I know that lots of folks here don't like Bluesky (and I understand most of the reasons why), But now that it's open, I tried to explain the reasons why I am excited about it and hope it succeeds. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/06/bluesky-opens-up/
@mmasnick So far I think Bluesky is doing a great job of being a more user friendly Twitter. As a Twitter iteration though, it feels less like a place for conversation and more for memes, shitposts, and watching various grades of celeb banter. These have their place of course, but they are not a meal.
I do like the idea of user algorithm’s but before that I’d like to see the default feed behaviour vastly improved. Right now it’s frustrating as hell.
"As a Twitter iteration though, it feels less like a place for conversation and more for memes, shitposts, and watching various grades of celeb banter. These have their place of course, but they are not a meal."
This goes a long way towards explaining why I just can't get into Bluesky.
@Chigaze that's an interesting take. Hasn't been my experience (I've had way more in depth conversations there than here), but is definitely a reasonable concern if that's what you're experiencing.
@mmasnick It may depend on what you want to talk about. For my part being on a Canadian based Mastodon server has made it fairly easy to connect with people local to me and other Canadians. With federation I can also go looking for other people to talk to without trying to sift a firehose. :)
@mmasnick Yeah and Mastodon kinda has QT, since almost every third party Masto app and interface support it. 😉
Honestly I’d be fine if BSky supported video embeds to Mastodon, then I’d just post the video here and link from BSky. Sorta like how I repost good posts from BSky and bookmark them here.
Agree to disagree on the search. I’ve had multiple cases where I couldn’t find a post from someone on BS and was able to find it here. HOWever, the latest BS version seems improved.
@mmasnick Pleasantly surprised about two aspects: the ability to tie your handle to your domain, and the whole notion of selecting your sort algo. Pretty decent implementations for both, from what I’ve seen.
Needs more people there though, particularly with my interests. Seems like a wasteland out there.
@cydonian hasn't been that way in my experience, but I imagine that's highly dependent on your interests. Have you tried looking for feeds relevant to your interests? There are many thousands of feeds to choose from?
Yeah. I'm not getting in line to ride that bus. They're going to need at least a year of non-jackassery before I'll even take a peek. Fool me once, shame on you...
tl;dr, BlueSky is not really decentralized, instance owners have no actual control over moderation. The biggest player (the company BlueSky) effectively controls everything.
@JustinH@rysiek there's a lot in there that's just... wrong. But I'm not in the business of going through and correcting everyone's errors on this as it just seems to get people to yell at me. You can believe what you want.
@mmasnick I am the first to admit I don't have the monopoly on being right, and I appreciate that kind of input. Also, it's been months since I wrote that so things might have changed.
Obviously you have better stuff to do than commenting on my little blogpost, but if you do decide it is worth your while, I'd love to hear it. I promise not to yell. :blobcatcoffee:
@Cyberpreppy yup. in total agreement on that. I don't mind nostr either. Let there be a bunch of experiments in building decentralized social media to figure out what works best.
@mmasnick@mike My biggest issue with Bluesky, isn't their ideas (some aren't great - but some are). It's that they chose to fragment open social media, instead of improving the standard already backed by the W3C.
It's like if the comic in the article said: "Isn't it cool how these islands are connected? Well, instead of connecting to them, we started a new island chain!"
I fear two smaller networks has a lower chance against the silos than one more robust. 😕
@Erlend I think multiple competing protocols is a good thing. It forces them to evolve and improve.
And, in some cases, you MUST use a different protocol to get certain features.
For example, Hubzilla has nomadic identity which allows you to migrate your account to another server, or even clone your account and have it synced on another server. You can't do that in ActivityPub, but you can do that with the Zot protocol. And several platforms are adopting federated single sign on. You can't do that with ActivityPub either. You need something like OpenWebAuth. If you want to support offline devices, you need a protocol like Scuttlebutt.
ActivityPub is great at doing what it does... but it won't cover all of the use cases out there.
I think that eventually these different open source networks will interconnect, but I don't think that there will be one protocol that serves all purposes.
@scott I'm not saying we can't have any other protocols - like, https is still fine in my book. 😛 But ATProto is so similar to to AP, that I fear it would be better to instead improve AP.
I think two competing protocols would be beneficial if it weren't for the case that the main competitor (which is countless times larger and more powerful) is "no protocol".
@Erlend There actually are more than two competing protocols. ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Zot Protocol, and Nomad Protocol (just to name a few) all do the same things, but with different implementations and different feature sets.
We are implementing Zot protocol and ActivityPub on all of our servers because ActivityPub doesn't support nomadic identity but Zot does. The only reason we use ActivityPub is to connect to servers not using Zot, because Zot does everything ActivityPub does and more. Eventually we plan on adding AT Protocol as well. Our servers will be multi-protocol to take advantage of features ActivityPub hasn't added (yet?).
Until ActivityPub implements the features we need, we're backing the Zot protocol instead, and Bluesky will be backing AT Protocol instead. Maybe our competing protocols will pressure ActivityPub to implement things like nomadic identity and/or portable identity. Things we have been asking for for years now.
@scott I guess what I fear, is that getting people away from the silos over to something open, is even harder if the open stuff is fragmented. And that you gotta balance that vs the protocols getting better due to competition.
However - I 100 % hope you are right and I'm wrong! 😁 And work towards the bridges (between the island chains 😉) getting better and more seemless, makes that more true. 👍🏻 @mike
@havn@mike i know, firsthand, that they very, very, very seriously tried to see if they could make activitypub work for what they wanted to do and concluded it just didn't fit what they needed.
And I see a couple of different protocols as a bonus, as each pushes the other to do better things.
@mmasnick@mike Seriously, what's the path to monetization for Bluesky? This article sounds incredibly naive to my cynical ears.
Bluesky is a platform built for social media broadcasters and their audience. It's a streaming service more than a conversation.
Jack didn't build Bluesky because he read your paper, he built it because he needed a version of Twitter that would be easier leverage for paid content.
But they've talked about business models in terms of providing additional add on paid services (which they already do with domain registrations for unique usernames). There is likely to be more like that as well.
And, if you don't think it's "conversational" um, I don't know what to tell you. It is.
@mmasnick@mike You certainly are in the habit of telling people they're wrong. From your point of view as a social broadcaster, it seems conversational because one to many is what you're looking for and the experience you're looking to replace from Twitter.
I've read more on the proposed business model, and I'm not convinced that selling ancillary services is adequate. I see paid content in their future, and yes I could be wrong..
@mmasnick@mike@mike
I find a whole lot of the below and folks asking for money because of this or that hardship. I’ve also found interesting things to read as well but there’s a whole lot of distracting noise that seems to take precedence over meaningful communication.
@LittleTokyo@mike@mike follow better people? Or use different feeds to find better people? Or use the tools they give you to filter out stuff like that? I've yet to see a single request for money or anything like what you appear to be seeing.
@LittleTokyo@mmasnick@mike a lot of Mikes in this convo! For the record Mike Masnick has been equally supportive and critical of both Mastodon and Bluesky. I think both have approaches that are useful to understand and learn from especially as Threads federates which dwarfs both. Activitypub has a ton of momentum but there are some things Bluesky is doing that will be important for scale especially regarding moderation. Clearly both networks have their fair share of trolls.
@mike@LittleTokyo@mmasnick I'm not as up to speed as I should be on Blue Sky moderation, but at one time the personal tools were lacking. If you're referring to algorithmic or ai based moderation, I'd be wary. Obviously with the gates now open, they'll start to be tested. I can see Bluesky gaining critical mass and then being sold. I have thoughts on AT but I'm not an expert so I'll digress.
@mike@mike@LittleTokyo one of the reasons they kept it closed so long was to build up moderation efforts. They now have a team of people and a bunch more tools, including some they've begun to open source.
@mmasnick@mike@LittleTokyo This concise post will bring you up to speed on "composable moderation"... a really good idea that should happen on #ActivityPub too. This is definitively not something that should stay exclusive to Bluesky.
A bit late to this thread - just curious if anyone knows what is in the pipeline for Activity Pub - what are they actively working on to adjust the protocol? Anything in light of the new competing protocols?
@mmasnick One small thing, Mike: “With Bluesky’s algorithmic choice, anyone can make or share their own algorithms and users can choose what algorithms they want to use”
Not anyone can do it. Only developers, at this stage. I’m sure they’ll build a UI for it into the app at some point, but right now you need to be able to code if you want to make your own algorithms.
@Brendanjones i mean, that's just wrong. Skyfeed exists already and is a third party service that makes it super easy to create feeds. Lots of people do it. https://skyfeed.app/
@mmasnick
The only good thing about Bluesky is that it looks very similar to Twitter so there is a hope that it will cause a mass migration off of X for the diehards.
I have found the feature set to be very incomplete as compared to Twitter.
@mmasnick I do hope it succeeds as well. I have had a Bluesky login for a couple of months and so far so good. It has been somewhat limited by the invite only so we'll see what transpires. I think it has the potential to be really good with proper monitoring. But, I really like Mastodon as well and my social network time is mostly there. For now, I live in both places. Luckily the majority of my follows do as well and some crosspost.
@mmasnick Mastodon was a nice holdover during the Twitter implosion, a good-enough social media to tie me over while something like Threads or Bluesky becomes a viable option. Threads is there, Bluesky is close. Once they (fully) add federation, I will hopefully be able to follow a handful of Mastodon-only accounts from within Threads (my 1st choice) and completely move back to a widely used (and populated) social media.
@hankg@mmasnick That's the biggest point: lack of people. Which directly results in lack of general content. Sports. Memes. Jokes. Politics. Business. World Events. Banter. Celebs. Comedians. Brands.
Many smaller frustrations (but far lower priority than point 1). Too many zealots here. Anti-everything. Very serious.
And I know this will upset many here, but an (option for an) algorithmic timeline is great when you just wanna waste some time. It's fun.
@peterbutler Nope. It has nothing (or little) to do with who or how many you follow. After big sports events, I searched Mastodon for the relevant hashtags. Got single digit or teens number of posts (I search on my own largish-instance, AND mastodon.social, the largest). Searched on Twitter (effectively unlimited hits), on Threads (effectively unlimited hits). As long as I wanted to read, there were more posts/replies/banter/disgust/defense/annoyance/jubilation. Haven't tried Bluesky yet.
@leoncowle Fair, but the number of accounts you follow impacts the number of posts you see in the hashtags and the number of replies you see to posts
The more connections you have with various instances, the more posts you will see, and not only for your follows
I have a smaller library account that follows 100 or so accounts. For the exact same hashtags my primary account here will show me 2-3x more posts than my smaller account
I don’t have a link that explains why but I’ll look
@peterbutler Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I like Mastodon, I spend way too much time here every single day. 😂. But it just doesn't have the reach. It can't. It has just over 1.5m active users (https://mastodon-analytics.com). Threads has 130m MAU (from recent earnings call). So it has nothing to do with connections, or who you follow, or how you come upon the hashtags on your instance. Remember, I'm actively SEARCHING for these hashtags, not waiting on my TL. The post count simply isn't there.
@leoncowle@peterbutler totally agree that overall there is far less “stuff” of everything (except maybe cats, board games, and infosec). Yes, overall it’s very small
@peterbutler@leoncowle Peter does have a point. I can't imagine how sparse my timeline would be with sub 200 follows. I get it though not everyone want to DIY their timeline.
@mike Just to be clear -- not sure if you read the full thread between me and Peter -- I'm not talking about my TL. I’m MANUALLY running hashtag (and more recently also plaintext, now that many have opted in) searches against both my instance and the biggest Mastodon instance. And get single-digit number of replies after large sporting events. The content just doesn't seem to exist here on Mastodon. Running those searches on Threads (or even Twitter) gives effectively unlimited posts to enjoy.
@leoncowle@mike There are definitely huge gaps in types of content on Mastodon, and sports is a big one. There’s a little traction on NBA, but not much
I play disc golf and the posts are non-existent. Twitter still has at least hundreds of conversations a day about it
I mean I’ve seen <5 posts about disc golf on Mastodon this entire year (it is winter…)
@mmasnick I'm skeptical of their survival - they have yet to engage with many of the really hard problems of moderation in a federated world, and with governance and funding as they move away from centralization.
But that said, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. I'll cheer them on to the extent that they don't become my enemy. :)
I wish them all the luck engaging with these problems and hope they succeed and become part of the wider federated social media space.
@rbos having spoken with them about the challenges of decentralized moderation, I actually think they've given it way more thought than most. But, of course, implementation is everything.
@jbenjamint they're experimenting with value add business models, like if you register a domain name for your username. I expect more similar things to continue (optional fees for value added services)
@mmasnick@jbenjamint Interesting. I think the differing financial models will forever delineate Bsky and Mastodon, and who is attracted to each.
Here I donate to cover server costs. It’s my choice to pay my way, and I feel some responsibility towards my server, and the network at large (I also donate to Mastodon).
But if Bluesky is for profit? Well then it’s their responsibility to price it to make profit. I’m not going to pay something unless they make me.
@mmasnick@jbenjamint My point being, I think it being for profit, no matter any underlying decentralisation, will mean a culture not unlike Twitter. As opposed to Mastodon always maintaining the culture of a self-reliant community.
@Brendanjones@jbenjamint i don't disagree with this. it could very well become that Masto is the NPR of the world, relying on donations, and Bluesky could find a place as a for profit media operation with a supportive following. I don't see any problem with that.
@seachanger@Hey_Beth oddly, that's the reverse of my experience. People here were much meaner to me for a while, though it's calmed down. And I haven't see the meanness on Bluesky. Just goes to show how people end up with very different experiences on different apps.
One of the worst experiences I ever had on social media was when I said that I have a legitimate use case for quote posts on Mastodon
On top of the harassment, the dog piling, and the ableism, I received a strike from my instance because, and I quote, "if you don't like Mastodon, you don't have to use it”. I wasn't saying I don't like Mastodon, I was saying quote posts would be useful for me.
@mmasnick Main reason I have avoided Threads is because of Meta is run by Zuck, who I do not trust, and they track you across different sites, even when you're not using one of their apps. What kind of tracking, collecting personal data is Bluesky doing?
@mmasnick Bluesky might be great for a Twitter replacement but, for many, the teardown of Twitter means we can move towards something else beyond a centralized environment.
Many, like me, have gone out at stood-up their own Mastodon instance and are either running their own single/small instance or hosting for others and working the economics and community fun around that.
It's no longer trying to play with Insta or X influencers or ballers or whatever. Such a breath of fresh air.
@mmasnick I hope it succeeds and we see a solid bridge beteeen the protocols. But I’m still skeptical of the AT protocol and the way user data flows through what’s essentially a centralized system
I have asked myself for a while "why does BS think they need their own protocol?" This is why.
OTOH, while I remain skeptical of Bluesky, it can't possibly be any worse than Twit right now. So I'm okay with BS succeeding even if I likely won't join.
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