Why Not Bluesky

I see his point about the &quot;fediverse&quot; and the potential benefits of anyone hosting their own message board, that has interoperability with other message boards, aka Mastodon.<p>We&#x27;ve seen it though, Mastodon&#x27;s model is garbage, and they lost from the start. No one wants horrible Reddit style mods ego tripping over their own echo chamber. There is no future for Mastodon.<p>To the point of the article, the real question is if we&#x27;ll see more atmosphere hosts (aka using a PDS other than Bluesky&#x27;s) and more applications built on the protcol. And I think the <i>real</i> test will be if anyone ever builds their own relay that gets popular.<p>Bluesky&#x27;s model is still better (more open, unbiased, harder to censor) than Mastodon&#x2F;Threads&#x2F;X by default, and yes it has a long way to go, but we&#x27;ve known that from the start.

I’ve learned my lesson. I’m done investing in someone else’s platform. POSSE model from here on out.

Bluesky now has a lot going for it that solves real pain points compared to mastodon. It has quote posts, it has full text search, it has DMs that are actually DMs. It does not suffer from an experience spanned across multiple domains. Most importantly it has a good client.<p>A normal human being can use it as if it was a normal website and I really think this might just be what is needed for this to stay alive.<p>The discourse is also at least today much healthier than on mastodon for the communities I’m a part of.<p>I think the most likely outcome however is that Twitter will just continue to be the platform to be on.

Jumping from one centralized, single-company platform to another doesn&#x27;t seem to accomplish much.<p>Every major social platform has turned into a shithole. Orkut, Facebook, Twitter...<p>Musk is such a child that he could easily decide to buy out enough investors to get a majority holding and...then what? You&#x27;re right back to square one.<p>In what other communication medium or protocol would you tolerate one company controlling everything about it?

I do think a lot of this comes down to who can create a better development community.<p>And Mastodon seems remarkably single leader. And the community seems expressly hostile to letting people make cool experiences that span the network -nthey want a level of insularness &amp; isolation, where the only things happening are defined by their server. And right now there&#x27;s not much variance across servers; they all do mostly the same things, with only moderation &amp; community differing.<p>It&#x27;s going to be an enormous challenge to see competing Relays and AppViews spring up for At Protocol. That really is the challenge, seeing if other people can chew the network. One interesting idea I heard floated was that cloud providers might be able to host their own, that see less platforms or what not might hook into. Not perfect, not as distributed as totally desired, but it sure could be cost effective to have them maintain network copies.<p>Where-as you will be burned alive if you try that on Mastadon.

I tried with Masto, I really did. I even self-hosted for a while. But the problem it has in my humble and not hugely technical opinion is: 1) it’s complicated (learning about why your server wasn’t federating with another was not what I needed when I just wanted to toot about my lunch), 2) there’s no (global) search, which makes it awful for discoverability, 3) the theory of portability is b&#x2F;s - when I moved from self hosted to .social because of the horror of self-hosting it turns out you lose your history. Or at least it did back when I did it. So the only “portable” thing is just a small part of the package, ie not really portable at all.<p>The other “network effect” in play here is that there’s only one viable place for masto accounts and that’s .social - and if everyone is flocking towards a single place with a single owner then the tech being federated still fails in the face of enshittification when the instance or instance owner goes bad.<p>TB and CD’s points are spot on - but Masto &#x2F; federation needs some serious work on the usability side before anyone approaching a “normal” (non-geek) user is going to find this a serious contender to X or any of the others.

Why not mastodon? why not reddit? All of these social medias have been crafted to protect their users from the deplorables.<p>I had the r&#x2F;ontario mod publicly admit they ban ALL canadian conservatives because they are ALL homophobic. Mastodon has a public blog post where they admit the same problem. as long as you ban opposing viewpoints you can never win.<p>Why is it each time the cognitive dissonance peaks in an echo chamber they simply seek a new social media safe space?<p>Toronto Maple Leafs are on a 10 game winning streak after they banned their opponents from the building.

There has been a lot of Bluesky shilling on social and legacy media over the last week. It almost seems intentional.<p>It is not the panacea they expect it to be. Most of these people don&#x27;t even know what they&#x27;re running from. Case in point, the histrionics in the very first sentence.<p>It&#x27;s reminiscent of the Jonestown cult exiling themselves to Guyana.<p>A quick trip to the Bluesky homepage showed its feed promoting some of the very same political &#x27;influencer&#x27; accounts that spew some of the most toxic and divisive content on X.<p>Folks packing up and running from X because their &#x27;friends&#x27; are, unknowingly are bringing the cockroaches with them in their luggage.

I like how this author is ambivalent towards the technology. &quot;They both are fine, whatever&quot; feels like the right take and I wish I saw it more in computing. Programming languages? IDEs? Repo structure? Service architecture? It&#x27;s always traders, it&#x27;s rarely clearly a one winner. Pick one that works and say meh.

&gt; If you have a deployment that can speak the languages of IMAP and SMTP and the many anti-spam tools, you are de facto part of the global email social network<p>It takes too much effort and time to actually have reliable email server. One mistake in config or wrong thing good luck convincing MS and Google. Even smaller players like fastmail and proton (many others) will have problems with Gmail or Outlook (Hotmail or whatever the hosted version of MA offering is called now) from time to time.<p>The language of anti-spam tools for any practical reason in this space is defacto unknown to you. So you don&#x27;t know what is actually this language.

Can&#x27;t mastodon, bluesky, twitter, threads, etc. not just be federated together? It seems like a relatively straightforward problem to solve. Especially considering several of these are kind of designed for federating.<p>I&#x27;m actually on most of these networks. I&#x27;m not on Threads yet. Just not especially in a hurry to join that crowd. But with four networks largely not sharing any content between them for mostly petty (non technical) reasons, it&#x27;s a definite downgrade from when everyone was using Twitter.<p>It seems a lot of energy is being wasted on raising walls against federating or arguing why such a thing would be a bad thing. I agree with Tim Bray that the tech largely doesn&#x27;t matter. What matters is the users and the content. And that is fragmented all over the place right now.<p>Twitter messed up by becoming a toxic waste dump and then losing a lot of its user base. What remains just isn&#x27;t very interesting to me.<p>BTW. Twitter had changed for the worse long before Elon Musk got involved. I see that more as a symptom than the root cause. The real problem was infighting inside Twitter and many years of stagnation of the platform because of a complete and utter lack of leadership. And good old corporate greed and VC induced stupidity&#x2F;madness.<p>They gradually rolled back features that made the platform interesting. They shut down the fire hose, they killed third party clients, and then AI was imposed. And then you got all the clowns gaming the AI trying to &quot;win&quot; at everybody else&#x27;s expense. they threw out the baby with the bathwater. Enshittication is a great word for that. Everything that made Twitter great was killed&#x2F;removed. And then they got Elon Musk. Not the other way around.<p>The shock therapy applied by Elon Musk was pretty brutal and ugly but also highlights what a bloated, dysfunctional platform it had become. There wasn&#x27;t much left by the time he took over. Just a bunch of clowns pretending to be a mature company and clearly failing hard at that. I don&#x27;t think Musk will save it but it&#x27;s interesting that you can just remove layers of dysfunctional crap from an org chart with a flame thrower (in human form) and not have the whole thing collapse into a pile of rubble. The platform continues to function with a fraction of the people involved. If somebody adds federation to the platform, unexpected good things might actually happen.<p>This isn&#x27;t rocket science from a technical point of view. Mastodon runs on a shoestring budget. Flicking short text messages around at scale is kind of a solved problem technically.

Its an (political) echo chamber, and will ultimately contribute to the division of people.

Well I hear it&#x27;s full of eternal September liberals . . . is there a better reason to avoid it?