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.
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.
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).
And yet, bsky still lacks basic functionality that Masto had years ago.
Like what? What did it solve that activitypub refused to?
