Bluesky continues to soar
As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta's X competitor, Instagram Threads.
Even if it doesnt have much impact on activitypub-fedi, I think this is good news for the fediverse in general. X is loosing more and more relevancy and microblogging is more and more happening on federating services.
I'm having trouble figuring out how bluesky is part of the fediverse at all.
From my understanding it doesn't federate with anything.
It's like saying a hamburger is really just a cheeseburger......you just need to add cheese.
Techcrunch has basically been an ad network for companies who want to promote themselves. Other open source projects probably don't have a budget to pay for an a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶ ad spot.
So which tech adjacent publishing you recommend?
Independent or otherwise.
i personally like Ars Technica quite a bit.
I'm way too federated for this.
Great, you can host your own instance!
But control of the protocol - the definition and development - is still controlled by the for-profit company, right? It hasn't been handed over to a nonprofit governance committee, has it?
Federation or not, if Bluesky dominates the protocol, they can decide to stop federating and essentially kill the independent servers. Much like what Signal did. Sure, you can run your own Signal server, but without access to the dominant player's market, and using a protocol that's controlled monopolistically, it's practically useless to do so - which is why almost nobody does it anymore.
And you'd still have federation issues, so doesn't solve OP's problem.
Mastodon.social just went over the 2 million user mark. The switch to fediverse and fediverse adjacent is going pretty quick.
I've been on Mastodon for over a year and the content simply isn't there. Several of the people that I follow on Twitter have tried moving or duplicating to Mastodon. They've had a fraction of the visibility and engagement from commenters that they would get on Twitter. Invariably after a few months they have essentially given up on it as a primary medium. For me the discoverability is essentially non-existent, which I don't think is helped by the idea of it being based around instance-local communities, which have no meaning when you're looking at something like Twitter.
Guess it's not for you then. I'm having a blast. A lot of my friends are now in it and the last year or so have been great.
And more and more people seem to be moving.
„The content“ is there. Its just the addiction inducing, never ending dopamine that doesnt flow as freely which is great.
If you follow the topics that are most prevalent on the fedi (eg freedom, activism, technology, diversity) you will not run out unless you scroll for many hours a day, which is suggests you find yourself a hobby.
Also, the self fulfilling prophecy of „the fediverse is too small, I go to big platform“ will keep the fediverse small.
Be the change you want to see.
Blue sky leads to the same trap Twitter was. A place that will be purchased by some asshole that shits on everyone for money.
You'll be shocked to know that bluesky is open source then and PDS is well on its way to allowing you to host your own instance.
In its developer’s blog, Bluesky stressed that “guardrails” are still in place. Most significantly, users can only self-host their own accounts for now, and in the next phase, self-hosted servers will initially be limited to 10 accounts each, with rate limits on usage.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/22/24080334/bluesky-self-hosting-servers-data-federated
What is the status now?
Jack Dorsey left the board, so I'm ok with that. Good for them!
i dont like bluesky bcs its missing alot of features compared to mastodon and twitter also when you host bluesky the server you hosted you cant view bsky.social so thats why i use mastodon alongside
What features are missing compared to Mastodon?
in bluesky (also being implemented) there is no post pinning,no post editing, No account privating and thats what i remember
@Tywele videos mostly
It would be interesting to know more about the additional users. The banning of Shitter in Brazil is very much tied to internal politics and AFAIK it might be the Brazilian equivalent to MAGA that is currently mass-migrating to Bluesky.
If so, this might be a bad thing for them, as they probably don't want to get perceived as the Brazilian truth.social.
it might be the Brazilian equivalent to MAGA that is currently mass-migrating to Bluesky.
actually, the opposite. The MAGA types are doing whatever they can to continue sucking on Elon's balls. It's journos and normies who are moving to Bluesky.
I would assume that since this whole thing is more or less a result of left-ish policy, and the opponent in the scenario is the far-right platform formerly known as Twitter, lead by the aspiring far-right icon Musk, the right-wingers would more likely opt to complain, cry several rivers and eventually turn to alternatives catered specifically for them (not even sure which ones are still alive after former tweetyplace took the crown) instead.
Haven’t done a vibe check on bluesky, but I assume it almost has to be more tolerant and potentially more progressive-ish than the old nazibirdhouse. If you lean towards the far right, why choose that, if alternatives exist?
Bluesky is explicitly promoting their system as "choose your own censorship" kind of deal, which in the way it is framed could look very attractive to right-wingers looking for an alternative platform. While this is technically also true for the Fediverse, it isn't promoted as such, and rather has a reputation for the opposite, as most fedi server admins are center-left leaning.
Bluesky might be also more left-leaning right now as obviously there is little reason for right-wingers elsewhere to switch away from Shitter to another (mostly) centralised platform, but given the overall low user numbers this could switch very quickly.
I guess we will have to see how this develops over time and get some answers from Brazilians that have a deeper understanding of the current social dynamics there.
Due to the language divide it might end up as two distinct social spheres, like Fedi's Japanese bubble, but that's a best case scenario for Bluesky I guess.
Even though I still don't understand those platforms, I had a look at the site. It seems like 80+ percent of the content is from Brazil or at least in Portugese.
If you enable and check nsfw content it is also 80+ percent dicks and furry content. One of the dick posts was a self declared "15y" which I promptly reported (a day later the posts & profile seem to be gone, presumably banned, which is good). You can mute hash tags of your choice, but then 90+ percent of the feed will be muted posts or those that did not get caught because they did not use hash tags. Muted users still show up in those feeds too, you have to properly block them to hide them but that is also incredibly tedious when it is basically all that there is.
A lot of posts also seem to just be weird spam, using the same odd list of hash tags that I can't make sense of (but maybe that's just weird local online trends there). I tried looking for various topics but could only find fringe posts & accounts, worse than even here. But that again might just come down to the fact that the majority of users seem to be from Brazil, so the English content is simply lacking on all fronts. You can specify languages in your profile, but I did not notice to what purpose when it still shows you all the non English stuff.
Aside from all that I once again couldn't figure out what to do, just like on Twitter back then or on Mastodon. I suppose those platforms and their hype will remain a mystery to me. But I can't help but wonder how people from Twitter who think about switching will react to this experience though...
Brazilian MAGA = Most Bolsonaro supporters. Of course, there are some decent people who aren't 100% fanatic, but most of them would be the equivalent to those hat-wearers.
If I have mastodon, how and when can I follow Blue sky users? I read something about an adapter server or something, but I don't know what that means in a practical sense.
There is Bridgy Fed, which bridges accounts over to the other side if they follow the respective Bridgy Fed account on their platform. This is opt-ín though, so you can't just follow anyone, they need to have followed @ap.brid.gy on Bluesky. To have your interactions bridged you need to follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy.
If the account you want to follow is not bridged and you are okay with just reading their posts, you can also use a service like RSS Parrot as every Bluesky account also serves as an RSS feed.
Just an FYI for the RSS thing: if a Bluesky account is set to be viewable to logged-in users only, its RSS feed will not work. It only works if the profile is viewable publicly without logging in.
What timconspicuous said. Make sure your instance hasn't blocked bluesky as well
People will never learn, will they? You give them AP and they go for the Jack Dorsey clone. Amazing
Jack Dorsey is not involved in Bluesky anymore.
It's a for profit company founded by jack dorsey and currently led by a cryptocurrency fanatic
Is there an easy to understand explanation to the differences of the AT Protocol and ActivityPub?
iirc, atprotocol was made to bring some features of mainstream social media to the fediverse that activitypub maintainer have said they won't be adding. They explain other reasons in their faq
Many of the functions provided by a Mastodon service is split into separate services in the AT Protocol. This means there are instances that just handle an end users data, instances that just handle indexing and streaming out the amalgamated end user data being streamed to the "relay", there are instances that are just filtering the stream from the indexing relay. so basically the various backend parts are modular with the AT Protocol rather than monolithic as is assumed by the ActivityPub protocol where separation is assumed to be only between the frontend and backend of the service.
Sorry if this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but how do we know that BlueSky isn't padding their stats with internal bots? I could see this being a viable strategy to attract users and overcome the social network bootstrapping problem.
They could be, but 2M new Brazilian users after Twitter’s block there actually seems quite low and definitely credible.
I really really don't like the app
I'm not on Bluesky, what downsides are you seeing in their app?
It's ugly
