cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17686207
It’s a very long post, but a lot of it is a detailed discussion of terminology in the appendix – no need to read that unless you’re into definitional struggles.
So, I find people talking about blue sky confusing; if I search for a bluesky user to follow via Mastodon, I don’t see them come up. Does that just mean my server isn’t federated with them? I’m on mastodon.online, which I think is one of the biggest instances.
It’d be cool if I could actually interact with blue sky but it’s really not clear to me how it works if I don’t have a blue sky account and am interacting externally
There isn’t direct federation between Mastodon and Bluesky; instead, Bridgy Fed connects them - https://fed.brid.gy/docs#fediverse-get-started
Gotcha. I understand why they chose to do it that way, but I do kinda wish it was possible to just follow someone
Thank you very much for the link/explanation!
Yeah, it’s somewhat useful but certainly not a great solution. It’s great that they went the opt-in route, but there aren’t any good existing frameworks for how to do it, so they had to roll their own. There’s certainly room for improvement, it would be great if either Bluesky or the Social Web Foundation (or both) or somebody else invested in it, but hard to know if and when thta’ll happen.
I’m squarely in the AT protocol is not the Fediverse camp. Fine if people want to enjoy Bluesky, but the Fediverse is built on top of the W3C protocol ActivityPub. AT is incompatible. Cool that there’s a bridge, but a bridge between incompatible protocols will always be a bit of a hack in my book.
You’re not the only one who sees it that way. Historically the Fediverse was always multi-protocol but some people don’t think it shojld be today. I talked about this view some in https://privacy.thenexus.today/is-bluesky-part-of-todays-fediverse/
“Anyhow, if Evan and Eugen and SWF and fediverse.party want to choose a definition of Fediverse where history stopped with Mastodon’s 2017 adoption of ActivityPub, erases earlier Fediverse history, and ties the Fediverse’s success to a protocol that has major issues … they can do that. “The Fediverse” means different things to different people. It’s still worth asking why they choose that definition.”
You seem to be incorrectly stating what is on Wikipedia, which leads:
The fediverse (commonly shortened to fedi)[1][2][3] is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol.
That last bit is absolutely key: a collection of services using a common protocol. Imagine if two different email servers didn’t both speak SMTP. Imagine if two different web services didn’t both speak HTTP. The Internet as a singular entity is only made possible because of protocol interop between all of its constituent parts.
To say “the fediverse” is comprised of multiple incompatible protocols goes against that grain, and to go back to pre-ActivityPub-as-W3C-specification days as an argument that it’s fine to label multiple incompatible protocols as all being components of “the fediverse” is a stretch.
To me, this isn’t a let’s-agree-to-disagree-issue, honestly. While the term “fediverse” is arguably colloquial and doesn’t necessarily imply any specific technical attributes, it ceases to be useful as a term if Fediverse Platform A cannot in any way communicate with Fediverse Platform B because the two platforms happen to be using 100% incompatible protocols. Aside from a third-party bridge, the AT protocol used by Bluesky is 100% incompatible with ActivityPub used by Mastodon, Threads, and others. Therefore, they cannot both be simultaneously services in the fediverse.
For what it’s worth, the guy who mostly maintains the Wikipedia page agrees with you. And yet even so, at least for now, the Wikipedia page states “The majority of fediverse platforms … create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol” – which pretty clearly implies that not all fediverse platforms use the ActivityPub protocol.
Anyhow whether or not you agree to disagree … we disagree. Time will tell how broad usage of the term evolves. In the original article I pointed to examples of TechCrunch and Mike Masnick using the term in the broader sense, but maybe those will turn out to be points off the curve. We shall see!
Getting the BTS fanbase to switch platforms is huge and can essentially get you millions of users in an instant. I wish Mastodon was in the picture though.
I think, possibly like many others, since BlueSky came from the creator of Twitter, I do not trust it. At the moment, I don’t even think there’s anything anybody can say about it that would make me want to even test it. It just feels tainted.
Also, what is BlueSky promising? A new Twitter? The fediverse is making so much more possible: new Twitter(s), new Youtube, new Instagram, new Reddit, and it’s even being put into Wordpress, maybe even Tumblr, and who knows what else. How does BlueSky fit into that puzzle?
I don’t trust it because there’s no believable plan to make it commercially viable, so it’s just going to end up defunct or enshittified. Mastodon is up front, it’s a volunteer service that you can either pay for or roll the dice on the instance staying up. And there’s a built-in way to move on when one goes down.
BlueSky is a B-corp, which theoretically means they can say their mission takes priority if sued by an investor in court, but doesn’t in any way require them to make it the primary goal, and the reality of funding and money and investors means that’s almost certainly not going to happen.
Dorsey’s not involved in Bluesky any more but I agree that there are lots of reasons not to trust them (including Dorsey’s original involvement).
Bluesky’s currently a much better Twitter alternative than Mastodon but I totally agree, there’s a lot more to social networking than that. I talk about ways I see Bulesky as complementary to the ActivityPub section in the last section, “It’s the end of the Fediverse as we know it – and I feel fine”
Can I ask why you say Mastodon isn’t a good twitter alternative and maybe what it could do to improve? Sorry if I missed that part in the article
You didn’t miss it, I didn’t go into detail on it in the article … one big reason is that because of how ActivityPub works you only see a fragment of the overall conversation (instead of everything). If you’re on a big well-connected instance like mastodon.social you see more of it but still not all; if you’re on a smaller not-so-well-connected instance you miss most of it. This comes in conversations (the “missing replies” problem), with search, and with hashtags.
Another reason is that Twitter’s got a lot of journalists, activists and organizers, politicians, government agencies, athletes, etc … and Mastodon for the most part doesn’t. That’s not a technical issue, but for most people, following one or more of those groups is something they’re used to from Twitter, so Mastodon doesn’t fill the same role.
Again, there’s plenty of stuff Mastodon is good at! And Twitter clones replicate Twitter’s problems as well as what people like about it. But for people who are sick of Twitter and want a similar experience elsewhere (as opposed to trying something different), they’re more likely to get what they want on Bluesky (and in many cases even Threads, especially if they already have an Instagram account and don’t want to see political stuff) than Mastodon.
Just a small Portuguese correction: “Bem vendos aos fediverses” should be “Bem-vindos aos fediversos!”.
