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?
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.
The Activitypub protocol is fine. It could use some minor improvements but there’s definitely no reason for an entirely new protocol.
I never said there was. I’d prefer it if they made AP better instead. And there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Even if the corporate is a public benefit corporation with open source foss code both for server and client?
Yup. PBC is just a slightly different flavor of a standard corporation. Bluesky have investors, they’re burning investor money right now, they don’t know how to monetize the platform yet, and when those investors come knocking for their ROI it’s the same ol enshittification process all over again. No thanks. I don’t care if the backend is FOSS as long as it all revolves around a corporation, especially one with the roots of Bluesky. If there grows a viable and open community and ecosystem out of that, completely self-sustaining without the need for the corporation, using the FOSS code (or perhaps preferably a fork of it), then that’s a different story and that could be interesting.
Its not FOSS anyways, its Source Available
That’s how OpenAI used to describe themselves, too.
What do I think of bluesky? Same as I think about everything in this day and age:
eat billionaires.
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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Ah, this is why I don’t know what Bluesky is. I had no interest in Twitter, so shrugs whatever
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.
Bluesky has no ads, and a chronological feed.
Huh, interesting. What’s their business model then, and how do they plan to scale?
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.
That’s not their business plan.
I read their posted business plan, and there is no way on God’s green earth that what they have in their business plan will raise the money they need.
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
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?
Agree. The episode partially answers some of those questions (of course with a biased answer, since it’s given by their CEO), but I guess that for most of them we’ll just have to wait and see
@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.
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.
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.
That being said, comparing it to mastodon in terms of size at the moment doesn’t make sense.
I wasn’t doing that. I was really talking about where the Twitter exodus went. I’ve said before, my opinion is that those that have left Twitter are gone and those that want to stay are not going anywhere. From what I’ve seen of Bluesky is that much of that exodus hasn’t gone there, or have stayed if they did. Bluesky feels very empty.
So what I was really saying is that they haven’t capitalised on that exodus and I think they are too slow and too late to be able to do that now.
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.
I think they is a really good question. And it’s something that confuses me (but I don’t know much about their financial situation). They are moving slow which isn’t ‘normal’ for a company. We’re used to them moving quickly, gaining market share and a user base and monetising it. So, assuming they are not going this out of the goodness of their hearts, what’s the end game?
Right, that makes sense. From my impression they’ve garnered an off-Twitter crowd of some sort, but probably smaller than masto. Their active user count (which can underestimate total activity) is on track to be about the same or bigger than masto’s, so there’s that.
And yea, the company clearly has some aim of playing a long game, with a small team. So it’s a bit weird. It’s also a bit weird how their product is more of a platform than an app, which requires third party devs to build on it for it to be attractive. All of which, IMO, is interesting enough to be worthwhile.
But yea, as you say, alternative social media momentum has likely dried up. I’ve said the same else where. So it’s hard to imagine what happens to anything that struggles to keep the lights on.
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.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.
I like that you can create and share custom feeds. I have an account because someone made one for gift article links (no paywall)
That would be nice for the Fediverse. I’d follow that.
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.
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.
My take is that they wanted to do things differently after extensive research. People here get their panties in a bunch but they talked about why, it’s as much culturally as it was technically. They wanted to mirror a more web like experience and some of the experiences mirrored on Big Social platforms. It makes sense to not tether user identities to instances, that’s not real freedom, especially when data portability is poor and there’s not true account migration on fedi. Fedi doesn’t really empower the individual and many people are oddly critical of Bluesky individualism, yet that’s how the dominant online experience is and more so mirrors real life. People come from Big Social platforms that are driven by their individual experiences so their transition to Bluesky is more natural than it would be on Mastodon. In neither place do you have people telling people how to use their own damn accounts! But, that happens on Mastodon Overall, they have some cool ideas and concepts, I’m happy to see any ideas and spaces that lessen the strong armed centralised grip of Big Social.
I was on there, but it seems to me to basically full of the neoliberal crowd that left X when Musk took over. Too much snark IMO.
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.
I mean i have a Bsky account, I don’t really use the platform since it doesn’t seem all that active in comparison to others available.
From my understanding they created it as a escape from the changes they disliked on twitter, but like in my opinion the privacy settings on it are far too simplistic to be able to function properly as a service. I find myself checking basically every other service instead.
Seems pretty active to me.
