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.
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.
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 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 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.
They could but they are developing their own protocol.
This is the best reply so far. Also worth mentioning both the platform and the protocol are open source.
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.
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.
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)
and misskey over firefish :)
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
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.
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
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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
It's more robust against enshittification than your average Mastodon server
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.
Blue Sky is a for-profit corporation. How do they plan to make money?
🤷
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.
Who controls access to the network?
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.
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.
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