Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx of new users has been a problem.
Irrespective of the popular success which Bluesky / Mastodon may receive, I am simply glad that enough platforms exist for anyone to seek refuge in if the rapacity by these giants becomes the norm.
I believe they opened things up to developers recently. I do think they will become decentralized, but am more concerned it will become a "no censorship" aka "no moderation" mess pretty quickly. It relies quite heavily on filters and aggregators rather than moderators.
bluesky is crap. it requires an invite and id verification. 100% will turn into a fascist navel-gazing network.
The rest of the platforms which will still be using anonymous access will be invaded by AI's astroturfing their stuff into your face. Which one do you prefer?
It's literally impossible for any social network to ever under any circumstances be relevant/important enough that asking for an ID could theoretically be forgivable under any circumstances, let alone valid.
There are very few scenarios where any website asking for an ID should even be legal. It's a massive and inexcusable privacy issue.
No. It's decentralized like the Fediverse, but it doesn't use ActivityPub. I think there are some 3rd party developers working on an ActivityPub-Bluesky bridge, but nothing concrete yet.
Isn't it also just not open to federation at the moment? So the federated/decentralized aspect could just be vaporware and never happen. I don't even begin to take their word for it until it stops being de-facto centralized.
The more I read about BS’s protocol, the more I think this is done on purpose.
Why? Because it allows BS to pay lip service to decentralization, without actually giving away the power in the system.
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Another pretty good sign that BS’s decentralization is actually b.s. is the fact that the Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) used by BlueSky are currently “temporarily” not actually decentralized. The protocol uses something imaginatively called “DID Placeholder”. If I were a betting man I would bet that in five years it will keep on using the centralized DID Placeholder, and that that will be a root cause of a lot of shenanigans.
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it decentralizes the cost to the central authority by pushing data load onto volunteers, while planning to keep control by being the biggest kid on the “reach” block.
They’re making their own federation. They brought in Mastodon consultants and have set up their own AT Protocol and of course we’re activitypub. To federate everyone their would need to be a bridge between AT and activitypub
The majority of social media sites (with the exception of youtube imo) don't provide anything of value. A smart high school kid could write a twitter clone over a weekend. The only thing these websites have to offer is their large user base.
EDIT: OK, I apparently upset some people. I was exagerating when I said it could be done in a weekend, but my point stands that it's pretty easy to make a twitter clone/reddit clone, and the challenge in succeeding for twitter is getting a user base. The tech is incredibly easy to build.
A smart high school kid could write a twitter clone over a weekend
This is a pretty good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Twitter is much more than the simple frontend you see when you click on the website, there is absolutely no way a single person could recreate it in a month, less alone a weekend.
It's unfortunate that this drop in replacement isn't in the fediverse though. Bluesky's success isn't technical (yet), it is better marketing and connections with VIP users.
Having used both Twitter and Mastadon, discovery on Mastadon is essentially impossible. You have to already know who you want to follow, there is no mechanism in place to help you actually find content you might be interested in.
Something that makes it a bit easier to discover new accounts is to join a medium to large server, and look at posts from the local and federated timelines. I know it's not as easy as an algorithm-powered timeline
Since you are the algorithm for what you see instead of the system, you do have to put in some work to find content that interests you. But it is possible and rewarding when you do. Assuming microblogging is of interest to you of course.
Mastodon is also seeing an influx, but probably smaller and crucially, the signups are spread across many many servers (there are thousands to choose from), so the likelihood of more than a couple getting overloaded now is slim.
The earlier twitter -> mastodon migrations put more stress on the servers because there were far fewer available but things have scaled up a lot since then. And we have a lot more experienced sysadmins and cloud engineers who are capable of scaling up their instances more rapidly at the helm of many of the large instances.
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