I want to join a federated network!
*federation happens*
No, not like that
We believe in open protocols and hate walled gardens!
Except our walled garden!
I feel like the people who got scared of Bluesky joining the AP fediverse don’t even actually want a fediverse. They want a bog-standard, non-federating bulletin board instead.
We want an open Federation!
But no Ferengi allowed.
I don’t understand the frustration.
It’s legal to scrape websites and this is doing it in a way that activity pub is designed to support. You can’t be mad another instance is reading your data, that’s what the fediverse is.
I think people will end up finding bridgy annoying frankly, but it seems like a useful tool that takes federated content and lets websites build things that used to be only available by adding Facebook pixel and Twitter links to your site.
Going out on a limb, but the for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset. I personally would block such a service as I don’t see these for-profit corporations as part of the fediverse, but as leeches out to Extend, Embrace, Extinguish.
but open data is an objectively good thing. This means anyone can suck up the data and build something instead of just Meta and X and people who pay millions of dollars to access that. Let everyone suck!
Open yes, but Bluesky is not open, they are after free content to make the corporate investors a return at all costs. If a non-profit wants to use my server to add content to their platform, I have no issue with that. But a for-profit can pay me for content if they want it, I don’t work for them or use their platform.
Open data as in publicly accessible without a login gate. Bluesky though does have this stupid login wall option but it can be bypassed very easily so it’s still open.
I do agree with you about how Bluesky is still a for-profit American corporation and nothing free or selfless ever came from one so it shouldn’t be trusted implicitly.
This argument makes no sense. Everything you post is already public.
The same argument could be used for copyright itself, and why we have non-commercial licenses for things. Just because you are giving something away as free (as in beer), doesn’t mean that some for-profit should be able to just use it to drive up their user base and make the corp more money. I think content creators, or at the very least in the fediverse - server owners, should be able to limit what corporations can suck up to further corporate profits at the expense of the fediverse.
If you want to run a server and donate your resources to make a for-profit corp money, that is your right, but to tell everyone that they should have no control of their content is unacceptable to me.
You can’t stop them from sucking up your data as long as your posts are public.
Even if it was made illegal, how would you even know they’re doing it? It’s not like these companies are afraid of breaking the law, they’ll just get a small fine if they get caught anyway.
Mainstream social media sites and apps collect an extreme amount of data for the companies running them. For this reason, you are already far better off using alternative like Lemmy or Mastodon. But don’t be delusional, you can’t expect privacy when you make public posts.
I don’t disagree that it would be a good thing if you could limit what these corps can suck up, it just doesn’t really seem possible.
I don’t think the argument is even about privacy, but giving away someone else’s (or in this case potentially a whole network of people’s content), and admins resources in order to drive some corporate profits they aren’t even getting a share of. If someone needs to chat with someone on Bluesky that bad then they should just make an account, not undermine a whole network so they can be lazy.
Following that logic, if someone on Lemmy needs to chat with someone on Mastodon that bad they should just make an account.
Calling someone lazy for building and running a service which bridges between different protocols is both dumb and rude.
Mastodon is part of the fediverse though, and is open and a nonprofit. Bluesky is neither of those things, and that is why it’s different.
And giving the resources from a free and open network to a for-profit corporation is both dumb and rude IMHO.
profit corporation being able to suck up your posts
anyone can spin up a server and federate, anyone can suck up your data, corporations, governments or unknowns
Yes, but consuming data and using someone else’s data for profit are 2 different things. Don’t believe me, start reposting a large news websites data verbatim with AdSense on it and see how quickly the cease and desist comes.
I can absolutely understand that sentiment, but that’s not quite how the bridge works.
I’ve chosen to put my content on mastodon, and my friend prefers bluesky. The bridge just shares content across so now we can interact.
I think that’s better than mastodon and bluesky each cutting off their bosses to spite their own faces. Fragmenting the between is why X didn’t die a much deserved death after Elon Musk bought it.
Tbh X is not the real enemy here imo. The bigger danger is losing the open protocol battle to something proprietary and both Meta and Bluesky are very shady with their intentions.
Tbh X is not the real enemy here imo.
Eh, X and Musk are always the enemy. I get what you’re saying, but ultimately it’s important to keep in mind that the underlying impetus is still Musk being a far-right bigot that has bought X to explicitly make it a haven for fascists, bigots and haters.
I kind of agree, Meta’s take of pulling content but no contributing back is clearly bad for the platform, but I don’t see Bluesky as being shady, though I haven’t followed what they do.
I thought the whole point of federation was the open standard allows anyone to be on the same standing as the larger corporations, so from that perspective I think it only works if you also allow large companies to participate.
Bluesky is a for-profit company. There’s zero precedence of a for-profit developing an open protocol AFAIK. I’d love to be proven wrong but I’m not optimistic to say the least.
I’m sure there are, a lot of the internet developed that way.
TBH I don’t know much about Bluesky, except that it’s a Twitter one with it’s own federation protocol, and I don’t get what the value of any project adopting their protocol over activity pub is.
If we’re allowed to - and happily do - copy over content from for-profit websites with bots, it feels a bit weird to then get angry about that happening in reverse, no?
Plus, oh no, interoperability. We get to just interact with people instead of everyone sitting in their respective walled gardens.
If we’re allowed to - and happily do - copy over content from for-profit websites with bots, it feels a bit weird to then get angry about that happening in reverse, no?
Not at all. It’s a matter of asynchronous power play.
We can do the former as a fight against power, but we have to fight for it. When they do it to us, it’s “just business” and we have no defense.
Plenty of for-profit companies use open protocols and don’t harm them in the slightest.
Almost any website you visit, for example.
for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset
They can already do that without a bridge. And it doesn’t “suck up your posts”. It works just like any other instance. They have to search for you and follow you. Then they receive posts going forward, but they won’t get historical posts.
I personally would block such a service
Good! You can do that and that is a perfectly reasonable solution. That’s part of what has ppl upset on the other side of this argument. All of this arguing and vitriol is happening over a service that you can block like any other fediverse actor.
What has people upset is that the “service” is opt-out instead of opt-in, and one someone else is making for server admins without warning. If this person wanted to run a server and give their own content to the corporate overlords that is their choice, but making something to give others content away without their consent doesn’t sit well with a lot of people.
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The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?
It seems to me that anything that’s being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don’t want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don’t post publicly.
I guess I just assume that everything I’m posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there’s no way to ensure it’s not. It’s ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there’s a conflict between the protocol and the culture.
I think it’s about usage rights. People are fine with their post being on their chosen end of the fediverse forever but don’t want corporations and news sites to generate a profit by using the posts. That is independent of federation, federation just makes it easier.
joins decentralized social network
complains about posts being decentralized and shared around the network
Bro some instances block other instances because those other instances don’t block all the instances the first instance is blocking
there are understandable concerns: most fediverse server software will respect “delete” requests of one form or another. if i signed up expecting that servers would at least try to delete content, and then i found out my content was being scraped and cached somewhere else that has no intent of respecting the delete requests, that would irk me. i also just dislike reposter bots in general, since it commonly seems like it’s spam, with no interaction from the original poster anyway.
I joined a network run by nerdy trans girls not Jack fucking Dorsey
my timeline on bsky is like entirely trans girls and it’s great :3
Bluesky just had to go and make their own federation protocol when ActivityPub was standardized years ago for federation.
i mean they literally used at proto because it did things that activitypub didn’t do and refused to do.
Remember even large corporations standardising on truly open protocols can be reversed after whatever the situation leading up to it is resolved.
I just remember Jabber/XMPP federation which included Google. Once Google decided they got big enough, they abandoned it. Of course nothing happened to the protocol itself, it is well and alive both on Fortune 500 and selected as official choice for presence protocol on internet2.edu
I am from Mastodon / ActivityPub bubble. Can someone explain me the benefits of Bluesky / AT protocol?
From their website:
Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user’s previous data.
Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).
https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub
Sounds fair to me, although I am also not using either Mastodon or Bluesky.
Yes these are certainly words
ELI5:
In the Fediverse your account and identity is linked to a domain (e.g. you are @someone@domain.com), and you can’t move that account somewhere else. You can’t even change the domain of a server, because all the accounts on that server would be known by a different domain and be treated as separate new identifies. In Bluesky your identity is basically a random number, it’s shown in the URL of a profile page for example. You can link that to a domain temporarily and get a nice user handle, but you can always move to another domain later. That means you can migrate between servers and keep all your friends and followers, something that’s currently not possible in the Fediverse.
The thing about schemas is a technical detail, not really any consequences for users. Then there is a different format for user handles, so the Bluesky people don’t like the double @ signs for those.
The last thing is about how you don’t just pick one server/instance in Bluesky, instead you can pick different servers for different things. One server hosts your account, but a few others can fill and sort your news feed, block spam for you or let you search through content. It’s supposed to create an open ecosystem for these services, and allow you to keep your account on a server that offers none of these by itself, e.g. a small home server. Of course there is nothing like that in the Fediverse, you pick a service and a server, and that’s it.
I have to say Bluesky looks extremely interesting from a technical perspective, there’s just the fact that it’s completely dominated by the official server right now. People can create their own servers though, so we’ll have to see how it evolves.
you can’t move that account somewhere else.
That means you can migrate between servers and keep all your friends and followers, something that’s currently not possible in the Fediverse.
It absolutely is possible to move accounts between instances on the fediverse. I’ve done it multiple times.
It does have some quirks tho. Posts aren’t migrated to your new account. (Some fedi software lets you migrate posts, but from what I hear it’s kinda jank).
It’s not seamless, but the option is there, and you won’t lose any friends or followers (unless they’re defederated or something)
Bluesky accounts seem like they’ll be more portable than fediverse accounts but I don’t know much about it
You’re not really moving your account - you’re just migrating your followers over to the new one. If people try to reach you at the old handle they won’t get through, like a dead email address.
That said, I don’t really think this is such a big problem. The reason the AT protocol was invented is because they wanted to do their own thing rather than adhering to standards.
I think I would be very interested in this version of doing things. Would it be feasible to build a link aggregator on that protocol? I don’t like the microblogging UX.
rn not much. In the future there’ll be properly portable accounts using cryptographic keys and once federation kicks in lighter servers making it probably more distributed.
So nothing to keep an eye on considering an overwhelming amount of cons of Bluesky.
Exactly
It’s not even a fight. Bluesky lost a long long time ago when they launched an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX and have done absolutely nothing to address this other than add curated feeds which barely work in the first place. Bluesky is so far behind that calling it a fight is just silly.
“Lost”. its still growing, gaining more features, and more users. Its a growing protocol thats in its infancy while activitypub is 6+ years old. Theres such a weird elitism coming from mastodon/activitypub people like can we chill and improve activitypub instead of constantly trying to shit on the atProtocol?
Hmm atprotocol has 1 server and 1 product. How is it competing with other decentralized protocols by not having anything to show? All I’m saying that it’s not a real competition yet especially since Bluesky is literally just the worst parts of Twitter without anything done to address the same toxic shit that came out of the original.
Its barely been around. How many services did activitypub have the first year? Atprotocol already has tools twitter didnt have to combat the bad shit. The block tool is way more powerful and theres block lists, theres custom feeds instead of toxic for you page that pushes ads and inflammatory posts.
You just can’t compare these two directly - ActivityPub which is a W3C backed non-profit free protocol and software collection to Bluesky which is a single for profit american product with some open source components that could be decentralized. But even if you do, it’s still underperforming despite being found directly to leech of users of an existing failing product (it’s even the same founder lol).
Again, you can like Bluesky and atprotocol but to say it’s on even remotely equal footing either in ideological or real sense to be “fighting activititypub” is just laughable any way you look at it.
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Well, 1 effective server. I would sure hope it actually runs on more than 1 for redundancy/latency reasons.
The server isnt effective by itself. Marketing and money to pay developers is. In comparison to mastodons completely open source approach, the proprietary bluesky software is a step back to the old ways. Its a public benefit llc which I can appreciate but it feels like someone wanted to show people that proprietary is always better. I‘m not a fan.
Bluesky lost? I’m all for corporate social media losing, but I think Bluesky has a bigger chance than Mastodon to become as big as Twitter at its peak, because of the money behind it. At least for the short/medium term. Long term, when Bluesky inevitably also falls due to enshittification or what not, Mastodon might win, unless it has splintered into a bunch of defederated clusters of drama at that point.
Personally I’ll never join another corporate social media platform ever again. But I’m in a miniscule minority.
I‘m in this minuscule minority with you. Fuck corpos.
There are many of us!
amen!
Yeah I was about to say, I could see an argument for Mastodon having lost (it’s momentum, which is the only thing it truly has going for it), but Bluesky? ~every podcaster I follow now advertises they’re on bluesky instead of twitter, and most youtubers link to their bluesky, too. At least in the US it seems to have gotten decently popular tbh.
OTOH, we have the BBC and Flipboard being all-in on Mastodon, granted. Which is going to be fun when people get around to defederating them considering how it went for Threads.
How would Bluesky be falling to enshittification if it can be federated just like Mastodon?
Everyone always says Mastodon can’t be ruined this way because you can always move to another Mastodon instance. Wouldn’t that also be the case for Bluesky, once federation kicks off?
There’s a for profit corporation behind it and they have investors. They’ll find a way when they decide they need ROI and increase profits. They still haven’t even disclosed how they’ll monetize the platform afaik so they’re just living off of investor capital thus far. First step of enshittification is when they monetize the platform. How it works when federated depends on how it’s designed (I have no idea), but what happens to the network if Bluesky Social PBC goes under?
The issue, at least for me, is proprietary software. The protocol is open and the company seems to be non profit, both big plusses, but there is no reason whatsoever to make the software proprietary imo. Federation (depending with whom) is only good if one can use non proprietary software, otherwise they control you again.
But the AT Protocol is open, isn’t it? Anyone can go ahead and create non proprietary software that lives on this protocol.
I understand your concerns regarding Bluesky specifically being proprietary, but as soon as someone creates an open source atproto server, you will be able to interact with Bluesky users without using proprietary software. It will require Bluesky to federate with instances using such software of course.
I agree that this would be a solution. Bluesky adding a bridge for ap would be 100.000 times easier though.
Why would anyone start anew? We have similar platforms already. One big downside is that someone buying into at protocol would need to start anew and bluesky is already so big that any instance needs to submit to their rule or wither.
Edit: any new instance would have to submit to their rule.
an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX
And yet, they have the one thing that matters: the users.
Are these users in the room with us? Because having 5m users for a centralized social network is laughable.
Bluesky so far had zero impact on pop culture especially outside of the US. It’s just trolling, bullying and though vomit that got exported from Twitter.
Hi, yes, I’m here. The user. Of both, in fact.
Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren’t relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.
Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the “fediverse”.
Social networks are absolutely our friends.
Like it or not but it’s a part of our society that is here to stay. To imagine a world where we suddenly abandon social networks is just delusional.
Also this might be an unpopular opinion but social networks are net good for the society despite the problems they’ve cause they’ve helped us solve many more.
I can be friends with a social network if I know my admin and I’m in a small instance. That’s the power of federation.
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You know mastodon is 50M++ right?
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When Twitter was bought by Musk I rushed to create myself a Mastodon. My hope was that most of the interesting, thoughtful people I followed on Twitter would eventually end up on Mastodon as Musk slowly ruined the platform. I kept my Twitter up just to keep tabs on them and grab their Mastodon handles as they shared them.
In the end, around half of them created Mastodon accounts that I follow to this day. All of them are inactive now.
At the same time I noticed more and more of them creating BS accounts. I think around 80% of them ended up in it. They’re still quite active in BS to this day.
I open Mastodon and BS once daily. Former rarely has new posts, latter always has.
I really wanted all of them on Mastodon. I don’t trust a corpo like BS. But the particular type of crowd I followed on Twitter (progressive essayists/humanities people, game journalists, artists, non-dev hobbyists, etc) seems to have mostly gone to BS, stayed on Twitter, gone to Cohost or back to Tumblr, or abandoned social media. I did find some interesting people active on Mastodon, mostly accesibility advocates, a couple of devs of games I loved and a few non brainrotten IT people. But the level of activity from my spheres of interest seems much higher on BS right now sadly.
I feel like its completely the opposite. Bluesky is just whining and screaming into the void while Mastodon feels like real stuff is actually happening. There are actually working feeds and a news section.
Bluesky has no hashtags or discovery mechanism other than the broken feeds that nobody knows how they work while on mastodon you can literally subscribe to hashtags like you’d subscribe to a community on lemmy. It’s not even remotely close.
Mastodon only got bad rap because it started of decentralized and people are just too dumb for that apparently.
I don’t like bluesky because I don’t like it’s owner. I don’t like the owner because he thinks everyone is dumb and forgot the fact that nobody pointed a gun on his face to sell Twitter to some Arab dictators.
pretty sure those are the noisy minority. afterall more content drives more people. artificial walls wont benefit anyone…
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
- On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
- On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can’t stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated “public squares” according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn’t blocked you).
- On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it’s not, so this doesn’t happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it’s clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
- Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.
Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
Have they by now come up with a way to moderate things?
Read the first bullet point:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
Ok, but can they also delete it once its through? Either all incoming messages are checked beforehand and are filtered by the admin, which is even worse of the bad censorship in the Fediverse nostr fans keep crying about, or its passed through and the user has to deal with toxic content. I’m not sure how that should work. The moderation has to happen somewhere, it sounds like nostr is heaving that onto the user.
Usually, if people say “its the best from both worlds” actually means “there is a tradeoff, but I like this adjustment of the tradeoff more”. If you want less “censorship”, which is ok, you use nostr, but have to live with a worse moderation situation.
A relay admin controls what goes through their relay. A user controls who they follow and who follows them. If you want, you can just auto-ignore all DMs directed to you by people who aren’t in your follow list. Also remember that your DMs have to come through a relay, presumably you are connected to relays you trust the moderation policy of, so toxic users can’t use those relays to DM you.
Then if its filtered - why is it better against cencorship?
Because you can choose which relays to connect to and you typically connect to multiple relays. This is all seamless. On Mastodon/fedi, an instance controls your entire view of the fediverse unless you make a separate account elsewhere and check it separately. You can’t follow or be followed by users or instances they block even if you want to. They also control your identity, since it’s tied to a relay/instance. If your relay shuts down or your account gets banned, you have to make a new account elsewhere, re-follow everybody, get everybody to re-follow you, etc. It’s a mess.
On nostr, instance/relay admins only control that goes through their specific relay. Relay admins can, of course, share common blocklists if they want for anti-spam or anti-abuse purposes. If you want to follow somebody blocked by a relay, you are connected to other relays and the signal can flow through there. You don’t need to check multiple relays separately. If your relay closes, you don’t lose your account/identity.
Ok, now I get it. It’s an interesting concept. However, I think usability is a trade-off here and that means limited scalability. The average user wants to join a server and that’s it. I continue to place my bet on the federated concept ;)
Well the part of cryptobros is a tradeoff for me.
And if we talk about on the crypto currency, i prefer the libre currency which is closer from libre/free software and very different from bitcoin.
On Lemmy, users are encouraged to use Matrix. A crypted chat.
nostr sounds interesting, any good android clients for nostr?
I recommend Amethyst which has all of the core features and very natural UX (similar to mastodon apps like Megalodon)
Literally backed by Jack Dorsey and crypto bullshit. Fuck off.
The concept is nice, problem is there are too many cryptobros.
People care about Bluesky? Like at all? Interesting.
I think not wanting to federate/bridge with Bluesky is a very bad idea. The entire idea is that we should get a Fediverse that is as connected as possible, not split up into many tiny subsets of users.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.
Barrett planned to make the bridge opt-out by default, meaning that public Mastodon posts could show up on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa.
In what one Bluesky user called “the funniest github issue page i have ever seen,” there was a heated debate over the opt-out default, which — like any good internet argument — included unfounded legal threats and devolved into bizarre personal attacks.
As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it’s not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy.
The ideological issues around Bridgy Fed are likely to continue stoking tension across these federated social networks as they increase their connection points.
“I am thinking and feeling deeply that however content moderation works on either side of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa,” Barrett said.
The original article contains 1,176 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
If this dev won’t do it, another will in a proprietary fashion. These people have too much time on their hands.
From what I saw, fedi people were mostly freaking the fuck out while most of the Bluesky users were just making fun of the whole ordeal.
I for one, welcome the presence of bluesky.
