What can you tell me about Bluesky?
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?
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 twitter except for the old guy instead of the new guy. If you left twitter for bluesky then you are likely just going to run into the same issue down the road where the old guy sells it for tons of money to whoever will pay. Those willing to pay are likely not great at managing a social media platform.
Came here to comment this. Spot on.
We should use Mastodon instead.
I wanted to like Mastodon but couldn't. The only reason I used microblogging services like Twitter was to shitpost about Vampire: The Masquerade. Said game includes lots of death, blood, and other topics that make some folks uncomfortable. On Twitter, the atmosphere was very "don't like, don't read", but Mastodon has an intense culture about using content warnings on anything that might make someone marginally uncomfortable. I'm cool with that, but I can't do it on my shitposting or it sort of ruins the joke. Bluesky doesn't have that atmosphere.
I know folks usually skew that way but it’s server to server. Frankly, I don’t use any warnings because I can’t be bothered and my instance is fine with it.
That misunderstanding proves how we need to review the user experience of federated projects, or at least do a much better job of explaining it to everyone.
Spot on. I do understand that there's a bit of difficulty to it considering its a fairly significant paradigm shift from where we were.
Did you try it this time last year?
When everyone migrated there were a lot of "helpful" newbies enforcing rules that simply don't exist. There are too many people like that still but not so many you can't mute them all.
Bluesky supports porting user accounts between servers even more smoothly than Mastodon does - even if the original host do not want to cooperate.
Has Bluesky even federated yet? I've not seen it happen.
They have a sandbox environment federating with 3rd party servers where other devs can participate in testing, and in the main public beta environment they just switched away from one main server to like a dozen (still no 3rd party there) and moved user accounts around, so they can test the federation code for stuff like performance and effects of account migrations, etc, in a live environment.
They've said they won't open up federation with 3rd party servers on the main environment until they have moderation tools which can handle it, so they're working on that also now.
It's great if you liked old Twitter (2016ish) or you're a furry. It's very furry-heavy though because the furry community is very tight-knit and so invites got passed around like candy for a while.
Been my experience that mastodon is chock full of furries too. So much of it gets posted on the art centric server I’m on. Had to create multiple filters for it.
It's caused by refraction of the sun's light by the atmosphere
It's actually caused by scattering of the light in the atmosphere not refraction. Refraction is what makes rainbows tho.
The best kind of correct.
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.
Could Bluesky not just implement ActivityPub too? Is there a reason why they are not doing that?
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.
Yeah the not being able to fully move your account and all its history is one of the biggest shortcomings of AP for me. I hope they shore that up eventually.
100% agree, without it, the decentralization aspect is severely weakened
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.
You clearly haven't read the docs
Here's a doc for ya: https://rys.io/en/167.html
This line is self contradicting
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".
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.
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.
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
They could but they are developing their own protocol.
https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub
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.
Ah interesting. One more in the “negative” column for Bluesky then imo. What Mastodon gets right (perhaps in a sea of things that it gets wrong) is that it relies on people to build and maintain their communities, rather than hoping that technology can solve all the issues of moderation, etc… Yeah, there are improvements that we hope will get to AP. It’s obvious bsky is just not the future.
Yes, you've hit the nail on the head. It's contextual moderation that makes a space worth being on. This is a good piece that sums up the differences.
The only thing they control is the DID lookup for PLC type account DID values, but if you have your own domain and use web-DID they control nothing that can't be replaced
This is the best reply so far. Also worth mentioning both the platform and the protocol are open source.
https://github.com/bluesky-social
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.
Bluesky is "decentralized" in the way that crypto is in that the biggest fish (bluesky.social) controls everything.
and misskey over firefish :)
Jack doesn't have a majority on the board, he's not even on the site anymore (deleted his account and ran off to nostr)
https://slrpnk.net/comment/3988061
If you don't like micro blogging then you won't like this micro blogging site. That's all you need to know!
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.
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.
From what I saw it was quite left leaning when I used it
Yeah honestly hearing it describes as being full of neo Nazis is wild lol, it's almost more left leaning than Lemmy
I'm glad to hear it's turned, but all I was hearing about was racism and transphobia that is at modern Twitter levels.
there is some transphobia but it's nowhere near modern levels and most of it is drowned out and countered but it is still there. it's not bad though. i only encountered one instance since ive been there
I see more transphobia on Lemmy than BlueSky, but that might be because Lemmy is more oriented towards what everyone is saying while BlueSky you mostly see stuff from people you follow. There isn't an algorithm driven feed there (yet)
Bluesky has 3rd party algorithm feeds, with hundreds of feeds already live
So far the people there have been pretty good at bullying neo nazis so much they leave. Otherwise it's pretty chill.
Weird to call a place "chill" that gives Nazis a home in the first place imo.
...you say that like they are being invited and not sneaking in against everyone's wishes. Even the Lemmyverse is not entirely free of them, unfortunately.
My instance doesn't have Nazis
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.
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.
If the users are the ones chasing Nazis away it demonstrates a failure (or lack) of moderation, yes.
I saw your other comments. If you were honest over this being about how you are against corporate driven social media and in favor of decentralized ones, I'd respect your opinion much more than this repetitive insistence on the same point that "driving away nazis means they embrace nazis". Which is neither logical and it's wildly disingenuous regarding the challenges and the uglier sides of decentralized social media. Which by definition cannot entirely exclude nazis, even if you are not seeing them in one particular instance. Which, again, does not mean they are not there, it might just be that they are trying to stay incognito. All the more reason the willingness of the users to drive nazis out themselves is valuable, because expecting moderation to always catch them is naive.
If you tell me that relying on corporate social media is risky, I agree with you. There is more to this matter worth discussing, such as why people who rely on social media for a living, such as artists, may lean towards corporate platforms over user-driven ones. But we can't advance in a discussion if you keep going in circles to make BlueSky look bad for the nazis (they are driving away). If you are just going to repeat "but it means there's nazis" again, I'm not interested.
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
So either go to lemmy flooded with tankies or go to blue sky flooded with furries
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.
Mastodon has significantly more active and diverse users than BS and none of the garbage.
Yeah, but it's "confusing", and "not owned by some rent-seeking narcissist", so no one seems to care.
Ugh so true. I frequently describe Mastodon as "community-led nonprofit" to help get it through to the people who think Threads or BlueSky will be different.
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
I'd love to try it, if they'd ever give me an invite code. Twitter was pretty cool back in the day and I'd like something similar as a place to post what I'm working on.
Since you are already hanging out here, why not give Mastodon a fair try :)
Every Mastodon client I have tried to use is way too confusing. There are plenty of people using it, but it feels like a wasteland because connecting with people is too high friction. Maybe I'm using it wrong /:
Android or iOS?
iOS
I hear good things about the Mona app on iOS. Also consider the official app. On Android, the official app is good but is active in an enhanced version called Megalodon, which is what I use. All those I listed should be user friendly.
@vanderbilt try out Kbin, it integrates communities and microblogging under one web interface. Makes it easy to access Mastodon posts as well as threads like this one on Lemmy or native to Kbin. I am on Kbin.Run, which is pretty well run but less populated than kbin.social
@admin @milan
here you go bsky-social-g7ivv-vqbuf
bsky-social-5h6ss-753kn
bsky-social-gywyf-jocqt
First come first served!
do you hapen to have more invites. Wanted to test out and see how it compares to mastodon but most invites got taken fast :/
Sure do: bsky-social-o7ui7-b74gw
If this one happens to be taken (I don't think so, lemmy isn't that big) I'll DM you.
Send them by DM, codes posted in public are scanned by bots which try to snipe them
Will leave it for @vanderbilt@beehaw.org :D I have taken first one
Cool :) might take a while until you receive your own invites. Took me 3 weeks. It's still kinda quiet but most of the people I had in my community on Twitter dropped mastodon for bluesky so I am sticking with it I guess.
To be true I'm admin of mastodon instance though not using that much :D
It's initials are BS and so are their promises. Anyone thinking it isn't just going to become twitter in a year are sorely mistaken.
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.
i joined beehaw and bluesky in the same week. i think it's fun! lots of artists and indie game devs on there. i didn't use twitter and don't really like mastodon, so i don't have any point of comparison. seems to me that moderation is lacking and/or apathetic. there's been a heavy focus on US political issues. there's a lot of stuff that i don't want to see, but i mute often and that has improved my browsing experience. it's been more friendly and welcoming than pretty much any other social media site i've tried so far. i also do not prefer microblogging platforms, but i've been having such a hard time with hateful comments across various platforms in the past few months, bluesky has been refreshing for me in that sense.
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.
Still full of Nazis then, I take it?
And no rules against it apparently
A few podcasts I listen to have switched to calling their bluesky handles out instead of their twitter handles in their outros. I'll probably install it and delete ex/twitter when I get an invite.
Go with Mastodon. Bluesky is just Twitter but run by crypto fanatics. It's not decentralized or nonprofit or safeguarded against enshittification.
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.
A lot of words for "I didn't know you could use the network without using servers controlled by Bluesky"
The network is the thing that's controlled by BS, a for-profit company who's CEO is a crypto fan.
I've already explained how they have designed it so they can't control it. Just use web-DID and your own domain handle on your own PDS, and then you can connect to a 3rd party relay (BGS, the CDN like cache) and whichever feeds and moderation tools and filter subscriptions you like. You don't need to touch the official servers at all.
The network doesn't use any cryptocurrency technology. There's no blockchain, etc.
nobody said they did
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.
🤷
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.
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)
@Natanael
> 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.
Well, I wrote about this as well, so I think I might not be missing these details:
https://rys.io/en/168.html
In bluesky I think those effects mostly lie on the side of which client people use.
The protocol is extensible and you can add new post types and formatting options by creating a new schema/lexicon, but these would only be readable by other clients which supports it. I hope they'll be able to add some general "category template" lexicons so a graceful degradation scheme can be implemented to support compatibility without hindering 3rd party development.
To protect against a PDS server going bad the client could assist with automated account migration (the new PDS doesn't need to understand the lexicon of your posts to be able to migrate them intact), even if the old PDS won't cooperate (the client could maintain backups for you to make migration quick). But if you don't control your keys separately then a bad client update could make your account unrecoverable, similarly to a mastodon server going bad.
@Natanael you seem to continue to focus on PDSes even though I explicitly said it doesn't matter which PDS you're on, the secondary centralization (and thus control) happens in the "reach" layer, outside of what PDSes do in ATproto.
In other words, changing a PDS gives you way, way less agency in BS, compared to agency you get with changing an instance on Fedi.
BS is designed to make that secondary centralization happen, and to be where the real power in the system is.
I don't see how that's a negative, all the choices attached to Mastodon hosts are distributed to multiple services in bluesky which optionally could be served by the same entity, but doesn't need to be. A PDS can run its own moderation services, or subscribe to another, or leave it to clients. A PDS can run their own feeds, or leave it to others. Clients can choose to use the services provided by the PDS, or to use others.
I don't see where the centralizing forces are (other than economy of scale stuff). Having the most users doesn't mean much when it's trivial to substitute your service, regardless if that's a moderation labeler service, a collection of feeds, or whatever else. It's really just the most popular client apps which have disproportionate power, but that's true for every protocol.
Edit: I also want to point out that the PDS by default controls a bunch of stuff for the client via the appview service, that's the service which the client talks to and it assembles your home feed and assemble post views (where it control sorting, etc) and it apply blocks and mutes and applies the PDS's own moderation, and it forwards moderation labels on posts (like NSFW tags) to the client.
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.
The CEO is a musk toe-sucker whose been cheering on all of his shittiest ideas.
Jack is not the CEO, and he's in minority on the board
Thanks for sharing, this is the kind of useful info I was looking for.
@pixelpop3 @admin happy to send you an invite if you want one. Especially if it helps you leave the bird site. DM me
The fediverse is way better. Interesting to check out what people are building... at least a bit. I find myself wanting to come back here way more than any of the other options.
All I know about Bluesky is what's in the name. When you look at the Fediverse tree, every branch, leaves, and roots are labelled. But the sky isnt. Bluesky. I believe the intent is to be bigger and far more important than the Fediverse, smother it rather than let it grow. Jack is a businessman, after all. He really liked having a hugely important platform in Twitter and how much political power it was beginning to have.
Who cares?
Just a heads up, on Beehaw we do our best to comment things that are actually helpful.
Apparently OP cares