As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta's X competitor, Instagram Threads.
Techcrunch has basically been an ad network for companies who want to promote themselves. Other open source projects probably don't have a budget to pay for an a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶ ad spot.
i dont like bluesky bcs its missing alot of features compared to mastodon and twitter also when you host bluesky the server you hosted you cant view bsky.social so thats why i use mastodon alongside
But control of the protocol - the definition and development - is still controlled by the for-profit company, right? It hasn't been handed over to a nonprofit governance committee, has it?
Federation or not, if Bluesky dominates the protocol, they can decide to stop federating and essentially kill the independent servers. Much like what Signal did. Sure, you can run your own Signal server, but without access to the dominant player's market, and using a protocol that's controlled monopolistically, it's practically useless to do so - which is why almost nobody does it anymore.
Is running a pds really equivalent to running your own instance? As I understand it, 2 friends running their own pds cannot federate without the centralized relay which still can't be self hosted.
Even if it doesnt have much impact on activitypub-fedi, I think this is good news for the fediverse in general. X is loosing more and more relevancy and microblogging is more and more happening on federating services.
In theory, bluesky can federate with other apps but it is currently the only one using their protocol, bluesky servers can federate with each other and when a new project using atprotocol appears it will probably be able to federate with that
I've been on Mastodon for over a year and the content simply isn't there. Several of the people that I follow on Twitter have tried moving or duplicating to Mastodon. They've had a fraction of the visibility and engagement from commenters that they would get on Twitter. Invariably after a few months they have essentially given up on it as a primary medium. For me the discoverability is essentially non-existent, which I don't think is helped by the idea of it being based around instance-local communities, which have no meaning when you're looking at something like Twitter.
mastodon had their chance during the first exodus but they refused to listen to what twitter users wanted and shot down things like lists, quote tweets, and privacy controls.
My experience has been better. User engagement is much higher per follower and the discussions don’t devolve. They’re much more useful and/or interesting. KPIs don’t measure everything.
„The content“ is there. Its just the addiction inducing, never ending dopamine that doesnt flow as freely which is great.
If you follow the topics that are most prevalent on the fedi (eg freedom, activism, technology, diversity) you will not run out unless you scroll for many hours a day, which is suggests you find yourself a hobby.
Also, the self fulfilling prophecy of „the fediverse is too small, I go to big platform“ will keep the fediverse small.
Maybe, just maybe, if your followers aren't willing to give up something vile because it's giving them a dopamine hit, they're not adding as much value to your life as you think.
In its developer’s blog, Bluesky stressed that “guardrails” are still in place. Most significantly, users can only self-host their own accounts for now, and in the next phase, self-hosted servers will initially be limited to 10 accounts each, with rate limits on usage.
It would be interesting to know more about the additional users. The banning of Shitter in Brazil is very much tied to internal politics and AFAIK it might be the Brazilian equivalent to MAGA that is currently mass-migrating to Bluesky.
If so, this might be a bad thing for them, as they probably don't want to get perceived as the Brazilian truth.social.
Even though I still don't understand those platforms, I had a look at the site. It seems like 80+ percent of the content is from Brazil or at least in Portugese.
If you enable and check nsfw content it is also 80+ percent dicks and furry content. One of the dick posts was a self declared "15y" which I promptly reported (a day later the posts & profile seem to be gone, presumably banned, which is good). You can mute hash tags of your choice, but then 90+ percent of the feed will be muted posts or those that did not get caught because they did not use hash tags. Muted users still show up in those feeds too, you have to properly block them to hide them but that is also incredibly tedious when it is basically all that there is.
A lot of posts also seem to just be weird spam, using the same odd list of hash tags that I can't make sense of (but maybe that's just weird local online trends there). I tried looking for various topics but could only find fringe posts & accounts, worse than even here. But that again might just come down to the fact that the majority of users seem to be from Brazil, so the English content is simply lacking on all fronts. You can specify languages in your profile, but I did not notice to what purpose when it still shows you all the non English stuff.
Aside from all that I once again couldn't figure out what to do, just like on Twitter back then or on Mastodon. I suppose those platforms and their hype will remain a mystery to me. But I can't help but wonder how people from Twitter who think about switching will react to this experience though...
it might be the Brazilian equivalent to MAGA that is currently mass-migrating to Bluesky.
actually, the opposite. The MAGA types are doing whatever they can to continue sucking on Elon's balls. It's journos and normies who are moving to Bluesky.
I would assume that since this whole thing is more or less a result of left-ish policy, and the opponent in the scenario is the far-right platform formerly known as Twitter, lead by the aspiring far-right icon Musk, the right-wingers would more likely opt to complain, cry several rivers and eventually turn to alternatives catered specifically for them (not even sure which ones are still alive after former tweetyplace took the crown) instead.
Haven’t done a vibe check on bluesky, but I assume it almost has to be more tolerant and potentially more progressive-ish than the old nazibirdhouse. If you lean towards the far right, why choose that, if alternatives exist?
Bluesky is explicitly promoting their system as "choose your own censorship" kind of deal, which in the way it is framed could look very attractive to right-wingers looking for an alternative platform. While this is technically also true for the Fediverse, it isn't promoted as such, and rather has a reputation for the opposite, as most fedi server admins are center-left leaning.
Bluesky might be also more left-leaning right now as obviously there is little reason for right-wingers elsewhere to switch away from Shitter to another (mostly) centralised platform, but given the overall low user numbers this could switch very quickly.
I guess we will have to see how this develops over time and get some answers from Brazilians that have a deeper understanding of the current social dynamics there.
Due to the language divide it might end up as two distinct social spheres, like Fedi's Japanese bubble, but that's a best case scenario for Bluesky I guess.
iirc, atprotocol was made to bring some features of mainstream social media to the fediverse that activitypub maintainer have said they won't be adding. They explain other reasons in their faq
Many of the functions provided by a Mastodon service is split into separate services in the AT Protocol. This means there are instances that just handle an end users data, instances that just handle indexing and streaming out the amalgamated end user data being streamed to the "relay", there are instances that are just filtering the stream from the indexing relay. so basically the backend is modular with the AT Protocol rather than monolithic as is assumed by the ActivityPub protocol where separation is assumed to be only between the frontend and backend of the service.