The decision was made the moment Bluesky chose to deliberately be incompatible with ActivityPub. They want the AT protocol to exist in their own domain because they know the moment they put the screws to monetize, users will flock to an instance where they don’t.
And still we all know it’s blue sky that will win, and we will be at it again in 5 years after its enshitification…
Mastodon logo looks like a happy comma
I thought that was the intention?
A double meaning icon, since the comma is used in writing on a text platform. I thought it was more creative than all the other soulless corporate minimalism.
That is cool…tbh I never saw the comma - I only noticed the elephant - until that person pointed it out. But you’re right - it is creative.
I just do not understand using a corpo solution over a better OSS solution. You know where it’s going to go in your bones, yet you sign right up for another 10 year run before you change all over again. Like these people were just waiting for another terrible option to show up before they switched.
Fuck, just sign up with Mastodon and get it over with, you putzes. What is your issue with free software?
I mostly use Mastodon, but I 100% get it. The onboarding process is much easier with centralized services (no need for analogies to email), and more importantly, you’re not at risk of losing half your follows/followers when server admins have a pissing match. As long as those friction points exist, there will be a market for centralized platforms.
There’s also less complexity for a centralised system, since you don’t have a big confusing mess having to learn which server you want to sign up with, how that impacts what you see, and how you connect with other servers.
It’s one of the downsides of Lemmy, since people get completely boggled over their heads, and either jump to the biggest Instances that they can find (assuming that the servers are basically completely separate), or give up on it entirely because it’s too confusing when you just want something simple and straightforward.
I was impacted by the closing of mastodon.lol and I never recovered either my follow count, or frankly my interest and engagement in the platform since. I’m not alone, either. The ‘migration’ behavior was half baked at best, giving me what equates to a 301, not much else. There’s a lot of work to be done here.
I am the most active on Threads for my brand account, and my personal account on Mastodon is a distant second. I know the people here are gonna throw shoes at me, but my activity is on Threads because that’s clearly where the numbers are for my field and the market outside of the total loss that is Xitter.
Mastodon is probably not going to be any bigger than it is now. But you can self host and dictate your fate. In a time of protocols, not products, existing is a great place to be in. Make your own fate.
👟👟 Here, hope they fit!
If you are running a business account you really should be using your own mastodon server.
And poof! There goes the appeal.
Yeah, sure, being the absolute authority on moderation for your content is real unappealing to businesses
Fuck, just sign up with Mastodon and get it over with, you putzes. What is your issue with free software?
What you are partially seeing here is the fact that there is friction to the very idea of Mastodon not being owned by a massive corporation. People have been trained so well to expect their social media to be run by a massive corporation that even if an alternative social network like Mastodon did onboarding perfectly people are still going to get tripped up and feel confused about Mastodon simply because a bunch of rich people don’t own it.
It is maddening and there isn’t much we can do about it other than treat that friction as an opportunity to help radicalize people into being more open in a broader sense to taking back aspects of their life from the control of rich people/massive corps.
People don’t care that it’s not owned by a millionaire. What they care about is it being simple and easy to understand. One choice is as simple as it gets.
People most definitely do care about that, and every single day more and more people are realizing how much ownership over their digital community spaces matters.
That process happens slowly most of the time but occasionally it happens in huge bursts that in a short time change the longterm growth trajectory overnight of the Fediverse. We can’t foresee when events will trigger that but the potential is always there.
Yes people will not use a service because a billionaire owns it. But nobody is using a service simply because a billionaire owns it. People might choose bluesky over mastadon because the owner created twitter originally. But nobody is choosing it because Jack Dorsey has a fuck ton of money.
Elon’s rabid fanbase not withstanding. That’s more the exception though, not the rule.
Yes people will not use a service because a billionaire owns it. But nobody is using a service simply because a billionaire owns it. People might choose bluesky over mastadon because the owner created twitter originally. But nobody is choosing it because Jack Dorsey has a fuck ton of money.
I get what you are saying but my point is I actually think subconsciously (and sometimes even consciously) this is how people think. The collective organism of (at least US) society desperately wants a businessman (especially a techy one) to tell us what the future of social media is. People aren’t actually able to comprehend NOT needing a tech businessman to own their social media in a lot of ways. It is weird, but it is really just a natural consequence of how utterly obsessed US culture is with seeing all of society through capitalism and rugged individualism.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.
Barrett planned to make the bridge opt-out by default, meaning that public Mastodon posts could show up on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa.
In what one Bluesky user called “the funniest github issue page i have ever seen,” there was a heated debate over the opt-out default, which — like any good internet argument — included unfounded legal threats and devolved into bizarre personal attacks.
As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it’s not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy.
The ideological issues around Bridgy Fed are likely to continue stoking tension across these federated social networks as they increase their connection points.
“I am thinking and feeling deeply that however content moderation works on either side of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa,” Barrett said.
The original article contains 1,176 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Why would you ever trust a Jack Dorsey thing of any kind?
“From the good people who brought you twitter…” reads like a threat.
Bluesky:
- Protocol is maintained by the same people who make the app and is developed on GitHub.
- Instance that was the only one for such amount of time is hosted on Amazon AWS, with domain bought on Google Domains. Does not support IPv6.
- Mobile app is not distributed on any of the open app stores, just Google Play and Apple AppStore.
- Weak non-copyleft license not protecting the software from turning closed source and not making users sure they actually use open source version.
Wow, such decentralization.
Bluesky is trash and not even decentralized
It’s federated just as Lemmy & Mastodon are…
Trash? Well I don’t use it, so automatically…It is not federated at this time AFAIK
You really think someone wouldn’t have their own server up .05s after it went public a week ago? You gravelly underestimate this community.
I’m just saying, it’s not federated today. And until I see that code released, it’s vaporware to me!
It’s right here
Ok, I did not know there was this reference protocol implementation. Seems like it may not have all the features you need to run a whole service, but better than nothing!
I’m perfectly fine with the unwashed masses flocking to non-federated services, it means things will remain sane a while longer over here.
We did learn a lesson from Facebook. It was fine until the Boomers got involved. Once the masses get in, we’re toast.
