this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Like it, like Bluesky too, uninstall Twitter after using these apps for several days.
Reject any app that has an forced automated recommendation system
I do wonder what prevents BlueSky from going the way Twitter did, though.
Absolutely nothing. I fully expect it to follow a similar trajectory.
If lemmy ever catches on ^doubt it'll be a reddit fractal.
You need to do double caret ^doubt^ for the proper ^formatting^. Yeah, the markdown is a bit weird. lol
Oh? It works for me? Maybe it's a sync hiccup.
Huh, on Jerboa I get Html tags where my escaped carets used to be. 😅
Bluesky is still running on VC cash. We haven't seen how they plan on monetizing it yet, but if anything that is where their major fuckup will happen.
All of these applications (yes, also Lemmy and Mastodon) are feed for the AI machine. That's where the money is.
And ads probably.
Enshittification once they have enough users, that's usually how these things go. I swear we don't learn.
It's open-source and has a public protocol.
You still have to go through the central hub. You can't spin up your own, wholly independent Bluesky. You can only make your own node.
This is not true.
The App view, relay, PDS, and mobile app, code is all open source. Anyone can spin up their own version if they want.
If you want a complete copy of bluesky (reflecting the bluesky post firehose) it's prohibitively expensive, but you can spin up your own version if you want.
The only thing that's missing is bluesky federating anything other than PDSes by default, but you can 100% go in the other direction.
A good overview is here: What bluesky is and what bluesky is not
I wonder if we’ll see p2p versions of the firehose so people can seed posts from accounts they trust/like as a way to make firehoses affordable for the public to run
Especially considering the lead dev was the creator of beaker browser https://beakerbrowser.com/
More than likely we'll see in/outbox functionality similar to activitypub, so the PDSes could interop with ActivityPub and individually talk to one another
Yes, it’s not a full web3 app, but I like that these apps are heading in the right direction.
However it's better than Twitter/Instagram. I can control my feed!
Twitter also looked great until it didn't, it even comes from the same guy.
While at this moment BlueSky looks good, we will end up the same way sooner or later. Muskov et. al. figured out how to monetize social media. Now Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others are tools to manufacture opinion. And certain opinions are worth a lot to certain people.
Reddit was open source at some point too.
The seed money came from Twitter, allocated by Jack Dorsey and he had a position on the board that he didn't really make use of. He literally left because he is against centralised moderation and didn't have enough influence to prevent bsky implementing it.
Until they build "The Algorithm" to "help you" find what ~~you~~ they want you to see or not.
Feeds offer algorithm transparency and you can use alternative frontends. ATProto can't suddenly be turned to private and disable third party access, it is intrinsically public.
It doesn't have to be app-based, simply account based. Then the third party app doesn't mean anything.
It’s not something where any one person can really host their own instance long term — though people still do (for now). But AtProto is designed so a reasonably-sized company (or maybe a well-funded foundation) can host their own instance and either make a clone or do something novel.
As I understand it, the core difference is just the scale of what you’d have to host. ActivityPub only downloads what users on an instance interact with so you could easily run your own one-person instance on a home computer. A BlueSky instance downloads everything so you’d essentially need the scale of BlueSky (which is already in the terabytes)
The upside to AtProto for users is that your username and content are all portable and you can switch providers (or even use multiple) and not lose anything. ActivityPub’s downside is that it can leave you at the mercy of your admin. Not a big deal on the main instances but there’s been some drama moments where some admin freaked out and those users essentially lost their account.
AtProto/BlueSky was originally envisioned (pre-Musk) as Twitter being semi-decentralized so it’d essentially be the hub of a wider ecosystem. But, obviously, the world’s worst truck designer had other plans.
That's a red herring, they still have full control of the network.
I mean it kinda already is a Twitter, just 5 years in the past.
Nothing, which is okay. People make the mistake of thinking users have any even passing interested in a good platform with social media, not just the social connections on it.
That is why Bluesky can be so successful: It's an absolutely smooth and effortless drop-in replacement for Twitter, and has no gathered enough momentum for it to be easy to find existing people you want to follow on it, further drawing more people who you might want to follow in. So the motivation to use it is there, and the switch itself is essentially unnoticable.