I’m on Bluesky. I have seen a drama increase in followers in the last few days since Twitter let blocked people see content that were blocked from.
It’s a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
I had to decide if I was going to Mastodon or Bluesky. I picked Bluesky because after reading Mastodon’s integration problems with itself I wanted nothing to do with it. It couldn’t scale unless each instance played nice and in the years since it went live they had refused to do that and showed no signs of even moving in that direction.
Mastodon is scaling fine though? I’ve been using it for years, and it’s great, and still growing. User base is a bit tech focused, could be more general, but I think it’ll get there eventually.
Well I’d say most of them are federated together, or at least those with a good amount of users. In practice you don’t really get islands other than I guess troll instances that everyone has blocked.
And AFAIK as long as an instance isn’t blocked by yours (and vice versa to be useful), you can follow a person on that unfederated instance and it should just work and get federated.
If there’s one thing a social media site loves, its a drama increase.
It’s a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
Honestly, more than anything, it feels like an indictment of Threads. That was supposed to be the big party spot for creatives, journalists, and D-list celebrities following the burn out of Twitter. But modern Threads just feels like the worst kind of Hype-House crossbred with LinkedIn.
BlueSky feels a lot more like a vintage '00s social media site, which is all people really wanted. Hope it survives its own popularity better than Twitter did. But for now, life is good.
I’m pretty sure they’re referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.
Bluesky is ““federated”” in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there’s basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.
To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it’s an irritation.
But the big appeal of BlueSky is the initialization of the interface. It defaults you to “Following” rather than “Discover” and isn’t jamming a ton of ads in your feed. There’s basically no algorithm. Its a very basic service, rather than an engineered mess. More akin to Facebook or Twitter from back in the '00s, before monetization ruined them.
the big appeal of BlueSky is the initialization of the interface. It defaults you to “Following” rather than “Discover” and isn’t jamming a ton of ads in your feed. There’s basically no algorithm. Its a very basic service, rather than an engineered mess. More akin to Facebook or Twitter from back in the '00s, before monetization ruined them.
The big appeal of bluesky is that it is in the early stages of monetization that hinges on effectively enclosing a commons so that everybody chooses the product and everything else effectively dies off. The next stage will come, which is when the enshittification happens.
Do we honestly believe there won’t be enshittification because the priorities of the current development in the near future is focused on benefiting users?
…or to put it another way, do you set a mouse trap with food a mouse finds miserable to eat? Do you think that first bite of cheese accurately depicts the reality about to unfold?
I get it, hearing about federation is the worst part of this site . Y’all sound like coinbros “here’s the most inefficient storage method, lets call it something easy to remember and sell it as a feature!”
Partly. Except the time different Mastodon instances were not federated much or at all. If you wanted to go follow someone on Mastodon you had to know the exact server they were on. In an environment like Reddit and Lemmy where you’re there for the communities instead of the people that isn’t an issue. But if you want to go follow some specific podcaster you need to know the instance because there’s no guarantee that whatever instance you happen upon is going to be joined up with the one there on.
Everyone was busy running their own servers and not trying to tie everything together. It was a thing that could be done but a thing not enough were doing.
That’s nonsense. I’m on one of the main servers, and like 90% of my feed is from other servers, and it includes lots of small servers. And that’s been true for years.
It’s try the search function was bad prior to earlier this year, but it’s improved a bit. And if you are looking for someone specific, then presumably their account would be listed somewhere on their website?
That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.
A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn’t remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.
Mastodon federation is not opt-in. As soon as anyone on one server is following one person on the other server, the servers are fully federated. From there, it’s opt-out, via blocking.
I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.
That’s…Not how Lemmy works either. In fact, and someone may correct me if I’m mistaken here, your hell is sort of how it works as I understand it. Instances don’t have any built-in crawlers to seek out others running on ActivityPub with the same software, e.g. Lemmy or Mastodon or the like. That’s genuinely been one of the biggest stumbling blocks with the whole protocol, as discovery is largely a manual affair. The only crawlers we have are the people using the service and following remote people or communities or channels from other instances to let the one we’re on see them.
One of the basic reasons for this that I’ve read is that it’s related to handling scaling, as each instance trying to handle all of the data of all the people on each other instance right away would bog down the servers and probably crash them. It also arguably works out, to a degree, that there’s a good chance not everyone on each instance is of interest to each other anyway, so you may not want or need each server to know about every other server’s people/channels/communities/etc.
But I’m going to stop before I get too much further into the weeds of all this. The irony is that the simplest solution to discovery issues with all of this presently is to invite those you want to have a similar experience to you, or want to connect to with the fewest jumps, to the same instance as you to mitigate any of those issues. Does that tend to undermine many of the benefits of it all? In a lot of ways, yeah, but that’s where many ActivityPub platforms are at currently, at least the more popular ones as I understand them.
I’m on Bluesky. I have seen a drama increase in followers in the last few days since Twitter let blocked people see content that were blocked from.
It’s a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
I had to decide if I was going to Mastodon or Bluesky. I picked Bluesky because after reading Mastodon’s integration problems with itself I wanted nothing to do with it. It couldn’t scale unless each instance played nice and in the years since it went live they had refused to do that and showed no signs of even moving in that direction.
Mastodon is scaling fine though? I’ve been using it for years, and it’s great, and still growing. User base is a bit tech focused, could be more general, but I think it’ll get there eventually.
Are instances federated or rag-tag islands?
Well I’d say most of them are federated together, or at least those with a good amount of users. In practice you don’t really get islands other than I guess troll instances that everyone has blocked.
And AFAIK as long as an instance isn’t blocked by yours (and vice versa to be useful), you can follow a person on that unfederated instance and it should just work and get federated.
If there’s one thing a social media site loves, its a drama increase.
Honestly, more than anything, it feels like an indictment of Threads. That was supposed to be the big party spot for creatives, journalists, and D-list celebrities following the burn out of Twitter. But modern Threads just feels like the worst kind of Hype-House crossbred with LinkedIn.
BlueSky feels a lot more like a vintage '00s social media site, which is all people really wanted. Hope it survives its own popularity better than Twitter did. But for now, life is good.
I’m leaving the drama typo. You made it too good to take away
What are the Mastadon Integration problems?
I’m pretty sure they’re referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.
Bluesky is ““federated”” in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there’s basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.
To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it’s an irritation.
You could just stay on the biggest mastadon instance and not care about anything. Wouldn’t be too different than just using bluesky.
Preferring handcuffs because it’s more seemless sounds like a terrible mindset
They’re not handcuffs. You can always log off.
But the big appeal of BlueSky is the initialization of the interface. It defaults you to “Following” rather than “Discover” and isn’t jamming a ton of ads in your feed. There’s basically no algorithm. Its a very basic service, rather than an engineered mess. More akin to Facebook or Twitter from back in the '00s, before monetization ruined them.
The big appeal of bluesky is that it is in the early stages of monetization that hinges on effectively enclosing a commons so that everybody chooses the product and everything else effectively dies off. The next stage will come, which is when the enshittification happens.
Do we honestly believe there won’t be enshittification because the priorities of the current development in the near future is focused on benefiting users?
…or to put it another way, do you set a mouse trap with food a mouse finds miserable to eat? Do you think that first bite of cheese accurately depicts the reality about to unfold?
Everything you just said is also true of mastodon.
Yeah I didn’t know Mastadon monetizes
I get it, hearing about federation is the worst part of this site . Y’all sound like coinbros “here’s the most inefficient storage method, lets call it something easy to remember and sell it as a feature!”
Partly. Except the time different Mastodon instances were not federated much or at all. If you wanted to go follow someone on Mastodon you had to know the exact server they were on. In an environment like Reddit and Lemmy where you’re there for the communities instead of the people that isn’t an issue. But if you want to go follow some specific podcaster you need to know the instance because there’s no guarantee that whatever instance you happen upon is going to be joined up with the one there on.
Everyone was busy running their own servers and not trying to tie everything together. It was a thing that could be done but a thing not enough were doing.
That’s nonsense. I’m on one of the main servers, and like 90% of my feed is from other servers, and it includes lots of small servers. And that’s been true for years.
It’s try the search function was bad prior to earlier this year, but it’s improved a bit. And if you are looking for someone specific, then presumably their account would be listed somewhere on their website?
That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.
A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn’t remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.
Mastodon federation is not opt-in. As soon as anyone on one server is following one person on the other server, the servers are fully federated. From there, it’s opt-out, via blocking.
That’s…Not how Lemmy works either. In fact, and someone may correct me if I’m mistaken here, your hell is sort of how it works as I understand it. Instances don’t have any built-in crawlers to seek out others running on ActivityPub with the same software, e.g. Lemmy or Mastodon or the like. That’s genuinely been one of the biggest stumbling blocks with the whole protocol, as discovery is largely a manual affair. The only crawlers we have are the people using the service and following remote people or communities or channels from other instances to let the one we’re on see them.
One of the basic reasons for this that I’ve read is that it’s related to handling scaling, as each instance trying to handle all of the data of all the people on each other instance right away would bog down the servers and probably crash them. It also arguably works out, to a degree, that there’s a good chance not everyone on each instance is of interest to each other anyway, so you may not want or need each server to know about every other server’s people/channels/communities/etc.
But I’m going to stop before I get too much further into the weeds of all this. The irony is that the simplest solution to discovery issues with all of this presently is to invite those you want to have a similar experience to you, or want to connect to with the fewest jumps, to the same instance as you to mitigate any of those issues. Does that tend to undermine many of the benefits of it all? In a lot of ways, yeah, but that’s where many ActivityPub platforms are at currently, at least the more popular ones as I understand them.
It sounds like an asocial network - something for me finally, perhaps :)