I’d like to preface this by saying that my prefrontal cortex is mostly lard and anxiety medication, so sorry if I sound stupid here.
Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?
Bluesky is a “public benefit corporation”, whereas Mastodon is proper open source if I understood correctly.
To me “public benefit corporation”, just sounds shady. Why should BlueSky be trustworthy? Because of Jack Dorsey?
I know musk turned Twitter into a bizarre fever dream hellscape, but I don’t recall it being sunshine and roses under Dorsey’s leadership either. The platform would pester me for my phone number to “prevent spam” (they really said that shit with a straight face). White supremacists openly just said awful shit. The video player was ass.
But, I’ll be optimistic. Hopefully this won’t be Twitter 2: Judgement Day. I hope it will be a good tool for whistleblowers and breaking news. Ideally, it will have a symbiotic relationship with other federated networks instead of a hostile pain in the ass.
Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?
Bluesky’s model of federation fixes the whole “if my instance goes down I lose everything”.
Your Identity and your data is portable, which means that each server on Bluesky is “merely” a service provider.
Are you saying its like the identity server model like matrix uses? Isnt that kind of model horribly complicated?
Bluesky has a much better community of artists on it. A ton of comics twitter relocated there. And that’s the content I want so I’m on Bluesky. I’ve tried to get Mastodon to serve me content I’m interested in but it just falls short for me.
In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
Also Dorsey only owns like 2% of Bluesky now iirc and had mostly cut ties with it in favor of his Nostr thing because he’s butthurt Bluesky is full of liberals.
In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
In addition to content itself there is also ease of finding it and how it’s presented. People on here tend to hate algorithms but honestly Mastodon never clicked for me because (when I checked it out) you were stuck with a chronological feed. I dabbled with it but like you I could never get it to serve me content I wanted the way I wanted. Algorithms can be dangerous yes and I don’t condone Twitter’s and Facebook’s outrage baiting, but Mastodon currently just seems to demand too much work out of me.
Agreed. I have tried 3 different servers (two niche topic and now one of the really big ones) and followed a bunch of hashtags and people and also filtered a bunch of keywords (to try to cut back on the mountains of fucking explicit furry art and similar) and for the life of me I just cannot get Mastodon to serve me good stuff consistently. It’s frankly boring as shit over there.
Yet every time I open up Bluesky, it’s tons of stuff that is relevant to me. I’ve also noticed that the few quality artist accounts I did find on Mastodon seem to favor their Bluesky accounts in terms of how frequently they post and engage with others.
I think Mastodon is a lot more appealing if you’re into Linux or dev sorta topics but for like a professional level art community, it’s terrible. Same for topics like graphic design.
Also the fediblock stuff going on throughout Mastodon doesn’t get enough discussion. There’s a cabal of chronically online, ban happy people that collude together on their provate Discord server to defederate Mastodon instances for the stupidest shit. The people who run matsodon.art are a big part of the problem and are legitimately out of their minds. Go look at their instance block list. It’s absurd. And any time you hear about instance drama on there there’s a good 50% chance they’re involved somehow.
Before I hopped onto Bluesky, I was one of those fediverse evangelists trying to get my friends onto it. Except, I couldn’t give a solid answer to the fediblock problem, and my friends definitely saw right through it or were confused about it. And I can’t blame them. They don’t want to worry about federation, or whether one instance will be blocked by the other over some drama. Meanwhile since Bluesky has been opening up more, I’ve only seen the fediverse grow more toxic towards Bluesky, to the point where it’s exhausting to be part of.
It notes that Bluesky users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join, as aspects of how your experience differs from others is in your control thanks to other features, like custom feeds and composable moderation. The latter means moderation is not tied to your server. While server operators can set rules around the content they host, communities can use blocklists and soon, independent moderation services, to introduce additional layers of moderation. That means there’s not as much pressure on server operaters to block other servers (defederate) because of the content they host, since users will have their own tools to manage their moderation preferences.
This is a nice bit of tech.
users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join
So… I guess the big brains that gave us Twitter reasoned that people randomly join communities where they don’t agree with the rules? This argument makes zero sense.
It seems like a nice way to say “Bluesky moderates everything, so we get to curate your feed!”
bluesky should abandon atproto and use activitypub
but why atproto solved several things activitypub doesn’t do (and refused to implement).
Like what? What did it solve that activitypub refused to?
And yet, bsky still lacks basic functionality that Masto had years ago.
I can’t tell if the Bluesky team is bad at business or planning some sort of eventual rug pull. They’re certainly a for-profit corporation without any evident way to generate profit, and their words and theoretical design all sound like they’re not easily compatible with profit, but multiple profit-focused entities have given them a lot of money for something that, if implemented as envisioned, will not make them any richer.
My only guess is some form of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish where the core server is better than the rest of the network, but the network exists to assuage fears about another social network implosion or protect from potential antitrust issues while not being a real threat, but it feels like a complicated way to make Twitter 2.0 and get rich.
As long as there’s a profit motive involved, enshittification seems like the expected conclusion. We could just be at step one. From Doctorow’s description of the enshittification cycle:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
they’re a public benefit llc not a for profit corporation.
Public benefit companies are for-profit, they just can’t be sued for not maximizing it.
