• dan@upvote.au
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      4 hours ago

      Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can’t run your own server yet. We’ll see if they keep their promise.

      Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you’re not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.

      • capital@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        They took crypto bros VC money.

        Do we really think they’ll allow mass federation without getting returns on their investment?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.

      Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).

      • dan@upvote.au
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        4 hours ago

        ActivityPub is the protocol though. Mastodon is an implementation of the protocol.

      • nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br
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        5 hours ago

        That’s an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I’m from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.

        I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy… this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          Do you think the same about lemmy?

          I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

          I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…

          I’m reasonably tech savvy and even I’d struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.

          There’s a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can’t. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that’s hosted on .sh.itjust.works.

          There’s also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.

          • prototype_g2@lemmy.ml
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            42 minutes ago

            a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

            Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.

            They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.

            It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            4 hours ago

            We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem.

            People complain that the mainstream sites are relatively closed ecosystems, but they also complain when those sites try to be more open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.

      • kazerniel@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        Yeah, that’s what I heard from my microblogging colleagues too. They tried Mastodon during the first wave of Twitter exodus, found it too frustrating/difficult, tried Bluesky and stuck with it ever since.

    • RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ca
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      8 hours ago

      What’s the difference, really? Aren’t they both decentralized microblogging social networks?

      • prototype_g2@lemmy.ml
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        35 minutes ago

        BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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        6 hours ago

        One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.