Fediverse

I'd like to preface this by saying that my prefrontal cortex is mostly lard and anxiety medication, so sorry if I sound stupid here.

Why bother with BlueSky over Mastodon?

Bluesky is a "public benefit corporation", whereas Mastodon is proper open source if I understood correctly.

To me "public benefit corporation", just sounds shady. Why should BlueSky be trustworthy? Because of Jack Dorsey?

I know musk turned Twitter into a bizarre fever dream hellscape, but I don't recall it being sunshine and roses under Dorsey's leadership either. The platform would pester me for my phone number to "prevent spam" (they really said that shit with a straight face). White supremacists openly just said awful shit. The video player was ass.

But, I'll be optimistic. Hopefully this won't be Twitter 2: Judgement Day. I hope it will be a good tool for whistleblowers and breaking news. Ideally, it will have a symbiotic relationship with other federated networks instead of a hostile pain in the ass.

It notes that Bluesky users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join, as aspects of how your experience differs from others is in your control thanks to other features, like custom feeds and composable moderation. The latter means moderation is not tied to your server. While server operators can set rules around the content they host, communities can use blocklists and soon, independent moderation services, to introduce additional layers of moderation. That means there’s not as much pressure on server operaters to block other servers (defederate) because of the content they host, since users will have their own tools to manage their moderation preferences.

This is a nice bit of tech.

Curious to see if this is/will ever be compatible with ActivityPub.

https://atproto.com/guides/overview

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

• 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.

Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

I can't tell if the Bluesky team is bad at business or planning some sort of eventual rug pull. They're certainly a for-profit corporation without any evident way to generate profit, and their words and theoretical design all sound like they're not easily compatible with profit, but multiple profit-focused entities have given them a lot of money for something that, if implemented as envisioned, will not make them any richer.

My only guess is some form of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish where the core server is better than the rest of the network, but the network exists to assuage fears about another social network implosion or protect from potential antitrust issues while not being a real threat, but it feels like a complicated way to make Twitter 2.0 and get rich.

As long as there's a profit motive involved, enshittification seems like the expected conclusion. We could just be at step one. From Doctorow's description of the enshittification cycle:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Cue the "OMG it's so complicated!" comments by people who somehow managed to sign up to email, but this is suddenly too hard.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0!

Bluesky's official app sucks ass, that's already enough of a reason for me to not use it for the time being. It really is terrible, shitty web view banking app level of terribleness and speed

I am using another great fediverse Twitter clone called Catodon.social which has a MUCH nicer UI than either Mastodon or Bluesky. I want all corners of the fediverse to do well. It's the future of social media I think.

bluesky should abandon atproto and use activitypub