How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse.
from tfm@europe.pub to fediverse@lemmy.world on 01 Sep 15:30
https://europe.pub/post/4092620
from tfm@europe.pub to fediverse@lemmy.world on 01 Sep 15:30
https://europe.pub/post/4092620
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/45188740
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Wait, there are 1600 BlueSky instances to join? Are they counting people using a custom domain name as an entire instance?
I suppose PDS instances are included: github.com/bluesky-social/pds
OK so it sounds like there is still just the single BlueSky that is “federated” with a handful of single-user BlueSkies?
Yes. The relevant metric:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/8ae9ee27-c5e6-4a17-895a-17adf87ae498.png">
99.55% of posts are on a single instance. That is not “federated” in any meaningful sense.
I’m moreso curious if it federated in a literal sense. Is it even possible to participate without using bsky.app’s servers?
Yes, very recently Black Sky launched. Much too late to make any difference.
Seems like it
A PDS still requires BlueSky’s servers
Oh, I misunderstood. So you mean federating with their network from other software implementing the AT Protocol? From skimming the docs it looks like it should be possible as long as you implement the correct schemas, but I didn’t dive very deep.
No it doesn’t. If other people on bluesky servers want to see your content then obviously it will go through bluesky servers, but if you connect to a 3rd party relay and use a separate appview like zeppelin.social and use DID:Web for account ID then nothing involving the bluesky servers was used and it still behaves like native
Where is this from?
PDSes only store user data. These are full instances that can be used to browse the network. The idea is to make your account really yours. Bluesky is hosting most of them. But there are some people who do it on their own.
But bluesky controls much more important components in the network, namely the Relay and AppView.
If Bluesky decides to cut off your PDS you are pretty much alone.
Bluesky is pretty much a centralized platform like Twittler.
Zeppelin.social is 3rd party appview and you can host your own
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
Add using DID:Web and you’re now fully self hosted
25% is too high, but at least it's not as embarrassing as 99%
True
So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
Bluesky is the newest iteration of privately owned and controlled social media
Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.
Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don’t like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don’t get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.
The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though…
Does it? None of my normie progressive friends are on the fediverse. The ones that tried it didn’t like it.
The tech press is talking to your normie friends?
No I’m saying the logic and propaganda of corporate social media seems to work on them, despite it being in obvious contrast to their ideals.
They didn’t mean those kind of progressives. Not the political one. But the ones that actually see beyond VC backed big tech.
I’m not sure I see the distinction you’re making here. Usually those groups are highly overlapping.
🤷
I’m with you. To my knowledge all my irl woke friends ride only mainstream social media.
I had a local anarchist reach out to me on my ancient FB Messenger of all things.
I get that it’s not the most important part if you’re doing prefiguration, but as far as I can tell most people just want to be where most people are, even if it is supporting actually vile corporations.
Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.
Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.
Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra “stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions” endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.
calling people normies tends to do that
Not weird at all; this was the case with cryptocurrency too. Otherwise qualified and intelligent people would invest in centralized scam coins because they had no understanding of economics, just tech.
It’s sad but cool that it works the same way with social capital.
Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.
Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.
They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.
"It's the same picture."
Always has been. The only difference is what they're selling.
I feel like this speaks to an unchallenged myth in our society. That corporate organizations and government organizations are somehow completely categorically different from one another such that they exist in totally separate spheres of reality. But they’re both political groups of people, exercising power over the peasants. It’s not as different as people think. And they often have similar goals and use similar strategies, like propaganda, to achieve them.
I don’t understand it at all. Where are all the supposed blueskys? It’s so easy to fact check.
Because, despite being wildly impractical, it’s technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized. Only recent a new host launched called Black sky. So it is no longer just one host. But it’s been one host for so long it almost doesn’t matter because so few people will switch.
Yes exactly, it reminds me of the logic of cryptocurrency boosters. I just found out that the bluesky CEO (not to mention jack dorsey) are both crypto advocates so it makes a lot more sense now.
Doesn’t BS have things in it’s software that are hard coded to the main server, so it’s not possible to make a completely independent host at the moment?
They continue to control 100% of the relays so they can control what servers are connected to the others.
Blacksky runs their own relay
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
The PLC registry is the only such thing, and also it’s not a blocker because you can use the DID:Web scheme to manage your own account identity
Technically, yes, if you squint; but, practically, no. It was designed with a prioritization of passing the information/data around to avoid any lack of missing anything (so you get a closer experience to the connectedness of Twitter than Mastodon) which means every instance hosts, basically, the entire world. Naturally, there’s only going to be a few entities that can store and afford to store the entirety of the data of the network. There’s no such thing as a small instance, in their protocol.
Because people who are Bluesky fanatics tend to be tech illiterate and are easily swayed by vibes and marketing.
Because it is decentalised, and beats the fediverse in many aspects.
It’s not:
dustycloud.org/…/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Hey, that’s a blog post from months ago. It no longer applies, hosting a relay can be done for $34 a month now.
Any more info on this?
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
Check atproto.africa, app.wafrn.net, zeppelin.social and altq.net
Ty!
They fixed the large cache needed to validate all traffic on your own relay. Now the cost is mostly bandwidth and whatever CPU power you want to spend on indexing
Parrot the marketing hyperbole.
The enshitification continies.
It’s where the useful idiots are being herded. They are using it because it’s “not twitter” and other people are influencing them. They don’t care about decentralization.
Would have been nice if they went to Mastodon, but I wouldn’t call them idiots. I don’t use that media format, but if there isn’t a lot of users there, I cant see the service being that useful to the users who do go there. It’s like Lemmy struggles with niches. Not enough people, want to find something or ask someone about something, you’ll hit a wall and find yourself looking for results elsewhere. Someday hopefully, but that movement from Twitter would have been a great time for activity pub to shine if it hadn’t gotten skipped over
Why should they care about decentralization anyway? Isn’t number of users and ease of content discovery far more important?
Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it’s usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.
They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it’s just a buzzword, I believe.
Wasn’t there a similar promise made by Reddit at some point? I remember people referring it to often until it became just some myth … and then at one point, people just realized it was never going to change and then it became a full blown private corporation that wanted an IPO and became a monolith that never even considered sharing anything.
I honestly have no idea, that would be going much farther back in Reddit’s history than I was on the platform for. It reminds me of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, though. It’s true until somebody realizes that there’s a lot of money to be made doing the thing that you said you wouldn’t do.
Which server is representing 25% of the index on the Fediverse?
I guess mastodon.social
Lemmy.world
I believe Lemmy is quite smaller than Mastodon (hence it is not even mentioned on the diagram), so it’s probably a Mastodon instance.
Anyone have the numbers for Lemmy specifically?
Lemmy has about 40,000 monthly active users. Lemmy.world accounts for about 15,500 of that. That’s about 40%.
Thanks. Yeah .world is definitely a bit too big, but it’s still miles better than bluesky.
True
On the one hand one instance having so many users is not ideal. If the mods/admins there go wild you can simply move, and organically the communities hosted there would appear elsewhere.
So in real terms any action they hypothetically could take can realistically be countered.
I think it gives them a little bit too much power in negotiating with other instances, especially with the number of communities hosted here. Choosing to stop interacting with them is a very drastic action because much of the threadiverse is here. Especially for me who has already cut out .ml which also has a disproportionate number of communities due to its age.
For sure entirely defederating would be hard right now. But you're could selectively block communities on your own instance. As I say if they did do something so heinous others would pick up the communities and it would be easier.
I’ve personally started creating my new communities on other instances to spread it out more. You create an alt on a fitting and reliable instance, create it there and then give control to your main account. My latest community is on mander.xyz.
If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.
And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that’s entirely fair. But if you’re looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don’t see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It’s a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.
But in the end, I think there is space for both.
This is only true of Bluesky because everyone is using Bluesky’s infrastructure at the moment. If Bluesky ever deindexes someone and they start posting to an alternative relay, you suddenly don’t have a guarantee of a full view of a post’s replies.
Content addressing means you can make your instance pull from both their relay and the bluesky relay and trivially merge threads and views without consistency issues, so that’s solvable.
The bigger issue is all those other regular users who doesn’t, and still get confused (unless they manage to pick a client app that does it for them)
I mean, this would become less trivial the more replays go into use, where to get a full view you’d have to pull from all the relays that exist.
ActivityPub’s solution to this is just IMO better, the original post has a replies collection attached to it that acts as the authority the replies the post has. This also allows creators to eject replies from the collection. There are issues with the way fedi software currently handles fetching from these reply collections, but the missing replies thing is very solvable in ActivityPub.
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user’s post goes viral.
And as for moderation bluesky also carries information with the top post from the post author and allows hiding replies too, etc. This gets enforced on the appview side, so the posting user’s PDS is unscathed if it goes viral.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
Realistically, the relay network will likely end up voluntarily adopting a tree topology - hobbyist communities would run small relays bundling all activity from members’ PDS servers, then a larger relay in front gathers everything from a ton of smaller relays and makes it available to appviews
Setting up caching in the reverse proxy layer would alleviate this a lot of this. Like, GoToSocial only recommends to set up caching for the key and webfinger endpoints, where having it set up to cache posts and profiles for like 60 seconds (or however long the
Cache-Controlheader says, Mastodon defaults to 180s) would alleviate the strain on the server so much.There are other thing you can do, like this post explains some other things for Misskey, but the defaults should be sensible so you don’t have to be a sysadmin expert to host an instance and they’re currently not. I host 2 Lemmy instances (ukfli.uk and sappho.social) from a £5/month VPS and they’re able to handle bursts of hundreds of requests without issue.
People are already building small, non-archival relays so this assumption seems mute. It’s also important to remember that relays are an optimisation, not a core part of the protocol.
i’m so tired of these posts. okay, fediverse, you won! you are more decentralized than bluesky. maybe it’s time to create real useful and interesting content instead of reveling in your elitism?
But…I came here just for the gloating fediverse content.
What else could there be?
It would be fair to say something like that if you yourself made content but your last post was 3 months ago lol
first, no, it’s fair to say regardless of how often i create content. posts like this is cancer, which adds nothing to the platform. second, even on this account my last post was 1 month ago.
It’s information. YOU are the one deciding to make this a competition.
I mean I agree… it’s kind of the constant crux isn’t it?
The IT nerds pick a protocol that’s uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because… well obviously that’s kind of the definition of uncontrolled.
Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc… that most people care about flock there.
Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify… open communities announce “hey we’ve got our alternative here”, they say “thanks but nah that’s too complicated, and you don’t have the users that I want to see anyway”. People complain more… and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal… or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.
I don’t really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter… fundimentally I don’t see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say… a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that’s actually… well hostable.
It’s basically like exactly what happens out in the real world… walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors… local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down… half of owners, etc… forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.
I think the difference is that while other services boom and bust, the fediverse keeps growing slowly because it is decentralized, and can’t be enshittified in the same way.
It is not as easy or attractive as Bluesky right now, but it keeps growing slowly and getting more kinds of people.
Maybe it won’t be the network of choice for journalists, metal celebrities, etc, like twitter and bluesky, but it already is making its way as something more like old school tumblr – some people like it, some don’t.
yeah it matches that old school tumblr vibe, i like it
WHEN YOU SEE IT
Not sure which IT I’m supposed to see…
It’s a double reference to osu player Cookiezi’s two plays on Blue Zenith’s [FOUR DIMENSIONS] difficulty using HR and HDHR respectively getting 727pp in both plays with a miss right around the end, and Aireu’s reaction after getting a 727pp play
There are a lot of cool features from at protocol that activity pub should steal. The way users can pick their algorithm is game changing
Wouldn’t that work more with a client or a server software than the protocol itself? The protocol shares the posts. It’s the client and the instance which chooses what the user sees.
Idk the wizardry required to make it work its just something i think would be cool
It’s possible I’d say. The fediverse is very cool in how much choice it gives you without limiting who you interact with too much (except lemmy where you cannot follow users)
It’s doable on Mastodon but significantly more complicated.
You need crawlers to index posts across the Fediverse (and avoid getting them blocked), personalized recommendation models per user, and you need pre-emptive caching on the user’s instance for anything recommended (ideally the crawler would make a cache on behalf of each of the opted-in users’ instances, but without content addressing this is a security risk). You also need to poll for edits / deletions.
Doesn’t Mastodon already receive the posts?
On Mastodon, your instance doesn’t receive posts until somebody on your instance interacts with the account posting it (following the poster, browsing directly to the post, etc).
Feeds with recommendations requires fetching stuff in advance to not be slow and janky. Basically the feed service would need a bot account on your instance and retrieving all popular posts, given the current architecture. Having thousands of these bots across every instance do this would cause a significant performance hit on smaller Mastodon instances when one of their users posts something popular. So you need something different, like a server plugin where the bot fetches the content once and tells all participating Mastodon servers about their cached copy, so they don’t all have to hit the hosting instance. But that’s a security risk with the Mastodon design.
The tradeoffs Bluesky made to achieve that means that Bluesky doesn’t have private posts. In fact, Bluesky doesn’t have private blocks.
Private posts is planned, but it’s not trivial. Mastodon can’t exactly brag about their nonintuitive technically just not broadcasted posts, where multiple implementations keep making private messages publicly discoverable due to bugs.
What kind of implementations do you mean? The last time I heard of such a thing (a few years ago), it was fixed within a few hours, and was on a dev instance
Currently Lemmy is leaking likes via the API even if they only should be available to the user’s host and community host server
Federation requires openness and that goes badly with secrecy. You can argue that one has to trust instance owners anyway, but knowing the users and not just the tallies makes uncovering manipulation easier.
It’s doable with E2E encryption, but lots of social stuff in large groups requires coordination which is incredibly hard to with a server that has no knowledge of what the data is because it can’t index anything, etc.
How?
peergos.org
Wait. What is the relation to vote federation?
They’re implementing E2E encrypted social stuff. Voting privacy and encryption is linked.
Especially when you have users across multiple servers and both want voting privacy AND being able to deal with vote manipulation. You need stuff like pseudonymous commitments per account attested to by the hosting instance, etc. The only thing that’s simpler but still private is having instances just digitally sign a total vote tally, which also means you can’t detect vote manipulation on other servers at all.
But accounts are already pseudonymous?
Here’s where I am at:
I can check if my votes are federated correctly by checking if any of my votes are suppressed or votes in my name are made up. If my instance sends a different random token with each vote, I can still do that, as long as I know which tokens are assigned to my votes.
But vote tallies can also be manipulated by making up new votes through fake/bot accounts. If a vote can be connected to posts, this can be checked to some degree. Say, if an instance has a lot of voters that never post, that indicates a problem.
I don’t see how the second thing with E2EE.
The very very short TLDR is that anonymization is very hard, but there’s auditable cryptographic voting schemes which preserves anonymity by using anonymous cryptographic commitments and one of a bunch of different techniques to count encrypted votes (homomorphic encryption, threshold encryption, etc).
You could set it up so you know which server each set of votes comes from but not which users on the server. You could also make it prove each vote comes from one real account and that no account voted twice. You could even make use of commitments plus ZKP to prove banned accounts can’t vote!
It sounds complicated because it is complicated. And somewhat inefficient. But it’s possible. And it would be fully encrypted and anonymous voting.
How would it prove that the account is real? I suspect that the meaning of “real account” is not the opposite of bot or sockpuppet.
A discoverable non-banned account. Not from “ghost accounts”. If a server creates a massive amount of accounts to use them to vote, you can see that a small server has a disproportionate amount of registered accounts too, which probably will be otherwise inactive. Then you can reject votes from that server.
I assume it proves that there is a public key associated with each vote.
It doesn’t sound like cryptography is able to add anything worthwhile. You have to trust the instance to police itself. Self-hosted instances still don’t vote anonymously.
A group of users has to cooperate to hide their votes from others and each other. Only the tally is known, but you have to trust the group. On the Fediverse, such a group will be the users of an instance. The more users the instance has, the more anonymous the individual becomes.
You have to trust the instance admins to weed out bots and sock puppets, which is extra hard when they don’t see the votes either. Presumably, compensating by collecting and keeping other data, such as IPs, for longer is undesirable. You have to believe that admins, volunteers all, are willing to do the extra work and that they don’t actually favor manipulation for ideological reasons.
The only way to uncover untrustworthy instances is to look at aggregated data. I guess you’d have to get/scrape data for some community and then analyze by instance if the number of posters is out of whack with the number of voters. I wonder if anyone’s ever done such a thing. It’s certainly more challenging than looking at oddities among voters who brigade some topic.
Admins of large instances could get away with having many sock voters among the real users, if they wanted to manipulate discussions for, say, ideological reasons.
I do enjoy how that couch fucking fascist cunt is the most blocked person.
Im trying to get more content on a few hobby communities on lemmy. I’m not really a big poster. I love to comment. But I’m willing to go through and start trying to build some momentum.
Awesome!
It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.
Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of “Lemmy” could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.
ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀
It’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.
otoh, atproto’s PLC DID method is also not really decentralized… but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).
In the blog post you linked, neither the author or myself came to your conclusion:
The blog post also says this:
My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more “decentralized architecturally” I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.
Okay yes this makes sense. Although, honestly i think I’d prefer the AP method of doing it because BlueSky sends ALL content to all nodes, so it’s MUCH less cost effective to join with a private server.
I run my own lemmy instance, so i know the data volume since 2023 has been probably like a terabyte or so. But, with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes (a guess based almost entirely on nothing).
So it really boils down to yes I agree that AP has problems with data accessibility, but I’d prefer that over unnecessary data redundancy
I think this is a common misconception based on some critics’ incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) “A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month” for some numbers.
If I understand correctly, to run a “full nework relay” does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren’t interested in for any long period of time.
Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people’s relays.
Disclaimer: I’m not an atproto expert, and I haven’t set any of this up myself.
You can design an appview that crawls PDSes directly, no relay needed.
AppViewLite does that
You can actually do it like mastodon and only take on data from specific users or PDS. Wafrn does this.
So like when bluesky starts having to pay back their investors I can portable my identity to… one of the other equally populated blueskies out there?
Yes. That’s the idea.
A meaningless “idea”. Might as well say BlueSky has “concepts of a plan”.
There are already “other Blueskies” out there, and you can already port your identity to them.
However, most users haven’t, and most users are not motivated to do so. Thus, OP created a website.
We’re counting hypotheticals as real now? I suppose your not-hypothetical girlfriend goes to another school too, right? Just not motivated to visit?
As you’re no doubt aware, the reason 99.9% of bluesky users are on a single server is obviously not because “nobody is motivated” to create other servers.
I’m gay.
I’m sorry your credibility is at zero with me. You keep avoiding the point.
At no point in this conversation did I ever rely on my own credibility to make an argument.
More avoidance. You astroturfing?
I’m literally just a guy
ok and bluesky is literally centralized
Ok but it’s federated.
<img alt="" src="https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/aeaef3b4-1aad-4edc-a65f-815ca085e4a1.gif">
I’m just going to respond to what you said before you edited your comment to be a reaction gif.
Since (as of November of last year) a majority of Bluesky’s user base is non-technical, they have don’t have the knowledge or motivation to switch to another PDS. If 30 million users joined mastodon.social, the fediverse would also be centralized.
The only way for Bluesky to be decentralized by the metrics you use is for them to force users onto other PDSes.
No, please respond to the gif. If my grandmother had wheels, would she be a wagon?
BlueSky is centralized. Describing it as “federated” is being (intentionally, in your case) misleading.
I don’t know what the point of the gif is, so I’m not going to respond to it.
Is Matrix federated? That’s also centralized
If a grandmother had wheels would you consider her to be a wagon?
I don’t care
Leaving the door open to the idea that putting wheels onto grandmothers could make them into wagons
For those who enjoy in-depth write-ups, Christine Webber has looked at how decentralized BlueSky is really, before: social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698
Yeah, but bluesky has users.
I’m pretty happy with engagement in the Fediverse.
Exactly.
Communities are not higher quality with a million people. Small communities where you can know who the other posters are are a much better experience.
If there are other posters…
this is where there can be disagreement, specifically if someone wants help with an issue they don’t care if the person is great thunburg or x_h1tt1er42069_x they just want a solution
There can be disagreement about anything.
I’m just not wasting my time trying to have a conversation with x_h1tt1er42069_x. I can find him at anytime on Reddit if I have a problem that only he has a Solution.
Having such a person in this community wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience.
Me too I love the hate bots.
And I hate AI moderation.
We could use some of that here tbh. I take that over expenriting volunteers to do it for free forever.
So does Twitter.
I’m always shocked by the number of of BlueSky fans that show up on Lemmy. If they don’t care about centralization why are they here and not on Reddit?
Because they’ve been told it’s federated and don’t understand that it really isn’t. My bluesky profile reads “Created a profile until you all figure out Bluesky is another Twitter.”
All I use it for is to read post from people not on mastodon and to reshare my bridged posts from mastodon.
That’s funny and makes me with I didn’t delete my reddit account
Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about “not Reddit” and “not Twitter.” I’m one of those users personally (not that I don’t care about the idea, it’s good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.
If I didn’t dislike the Twitter format as much, I’d probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I’d probably be on Tumblr still if I didn’t only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn’t have such a horrible app.
People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn’t care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by “newest posts first” went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.
The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you’re into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants’ company towns.
So does Reddit but you presumably see some value in federated platforms yea?
Oh yeah sure. I’m here after all, jumped ship from Reddit a year or so ago and I actually prefer Lemmy.
I jumped ship from twitter to mastodon around the same time. And while I like the idea of mastodon and I like the interface, fact is that Reddit / lemmy is a different sort of usage from twitter / bluesky / mastodon. Twitter I mostly used to keep up with my favourite content creators, and occasionally shout at clouds. Those content creators just aren’t on mastodon, they’ve mostly moved to bluesky. Those are the users that are the foundation of a platform like that. So yeah, I use lemmy and bluesky now.
TBH I’m not sure mastodon could scale up big anyway - it would be a nightmare trying to regulate bad content and comply with local laws etc.
Are you me?
Twitter has more users.
Twitter has more bots.
Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there’s a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?
How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon? BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.
The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?
It’s the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren’t federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.
The same way you manipulate Twitter, by tweaking the algorithm.
That’s not how it works.
It only has to be compatible with Mastodon, not necessarily be an actual Mastodon instance, see Meta’s threads.net.
Capitalists love interoperability when they can use it to disrupt other capitalists. When they get in a dominant position they hate it.
It’s basic enshittification theory.
I’d like to see what the metrics for the Fediverse would look like if it included federated Threads users.