system is something a community organisation could keep afloat.

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 5 points 3 months ago

Personally I don't understand the appeal of microblogs outside of making dumb 1-liner jokes. Which you can do on other social media, too. 🤷🏻‍♂️

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

Quick, up to the minute updates from sources you want to be sure you hear from. That could be a YouTuber, a musician, a public transit service, or whatever.

[-] clgoh@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 months ago

It's a notification service for everything you care about.

[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 months ago

love bluesky;; it has a really great trans community on it. plus both artist and romance book twitter moved over to it so i've been having a blast. i go between bsky, threads, and mastodon. i love how threads brought in activitypub support i just wish that bsky would bring in the atproto bridge natively. i'd love to follow bsky users on mastodon like i can threads users

[-] Sar@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

I'm using it in addition to Mastodon for different communities.

Bluesky has a lot (but far from all) of the old WoW community I was a part of on Twitter. So that's what I mainly use it for.

Mastodon on the other hand I use for pretty much everything else: other gaming, privacy, tech, AuDHD posts, infosec, linux etc.

Different horses, different courses.

[-] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 4 points 3 months ago

Venture capital backed project. That's enough for me to avoid when non-corporate options exist. Tired of for-profit corporations ruin open source.

There's tangible reasons to avoid it, but the VC thing is enough for me.

[-] can@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago

I like that you can create and share custom feeds. I have an account because someone made one for gift article links (no paywall)

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[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

As has already been discussed, there were attempts at bridges for the two protocols with pretty rough outcomes.

I dont really care if bluesky joins the fediverse but I‘m not going to change protocols because its too much work and gives too much control to them having a proprietary protocol and therefore reversing the good the fedi is doing.

They can join imo but thats it.

[-] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

It’s federated but not really decentralized. I don’t know if it’s planned down the road to be interoperable with servers that don’t rely on its master server for identity or not.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago

I know next to nothing about it, but isn't it created and owned by the dude who created twitter? I don't trust it one bit. There must be some trap somewhere.
Only one entity develops bluesky. AP has many implementations and room to grow. My expectation is that there's a plan to make a change to the protocol once they have enough marketshare that will make it much less open.

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