cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17686207

It’s a very long post, but a lot of it is a detailed discussion of terminology in the appendix – no need to read that unless you’re into definitional struggles.

49 points

Hello,

I skimmed through the article. Isn’t Bluesky one billionaire purchase away from becoming the new X (and in this case, I don’t mean Twitter)?

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-6 points

No. It’s already owned by multibillionaire Jack Dorsey.

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30 points

This is straight up misinformation, Dorsey was on the Bluesky’s board, but left in May. As far as I’m aware, he’s never even invested in the company (but he has given money to the nostr devs).

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3 points

It did originate from Twitter. Somehow Twitter at the time considered it wise to split it into a separate entity, and Dorsey was fine with not controlling it. And then Twitter was sold, and Dorsey and Bluesky grew apart from each other.

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Correct. Dorsey’s early involvement is certainly grounds for concern – the way I think of it, he’s gone now but his stench lingers on – but he’s not influential there going forward.

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2 points

Oh, I didn’t know that. Everything I’ve heard about it associates them together.

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Yep. And that’s far from the only way it could work out badly. I talk about this a bit in the section on “Bluesky is a useful counterweight to Threads”

Bluesky is far from perfect. They’re venture-funded, so likely to end with an exploitative business model. They’ve got a surveillance-capitalism friendly all-public architecture. It’s great that Jack Dorsey’s no longer on the board but he was.

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79 points

bluesky is run by a single org, and you have to beg them to let their router include your ‘independent’ instance. it is a closed garden.

it is like federating with facebook (not threads) by begging facebook to include your server and content into their garden.

thats not open federation. even after they let you in, they could take their ball home and lock it down at any moment.

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Agreed that Bluesky’s run by a single corporation so it’s different than today’s ActivityPub Fediverse, but the Fediverse’s historical approach to “open federation” isn’t the only approach. Even in the ActivityPub world we’re seeing more and more experimentation with allow-list federation.

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11 points

allow lists run by individual instances…not a gatekeeping board of a single entity.

my points stand. if you want to join a true federating twitter clone youre not using the atprotocol.

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For people who want to join a twitter clone there aren’t any good ActivityPub options – Mastodon’s good at other things, but isn’t a good Twitter alternative let along clone. And ActivityPub’s version of “true federation” isn’t the only kind of federation. That said, I agree that AT isn’t an option for people who want to join a federating-in-theActivityPub-sense-of-the-word Twitter clone,

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36 points

BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization https://rys.io/en/167.html

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Blueksy’s approach to decentralization is very different from ActivityPub but it’s definitely decentralized. (Also that article’s over a year old, and some things have changed since then.). But, like I say in the article, not everybody is so welcoming!

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-1 points

@thenexusofprivacy we can’t tell bluesky is fediverse even though it’s decentralized imo

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You’re not the only one who thinks that way – opinions differ!

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10 points

They’re still cosplaying decentralisation. Google hosts images on a separate domain to the one where they serve documents, are they decentralised? When we see more indexers, by all means let’s consider BlueSky decentralised, but until then, they’re just offloading traffic.

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1 point

I hope they start supporting people who want to run an indexer. Right now they just point to their source code and say, “if you can get this largely undocumented complex service running on your own, you can run a indexer, but don’t ask us for any help”.

I’m not entirely confident that it will happen before their only funding source decides to cut off the cash flow.

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7 points

There is this thread too: https://feddit.org/post/2656676

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Kuba’s link i that thread is good, it looks like there’s currently about 370 PDS’s – Bridgy Fed got an exception from Bluesky so is the only one that currently has more than 10 uses. https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses I know some people who just run the open-source code for Bluesky’s PDS (which is pretty straightforward) and some run other implementations.

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27 points

Not sure about Bluesky, but welcome Brazilians!

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3 points

They’re going to federate with ActivityPub?

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Bridgy Fed and Friendica already connect Bluesky to the ActivityPub Fediverse.

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6 points

To bridge your fediverse account into Bluesky and interact with people there, search for and follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy. That account will then follow you back. Accept its follow to make sure your fediverse posts get sent the bridge and make it into Bluesky.

https://fed.brid.gy/docs#fediverse-get-started

I mean, I guess, but that’s pretty convoluted and opt-in, not so much a direct compatible connection from Bluesky to the Fediverse. And you’d have to trust them regarding privacy.

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Agreed that Bridgy Fed is opt-in … I see consent as a good thing, but not everybody agrees.

And yeah, Bluesky’s just ike any other instance, you have to trust them with privacy. I think the argument that Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, and Wordress.com-hosted blogs shouldn’t be considered part of the Fediverse is intellectually consistent, I just don’t see a lot of people making that argument. But, “the Fedivese” means different things to different people, the followup post Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse? goes into a huge amount of detail on that …

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