@jerry Bluesky has some interesting ideas. The interface is pleasing. As of last week they didn't have their Federation story together yet, which means it's probably too early to have a useful opinion about them.
I think that in social media, every platform should federate with every other platform. This works just fine for email. The Fediverse, most notably Mastodon, have a well-understood way to do this which is imperfect but works. Until Bluesky has such a thing, it's not interesting.
@malwaretech@jerry In my view, the fact that it’s helmed by one of Twitter’s architects is the biggest reason not to use it.
I think most of us here agree that Musk has ruined Twitter, but let’s not forget the revelation most of us had upon arrival here: Twitter wasn’t really very good in the first place. We used it in spite of all the social ills and bad habits it reinforced. It was that way because of Jack, not Musk.
@malwaretech@jerry I feel like once it takes off, it'll be the final nail in Twitter's coffin. Although I personally do have some concerns and reservations about it, especially due to the VC backing and being run by said guy who now seems to be part of some weird crypto cult.
@jerry it feels more extensible, but it's making some different trade-offs than Mastodon. It's less mature and I'm not 100% sold on all architectural decisions but I feel like it has a chance of supporting more users in terms of both numbers and in choices
@jerry if it is "versus", I have no interest at all in bluesky. If they are federated, fine, maybe it would be nice to be able to follow people who use it. But why would people want to use yet another social media platform from the same guy who founded the last one that brought it to the hellscape that it is now?
@jerry On a technical level I like that your identity on Bluesky is basically DNS: used to lookup what PDS stores your data. The use of signed data repositories and the DID standard (https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/) for account migration makes it much, much easier for users to gracefully migrate without much work on their side. Neither of these would be easy to add to ActivityPub as far as I can tell
Building in search as a first-class citizen is smart, with the concept of "server" isolated from the higher-level function of “Crawling Indexer". However a lot of the key exchange stuff places a lot of trust in the server/dns stack.
Going through the docs (https://atproto.com/docs) I think it does some things really well compared to Mastodon and has some advantages to ActivityPub, especially around user identity and portability. It does seem geared towards very large servers given how often a smaller server would be needing to make calls to get public keys (which presumably large servers would cache).
I don't think people are going to be hosting PDS on raspberry pis on their own domains. I think it's going to be primarily a small number of commercial servers. However honestly their docs are missing so much information that it's very hard to make an informed guess at this point.
Its early still. Still missing some safety features, but at the rate they're shipping things, I'd imagine that might not be too far. They do a really really really good job of keeping a lot of the technical things out of the end users face, partially because some of those don't fully exist yet (federation), although some other parts like using-a-domain-as-a-handle are tough for normal folks, and I think could use some neat tooling around them as the environment matures/grows. There's some neat underlying tech that is nice to see being used for non-cryptocurrency things too.
@jerry Bluesky is still very early, but it could go further than mastodon because if the feature choices like being able to search and move your account even if the server youre on goes offline later
@jerry The part that bums me about blue sky is that there was a perfectly good existing protocol, (activitypub) and they went “let’s just make a new one”.
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