Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.

The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.

Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.

  • ruk_n_rul@monyet.cc
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    2 months ago

    I’m sad that a lot of people couldn’t perceive the mastodon in the room.

    • Beacon@fedia.io
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      Mastodon isn’t a straight replacement for twitter, bluesky is.

        • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          From what I can tell from within the Mastodon echo chamber: quote replies and moderation

          • KNova@infosec.pub
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            Sure, but there are other ActivityPub protocol softwares that have quote replies and moderation, that aren’t Mastodon. I think the challenge is getting the average user to seek out an instance running one of those softwares and not just mastodon dot social.

            • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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              Problem is there’s no marketing money to make the better platforms more widely known because there’s not as much monetization of the users to fund it.

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                I’m perfectly fine being part of a community not driven by capitalism. It means there’s a lot less incentive to create spam bots. I also can’t run my own BlueSky instance, but I can run Lemmy/Mastodon pretty easily, just like an email server.

                Edit: I didn’t realize BlueSky was also federated, but just using a different protocol. I don’t think that was an option back when I set up lemmy.

          • ripcord@lemmy.world
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            Also a bunch of hinky weirdness and slowness.

            The Technology Connections guy (Alec) threw some shade on Mastodon yesterday that seemed like a good example:

            My favorite thing about Bluesky is that I haven’t gotten a stream of notifications that I’ve been tagged in a post on a weird fork of the software which my client doesn’t parse correctly so I only see one side of a conversation.

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            Also from my experience the users on BlueSky are pretty much a straight swap from Twitter. And by that I mean nobody ever bothers interacting with me at all.

            On mastodon if I so much as rip a fart on there, *someone* will engage with it. On BlueSky? Nada.

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            I do really wish mastodon had normal quote replies. I believe they decided not include it for reasons related to harassment or bullying. I don’t really get it since you can do practically the same thing but just linking to the post in yours. The mastodon UI even makes it look almost the same as a quote reply.

            • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              I do kind of like how it makes mastodon feel smaller since I cannot interact with or post quote replies, unlike Tumblr or Twitter. Those sometimes accrue millions of interactions. But it is a choice that will keep Mastodon small

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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          Federation is a pretty straightforward concept once you understand it and have basic knowledge of networking and software. However many people (apparently the majority of people) find it to be too complicated to understand.

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            Yes, I tried the mastodon app probably about 4 years ago before I knew what federation was. I could not figure out how to sign up and ultimately gave up. There needs to be an app/website that explains it well and guides you through the process.

            And honestly both bluesky and mastodon do a poor job if this.

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      Finding the right mastodon instance was incredibly annoying. I use it, but barely. Most of the artists I follow are on Bluesky, anyway, which is a lot easier to use.

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        Mastodon allows you to transfer your followers when you migrate, so it’s not a big deal if you change your mind about the first instance you had chosen.

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          You lost an average user at “instance”, long before “transferring an account”. It’s a big deal.

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            That may be true for someone just looking to sign up with no help, but if they come across a guide or if their friend helps them, then it’s easy.

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              So you agree with me. To succeed, a product shouldn’t require a guide or a friend’s help to install and configure it. I work in IT, yet I don’t see people around me bothering with all that. Now think of your relatives, friends, people you see every day on the street or in a mall - they couldn’t care less.

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                Well, entering Mastodon in the search bar of a search engine today shows that it’s even easier than it was during the big Twitter exodus. The first link is mastodon.social. Clicking that lands you on a page where Create an account is highlighted in blue. From there, it’s the standard signup process everyone is used to.

                Edit: Rewrote the comment to focus on the actual flow today rather than anything speculative.

    • nutsack@lemmy.world
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      the last time I tried to make a mastodon account I had to type a paragraph about why i want an account and then wait for an email approval and I don’t know what the hell happened because I forgot to look for the email and by now I don’t give a shit

      • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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        When you try do sign up on the Mastodon app it defaults to and recommends mastodon.social, which does nothing of this sort. The average user will just keep this default and be fine.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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        Since I was a poor little kid in the slums of Nairobi with no internet access I dreamed about having a <service> account. […]

      • hemmes@lemmy.world
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        That’s actually a good question. Surely Mastodon and Lemmy instances should have also seen an uptick in registrations?

        • Sadsquatch@lemm.ee
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          I saw some posts on Mastodon yesterday celebrating an influx of Brazilian signups, but it was pretty modest compared to the massive exodus to Bluesky. Which, honestly, seems about right and proportionate. (I love Mastodon, but it doesn’t feel like a 1:1 replacement for Twitter the way Bluesky does.)

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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      Frankly? I’m happy that they didn’t end in Mastodon. Most of those users would have negative value there, and in the Fediverse as a whole.

      Twitter was always a cesspool of assumptive, entitled, whiny, nationalistic, context-illiterate users, who’d spend most of their time finding reasons to screech at each other (and at you) than sharing interesting content. That’s regardless of language, but it was specially egregious among Brazilian users there. And it got only worse when Musk bought it, as suddenly the alt right users felt themselves justified to soapbox nonstop there.

      Most people with a shred of dignity got the fuck out of that shithole ages ago. The ones not doing so were, most of the time, the ones saying “this is fine, this is how it’s supposed to be”. And those are the ones migrating to Bluesky now.

      Someone might say “but we could integrate them into Mastodon. They’d behave better.” Well… we’re talking about a large horde of users, they’d be more likely to bring the place down than let the place bring them up. Eternal September style.

      • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.club
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        A not-so-recent fediverse Brazilian user here, before all the X incident in Brazil. I joined Mastodon exactly 1 month ago. Since the beginning, I was only interacting with non-brazilian Mastodon users. In the last few days, however, I’ve been noticing more and more brazilian posts emerging inside Mastodon feeds, even in my home feed (where I follow hashtags such as #poetry, #poems, #occult, #hermeticism, #art and #aiart, as well as non-brazilian users that I’ve been following). Seems like brazilians are spreading across the many existing alternatives, not just Threads or BlueSky. It’s exactly what happened when WhatsApp or Telegram got temporarily blocked here: people started spreading across Discord, Signal, Matrix and so on.

        • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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          It’s fine if it’s only a handful of users. Even if they’re from Musk’s Xithole*. My issue would be if a lot of people saw Mastodon and said “it’s Twitter, with an elephant instead of bird!”, still behaving like Twitter users.

          *desculpe-me pela piada besta; não resisti.

      • elucubra@sopuli.xyz
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        I was a redditor pre Eternal September. That was the beginning of the end for old reddit.

        • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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          I was a redditor pre Eternal September. That was the beginning of the end for old reddit.

          Dunno if Reddit got its own Eternal September, but the one that I’m referring to was in 1993, predating Reddit by 12y. It was a huge influx of new internet users, specially evident in the Usenet. Wikipedia has a good article on that, but to keep it short: if you got a huge flood of newcomers at once, you aren’t able to enforce the social norms of a place that keep it friendly and nice; instead the new users force the standard to be lowered.

            • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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              I agree that it’s wild. And it’s a bit bittersweet for me.

              Usenet - and the old internet as a whole - were all about humans sharing stuff between themselves: I see something cool, I give you the link, you see something cool. While modern platforms try to remove the human from the equation, make them invisible: I see something cool, I “endorse” (upvote, like etc.) it, and that endorsement is used by some algorithm to automatically pick what you’re supposed to be seeing.

              Reddit is both and neither at the same time. The links are manually picked and shared, like in the old internet; but they’re algorithmically sorted and ranked as in the new internet. It’s like a product of the old internet trying to carve its way into the new internet, but never completely ditching its roots.

              Perhaps that’s why that site lasted so long. And I hope that one day we’re going to say “a shame that it died”.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          I was a redditor pre Eternal September.

          The point of Eternal September is that it happens all the time, so when was that?

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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            The point of Eternal September is that it happens all the time, so when was that?

            Kind of - it doesn’t happen “all” the time; it has a beginning, but no end.

            • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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              If you consider it’s the influx of new users, then yes, it does happen all the time. Do you have a different definition?

              • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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                What’s “eternal” in “Eternal September” is not the influx of new users, but rather the disruption of the social norms caused by a huge and sudden influx of new users.

                That disruption started in 1993, and never ended. So it had a beginning but no end as of yet.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      Early in, the Fediverse gained traction with people that were banned from Twitter and others when it had moderation besides for the word “cis” and to suppress leftist viewpoints. Now that Twitter has none, those people have crawled back alongside with the crypto bros, but the bad name generated by gab, truth social, etc. still prevail.

      Also people are way too dumb to realize what an instance is (people already have trouble realizing e-mail is not a tech invented by Google for Gmail), defederation dramas, drama around loli, no algorithm “to suggest the users whatever they interested in”, less users, generally fediverse apps being way less addictive, etc.

      • ripcord@lemmy.world
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        way too dumb

        Or, more likely in most cases, don’t care and don’t want to care.

        • vii@lemmy.ml
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          isn’t that another way of calling ignorance aka being dumb?

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            There’s only so many hours in the day. There is something to be said for doing the convenient thing that doesn’t have a learning curve if you’re just trying to enjoy yourself.

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              Of course, imho, being aware of your own lack of knowledge is something already.

    • mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world
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      Can’t fault them. I went through three different instances, one because I disagreed with some of their policies, I don’t remember why I left the second one, I want to say it was technical issues but I honestly don’t remember. Then the third one got closed down because the owner had IRL issues they needed to take care of. Also that instance was on some defederation list because some mod from a large instance had an argument with a mod on my instance.

      Ultimately I ran my own solo instance for a while but lost interest eventually. Mastodon is frankly a shitshow and as long as it stays like that, federation or not makes it just a slightly worse twitter, just with some mods taking the role of Elmo instead.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      normies are allergic to anything other than corporate social media and software

    • NostraDavid@programming.dev
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      Good. Super-fast growth fucks with local internet culture. Look at what happened to reddit when digg died.

    • Clot@lemm.ee
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      Mastodon’s original app is just trash Threads are completely unreadable, it should be like that of X

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    Non-twitter is fine in any form. Real progress is gonna be going to Mastodon, although that’s hamstrung by user-unfriendliness.

    • Sadsquatch@lemm.ee
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      user-unfriendliness.

      I can’t really disagree with this, since I’ve personally seen folks make a casual attempt and bounce off Mastodon, and it comes up enough online that it feels like it has to be true, but at the same time I’ve got this reflexive skepticism since I’m an absolute idiot and managed to figure out how to have a good time on Mastodon and really enjoy it. (I signed up in the spring of 2023, though, so can’t speak to earlier times.) I think I’m probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person. So I really wonder what it is specifically that frustrates folks enough to just give up on Mastodon when I, an amiable doofus of the highest order, love it so much.

      I have additional Thoughts on cultural issues that might disappoint people who were expecting Mastodon to replicate whatever specific era of pre-Musk Twitter they yearn for, but it can’t *just *be that. There has to be some technical barrier a lot of folks are stumbling over, right?

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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        I think I’m probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person.

        Just from the fact that you are here, it is statistically likely that you are much closer to the tech literates than the normies. Can you search for a specific email in your email inbox? You’re already way ahead of many people. You are severely overestimating the technical literacy of normal people.

      • MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip
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        In reality, mastodon doesn’t achieve the same dopamine hit by design. This is both a good thing (less addictive, more conversational) and a bad thing (less retention, more opaqueness in statistics) depending on why you want to use or don’t want to use social networks.

      • Facebones@reddthat.com
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        I never used twitter anyway so idk I never got into Mastodon. Didn’t help that the few people I thought to follow basically pulled the “yeah this is cool #fucktwitter buuuuuut everyone is still on Twitter okbaiiiiiii”

      • danciestlobster@lemm.ee
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        I have a potentially really dumb question: how is mastodon different from the assorted lemmys and such? I originally thought mastodon was just another fediverse instance but now that I think about it I don’t think I’ve seen posts and content from others on a mastodon instance, either on .world or where I am now at .ee. is this just due to defederation with mastodon or is mastodon different in some way that I am missing?

        • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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          Mastodon works more like twitter, several microblog posts that you only see if you search or check:

          • Latest posts of an instance;
          • The profile of the person posting;
          • Posts with certain hashtags;
          • Posts of people you chose to follow;

          Meanwhile, lemmy works more like reddit, easier to find “specific content”, with posts neatly separated by community/instance and easier to find/search/interact with in the future. It’s less about individuals and more about communities

          I think mastodon only interacts with lemmy as comments on existing posts, though there’s probably a way to post to a community from a mastodon client/site

    • tabris@lemmy.world
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      Mastadon has definitely improved it’s user onboarding process. When I first tried, and failed, to use it 3 years ago it was awful. Signing up a year ago was a painless process. It may not be fully ready for the mainstream just yet, but it’s definitely getting there.

    • blindbunny@lemmy.ml
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      While I agree with you. I don’t think Mastodon is user unfriendly I think of it as a normie blocker. That being said, bluesky is owning class social media, I expect the enshittification to start now that they have a million + users.

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        “Normie blocker” is just how abnormies rationalize bad design

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          Seriously yea. Same reason Linux user experience is generally bad. Unfortunately engineers usually make for poor designers.

        • blindbunny@lemmy.ml
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          Except it’s not. It’s real easy to learn you can choose any instance you’re welcome to. Normies are the ones choosing not to learn.

          I do feel sorry for them because they’re probably going to get pushed to the next billionaires social media in the next decade to be exploited there too.

          Unless I’m completely missing something? What’s so bad about the design? I’m pretty dumb and uneducated and I dig me some federated social media purely because it’s genuine compared to the owning class social media.

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            I’m pretty dumb and uneducated

            Statistically speaking, the mere fact that you are here indicates that you are among the top percentages of tech literal people. This isn’t necessarily about intelligence or general education, but about tech literacy.

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              Brah, I’m not a normie. That’s why we’re talking on Lemmy. /s

              • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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                That’s… exactly what I’m saying. Did you misunderstand my comment perhaps? Normies are not “choosing” not to learn, they just literally don’t have the tech literacy skills to easily participate in the fediverse. The fediverse should improve its UX to allow more people to participate.

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            Personally I wish there was a better way to link multiple accounts together to say they’re the same person. When I switched to hosting my own instance, I basically just abandoned my old account, but I would have loved to link them to have the history there.
            We have the technology, it could be as simple as SSH keys, or like how bitcoin wallets are unique and don’t require internet to verify a match.

            Edit: I actually just discovered that this is one of the main feature differences between ActivityPub and BlueSky’s AT Protocol. BlueSky has “account portability”, and now that you can self-host it, I’m seriously considering setting it up. It would be really nice if we get an update that lets the protocols federate with each other. I think that BlueSky has said they intend to support ActivityPub federation in the future.

            • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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              ActivityPub actually has a similar mechanism of a “Move” activity. There are just very few implementations that support that kind of thing.

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                The main problem with that seems to be that the original server needs to be active to migrate. If the instance I’m on shuts down or is uncooperative, then my account history is gone. And for Mastodon, that’s even worse if you have a bunch of followers. These are all reasons I decided to self-host before I built up too much of a presence.

                • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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                  Right, of course. I don’t really see any way any protocol can get around that though. If the original server is suddenly just gone, there is no way to tell it to move your account elsewhere. Hopefully such a situation should happen very rarely though.

      • mke@lemmy.world
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        Purely anecdotally from what I’ve been reading online, it seems most younger folks hate Threads.

        Not necessarily because of privacy issues or social impact, mind you. They also think it just sucks to use, don’t like the UI, don’t like the content—which turned out to include a lot of people trying to build a personal brand and sell you things. Just like Instagram, where most users came from.

        Excluding content details, Mastodon fails similarly. Requires learning, unsatisfactory UI, more difficult to find and engage with content you like.

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    Bluesky has gained a million brazilion new users…

    I’m so sorry, it was right there. And yay for Bluesky!

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    The fediverse is seeing an uptick as well. Elons enshitofication continues. Good for us I suppose.

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    I had originally been 100% against Bluesky because of Jack Dorsey, but when he got so steamed about them doing things like actual moderation and left entirely back to Twitter to pettily suck up to Musk, I really started feeling like maybe Bluesky might not be so bad after all.

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    What are blueskys current userbase numbers, mastodons current userbase numbers, and are they federated with each other?

  • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Downloaded it. Signed up. Replied to a post about rechargeable batteries. Account got restricted. Left.

  • yamanii@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Blue Sky is the only one that allows porn and has no defederation drama, so I’m not surprised people went there. Instagram even put a banner telling people to try out threads but who would trust Zuck?

      • yamanii@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yes, and that’s why it’s hard for artists and their fans to leave, a social media that allows that and normal people posts together has massive visibility compared to enthusiasts site.

    • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Bluesky is built on an open source ActivityPub alternative called “AT Protocol”. However, Bluesky itself is not open source* and afaik does not yet federate with any other software. The company is a “public benefit corporation”.

      From my understanding, Bluesky has good moderation, to the point where Jack Dorsey (the Twitter founder) condemned it and withdrew from the project. That’s a big plus in my book.

      • Another commenter pointed out that some parts of it are open source, such as the apps and at least some parts of the backend. Im not sure to what extent the backend is open source.
    • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      The latter has been taken over by ElMu and his shenanigans, the former was originally a Twitter-internal project for a decentralised social media interfacing protocol, got forked out from Twitter in 2021 (the year before Musk took over Twitter), has a lot of Ex-Twitter people on it and promises to do a lot of things a lot better than either Twitter (now X) and offer a little more resilience against things like moderator abuse.

      Curiously, that last bit is the first time I’ve seen a reasonable use case for Blockchain: Your content can be stored on arbitrary servers and migrated to others. Your identity is tied to keys that can be used to verify your content is actually yours. The info where the public half of the key and all your content are stored is recorded in a public, distributed, append-only ledger, where each entry verifies the integrity of the previous one. Thus, once you’re registered on that, no single moderator can arbitrarily ban you anymore. (Pretty sure there’s a hole in that logic, but I’m not versed enough to confidently assert as much.)

      Of course, there’s a caveat: To discover content, you need an index (“relay”) of all the content feeds. That takes some of the content aggregation load off your individual content servers and makes hosting them easier. However, it shifts the content moderation / federation power from the individual instances to the shared index: If a given index blocks your content, people using it won’t see your content.

      In theory anyone can host their own relay and everyone can choose which relay they want their content feed to use. In practice, hosting a relay is resource-intensive, bsky have a solid headstart and probably more resources, and their app also obviously uses their own index by default, so if you do want to create a “competitor”/alternative index, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. They even state that expectation: “In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers” src

      Which is basically a small-scale version of Google and Bing (and the AT Protocol Overview explicitly uses that comparison): Sure, you can make your own search engine, but if Google is the default everywhere, has a lot of storage and computing power to serve more requests and has way more indexed content, why would people use yours instead? Thus, if you want your content to be seen by many people, you have to play by the big relays’ rules.

      Much decentral. Very open.


      (I’m being snarky here, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt: They probably do mean to make self-hosting your personal data and content easier, and it’s easier for custom feeds to use single, big relays to draw from rather than doing the indexing and collation themselves. However, it provides them with a lot of leverage and just because they call themselves a “public benefit corporation” doesn’t mean I trust them not to start enshittifying for profit at some point.)

  • ArugulaZ@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    Yep, I saw them coming in. Works well enough for me… Brazilians make the best Sega Genesis games!

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?

    I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.

    • Enthusiasticwhale@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s more valuable than Twitter and threads to me… It really is only missing video and I’ll be fully sold and hashtags seem to work… I just don’t use them often

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      From what I heard from a friend that’s pissed at losing access to xitter and begrudgingly made an account on bluesky, it doesn’t have trending topics yet, “How am I supposed to know what’s going on in the world?”

  • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    inb4 in 8 years time “Greensky a.k.a. Trust Me Guys This is THE New Twitter Forever” gains a million new users in the last 3 days.