Why I recommend against Bluesky.
(thelibre.news)
from Tea@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 18 Mar 15:19
https://programming.dev/post/27143191
from Tea@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 18 Mar 15:19
https://programming.dev/post/27143191
Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
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it’s not yet federated properly, or would not be completely, but it’s still a good player in the game for now. I’ll advocate against it if shareholders start shenanigans.
I get the mentality, but that’s the problem with enshitification. It always starts good, but once all the twitter traffic moves over, and the world becomes dependent on BlueSky the way it still is for Twitter, what do they become next?
It would be better to push people away from the closed platform and towards the actual open platform.
Edit: maybe BlueSky is open source. In such case, if they start fucking around, maybe it would be simple to fork this source code and form your own community. I think until other instances gain tractions, it is hard to consider BlueSky comparable to mastadon.
github.com/bluesky-social/social-app
That happens only when user count and platform lock in are past the point of no return. This sentence is the essence of why platforms have been allowed to do this again and again.
Its already too late for bluesky, because even if they started federating now, any other instance would be in such a minority that it would have zero sway over the wider federation if bluesky HQ went rogue.
The devs also made it clear that if ever bsky became crap, the system is made so that you could just jump over to another instance and go from there.
So far so good, but yeah I get it, the more they talk about investors, the more I’m reluctant to jump in fully.
Except they haven’t actually backed that up with a way for you to jump servers. If the central Bsky server goes down, it takes the network with it. Until they actually let other people host, it’s just meaningless posturing. Without a way for people to leave their network you are as captive there as you are on Twitter
They do let other people host; it's just that they're not going to be federated and one has to clone quite a lot of data. And there's people mirroring Bluesky's servers.
That's exactly what Bluesky was designed for: so that anyone can clone their qubibytes of data and start a new central platform anytime without any account loss (though this mechanism relies on user domain owners staying the same). You can read more at https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ from the 'Bluesky is centralized, but "credible exit" is a worthy pursuit' section on.
Is this possible to do now? If BlueSky was bought out by somebody like Trump, could he disable this feature?
BlueSky is not open source, is it? The entire premise of things like mastodon and Lemmy is that they are open source and federated at their core. Nobody can change that.
BlueSky is not federated at its core or there would be other BlueSky instances.
@danc4498 @Aatube I'm not quite sure how it's set up, but someone is trying it: https://bsky.app/profile/transrights.northsky.social/post/3lkm5ii4mo22w
Sure, but the federated aspect is not at the core of its functionality the way it is for Mastadon/Lemmy. If Elon Musk ever bought BlueSky, would he be able to shut down 3rd party instances? Or stop supporting them with security updates? Would the instances be forced to abide by whatever rules Elon says in order to stay active?
This is a hypothetical scenario, but if the answer is “yes” to any of those questions, then it is not worth the risk of moving to BlueSky. You’re just kicking the can down the road.
There is no way for Elon to come in and take over mastadon. He could buy the organization, but the software is open source he cannot ever stop that. Meaning he could never force his values onto the fediverse the way he did with Twitter.
@danc4498 agree! Just interesting to note that someone is trying a new instance. Unclear, as you say, what control they will have.
I did some digging, and it seems like BlueSky is open source. I’m not sure the process of creating an instance, or how easy it is for an instance to interact with the main instance. So maybe I take back much of what I’ve said.
The network effect makes this extremely difficult, even with the source code, it’s basically starting from scratch again.
It's not from scratch; every piece of old data is public. I've sent a link somewhere else here.
In theory I guess. But you’d need a ton of funding just to get the server power for that, and there’s no guarantee that users will switch over to your service. And if Bluesky starts turning bad then they could start blocking your instance. Also the users are much more valuable than the data. There’s lots of ways this could fail to pan out. The Fediverse is much more flexible to new instances joining.
True. There's reassurance in Bluesky plus many open-source endeavors getting that funding, though. One might look at organizations like SDF. There's millions of insane people out there like me and at least one of them has a big-enough nest egg.
There is a recent community project that focuses on federating Bluesky without the Bluesky devs’ involvement:
Free Our Feeds wants to build a social media ecosystem ‘resistant to billionaire influence’ | The Verge
This would be good. I just hope it can do so while still being a part of BlueSky (as it is today).
I mean, they will. It’s inevitable. So why bother? BlueSky also ultimately retains the final word on moderation as well.
It’s not a non-profit like Mastodon so, seems inevitable
I had a nice little profile on there until about a month ago. I didn’t delete when I saw AI spammers join. And I kept my profile even when the mods were starting to become reddit-ish. What sent me over the edge was when they announced a partnership with an AI company who said they were “just there to beef up security”. Yeah, no, not for me. Super sad, too, because Bluesky is a good idea, but I’m sticking with the fediverse.
Every time i’m amazed at how such authors are talented at avoiding mentioning Nostr 😏
You mean the Dorsey-endorsed crypto platform that has spam waves conducted against Bluesky and ActivityPub?
the speed with which you encounter your first nazi on nostr is not indicative of a system worth spending time on
Come join Mastodon where the skies are bluer and the grass is greener.
People didn’t go to Bluesky because of an informed choice based on features or security. People went to Bluesky because that’s where everyone they want to follow went.
Yup, the network effect is real.
But Bluesky does have a lot better features when it comes to actually effectively using the platform. Getting set up on Bluesky is orders of magnitude easier than Mastodon, and I do think that’s a big part of why it’s become the preferred destination recently. Mastodon had a real shot early on but didn’t make it easy enough for people.
You can convenience or security, never both. Unfortunately bluesky’s compromises towards convenience hurt it’s security measures against enshittification
Generally, yes. Strictly, no.
For me it’s the difference between something that’s usable for its purpose and something that’s not. As much as I wanted to use Mastodon and tried, it just never got off the ground. If Mastodon introduced starter packs, subscribable block lists, topic tagging and blocks, etc. I would use it in the same way I do Bluesky. But it hasn’t done that so I don’t.
I’m so tired of hearing this. Just click the mastodon.social button in the app and it’s not any different.
Wouldn’t that mean everyone is centralized on the same instance? I don’t use Mastodon so I don’t know if it’s the same as here…
Not everyone. Just those users who don’t care enough to be picky. I wish they would rotate the instances but this is better than nothing.
Sorry what do you mean? I see users posting from other instances in my mastodon app (I haven’t used it much).
Sorry, what do you mean?
Which would indicate that
is incorrect.
Idk this whole thread confuses me. I’m on est.social instance, I’m gonna assume I see everyone who hasnt excluded my instance and vice versa…
It’s a bit more complicated than that, but yes, that’s the gist of it.
I’ve been on Mastodon for two years now. I’m active and all.
And yet, to this date, I still can’t find a single person in my working field, who are located within the province of Quebec.
Bluesky? Found and added over a hundred, in mere days.
Yeah I mean you’re making my point here. More marketshare = more leverage over users.
I don’t think I do… what I explained was, Mastodon is too difficult not because of the interface, it’s because it’s too decentralized, to the point of everyone getting lost in the forest, and no one can find each other within the networks.
As for Bluesky, while it’s not the best or safest alternative, is way more convenient for networking—the raison d’être of a social network.
No one is arguing about that. None of that matters when BlueSky turns into the next Xitter. Your social network is irrelevant when you can’t even find those people in a feed full of ads for weight loss supplements and unchecked disinformation.
I know that. And I do believe Mastodon is superior tech-wise, safer and better.
But, at this moment, the people I look to reach are on Bluesky, none are on Mastodon.
Again, that is not the discussion we are having.
“Im so tired of hearing that getting set up is easier in bluesky, you can do it like this on mastodon”
“That didn’t set up my account, which includes getting a healthy following base”
…
“That’s not the discussion we are having”
I’m another person but, are you sure it isn’t? Setting up the account is not only creation, it’s all the tweaks until it’s useful for the user. If the user needs connections and searching for them is harder (due to how search works currently with federation) then setting up is indeed harder on Mastodon, which is the point the one you are responding to is reinforcing.
Not having users on the platform is not part of account set up, no.
Maybe they have more users for the same reason you’re sick of hearing how much easier it is than Mastodon: because it’s easier than Mastodon. Users didn’t spontaneously materialize on BlueSky.
Okay but…it’s not.
Not setting up an account, that’s roughly the same. Adding contacts by topic, blocking topics and people with bad agendas en masse, etc. I started my Mastodon account almost a year before Bluesky. In Bluesky I had something useful in a week. In Mastodon I still don’t (and it’s not for lack of effort).
I’m probably an idiot, but my experience was exactly the opposite. I don’t really feel like following specific users (at least for now), I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn’t figure it out on Bluesky.
I never used Twitter, and am not particularly excited about the general format, so I’m probably not the target user, but I check Mastodon occasionally, and gave up on Bluesky after like 2 days.
On Bluesky you follow starter packs which are collections of users which go to your main feed. blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
Or you follow feeds which are set up by users to track certain topics. These can be very highly customized follows of people, hashtags, keywords, crowd tagged topics, including blocks of certain stuff. These are like subreddits or Lemmy communities. blueskydirectory.com/feeds/all
Yeah, I saw those and appreciate the idea, but I didn’t like them, at least not yet. I just want to follow a few cat related tags, maybe some FOSS stuff, and some tags relevant to my local area. I just clicked through a few feeds related to each of those, but didn’t like any of the ones that came up. Each feed contains posts that seem totally irrelevant and I don’t understand why they’re included or how to tweak my feed to remove them.
For me the feeds solve a lot of problems with straight hashtags, like getting stuff that’s the wrong language, or bot spam. But I guess if you are just going for visual stuff that stuff may be easier to tolerate.
If you don’t like the feeds that are out there already, you can build your own feed. southernfriedscience.com/a-quick-and-dirty-guide-…
Thanks! I was looking for a way to build my own feed, but this is the first guide I’ve seen that seems relatively simple to follow. I agree that there’s downsides to simply following hashtags, but I’m familiar with ways to curate my feed based on hashtags, and just wanted to start with something familiar. The curated feeds are probably great for a lot of people, but just really frustrated me, as the feeds I happened to browse seemed to somehow include more “junk” than what I’ve encountered with the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon.
You can build a feed just from straight hashtags if you want, but I think combining it with crowdsourced tags, block lists, and keywords will get you better results.
BSky is just a little different, and I would argue superior, in the way discovery works. Instead of searching for hashtags for a subject (which can easily be abused) you search for feeds of the subject, which are far more useful. Then if you want, you can combine multiple feeds.
Another commenter shared a link with a guide to create a custom feed, and I definitely see how that can be better. As a new user, I was having too much trouble finding an easy way to create my own custom feed, and wasn’t happy with any of the existing feeds that I looked at… they all seemed to include more “junk” than the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon. I agree that simply following hashtags has downsides, but the logic as to why a specific post shows up in my feed is much more obvious in that case, allowing me to more easily troubleshoot and adjust my follow/block settings.
I know you’ll get blowback for this, eye rolls and such about how it’s not that hard, but I’ve been building social software for ordinary humans for almost 25 years and you are quite correct. Honestly the Mastodon PR itself was too complex. Anytime you heard about it, you heard not about what a hot social destination it is, but how cool its distributed technology model is and that shit just flies over most peoples heads and actually scares them into think it will be complex and hard. Then you prompt them to choose an instance and it’s just game over. Ordinary users have the attention span of a fruit fly.
You’re 100% right. I’m a technical person and until I started diving deep into my journey to manage my privacy better, I didn’t understand the appeal. NOW I do but to others points, when I first started looking to just leave Twitter, the people I followed were on Bluesky. I can’t find many people on mastodon.
Hell I wouldn’t even say that… they don’t understand it, they don’t care to understand it, they don’t know or care what federated means. They went there because, it’s not currently nazified twitter.
I get that it’s “technically” federated… but practically it’s for all practical purposes just a proprietary program, run by a group that isn’t currently horrific. Unfortunately everything I see in it says, it’s every bit as vulnerable, and it can be good for as long as the owners care about not becoming a nazi propoganda machine. Actual recourse from it going evil… is non existant.
Bluesky isn’t Twitter. That’s all that mattered to most people. A few influential people went there first and the network effect kicked in.
That’s a great write-up!
None of the people I follow are active on Mastodon. The selling point to me for Bluesky is that it’s essentially a Twitter clone not owned by a billionaire. It’s friendly to the communities I’m part of specifically and doesn’t have ads. What more should anyone ask for from a social media platform?
To not be corporate owned at all? Reddit used to be all those things, too. As was Digg. Until they had a critical mass of users and began trying to turn a profit.
It surly can’t avoid having ads permanently tho?
I assume they’re just burning cash rn but will eventually need to have sustainable income. Alternatively Mastodon is an actual non-profit, it doesn’t need to have the same type of income
This is why I can’t get into it. The whole twitter format just feels so unappealing to me.
Yeah, that is me too. I tried Mastodon for a bit and it just didn’t work for me. Posting something just drowns you out until you actually have a decent amount of followers, however many that may need to be.
If I post with a new account, 99% of it goes into the void. I had a few people like and boost my posts but they were still gone into oblivion within an hour or less. Not sure how that is appealing? It is like a popularity contest. Like those cliques in schools of the popular kids.
What more you should ask is precisely that it’s not owned privately. Otherwise, soon the next Elmo comes along and buys this one too.
Sure, I get that, it’s just when it eventually becomes corrupt or falls apart, everyone that moved from Twitter to Threads to Bluesky will find another platform. Nobody is going to move to Mastodon until the people they want to follow move there too.
In my three attempts to make Mastodon work for my needs in the last few years, I can’t follow NBA or NFL news, catch up on AEW wrestling or hang out with IRL friends.
The content I want/need simply isn’t there. Until it is, i don’t really care how private it is or how perfectly decentralized it is.
Bring them to Mastodon. I got family to join because it is the exclusive place that they can see updates on my life and see pics of the family. I have no qualms about not talking to most of my family though 🤷🏻♂️
That’s how it is today, that is how most of these projects start out. Google too was “do no evil” and look at what it is today, or what it’s been for the last decade.
How will bluesky be tomorrow?
Bluesky didn't have a strong of a hold on me, tried it, wasn't impressed with what was there before deleting the account. Getting too burned out on social media in general to really be invested in these kinds of platforms. The fediverse is more or less my last rodeo.
My $0.02 from extensive cryptocurrency experience:
A centralized project with a user base never becomes decentralized later. It’s always a lie to get users quickly. Centralization generally just gets worse.
I think BlueSky will keep half-assing decentralization until their owners decide that narrative is no longer necessary.