This is the first time I’m seeing a way to host a full Bluesky network, I think. It seems like a big step towards full federation beyond appviews and personal data servers.
There is already a fediverse twitalike called mastodon. I don’t understand why anyone here cares about bluesky.
Because mastodon is the Linux of social media. One day it will be ready for the average user…
2025 is the year of
Linux DesktopMastodon
Because it has the users Mastodon lacks.
By that logic we should also connect up with facebook and 4chan, not to mention twitter itself. bsky is just another one of those platforms from what I can tell. It is fairly new so not yet blatantly evil, but give it time. We here are supposed to know better.
bluesky is foss and open to federation, why not bluesky? Also a mastodon bluesky bridge is possible because of this as well
It’s not about the code, it’s about control of the servers and feeds. Decentralization doesn’t just mean multiple servers. It means no single entity has special authority over the user community. That isn’t the case with bluesky from what I can tell.
By that logic we should be happy gazing at our own navels, shouting to the void, looking at empty pages.
That’s how I see nostr
Navels, but federated!
Because it doesn’t have search (at least my instance doesn’t), doesn’t show engagement so the whole thing feels empty like people are posting into the void
If the problem is fixable technical shortcomings, why not fix them instead of throwing up our hands and surrendering?
As a Linux user since 2007 I feel a little dirty uttering this phrase, but:
Because not everyone is a developer.
You don’t have to be a developer to use Lemmy, yet it has similar features to reddit including search. Maybe there are sociological issues in growing its userbase, but not serious technical ones, as Usenet showed 40 years ago.
It sounds like mastodon still has technical issues . If Lemmy’s were solvable, mastodon’s are too. Otherwise, how did mastodon get built in the first place?
Just clarifying because I feel we’re talking past each other:
You asked the folks in this discussion:
If the problem is fixable technical shortcomings, why not fix them instead of throwing up our hands and surrendering?
to which I said
Because not everyone is a developer.
to which you said
You don’t have to be a developer to use Lemmy
True. But that’s not what where we’re at in the discussion.
It sounds like mastodon still has technical issues . If Lemmy’s were solvable, mastodon’s are too. Otherwise, how did mastodon get built in the first place?
I’m quite sure they are solvable, but likely not by the folks complaining about the technical issues and choosing to use other services like bluesky. Because not everyone is a developer.
So in other words, I think your musing out loud about why don’t we solve the issues instead of giving up and using something else is being directed to the wrong people.
this seems like a way to setup another centralized install. it still doesnt allow for federation between installations.
I asked the devs about this and they said that bluesky is designed to be a) modular b) trustless as much as possible. federation is supposed to happen on the trustless hosting and relay layers - you can ask your posts to be crawled by any indexer/appview.
But once you get to the indexing/querying layer, there are no more merkle proofs to keep everyone honest, so there is no point in federating because any indexer can modify/censor the content they send to another indexer instance. So you could still build an api to interact laterally between servers, but it wouldn’t be atproto anymore.
Could you maybe explain that in dumb people words in case some dumb people read your explanation and didn’t understand it? 👉👈
the short is, bluesky is only designed to ‘federate’ with itself and will never be truely decentralized as it will never interact with ‘foreign’ servers.
all they really built is a twitter where a user can control their own node of information (pds) but it will never interact with another bluesky instance.
in the real fediverse, servers interact as they come on-line and are subscribed to each other by users. this causes some security issues, and portability issues but at least its actual federation creating webs of content by fully independent peeps.
The entire point is that your pds can interact with multiple “instances” of bluesky or whatever other apps people build on the protocol.
For example there is a reddit/hn clone that people can post on (keeping their same identity) when the official bluesky service goes down. The reddit clone is fully independent from the twitter clone, but they use the same protocol and (unlike AP) the same hosting and authentication infrastructure.
Whereas on Lemmy and mastodon, my accounts are totally separate. And unlike AP, your data lives on your own pds and is never hostage to the owner of the instance that actually runs the load bearing interactivity. If they become compromised or shut down you can switch to another. No cooperation from the old owner required (unlike activitypub).
in other words, if bluesky goes titsup you can take your pds, and set it to another relay. but then when the original bluesky comes back up you are dark on that instance. thats not decentralization. thats islands of twitter that you can switch between.
you will not be able to interact with multiple bluesky instances simultaneously.
Thank you very much.
Why do the work for a for profit corp instead of just making a Mastodon server? I also wish we had a different term for these for-profit leeches that want to vacuum up free fediverse content for profit. I may be in the minority, but they are not Fediverse in my eyes. And we should not be working on ways to incorporate them, but on ways to block them off completely, and quarantine them to their own little islands in cyberspace.
Seems like a lot of people prefer bluesky for whatever reason. I wouldn’t know since I’ve no interest in either.
Marketing. Bsky got the venture dollars. That’s all.
I think it’s just discoverability of content, and probably some UX. Mastodon isn’t really a great show of what ActivityPub can do. They intentionally don’t have an “algorithm” or any kind of content discoverability. Also the federation is limited to following users, on Lemmy you can follow topics and that causes all their posts and comments to federate.
Just today I heard Bluesky is making a Reddit alternative. I’m a bit worried they overtake Lemmy.
I think it’s just discoverability of content, and probably some UX. Mastodon isn’t really a great show of what ActivityPub can do.
I’m kind of surprised I don’t see Calckey or similar mentioned more. Personally I think it has solved a lot of Mastodon’s problems, but it seems niche even within the niche that is the fediverse.
Unfortunately I feel like people have stopped looking for a Twitter alternative already
Yeah discoverability is a huge issue. I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them. I know people in the fediverse have negative feelings about algorithms (and most that exist today are harmful) but does a transparent, community-managed algorithm have to be a bad thing?
tech people hate algorithms
Language is so silly sometimes
I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them.
I think this is also true for why people gravitate towards places like Bluesky in more general terms as well. Without even getting into the details of whether or not a platform has an algorithm or whatever other features, whether or not a platform is federated means nothing to the average person and the benefits of the decentralized servers are a disadvantage to onboarding people. When the Reddit exodus happened, I was describing Lemmy to a friend, and when I told him that anybody could spin up their own instance, his response was “why the hell would anybody want to do that.” And this is a guy who ran his own TeamSpeak server for like 20 years.
People don’t want an alternative to Twitter - they want Twitter without the rightwing extremism. Bluesky offers exactly this with an easy and straightforward onboarding process and a familiar UI. There’s even browser extensions to search the people you follow on Twitter and find their Bluesky handles to make the swap easier.
I’ve also seen people praising Bluesky’s algorithm being entirely optional as well as a plus for discoverability. People really like the chronological timeline that doesn’t bury posts - especially artists. I haven’t used Mastodon, and I only used Twitter because all the artists jumped ship after Tumblr banned the porn, but I can say that I have enjoyed how Bluesky works similar to Tumblr in that regard. I’ve never liked algorithmic based feeds, so a chronological feed of the people I follow and the stuff they reblog from other people who I can then go check out as well is exactly the kind of experience I want out of a platform.
Yea the Mastodon devs are seriously underestimating how lazy the average person is lol
Bluesky is not making a reddit alternative, a third party developer is using their hosting/auth infrastructure.
https://bsky.app/profile/frontpage.fyi
https://github.com/likeandscribe/frontpageIt’s not BlueSky making the Reddit alternative, it’s third party devs. There are a few alternative apps being built on BlueSky architecture and ATProto right now.
And yea, it definitely could overtake and harm lemmy, if there are people here into the BlueSky approach (which likely suits Reddit-like apps, I think I’ve seen some say BlueSky has a Reddit flavour to it).
Honestly, given the dominance Mastodon has in AP and the shitty interop it has with lemmy, migrating to ATProto wouldn’t be the most insane idea for Lemmy IMO. Relying on BlurSky’s relay wouldn’t be for everyone. But some sort of multi-relay set up seems plausible and might be cool to see.
Drag agrees. Drag has fiddled with Lemmy’s API, and there’s so much redundant and unnecessary information on every post. No wonder it’s such a resource hog. If that redundancy is part of ActivityPub, then drag would be happy to dumb AP for a lighter protocol.
What’s the point in them making a reddit alternative when they can just spin up their own Lemmy instances? That seems pointless.
You could say the same thing about why they made Bluesky when Mastodon exists
24 millions users
it’s going to be a merrier once the dot world team adopts and runs it.
just like lemmy.
This sounds cool, but too technical for me to follow.
- Seems like it got removed…
works on my end
Oh weird. When I click the link from my client it goes to a 404, but if I copy/paste the url into my browser it works
