You must log in or register to comment.
I run a few bots on Bluesky and absently check it occasionally on a personal account. Anecdotally I can say that I’m seeing a lot more engagement even just over the last week.
Is Bluesky federated?
Theoretically, yes. Practically, the way their model is set up, it costs a lot to host a federated server so no one is doing it.
Wait really? I thought cost were relatively low since a lot of people do it themselves
I’m on Bluesky. I have seen a drama increase in followers in the last few days since Twitter let blocked people see content that were blocked from.
It’s a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
I had to decide if I was going to Mastodon or Bluesky. I picked Bluesky because after reading Mastodon’s integration problems with itself I wanted nothing to do with it. It couldn’t scale unless each instance played nice and in the years since it went live they had refused to do that and showed no signs of even moving in that direction.
What are the Mastadon Integration problems?
I’m pretty sure they’re referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.
Bluesky is ““federated”” in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there’s basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.
To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it’s an irritation.
Partly. Except the time different Mastodon instances were not federated much or at all. If you wanted to go follow someone on Mastodon you had to know the exact server they were on. In an environment like Reddit and Lemmy where you’re there for the communities instead of the people that isn’t an issue. But if you want to go follow some specific podcaster you need to know the instance because there’s no guarantee that whatever instance you happen upon is going to be joined up with the one there on.
Everyone was busy running their own servers and not trying to tie everything together. It was a thing that could be done but a thing not enough were doing.
That’s the same Bluesky that Dorsey abandoned.
Taking a page out of Valves book.
Doing nothing and let the competition drive customers your way.
Not really what Valve did. Valve kept doing cool things that benefit the customer, while the competition actively drove them away.
I don’t follow social media. Is BlueSky feature rich and only getting better?
The biggest thing that valve did that kept them in everyone’s good graces is that steam’s core functionality hasn’t had any major changes in years. Dare I say, more than a decade.
It’s a platform where you buy games, download them, and play them.
In the early days you still had to deal with all the bullshit, including third party launcher installs and crap to get things going, and over time, valve simplified all of that, making it easier than ever to take advantage of the core function of steam: buying, downloading, and playing games.
Literally the only improvement I can absolutely, positively credit them for, is making that entire process, easier, simpler, and quicker, than ever.
Sure, you can chat to people, track achievements, comment on your profile, comment on your friends profiles, buy and sell cosmetics on the market thing, even voice chat and I think they have a way you can stream your game to friends… Not sure on that last one.
It’s like Facebook, FB marketplace, FB messenger, discord, Twitter… And a bunch of other services, all huddled together to make a bastard child with the entire PC video game industry… That’s steam.
But the core mechanic that was always the main reason why steam was great, remains the same.
It’s a lot of art, cats, and big tiddy cartoons. I haven’t found anything too onerous in its UI, the community has a somewhat toxic level of positivity but that’s certainly better than the general toxicity of most of the web these days.
Aw gross tig buddy cartoons yikes.
Can you share those links so I know what sites to avoid?
the community has a somewhat toxic level of positivity
Could you elaborate?
Well if you post something political you’ll get a couple dozen replies telling you to “Leave that stuff at the other place”.
…that sounds amazing. Perhaps I should go investigate Bluesky, heh.
It’s pretty okay. Lots of engagement, also there’s something of a ‘block early and often’ culture that seems to have a way of really reducing the drama and nonsense
Bluesky is decentralized only in its name. And media storage.
This isn’t necessarily true. Just because their architecture is harder and not a simple server host does not strip away its decentralization.
They have decentralized the following:
-
App access (can build your own or show openProto posts in your platform
-
Algorithms
-
Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)
-
More if you consider the domain name hosting stuff and media storage control. Also moderation is planned to be decentralized.
Isn’t the only thing that really matters decentralised control?
Open protocols and APIs seem pretty meaningless to me if there’s a single point of control for the brand.
If everyone migrates to bluesky and then bluesky says “of we’re not doing that open thing anymore because of this new embiggened thing we’re doing” everyone will still be on bluesky.
Open protocols and APIs seem pretty meaningless to me if there’s a single point of control for the brand.
You’d need to expand on this more for me to understand you. Yes there’s a single point of control from a moderation standpoint (labeler), as there is on Lemmy instances. But anyone can host their own ATProto relays and the Bluesky relay will federate with each other automatically.
If everyone migrates to bluesky and then bluesky says “of we’re not doing that open thing anymore because of this new embiggened thing we’re doing” everyone will still be on bluesky.
Not necessarily because the accounts are atProto accounts and you can migrate to another platform(albeit another doesn’t exist yet) without data loss. As far as the Bluesky app goes it really just shows you atProto posts and hosts your data (similar to Lemmy instances) they as an entity just also maintain the OSS backend Relay crawler and more.
I really think a lot of people have this perspective that it’s not decentralized just because it truly is a lot more complicated due to there being like 5 different moving pieces of decentralization (PDS, Relay, Appview, tbd labeler, algorithm) and they do a great job at obscuring it for regular users which is a great thing. And nobody has really tinkered around and set-up any sites or integrations with it yet. I’m personally trying to get a two way mastodon integration as it’s possible but nobody has done a solid implementation (just somewhat gnarly bridges between protocols)
Oh sure ok. Silly me. I can’t wait to be embraced by the utopia of open standards bluesky is going to inspire.
Tl;Dr it isn’t decentralized.
If you can build your own or selfhost each of the following to read and push back to all of the atProto protocol:
-
App
-
Backend Relay
-
Moderation
-
Algorithm
And you still say that’s not decentralized I’m not sure what you’re looking for nor what your definition of decentralization is.
If I log into BlueSky right now, can I see posts from other instances? This is a legitimate question since the twitter archetype doesn’t appeal to me.
-
-
Better than the burning garbage inferno that is xitter.
but for how long?
Doesn’t matter, less time on twitter is better, even if bluesky ends up the same way. Something else will be less shit and worth going to then.
At the rate we’re going all that will be left on X is EM and his 200 sockpuppets.
we’ve been seeing these “twitter’s in biiiiiiiiig trouble now!!” headlines for how many years now?
yet people refuse to just delete it
i can’t wait for the day i can go a full 24 hours without twitter shit showing up on every feed
I feel like I’m the only person who never signed up for Twitter.
i installed it while i was bored in a doctor waiting room, thought it was the dumbest most pointless thing ever. deleted after 5 minutes and went on with my life
I deleted Twitter as soon as Space Karen took over.
However, my friends and so many people I follow on other platforms still link their Twitter profiles. For some there needs to be something solid to make a real and consistent migration. I was overly hopeful that Threads (yes, another evil) would have buried Twitter.
Threads stood as much chance as Google Plus had against Facebook.
Zuckerfucker using a somewhat similar strategy to artificially boost Threads membership (login with instagram once, you can’t delete your threads account without also deleting the instagram one) speaks volumes.
For what it’s worth, it is now possible to delete your threads account without also deleting your instagram account.
I also like the absurd amount of permissions it requires. Meta couldn’t let their guard down for a moment.
To clarify, I mean Meta couldn’t be a little less data hungry in order to take marketshare from Twitter. They instantly needed access to absolutely everything at the start.
Many people have deleted it. There just Right wing trolls and bots on that platform
we’ve been seeing these “twitter’s in biiiiiiiiig trouble now!!” headlines for how many years now?
this time it’s for realsies.
yet people refuse to just delete it
Many journalists want to feel connected, and since many politicians have a presence on Twitter, they feel like they can’t. That means Twitter gets referenced way more than necessary in news stories, which feeds its popularity.
I honestly don’t think twitter will ever go away until all of a majority of all major sports teams and leagues, a majority of legislative body members, and major news and wire services have a sustained and active presence on bsky. it right now is literally coasting on everything that made it useful pre 2022 and every stupid fucking thing elon has done to make the twitter experience worse hasn’t done enough to cause a critical mass of people to jump.
once you see major popular twitter accounts like rex chapman, mark hamill, taylor swift and the like (and I say this not because of their politics but because of their massive follower base) regularly post on bsky you can probably start closing the book on twitter.
I’ve deleted it ages ago, but another friend that actually knows and cares about the insanity of twitter still refuses to get away from it because “it’s where the kpop community is”, nowhere else. It’s fucking sad.
Now that is an interesting target to get tons of people off twitter. If all these K Pop labels like Hybe and JYP suddenly started publishing on BlueSky their fans would immediately follow suit
I remember putting in so much effort into my MySpace page… and then it was replaced by Facebook… and I had to start over. That’s the only reason why people are staying in the shitter…
I’ve been on Bluesky and Mastodon but I’m seeing people pretty happy with how less toxic it is on Bluesky.
I mean at some point elon will buy bluesky, too
Just wait until enough sane people have left Twitter; it’ll then implode and the fascist Nazi shitheads will migrate.
They don’t want an echo chamber- they want to be able to shout their slurs and right-wing bullshit at you while you can’t respond. It’s exactly why places like Voat and that shitty T_D knockoff crashed. Once the ratio of right-wingers to non-right-wingers on Twitter hits a critical amount, they’ll start looking for other places to infest.
Just wait
Dude. It’s been 2 years. The people who were going to leave because of Elon already left.
I’m not saying the current twitter userbase 100% fully believe in his views, but I am saying that they’re not leaving the platform over it.
Either they don’t know about bluesky/mastodon, or they don’t care enough to leave.
Uhh, the very existence of this article indicates you’re wrong. Elon removed the block feature and even more users left; how can you say that “the people who were going to leave because of Elon have already left”? Certainly the group who disliked Elon on ideological grounds did, but there are plenty of other users who are leaving because they’re finally deciding the changes Elon is making removes any value they see in remaining on Twitter.
At least Blue Sky supports community block lists. You can block every nazi with the click of a button
Dude. Isn’t truth worth billions?
I guess you’re mostly right, but the exception is that they need one safe space in which to congratulate each other and wank about NFTs and what not.
You mean Trump’s Twitter clone? Depends on how you define “worth.” The total stock valuation is worth that much, but that’s because stocks are largely bullshit priced based on how buyers feel. Someone keeps buying the stock, so the price reflects that.
If you’re talking about the company itself, it’s not worth dick. They have a six or seven digit revenue compared to eight or nine digit losses- there is absolutely no way the stock price represents the “true” value of the company. Given that Trump owns 60% of the shares it’s absolutely certain that someone is using it as a way to funnel money to Trump outside of campaign finance laws.
Also, they don’t have that many users.
You’re dead right that the company isn’t worth anything in a traditional sense.
However, the existence of truth social directly contradicts your claim that they don’t want an echo chamber.
A daily active user count of under 80,000 is utterly meaningless for a social media site.
The right-wing chuds aren’t flocking to Truth Social because they can’t “own the libs” there. That’s what I mean when I say they don’t want an echo chamber.
Yeah bro I wish they would keep to their own echochambers so they can become more and more radicalised and end up causing even more harm in the long run rather than at least having some if minimal exposure to normal fucking people /s
Toxicity drives engagement. Engagement means more ad views.
As long as profits are the motive it’s a flawed design.
How? I’m mostly following mlp-related accounts on mastodon and don’t see any toxicity.
I haven’t seen any toxicity on the server I’m on (https://mastodon.gamedev.place ) either. But I’ve seen people I follow complain about it in the past, and I trust them. Especially considering they left for Bluesky.
I think Mastodon users are more technical and blunt, drawing from the same stereotypes that people have (often fairly) thrown at nerdier people. We just need to keep that in mind. And maybe a good ad/explainer, given how many people bounce off the concept of federation and different servers.
Its just an opinion piece, I’d take this with a grain of salt
This user is a troll FYI.
Glad to see people leaving X. I look forward to it’s end.
Whelp, did mastodon got something out of this screwup?
Mastodon struggles a bit to pick up pace.
Found this:
https://www.makeuseof.com/why-people-leaving-mastodon/
It explains some pain points.
Basically it’s “I can’t get ✨ engagement ✨ on Mastodon”
People want big amounts of likes and reposts you don’t get that on Mastodon, the system is too distributed for that.
Bluesky gives them the big numbers
They want an algorithm.
As much as people mock it, or know it’s the source of why social media optimizes for outrage and other unhealthy behaviors, the algorithm is what they are missing on Mastodon.
As someone who always used third party Twitter apps, and never directly saw the algorithm in my timeline, mastodon feels like Twitter always did.
Some people don’t want a suggestion algorithm but do want full reply federation.
Alec from Technology Connections stopped using mastodon because of this, every post he made would get nitpicked on by 20 different people from instances who did not federate the replies with each other so each reply guy thought they were the first.
I have a single user instance and I use a relay, but most replies are still missing if I click on a post unless I go to the original webpage.
Lazy-federating replies when a post is viewed sounds like an obvious solution but AFAIK the mastodon devs are very opposed to this.
Yep. Actually brave to say this given the fever that word throws people into. But not only is everything literally an algorithm, including “show your subscriptions in chronological order” but we all want a little more than that because it’s easy to imagine how one frequent poster would throw that experience off completely. We need to talk about what we want from algorithms and lay down this narrative that we must stamp them out of existence.
Damn we can’t get influencers? How will we live.
we need People to tell us what to like!!!
People want to socially interact on a platform with the intention of letting you socially interact. I understand Mastodon intends to do the same thing as.BlueSky so the question is why is BlueSky more.popular.
As someone who uses both. Mastodon’s UI and signup process is not as straight toward at least that is my personal reason why.
Mastodon is fantastic for niche things. For example myself and my colleagues use it for work stuff and I also use it with a few friends for gaming. that’s it. Beyond that if you’re going to Mastodon to reach a lot of people and chase clout or what have you you’re gonna have a bad time. you’ll just be shouting to the void in many cases. I also use it to connect with people using linux for help and suggestions.
But just read feeds on Bluesky and you’ll see many people, probably the vast majority, just say they want something that “just works” and them trying to use Mastodon was too difficult. They didn’t understand the instances and what have you. It’s a generation that’s been raised on downloading an app, tapping on it, and it works. Login with your google, facebook, or apple id…that’s it.
People these days simply don’t want to do too much to use something. they don’t want to customize their online experience like we used to do years ago. If it doesn’t instantly “work” right out of the box, they won’t use it. And even regardless of how much they’ll complain about using it and all it’s bugs and foibles (X/Twitter, Windows 11, etc) they’ll continue to use it cause, again, “it just works”.
“Freedom of choice Is what you got Freedom from choice Is what you want” -Devo
Who is this wise sage, Devo? Are they internet search, wait the 80’s band with the construction helmets?
Whip it? Whip it good??
’80s* band
Yeah that looks better! Ty.
The reasons mentioned in the article:
One reason is that it seemed tech-savvy users heavily dominated the platform, making it difficult for regular social media users to find their way and feel comfortable on the platform.
I think that’s saying the content tends to be very niche and it’s hard to find people with similar non-tech interests.
and
Users have described their timelines (and even the explore tab) as “stale” because there’s often not much interesting content to consume or engage with.
This lines up with my experience: it’s hard to find people with similar interests. Even when you do, people aren’t saying much of interest.
Yep, same problem Lemmy has vs reddit. Only the nerdiest tech nerds got on here. Not many communities from reddit or just in general here. For example, I had to go back to reddit for a good sized general anime community. It’s that or fucking 4chan, and no thanks on the latter.
To me, Lemmy feels very much a giant technology board with a few memes.
But I will say, the past few days, Bluesky has gotten a lot more interesting.
Yep, same problem Lemmy has vs reddit. Only the nerdiest tech nerds got on here. Not many communities from reddit or just in general here. For example, I had to go back to reddit for a good sized general anime community.
I’ve had the same experience. I still post here because I want the platform to take off, but Lemmy doesn’t fulfill my needs.
The last part I think happens because the people who are there are most likely the ones that dislike very short content, which is what Mastodon offers by default (I know it depends on instance, some allow 1k or 5k character toots), but it’s a disorganized mess. It’s a kind of service/software for fast communication that can be done better in a specific Discord server. The “good stuff” will always end up posted elsewhere, like personal blogs or websites, where it’s better organized (most of the time)
One thing that keeps people on xitter is the “it’s where I get the news”. Major news outlets aren’t on Mastodon and likely won’t be. There’s also the stuff that “you get to know before it becomes news”, which also won’t be on Mastodon because it lacks the “gossipers” and the mass of users that is needed for having people “everywhere”
There’s also the stuff that “you get to know before it becomes news”, which also won’t be on Mastodon because it lacks the “gossipers” and the mass of users that is needed for having people “everywhere”
It’s not the gossipers, it’s a trending view. Mastodon doesn’t tell users about active conversations as they happen. That makes it really hard to get breaking news, because you need to be following someone who is posting about it AND you need to recognize that it’s breaking news.
Maybe that has improved in the year or two since I used Mastodon.
BlueSky has the one thing Fedi doesn’t: a large advertising budget. Hate to say it, but we have lost.
What are you talking about man?
BlueSky has money. We don’t.
People are going from one corporate-controlled social media platform to another corporate-controlled social media platform. You and I both know that’s the problem, but to the average user, they’re going to go to whatever has a large corporation spending a lot of money to tell them that their platform is the next big thing.
It sounds to me you are making excuses instead of confronting the obvious problems of Mastodon. It’s user-hostile to anyone who is not already a fucking nerd.
Just like Lemmy.
I haven’t observed that on Lemmy or Mastodon.
Non of my IRL friends are on mastodon. So there’s that.
The wolf ate our babies, let’s go see hyenas.
