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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
It’s just as scalable as fedi, I’d say it’s even more scalable since relays don’t need to communicate with each other, which reduces the cost to run a relay. The average user experience is basically identical. They download an app, it connects to a set of default relays (or they can choose some manually if they want), they tweet.
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.
The quotes were my indication that I don’t personally find it confusing, but a lot of people obviously do or it wouldn’t have that perception.
People just have different ideas about what the experience should be
If they have different ideas, it’s because they are confused about how it works. There’s only 1 way it’s ever going to work. There’s no debate to be had. No one gets to control the Fediverse, and no one needs permission to join it. That is inherent in it’s fundamental design.
No they’re not confused. I’ve seen a lot of these discussions on Mastodon. They don’t misunderstand the tech, they’re actively trying to curate a community.
Exactly. There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent (the multiple battles about consent-based search), but relatively few people are confused about whether bad actors will use it without consent.
Yeah the people throwing up their hands about ppl not understanding the tech are raging at a strawman. It’s also a BS argument that acceptable behaviour is only what the tech allows.
There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent
Wouldn’t this better be served by implementing per-post licensing, rather than mixing federation into it? After all, most of the real issue is people not accepting the fact that, regardless of federation, bad actors can do bad things with their content. Federation is not gonna change that, but at least licensing posts would allow you a legal avenue to pursue, which currently doesn’t seem to exist.
If they’re afraid of that, they joined the Fedi with a fundamental misunderstanding of how its supposed to work.
Yeah I was about to say, sure this isn’t ActivityPub, but the specific implementation of the federation should be an impolementation detail the user should never care about. You joined a federated system. Your content gets federated. Period. Whether said federation happens through ActivityPub, AT, some bridge system or the Binford Content Disperser 5000XL+, that’s really not the point of any discussions so long as the content does get federated.
The same exact people will whine about how Bluesky should have been using ActivityPub in one second, and bitch about how they don't want their content bridged over there in the next. It's almost as if they haven't thought this through.
Of course anyone is free to join an instance that blocks the bridge - that's part of the beauty of the whole system.
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.
Jack Dorsey doesn’t “own” Blusky, he just gave them grant money in the beginning to kick things off, and is one of the board members.
“Prior to the seed round, Bluesky’s website described the company as a Public Benefit LLC owned by CEO Jay Graber and other Bluesky employees. Post-seed round, the company describes itself as a public-benefit C Corp.”
This is what so called open ai does. It isn’t open even in the sense of open group Unix. I just feel pity for American tax payers as elections are near. Both of these people have significant say in US/World politics.
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
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.
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).
In the Fediverse your account and identity is linked to a domain (e.g. you are @someone), 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.
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.
Yes, that’s basically what those schemas are about. You can create different schemas for different kinds of posts and content structures, so something like Lemmy should be possible. The Fediverse has something similar as well, but the way you introduce new schemas is different between the two as far as I understand it. In the former you’ll have to adapt some features of the underlying ActivityPub protocol to your new usecase, or work with others towards extending the protocol. The later allows you to just declare and describe your new structure in a machine-readable way, and others can then choose to support it. So Bluesky is more flexible and open in that regard, but could also end up more fragmented.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
“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.
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 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.
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