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> to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. I think this is the most impor

> to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong. My prediction is that Bluesky will be successful because of ease of use, not because of the distributed nature. Most users don't care about being distributed at all.

TylerE 3y ago
I’ll go farther: for most users being distributed is actually worse. They don’t care about copyleft or “information wants to be free”. They want a feed that isn’t full of Nazis and that all their friends post on They don’t want to think about platforms, peering, distribution, server mutes, or any of that faff.
- psionides 3y ago
  Personally, I haven't really seen any "Nazis" on Twitter that I keep hearing about (though that probably depends on the definition), I'm just excited about Bluesky because it has an open API that's not controlled by one dumb guy who can shut down whole businesses like Tapbots with a flip of a switch or decide that $100 per month is a fair price for "hobbyists" to use it... but I guess I'm probably an outlier.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    There a tons of truly vile fediverse instances.
    - hypocrticalCons 3y ago
      But fediverse isn't run by one man that personally uses his position to push those opinions.
    - runarberg 3y ago
      I think the difference is that moderation is easier on the fediverse (as well as on Bluesky). If you want that vile content you kind of have to either be in that circle your self, or you have to explicitly look for it. On Bluesky there are popular mute and blocklists, hateful accounts get mass blocked, and engagements around hateful content is diminished (not proliferated like on Twitter). The Fediverse is even more so, where whole servers are mass blocked by because hateful content is allowed to fester.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        Someone has to do it though. A default federate-everything install will, well, federate everything.
        runarberg 3y ago
        True, but apart from moderation, the engagement driven algorithm on Twitter also does a ton to proliferate vile content. On the federated platform the algorithms tend to be simply chronological and limit the content to account you explicitly follow. Meaning there is way less exposure to undesired content. One of your follows must be the one to repost it (which may warrant an unfollow or mute, etc.) or you must opt into an algorithm that gives you unwanted content (which you may then simply swap out for a better one).
        Zak 3y ago
        Sort of. Somebody still has to follow the other or find a post from outside their server and comment on it before any communication takes place. How likely that is depends on who's on your server. If you're hosting people who already have a large audience, or are especially vulnerable to harassment, that's probably going to happen sooner or later and it would be wise to craft or copy a denylist before it does. I run my own Mastodon server and I've never had to take any moderation actions with a few hundred followers. I know the names of a few vile servers and can't recall seeing them among my followers. I suspect I'm fortunate in just not being interesting enough to vile people.
    - Chiba-City 3y ago
      [dead]
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      .. and I as a mastodon server admin can just unilaterally block them at the behest and for the benefit of my users.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        Yes which is a feature of the fediverse, not a bug. If the admin blocks an instance it's either a community you as a user won't want to be interacting with, or the user has chosen the wrong instance for them to be on. I don't know why people say that every instance not federating with every other is a bad thing. It's not. I definitely don't want to interact with the extreme right instances around so I choose one that I feel at home with and that has them all blocked. I think that's the beauty of the system.
        numpad0 3y ago
        No, it's a bug, not feature. Those content should not flow into your timeline if your friends are all nice and vile accounts are banned on your instance. The fact that instance owners not just can, nor just do, but HAVE TO block a bunch of demonized instances as a checkbox obligation and compromise and virtue signaling is a bug.
        sleepybrett 3y ago
        How my community wants to operate is not beholden to your standards if my instance wants to block the stormfront mastodon instance it's going to and nothing you say is going to make anyone on my instance change their minds about that. I have not seen any evidence of any major instance ban another instance because it refuses to ban yet another instance. There would be no reason for that. Messages from the controversial instance still won't make it to the instance that demands the 'virtual signaling' even through my instance.. unless some user on my instance essentailly quotes whole posts.
  - hypocrticalCons 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - psionides 3y ago
      What (not an American, been to the US once for 3 weeks)
      - timmytokyo 3y ago
        This reminds me of one of those old jokes where someone is called stupid and ugly and they respond "I'm not ugly".
        psionides 3y ago
        The response to the first line was contained in the "What" because I was speechless
  - runarberg 3y ago
    On the Icelandic twitter, Nazis—or at the very least extremely and explicitly xenophobic rhetoric—has been getting more and more prominent. There was a time where you could look past it for the most part, but currently every time I go on Twitter I’ll spot a very hateful comment or two. It may be that most of my circle has migrated over to Bluesky and the only people left on Icelandic twitter are either public figures or nazis. So the nazi content is just a greater proportion of the diminished Icelandic content. Or that nazis feel empowered inside the current Twitter atmosphere, which honestly is very scary to think of. I tend to think that the reason is a mix of both.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      How does Iceland end up with Nazis? Isnt Polish your largest non-native ethnicity? Don’t think they were exactly fans, by and large.
  - curtisblaine 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - TylerE 3y ago
      I’m talking stormfront reading kill-all-the-Jews actual Nazis.
      - psionides 3y ago
        Yikes :| Yeah so luckily I've never come across those...
        chungy 3y ago
        If you've ever seen someone chanting "From the river to the sea", that's a euphemism for "kill all the Jews"
        curtisblaine 3y ago
        That's very far, etnically and ideologically, from "Stomfront nazis" though.
        davidy123 3y ago
        No it is not. In the mainstream, is either that Palestinians should have full access to their historical lands, or at its extreme that it should be a fully Palestinian state. Of course some people on the fringes take it further. From the now hard-right Israeli side, Likud literally used this expression in its initial charter[1], and N. dog whistled it in recent statements about two states. 1. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform...
      - curtisblaine 3y ago
        In my experience, these kind of extremists kinda get banned immediately. I might be wrong though: do you have any example of right-wing accounts publicly saying that one entire ethnic group should be killed?
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    That's surprising. Before I left twitter I had probably came across more than ten accounts that were openly white supremacist or explicitly calling for the extermination of the Jewish race
  - teamonkey 3y ago
    I didn’t understand why people kept saying there were so many nazis on Twitter. I thought that maybe people had less tolerance for spicy replies and such. Then Elon turned off the app access and I had to use the official app. There they were! White supremacists, algorithmically injected straight into my feed.
- Chiba-City 3y ago
  [dead]
ulrischa 3y ago
I played around with the api and it is one of the most easiest apis I have seen. Very good for hobby projects as well as advanced usage
nightpool 3y ago
Except for the fact that it requires a centralized directory server that you can be banned from at any time, with no recourse. And for users, being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly—a big step backwards from Mastodon where a group of users can come together and live on a server run by an admin they trust without needing their own DNS names. It replaces social trust that's more accessible for a lot of non-technical users with a more complicated kind of technical trust that requires a high level of technical sophistication (Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of twitter users all signing up for a registrar and buying their own domain names?)
- cma 3y ago
  It doesn't work with subdomains?
- BryantD 3y ago
  Well, or a group of users can come together and attach their identity to a DNS server run by an admin they trust. If I register pinksky.com, it is fairly cheap for me to hand out subdomains to Bluesky users -- certainly easier than running a Mastodon instance. I think the questions about indexers and firehose servers are more relevant to the question of centralizations. Identity is much easier to solve.
- nightpool 3y ago
  The other issue is that I fundamentally don't think the problems of moderation and hosting are "separable" as the paper claims—the moderation of your content is intrinsic to the question of "who wants to be responsible for hosting and paying for this content?". And people are going to want to use moderation systems that make moderation decisions they agree with and support—they're not going to want to be paying for a hosting provider that hosts content they disagree with. That's why I see the fediverse "plurality of networks" federated model winning out in the end, because it can be funded and operated by small groups of people interoperating with each other rather then requiring large centralized directory resources that nobody wants to pay for.
  - detourdog 3y ago
hermanradtke 3y ago
I believe the client is the _most_ important thing to focus on, but is often secondary to the needs of the server. True RESTful (HATEOAS) APIs are really powerful, but they are a major pain for any client to implement. GraphQL APIs are worse than HATEOAS, but the client tooling is amazing. GraphQL won. I think the same thing will happen here. The distributed nature of the Fediverse is really powerful, but creating clients are a huge pain. The API is so complex. In contrast to the Federvise API, the BlueSky API is easy to use which will allow more people to "play" with different clients and use cases.
- hobs 3y ago
  And then in a few years they will close the gate after the walled garden is complete. Same stuff, different platform.
  - cma 3y ago
    Same people even, isn't Dorsey involved? And it is a public benefit company that sort of laughably hasn't disclosed its charter, like how OpenAI backed out of revealing the details of its corporate structure.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      Dorsey is on the board but does not hold any ownership in the company. He also deleted his account. Seems like he only cares about nostr.
      - jimmydoe 3y ago
        he's on the board says everything. many including myself don't believe he'll give up his stake in neither Bluesky or Nostr. Nostr is full of crypto and "free speech" people. there will be too much controversies if he's seen active on both.
        steveklabnik 3y ago
shadowgovt 3y ago
Question is: when BSKY goes belly-up, will all those users have somewhere they can turn to? The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance).
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance). Can you tell me more about that? If you just redirect webfinger requests, don't you still lose everything if your current instance disappears or you move to a new instance?
  - apitman 3y ago
    I would also like to hear more about this. AFAIK there's no way to keep your ActivityPub identity if you (or the instance owner) loses access to the domain it's hosted on.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      It's more complex and depends on what you consider your identity. Webfinger redirects control what people look you up by. The domain of the URL of the actor webfinger resolved to defines how clients access your profile. They are usually the same domain, but don't need to be. Effectively your webfinger address functions as an alias (and you redirect multiple URLs to the same actor) Follows follow the actor, so your webfinger may break and follow relationships will continue. If the actor url becomes unavailable, however, your profile is inaccessible whether or not you redirect the webfinger. To get Bluesky like portability we'd need either for that actor url to be possible to point to a DID or other means of decentralized lookup mechanism, and/or for servers to store the webfinger handle and recheck that regularly, and a way for clients to control a key that can be used to sign claims to say "this new instance key is also mine". It's very much doable, but not done, nor is there consensus about exactly how. Best current option if you don't want to host your own instance is to control your webfinger domain; if your instance goes without warning so you can't use the normal migration, you'd still need to manually get people to follow you again, but at least you can point them to the same id.
jes5199 3y ago
shouldn't Metcalfe's law apply here?
- wmf 3y ago
  Metcalfe's Law is fake BTW. There's no one answer to these questions because some people want to be part of a tight-knit community and other people want to be part of a global network.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
I still don't know what this supposed burden is [0] ... you pick an instance (is that actually hard?) ... done. [0] migration is a challenge if your instance vanishes without warning, but that's true of Bsky too.
- edavis 3y ago
  It wasn't hard for me because I grokked what I was doing, but for a lot of people they've never had to make a decision like that before. Especially so early in an onboarding process. And they get caught up trying to decide if they should join the instance for web developers or the one for cat lovers, because both interests are important to them. It turns people off to the idea of federated social media. I'm going to push back on the migrating being a challenge even for Bluesky if an instance vanishes. If nothing else, you do not need your old host ("PDS" in atproto parlance) to cooperate — or even be online — if you wish to migrate in Bluesky. With a local copy of your data, you can send your social graph to a new host with ease and be right back in business.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    What do I think? I think it turns them off because people (possibly yourself included) say that they should intimidated and confused by this, rather than encouraging them to make what is actually, for almost everyone, a rather simple and inconsequential choice.
    - edavis 3y ago
      I don't think they should be intimidated, I'm just saying they are: https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when... But I wouldn't say it's a fully inconsequential choice, either. Your instance and how it's situated in the wider fediverse does matter to some degree. Not having a full view of the network, missing meaningful replies, at the mercy of some admin #fediblock drama, etc. Or maybe you finally find a good instance but your admin dislikes Meta so you're defederated from threads.net now. That's a bummer.
pants2 3y ago
If being distributed means the API is more easily accessed than other apps', it can contribute to its success by facilitating excellent third-party clients that users love.
Baguette5242 3y ago
The Fediverse “is complicated” only because it has been designated as such by countless bullshit media online posts, when Mastodon started to boom after the Twitter/Musk episode. At some point, if people/users are able to understand the concept of emails, emails accounts and emails providers, they are able to understand the Fediverse that’s all. > _I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong._ The Fediverse got nothing wrong or did nothing wrong, it was just portrayed as complicated, by some fing community manager of I don’t know which fing bulls*t company that must have been pissed/worried that all his job had to be redone on another service.
lxgr 3y ago
To me, a Twitter successor has to do exactly two things: Look and feel almost exactly like Twitter, and have an escape hatch once things go south that lets me preserve my handle (essential), social graph (important), and post history (nice to have). In other words, I want what has always been possible for email: Gmail with a personal TLD. I haven't looked too deeply into AT proto, but at a first glance, Bluesky might be that.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Twitter didn't become big by being almost exactly like something that came before it. Learning something new was not a burden for all the users that jumped on to the Twitter train. Elon has weakened Twitter substantially and now it's leaving the door open to newcomers with ideas in a different direction. It's the churn. Platforms rise and fall. But this time the power vacuum is so big a non commercial platform might have a fighting chance.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    There was almost nothing to learn on Twitter: Sign up, write about anything in 140 characters or less. Replies/tagging, hashtags etc. augment the experience, but aren't necessary (and weren't even natively supported in the beginning/were just convention anyway). For Mastodon? I need to: - pick a server and remember it (I've actually lost my own handle a couple of times between months of giving it a try!) - manually copy-paste the handles of people I want to follow back on my server, since there is no native single-click way to just follow an account I am looking at on my own server - do the same on mobile, because all Mastodon apps can't possibly be associated with all server URLs on iOS and Android - remember to follow people I care about, since otherwise there is no way to discover interesting posts outside my bubble - give up on the idea of global search entirely, which is one of the things I miss most from Twitter: "flight delays XYZ", "MTA line X delay", "<bandname> <cityname>" would allow me to find content by people about any topic of interest in a way that web searches don't. All of these are annoying but doable for me, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're a major deterrent for many non-sophisticated users.
    - 3y ago
wkat4242 3y ago
Meh. Users have no issue picking an email provider. They can pay with money (eg proton) or with their data (Google, Hotmail), champion their local identity (think gmx.de) and they manage to pick the one that works for them. Why should Mastodon's diversity be an additional burden? In fact a lot of people are now on Mastodon because they picked Instagram. Soon another platform may follow suit and federate. I'm sure users will understand pretty quickly that they can communicate cross platform just like a Gmail user can mail a Hotmail one. It's really not that hard to grok.
lutoma 3y ago
Which so far they've accomplished by not being decentralized at all, which is of course convenient.
xinayder 3y ago
I thought Bluesky was way more complicated to setup than Mastodon. It's a different concept and it's just like Twitter. I still prefer Mastodon over all the extra features it has and it runs on ActivityPub. Bluesky is reinventing the wheel with a protocol only used by them. They could've built ontop of ActivityPub.

TylerE 3y ago

I’ll go farther: for most users being distributed is actually worse. They don’t care about copyleft or “information wants to be free”. They want a feed that isn’t full of Nazis and that all their friends post on They don’t want to think about platforms, peering, distribution, server mutes, or any of that faff.

psionides 3y ago
Personally, I haven't really seen any "Nazis" on Twitter that I keep hearing about (though that probably depends on the definition), I'm just excited about Bluesky because it has an open API that's not controlled by one dumb guy who can shut down whole businesses like Tapbots with a flip of a switch or decide that $100 per month is a fair price for "hobbyists" to use it... but I guess I'm probably an outlier.
- TylerE 3y ago
  There a tons of truly vile fediverse instances.
  - hypocrticalCons 3y ago
    But fediverse isn't run by one man that personally uses his position to push those opinions.
  - runarberg 3y ago
    I think the difference is that moderation is easier on the fediverse (as well as on Bluesky). If you want that vile content you kind of have to either be in that circle your self, or you have to explicitly look for it. On Bluesky there are popular mute and blocklists, hateful accounts get mass blocked, and engagements around hateful content is diminished (not proliferated like on Twitter). The Fediverse is even more so, where whole servers are mass blocked by because hateful content is allowed to fester.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Someone has to do it though. A default federate-everything install will, well, federate everything.
      - runarberg 3y ago
        True, but apart from moderation, the engagement driven algorithm on Twitter also does a ton to proliferate vile content. On the federated platform the algorithms tend to be simply chronological and limit the content to account you explicitly follow. Meaning there is way less exposure to undesired content. One of your follows must be the one to repost it (which may warrant an unfollow or mute, etc.) or you must opt into an algorithm that gives you unwanted content (which you may then simply swap out for a better one).
      - Zak 3y ago
        Sort of. Somebody still has to follow the other or find a post from outside their server and comment on it before any communication takes place. How likely that is depends on who's on your server. If you're hosting people who already have a large audience, or are especially vulnerable to harassment, that's probably going to happen sooner or later and it would be wise to craft or copy a denylist before it does. I run my own Mastodon server and I've never had to take any moderation actions with a few hundred followers. I know the names of a few vile servers and can't recall seeing them among my followers. I suspect I'm fortunate in just not being interesting enough to vile people.
  - Chiba-City 3y ago
    [dead]
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    .. and I as a mastodon server admin can just unilaterally block them at the behest and for the benefit of my users.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yes which is a feature of the fediverse, not a bug. If the admin blocks an instance it's either a community you as a user won't want to be interacting with, or the user has chosen the wrong instance for them to be on. I don't know why people say that every instance not federating with every other is a bad thing. It's not. I definitely don't want to interact with the extreme right instances around so I choose one that I feel at home with and that has them all blocked. I think that's the beauty of the system.
      - numpad0 3y ago
        No, it's a bug, not feature. Those content should not flow into your timeline if your friends are all nice and vile accounts are banned on your instance. The fact that instance owners not just can, nor just do, but HAVE TO block a bunch of demonized instances as a checkbox obligation and compromise and virtue signaling is a bug.
        sleepybrett 3y ago
        How my community wants to operate is not beholden to your standards if my instance wants to block the stormfront mastodon instance it's going to and nothing you say is going to make anyone on my instance change their minds about that. I have not seen any evidence of any major instance ban another instance because it refuses to ban yet another instance. There would be no reason for that. Messages from the controversial instance still won't make it to the instance that demands the 'virtual signaling' even through my instance.. unless some user on my instance essentailly quotes whole posts.
- hypocrticalCons 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - psionides 3y ago
    What (not an American, been to the US once for 3 weeks)
    - timmytokyo 3y ago
      This reminds me of one of those old jokes where someone is called stupid and ugly and they respond "I'm not ugly".
      - psionides 3y ago
        The response to the first line was contained in the "What" because I was speechless
- runarberg 3y ago
  On the Icelandic twitter, Nazis—or at the very least extremely and explicitly xenophobic rhetoric—has been getting more and more prominent. There was a time where you could look past it for the most part, but currently every time I go on Twitter I’ll spot a very hateful comment or two. It may be that most of my circle has migrated over to Bluesky and the only people left on Icelandic twitter are either public figures or nazis. So the nazi content is just a greater proportion of the diminished Icelandic content. Or that nazis feel empowered inside the current Twitter atmosphere, which honestly is very scary to think of. I tend to think that the reason is a mix of both.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    How does Iceland end up with Nazis? Isnt Polish your largest non-native ethnicity? Don’t think they were exactly fans, by and large.
- curtisblaine 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - TylerE 3y ago
    I’m talking stormfront reading kill-all-the-Jews actual Nazis.
    - psionides 3y ago
      Yikes :| Yeah so luckily I've never come across those...
      - chungy 3y ago
        If you've ever seen someone chanting "From the river to the sea", that's a euphemism for "kill all the Jews"
        curtisblaine 3y ago
        That's very far, etnically and ideologically, from "Stomfront nazis" though.
        davidy123 3y ago
        No it is not. In the mainstream, is either that Palestinians should have full access to their historical lands, or at its extreme that it should be a fully Palestinian state. Of course some people on the fringes take it further. From the now hard-right Israeli side, Likud literally used this expression in its initial charter[1], and N. dog whistled it in recent statements about two states. 1. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform...
    - curtisblaine 3y ago
      In my experience, these kind of extremists kinda get banned immediately. I might be wrong though: do you have any example of right-wing accounts publicly saying that one entire ethnic group should be killed?
- bowsamic 3y ago
  That's surprising. Before I left twitter I had probably came across more than ten accounts that were openly white supremacist or explicitly calling for the extermination of the Jewish race
- teamonkey 3y ago
  I didn’t understand why people kept saying there were so many nazis on Twitter. I thought that maybe people had less tolerance for spicy replies and such. Then Elon turned off the app access and I had to use the official app. There they were! White supremacists, algorithmically injected straight into my feed.
Chiba-City 3y ago
[dead]

ulrischa 3y ago

I played around with the api and it is one of the most easiest apis I have seen. Very good for hobby projects as well as advanced usage

nightpool 3y ago

Except for the fact that it requires a centralized directory server that you can be banned from at any time, with no recourse. And for users, being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly—a big step backwards from Mastodon where a group of users can come together and live on a server run by an admin they trust without needing their own DNS names. It replaces social trust that's more accessible for a lot of non-technical users with a more complicated kind of technical trust that requires a high level of technical sophistication (Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of twitter users all signing up for a registrar and buying their own domain names?)

cma 3y ago
It doesn't work with subdomains?
BryantD 3y ago
Well, or a group of users can come together and attach their identity to a DNS server run by an admin they trust. If I register pinksky.com, it is fairly cheap for me to hand out subdomains to Bluesky users -- certainly easier than running a Mastodon instance. I think the questions about indexers and firehose servers are more relevant to the question of centralizations. Identity is much easier to solve.
nightpool 3y ago
The other issue is that I fundamentally don't think the problems of moderation and hosting are "separable" as the paper claims—the moderation of your content is intrinsic to the question of "who wants to be responsible for hosting and paying for this content?". And people are going to want to use moderation systems that make moderation decisions they agree with and support—they're not going to want to be paying for a hosting provider that hosts content they disagree with. That's why I see the fediverse "plurality of networks" federated model winning out in the end, because it can be funded and operated by small groups of people interoperating with each other rather then requiring large centralized directory resources that nobody wants to pay for.
- detourdog 3y ago

hermanradtke 3y ago

I believe the client is the _most_ important thing to focus on, but is often secondary to the needs of the server. True RESTful (HATEOAS) APIs are really powerful, but they are a major pain for any client to implement. GraphQL APIs are worse than HATEOAS, but the client tooling is amazing. GraphQL won. I think the same thing will happen here. The distributed nature of the Fediverse is really powerful, but creating clients are a huge pain. The API is so complex. In contrast to the Federvise API, the BlueSky API is easy to use which will allow more people to "play" with different clients and use cases.

hobs 3y ago
And then in a few years they will close the gate after the walled garden is complete. Same stuff, different platform.
- cma 3y ago
  Same people even, isn't Dorsey involved? And it is a public benefit company that sort of laughably hasn't disclosed its charter, like how OpenAI backed out of revealing the details of its corporate structure.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Dorsey is on the board but does not hold any ownership in the company. He also deleted his account. Seems like he only cares about nostr.
    - jimmydoe 3y ago
      he's on the board says everything. many including myself don't believe he'll give up his stake in neither Bluesky or Nostr. Nostr is full of crypto and "free speech" people. there will be too much controversies if he's seen active on both.
      - steveklabnik 3y ago

shadowgovt 3y ago

Question is: when BSKY goes belly-up, will all those users have somewhere they can turn to? The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance).

CharlesW 3y ago
> The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance). Can you tell me more about that? If you just redirect webfinger requests, don't you still lose everything if your current instance disappears or you move to a new instance?
- apitman 3y ago
  I would also like to hear more about this. AFAIK there's no way to keep your ActivityPub identity if you (or the instance owner) loses access to the domain it's hosted on.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    It's more complex and depends on what you consider your identity. Webfinger redirects control what people look you up by. The domain of the URL of the actor webfinger resolved to defines how clients access your profile. They are usually the same domain, but don't need to be. Effectively your webfinger address functions as an alias (and you redirect multiple URLs to the same actor) Follows follow the actor, so your webfinger may break and follow relationships will continue. If the actor url becomes unavailable, however, your profile is inaccessible whether or not you redirect the webfinger. To get Bluesky like portability we'd need either for that actor url to be possible to point to a DID or other means of decentralized lookup mechanism, and/or for servers to store the webfinger handle and recheck that regularly, and a way for clients to control a key that can be used to sign claims to say "this new instance key is also mine". It's very much doable, but not done, nor is there consensus about exactly how. Best current option if you don't want to host your own instance is to control your webfinger domain; if your instance goes without warning so you can't use the normal migration, you'd still need to manually get people to follow you again, but at least you can point them to the same id.

jes5199 3y ago

shouldn't Metcalfe's law apply here?

wmf 3y ago
Metcalfe's Law is fake BTW. There's no one answer to these questions because some people want to be part of a tight-knit community and other people want to be part of a global network.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

I still don't know what this supposed burden is [0] ... you pick an instance (is that actually hard?) ... done. [0] migration is a challenge if your instance vanishes without warning, but that's true of Bsky too.

edavis 3y ago
It wasn't hard for me because I grokked what I was doing, but for a lot of people they've never had to make a decision like that before. Especially so early in an onboarding process. And they get caught up trying to decide if they should join the instance for web developers or the one for cat lovers, because both interests are important to them. It turns people off to the idea of federated social media. I'm going to push back on the migrating being a challenge even for Bluesky if an instance vanishes. If nothing else, you do not need your old host ("PDS" in atproto parlance) to cooperate — or even be online — if you wish to migrate in Bluesky. With a local copy of your data, you can send your social graph to a new host with ease and be right back in business.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  What do I think? I think it turns them off because people (possibly yourself included) say that they should intimidated and confused by this, rather than encouraging them to make what is actually, for almost everyone, a rather simple and inconsequential choice.
  - edavis 3y ago
    I don't think they should be intimidated, I'm just saying they are: https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when... But I wouldn't say it's a fully inconsequential choice, either. Your instance and how it's situated in the wider fediverse does matter to some degree. Not having a full view of the network, missing meaningful replies, at the mercy of some admin #fediblock drama, etc. Or maybe you finally find a good instance but your admin dislikes Meta so you're defederated from threads.net now. That's a bummer.

pants2 3y ago

If being distributed means the API is more easily accessed than other apps', it can contribute to its success by facilitating excellent third-party clients that users love.

Baguette5242 3y ago

The Fediverse “is complicated” only because it has been designated as such by countless bullshit media online posts, when Mastodon started to boom after the Twitter/Musk episode. At some point, if people/users are able to understand the concept of emails, emails accounts and emails providers, they are able to understand the Fediverse that’s all. > _I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong._ The Fediverse got nothing wrong or did nothing wrong, it was just portrayed as complicated, by some fing community manager of I don’t know which fing bulls*t company that must have been pissed/worried that all his job had to be redone on another service.

lxgr 3y ago

To me, a Twitter successor has to do exactly two things: Look and feel almost exactly like Twitter, and have an escape hatch once things go south that lets me preserve my handle (essential), social graph (important), and post history (nice to have). In other words, I want what has always been possible for email: Gmail with a personal TLD. I haven't looked too deeply into AT proto, but at a first glance, Bluesky might be that.

wkat4242 3y ago
Twitter didn't become big by being almost exactly like something that came before it. Learning something new was not a burden for all the users that jumped on to the Twitter train. Elon has weakened Twitter substantially and now it's leaving the door open to newcomers with ideas in a different direction. It's the churn. Platforms rise and fall. But this time the power vacuum is so big a non commercial platform might have a fighting chance.
- lxgr 3y ago
  There was almost nothing to learn on Twitter: Sign up, write about anything in 140 characters or less. Replies/tagging, hashtags etc. augment the experience, but aren't necessary (and weren't even natively supported in the beginning/were just convention anyway). For Mastodon? I need to: - pick a server and remember it (I've actually lost my own handle a couple of times between months of giving it a try!) - manually copy-paste the handles of people I want to follow back on my server, since there is no native single-click way to just follow an account I am looking at on my own server - do the same on mobile, because all Mastodon apps can't possibly be associated with all server URLs on iOS and Android - remember to follow people I care about, since otherwise there is no way to discover interesting posts outside my bubble - give up on the idea of global search entirely, which is one of the things I miss most from Twitter: "flight delays XYZ", "MTA line X delay", "<bandname> <cityname>" would allow me to find content by people about any topic of interest in a way that web searches don't. All of these are annoying but doable for me, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're a major deterrent for many non-sophisticated users.
  - 3y ago

wkat4242 3y ago

Meh. Users have no issue picking an email provider. They can pay with money (eg proton) or with their data (Google, Hotmail), champion their local identity (think gmx.de) and they manage to pick the one that works for them. Why should Mastodon's diversity be an additional burden? In fact a lot of people are now on Mastodon because they picked Instagram. Soon another platform may follow suit and federate. I'm sure users will understand pretty quickly that they can communicate cross platform just like a Gmail user can mail a Hotmail one. It's really not that hard to grok.

lutoma 3y ago

Which so far they've accomplished by not being decentralized at all, which is of course convenient.

xinayder 3y ago

I thought Bluesky was way more complicated to setup than Mastodon. It's a different concept and it's just like Twitter. I still prefer Mastodon over all the extra features it has and it runs on ActivityPub. Bluesky is reinventing the wheel with a protocol only used by them. They could've built ontop of ActivityPub.