Bridgy Fed’s Bluesky integration is now in beta, and makes it possible to connect your account from the Fediverse to Bluesky, and vice versa.
There’s still some quirks, and every bridged account has to opt in to it, but it’s a promising moment for people that want to communicate across networks.
It’s not ideal but it is in place to accept the normie Twitter refugees as Twitter turns into an alt-right propaganda platform run by a shitty AI that promotes false stories.
It’s a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.
I definitely wish they would’ve extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.
No. With ActivityPub, it’s totally decentralized. There’s no central authority whatsoever. What there is however, is an instance that’s bigger than the rest. So if we talk about Lemmy. I can access it and post and my ISP can block Lemmy World and I’d never know.
With BlueSky, it pretends to be similar, but the reality is that everything needs to go through their central server in order to be displayed on a timeline. BlueSky is designed in such a way so that everyone does the heavy lifting, but to be seen, you need to have approval from their central server, where they can modify, insert adverts, do whatever. It’s a centralised service that cosplays as decentralised. I don’t understand why people keep pushing it when it’s literally the same shit we all escaped from but with a new paint job.
With BlueSky, it pretends to be similar, but the reality is that everything needs to go through their central server in order to be displayed on a timeline.
They have been saying that this is an implementation detail that will change when they open up that part of their implementation. Which is nice, but until that happens I’m only lukewarm in my optimism for Bluesky and the AT protocol.
On the other hand, every federated network has converged on a central host for the vast majority of accounts and data. That host has outsized influence over the standard used on the network and unencrypted acess to the majority of data. So I’m not sure what really matters to what extent.
I can’t tell whether this is serious or sarcastic 😅
As far as the “global square” part of the equation is concerned: yeah, you’re right! A firehose of public statuses requires indexing to work, as a basic foundational premise.
However, there’s nothing preventing someone from standing up a PDS, opting out of the firehose / big graph service, and instead leaning on federation between individual PDSes. I’m not saying it would necessarily be a common use-case, but it’s definitely not impossible.
I don’t see any need for BlueSky at all when there already is a great network in the form of Mastodon. I mean all (most) of the ideas you mentioned apply one-to-one to Mastodon as well. To me they have very similar ideas.
Mastodon’s moderation model is very different than BlueSky. BlueSky’s seems to be much better for targeted individuals and groups. But things aren’t entirely hashed out on either protocol or their implementations. We’ll see how it goes.
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