I just received my invite code today and took a quick look around the app. Like Mastodon I do not prefer microblogging platforms. And that’s all I know about Bluesky.
So, what can you tell me about this project?
It’s twitter except for the old guy instead of the new guy. If you left twitter for bluesky then you are likely just going to run into the same issue down the road where the old guy sells it for tons of money to whoever will pay. Those willing to pay are likely not great at managing a social media platform.
I wanted to like Mastodon but couldn’t. The only reason I used microblogging services like Twitter was to shitpost about Vampire: The Masquerade. Said game includes lots of death, blood, and other topics that make some folks uncomfortable. On Twitter, the atmosphere was very “don’t like, don’t read”, but Mastodon has an intense culture about using content warnings on anything that might make someone marginally uncomfortable. I’m cool with that, but I can’t do it on my shitposting or it sort of ruins the joke. Bluesky doesn’t have that atmosphere.
I know folks usually skew that way but it’s server to server. Frankly, I don’t use any warnings because I can’t be bothered and my instance is fine with it.
Bluesky supports porting user accounts between servers even more smoothly than Mastodon does - even if the original host do not want to cooperate.
They have a sandbox environment federating with 3rd party servers where other devs can participate in testing, and in the main public beta environment they just switched away from one main server to like a dozen (still no 3rd party there) and moved user accounts around, so they can test the federation code for stuff like performance and effects of account migrations, etc, in a live environment.
They’ve said they won’t open up federation with 3rd party servers on the main environment until they have moderation tools which can handle it, so they’re working on that also now.
It’s a microblogging service (similar to Twitter), ran by a small dev team and backed by Jack Dorsey (of Twitter origin). It’s been in “invite-only” closed beta forever so it has never really gone super mainstream. Some communities have kinda made their way over there but for the most part it seems threads and mastodon will run away with things in terms of being heirs to Twitter (imo). Bluesky is building their own platform (AT) that will allow others to stand up their own “bluesky” instances that federate with each other, similar to how mastodon works on the Fediverse with ActivityPub. Not sure what the progress is with that but am skeptical it will ever actually be a popular choice given the success of AP/Fediverse and the fact that threads and other large platforms (Wordpress, Tumblr, etc…) have already implemented or committed to building in AP support.
Could Bluesky not just implement ActivityPub too? Is there a reason why they are not doing that?
They chose not to after researching options. Pretty sure they decides account portability was a key feature needed and AP doesn’'t do this. As in taking your account and all your posts and data witj you to a new server. I assume there is a technical reason why this would be very difficult to add to AP/Mastodon otherwise they could have just added it themselves.
Yeah the not being able to fully move your account and all its history is one of the biggest shortcomings of AP for me. I hope they shore that up eventually.
It’s nothing to do with that, they made the AT protocol because is structured in a way that ensures that bluesky (the company) will always control the network. They wouldn’t be able to keep control with ActivityPub, it’s the same reason Threads will never implement it.
All the stuff about account portability is a distraction. Think about it: where would one move an account to anyway? Another BS node? Why? Unlike Mastodon instances there is no functional difference.
They could but they are developing their own protocol.
This is the best reply so far. Also worth mentioning both the platform and the protocol are open source.
AT is not truly decentralized like activitypub. It’s similar to crypto where the majority stakeholder (in this case, bluesky the for profit company) controls the network. There are not “instances” run by community leaders, just free hosting.
Ah interesting. One more in the “negative” column for Bluesky then imo. What Mastodon gets right (perhaps in a sea of things that it gets wrong) is that it relies on people to build and maintain their communities, rather than hoping that technology can solve all the issues of moderation, etc… Yeah, there are improvements that we hope will get to AP. It’s obvious bsky is just not the future.
Yes, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s contextual moderation that makes a space worth being on. This is a good piece that sums up the differences.
It’s great if you liked old Twitter (2016ish) or you’re a furry. It’s very furry-heavy though because the furry community is very tight-knit and so invites got passed around like candy for a while.
I heard it was pretty much twitter with even less moderation, but it’s a smaller so you’re slightly less likely to run into open neo nazis, but only slightly. I only have hearsay to go on, as it never really interested me, but most of the people I know that went to it have stayed.
Yeah honestly hearing it describes as being full of neo Nazis is wild lol, it’s almost more left leaning than Lemmy
I’m glad to hear it’s turned, but all I was hearing about was racism and transphobia that is at modern Twitter levels.
So far the people there have been pretty good at bullying neo nazis so much they leave. Otherwise it’s pretty chill.
Weird to call a place “chill” that gives Nazis a home in the first place imo.
…you say that like they are being invited and not sneaking in against everyone’s wishes. Even the Lemmyverse is not entirely free of them, unfortunately.
I’d love to try it, if they’d ever give me an invite code. Twitter was pretty cool back in the day and I’d like something similar as a place to post what I’m working on.
Since you are already hanging out here, why not give Mastodon a fair try :)
Every Mastodon client I have tried to use is way too confusing. There are plenty of people using it, but it feels like a wasteland because connecting with people is too high friction. Maybe I’m using it wrong /:
@vanderbilt try out Kbin, it integrates communities and microblogging under one web interface. Makes it easy to access Mastodon posts as well as threads like this one on Lemmy or native to Kbin. I am on Kbin.Run, which is pretty well run but less populated than kbin.social
do you hapen to have more invites. Wanted to test out and see how it compares to mastodon but most invites got taken fast :/
Sure do: bsky-social-o7ui7-b74gw
If this one happens to be taken (I don’t think so, lemmy isn’t that big) I’ll DM you.
