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.
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.
There is already a fediverse twitalike called mastodon. I don’t understand why anyone here cares about bluesky.
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.
By that logic we should be happy gazing at our own navels, shouting to the void, looking at empty pages.
bluesky is foss and open to federation, why not bluesky? Also a mastodon bluesky bridge is possible because of this as well
Because mastodon is the Linux of social media. One day it will be ready for the average user…
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.
People here need to realize that 90% of the microbloggers don’t give a fuck about decentralization or FOSS. They want something that works and doesn’t force them into a ketamine fuled nazi oligarchy delirium. Mastodon doesn’t work for normal people. It kind of works if you’re a FOSS nerd or some kind of fediverse idealist. (It works for me, because it doesn’t drag me into endless flame wars and I’m almost only following FOSS accounts).
My experience with Lemmy is that it is much more functional as in “Reddit replacement”. There are of course super few users, but it feels active and engaging (for better or worse). So in theory, maybe it could be a replacement.
But Mastodon has never been a “Twitter replacement”. It feels more like a fancy RSS client. Search, feeds and interactions just doesn’t work very well.
There are several reasons why Mastodon doesn’t work for normal people, but the biggest one is, honestly, Mastodon users. People have shown themselves to be rather inventive in the face of technical limitations, or they’re willing to put up with toxic people for the sake of a great user experience, but you need the people who show up in the space to not experience both negatives.
A lot of Mastodon’s UX is really frustrating, in large part because Mastodon tries to disguise the fact that everyone’s using different websites. People would be a lot more forgiving of the jankiness of federation if they truly understood that what they’re doing is the equivalent of talking to Facebook users from Twitter. But the UI of Mastodon, the language of Mastodon, the layout of Mastodon, the features of Mastodon, and even the ‘marketing’ of Mastodon all try to make it look like the @website.com at the end of everyone’s name is just some frilly flair.
Lemmy has some similar issues, frankly, though not nearly as bad. And Lemmy is a space where I think we will see the idea of talking to people across different websites will really be treated as more core to the culture of the space, because Lemmy isn’t really going out of its way to hide the nature of the space as much as Mastodon is.
Still, I wish the hosting websites were treated as first-class citizens by Lemmy itself, rather than as just the url the ‘communities’ are taking up space on.
I’ve heard from numerous people here that Mastodon is the “worst” of microblogging platforms on the Fediverse. Mainly due to its lack of features.
There are two kinds of people who claim that Mastodon is the best.
One, absolute fanbois and fangurls who, in addition, don’t even know that Pleroma, Misskey or any forks of either exist, much less what they’re like. Their point is always “biggest = most popular = best”, although they themselves, like almost everyone on Mastodon, were railroaded onto Mastodon without being told that there’s more to the Fediverse than Mastodon, even in terms of microblogging.
I’m not even kidding when I say the UX on the *keys is closer to Twitter than that on Mastodon. And at the same tiime, the *keys show what Fediverse projects something comes from whereas Mastodon tries hard to make everyone believe that the Fediverse is Mastodon.
Two, Mastodon devs. I’ve actually had a Mastodon developer who knew that I’m on Hubzilla comment into my face that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete Fediverse project. I could have inquired him about Mastodon support for one or two dozen Hubzilla features, ranging from full HTML rendering over nomadic identity and WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV connectivity to a built-in wiki engine. But I didn’t.
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.
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.
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?
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/frontpage
It’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.
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.
What’s the point in them making a reddit alternative when they can just spin up their own Lemmy instances? That seems pointless.
it’s going to be a merrier once the dot world team adopts and runs it.
just like lemmy.
