People are actually on BlueSky
There’s now a decent measurement of #bluesky user numbers (https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html) …
They’ve got about 1.6M MAUs …
& 0.8M Weekly unique users & 0.340M Daily.
That’s not nothing!
Roughly double mastodon and 60% more than the whole fediverse (by MAUs, see fedidb.org).
Bluesky is quite “international” with large Japanese and Brazilian popltns, and there’s real attrition happening IMO.
Still, let the protocol wars begin I suppose?
but afaik they aren’t effectively decentralized yet. might as well use Twitter.
Yup. they “decentralised” servers for hosting profile info but it’s still totally centralised for receiving and sending posts.
@maegul @fediverse Bluesky appears to be just a creative way to build a bird site without Moskhos ie indexing and proprietary open source code, & little blueskies within bluesky- if it becomes successful it can’t be long before litigation. Federations are only as good as the people who live there - little moderation means parts of X are like Zombie City - I like it here people are mostly warm, funny, unique, intelligent & reasonably tolerant of each others eccentricities.
@maegul @fediverse I find BlueSky to be a lot more diverse and also far better for news than Mastodon. But at the same time it’s a nastier and more superficial place.
Comparatively, it’s definitely a lot more into shitposting vibes, for sure.
I think their biggest problem right now is they don’t have good community self-organising features (nor masto, but the boost culture corrects for that IMO), so those who want more serious sub-cultures aren’t getting much footing (and may never).
Feeds are interesting but not very fruitful IMO and hashtags are new, so it’s a bit flat community-wise there, and many users are “wait & see” I suspect.
@maegul @fediverse The lack of community tools might be the biggest technical gap, but the real problem is a lack of communities who want to use either.
Because of this, I think both Mastodon and BlueSky have hit their highwater marks under current conditions and no technical changes can alter that.
A million each is enough to survive and stagnate but it doesn’t enable growth. Only some major antitrust action against Meta by EU could do that :)
Agreed (and said the same myself)!
As I’ve said it … alternative social has run its course in this post-musk-twitter moment. Everyone’s settled down where they ended up.
And yea, either more major disruption or some new killer features (rather than clones of big social) will be needed to shake things up. Neither seem particularly likely in the short term … your EU-meta smackdown is probably the best bet??
So none of you thinks the Threads / Activity Pub thing will have an impact?
My personal opinion is that its a strategic move to avoid regulation by being able to claim they are open.
@mkarliner @maegul @fediverse We see a lot of actors using the same machinery as Mastodon, from Meta to Truth Social. I think it’s just because it’s easy for them to do so, and hence the marginal costs are low for them. Rather than it pointing to any strategic intent or meaning anything for the ‘Fediverse’. Although in that sense Mastodon has already had a phyrric victory in the protocol wars, because its enemies are using it.
Why pyrrhic? Genuine question.
@mkarliner @maegul @fediverse because what we know as the Fediverse will not grow and may disappear, even as the tools it developed and proved could work become widespread and even dominant.
Is blue sky part of the fediverse?
I thought they had plans to at one point? Maybe misremembering
Their federation protocol was called ActivityTrack, which is different than ActivityPub that much of the Fediverse uses. There were some efforts to host relays that translate between the two protocols but some people got upset that their data is being accessed and processed in order to do that.
Ahh that fills in the gaps. Thanks for the explanation 🤘
No
Bluesky is twitter. All the issues we have with X now are bound to happen with bluesky when it gets relevant.
The fediverse is the only viable alternative.
Bluesky is part of the fediverse. Isn’t it?
They built their own protocol which interacts with nothing else.
They don’t speak the same language as Lemmy and Mastodon, so can’t really federate with anyone else at the moment
@[email protected] Diaspora don’t speak the same language either yet we consider it part of the fedi. It’s one of the OGs that refused to adopt ActivityPub.
They use the AT protocol, whereas the real fediverse uses activitypub. Also, to my knowledge there is currently only one instance that uses the AT protocol: bsky.social.
Your knowledge is wrong. They opened up federation in February. There’s currently people from fedi that have Atproto PDS
Do you have any links? I was unable to find any. Also if you don’t mind, what is the benefit to running one’s own BlueSky instance?
People would run their own PDS for a couple of reasons, build their own communities, host their own data, their own moderation practices & policies, and maybe they don’t want the “big world” view
I meant links to instances not owned by the main company. Are there any?
That’s awesome! Activitypub is garbage, so the AT protocol catching on can only be a good thing.
Can you give a more detailed explanation why Activitypup is garbage? And why AT should be any better?
Some people don’t like ActivityPub because it allows mods/admins to remove their content. If you are the sort of person who believes that a moderator moderating content is “censorship” then the AT protocol is a lot more appealing.
ActivityPub is not garbage, it’s just missing important aspects. Atproto is good that users get a global view, identity isn’t tethered to a PDS, custom feeds and not at the whims of an admin that can sever any relationships they have or that can delete their account.
the real fediverse uses activitypub
Well, yeah. There are a few interoperable protocols but activitypub is certainly the major mover and shaker. Friendica and Diaspora doggedly stick to their own protocols afaik but they manage to still federate to the larger fediverse.
@[email protected] Diaspora only federates with Friendica (because the latter has diaspora protocol support). Friendica doesn’t have its “own protocol”, it uses ActivityPub with its own proprietary extensions IIRC.
It’s crazy that people would rather migrate to a social media managed by a power hungry capitalist than to a “libre” platform
I have a mastodon and honestly, it’s hardly a replacement. different instances are far too isolated even when federating together. Finding user accounts is difficult, and basic stuff like seeing content on another instance is needlessly kneecapped compared to other ActivityPub stuff like Lemmy.
It’s unfortunate, but regular people don’t want to learn about new things and just want one platform where everybody is, basically “Twitter without Musk”.
Because it’s normal people instead of 100s of posts and Linux and thigh highs.
LOL this is the answer. For better or worse, the Fediverse has a large established culture. I would not fault someone for trying out every possible alternative first.
Most people dont give a fuck. They just want something better than X and popular. “Power hungry capitalism” doesn’t even cross their minds.
I agree, but I think it does cross the minds of many. They just still choose not to care.
Fediverse isn’t intuitive
Is it really crazy? Most users don’t give a shit about the tech or politics, they just want to go where the people they are interested in are, and most of them don’t care either! Bluesky is actively promoting itself as the new old Twitter, so that’s where people who want that are going.
Majority are not too techy to understand fediverse, nor they really care of the benefit decentralization provides.
@maegul @fediverse people are actually on twitter
LOL … yea plenty right.
I do wish for the Fediverse to grow though, and to include more groups from all over the world. But I feel done with corporate social media, regardless of their MAUs.
Fair (kinda the simple explanation why I’m anti-threads-federation).
While I’m no BlueSky-stan, the idea/promise of the system is a hybrid, which I think is generally worthwhile (especially while things like twitter and threads *dominate*) but also interesting.
How hybridised it becomes (and can become) is the question though with *big* outstanding questions.
