Bluesky users five years from now

Context:

23 comments

Fediverse needs to get shiny and intuitive. This "just open the source code and change a few variables" github energy isn't good enough for a big boy platform.
Which probably means more people need to be working on it, because I'm certain the people who have made the functional thing we have now have their hands full maintaining it and making iterative improvements.
- Which probably means more people need to be working on it, because I’m certain the people who have made the functional thing we have now have their hands full maintaining it and making iterative improvements.
  There's enough funds to keep a couple of Lemmy devs beavering away on it and some grants to add specific features but that isn't going to lead to the rapid addition of features you get by throwing VC cash at hiring engineers. However, someone is going to want something in return for all that money and down that road enshittification lies. The rate of progress on the Fediverse is slower but it is sustainable.
- This "just open the source code and change a few variables" github energy isn't good enough for a big boy platform.
  Honest question, who is doing this? All android apps I've used have been completely fine and usable out of the box, and you can just go to your instance web address on your computer. Are you on some ancient alpha version of a client that hasn't been maintained?
  
  Seriously. I downloaded Lemmy connect when Reddit is fun shut down and have used it exactly the same. Setting up an account was the same. The UI is so similar I can't remember the difference. People choose to get in the weeds with the platform and don't realise that it isn't necessary at all.
- For the last year I've been thinking both Lemmy and Mastodon need a good hard UI/UX polish. But it seems that quite a few want a plain html bullet list for their feed and lose their mind over change. 🤷‍♂️
  
  As long as you give people choice you don't have to worry about change.
  Look at Reddit. If they hadn't killed the API myself and many others would still be there. I used Reddit is Fun for 10+ years. Reddit made hundreds of changes, many of them stupid, but I didn't care because no matter how many changes they made I could choose to ignore them and use the exact same client/UI I had been using.
  Also Lemmy and Mastodon have plenty of good UIs in the form of apps. If you want to change the default UI I say go for it, just provide the old one. If you don't want to maintain the old one, don't. Just give folks to the option to maintain it.
  
  Lemmy will get a new UI soon™, something much more modern using DaisyUI.

Not that this is all "Bluesky bad, Fediverse good" as a lot of the Fediverse may not be ready for primetime and that's OK, at least for us early adopters who are not overly concerned with the services being rough around the edges and/or lacking in key features.
An interesting reply to the thread by Dave Troy gives a more nuanced overview:
I still see Bluesky as a useful short-term Twitter alternative (Meta and Threads are already doing all the things that Bluesky is likely do in the future, it's a lot easier to get up and going on Bluesky than Mastodon, and Blacksky is the only thing I know of in the decentralized world that's a good path for Black Twitter. Still, even without all the important points you make, and the "we don't have to ban Alex Jones" factor , they're a venture-funded startup, so once they need to monetize they're very likely to turn to an exploitative business model. So while it's situationally useful, it's not a promising long-term base.
And later they say:
Right now, Bluesky is a much better place for Twitter-like progressive organizing and activism than anything else in the fediverse. And it's still contested ground; Jay and the other founders still have the balance of power (not the VC), and it's not yet clear that they'll fully side with fascists -- and even if they do, the broader ecosystem may well split to at least some extent, and there will be a "free ATmossphere" as well as the "free fediverse" that @ophiocephalic and others (includingn me!) talk about. So building a presence there is a reasonable thing to do,.
Still also there's a lot more to organizing on social networks than Twitter alternatives, and that' plays to the fediverse's strengths. So it's all the more critical to address the fediverse's weaknesses so that there's another organizing and activism platform, both to support the battle on Bluesky and as an alternative power base.
- all platforms with investors behind it enshitify in the worse ways possible a la reddit, facebook, etc.
- a lot of the Fediverse may not be ready for primetime ... lacking in key features
  Such as?
  
  Signing up is not very intuitive. My first account was on .ml and didn’t know wtf they were about
  
  I'm sure there's a big list somewhere but a couple of quick ones from:
  I've run web forums almost as long as they've been around and the Mod and Admin tools are skimpy even compared to clunky early ones. The AutoMods give us more tools but one key missing one is just being able to move a post to another community.
  Lemmy also doesn't allow you to move your account to another instance.
  A lot of reasons people give for going with Bluesky is the features it has. This is more a criticism of Mastodon and the *key forks have a lot more available, but Mastodon is the Fediverse's big beast.
  
  GDPR ownership of your data and the ability to have your data erased

Thoughts on their protocol vs ActivityPub? ActivityPub seems to have inherent issues with scaling and authentication whereas Bluesky’s at:// protocol seems pretty robust at first glance.
- Afaik from some folks who claim to have dug through the protocol: the protocol is needlessly complex with some very important parts of the network very unlikely to be decentralized (I think that was called relays) as it requires massive computing ressources.
  The benefits of ActivityPub is that it is really really simple (basically just standardized json). Yes it has scaling issues, but those are solvable and partly just a sideeffect of actually being federated
  
  What kind of scaling issues does the fediverse have? Is it due to instances needing to communicate with all federated peers?
  
  Both approaches have a load the world problem.