I just received my invite code today and took a quick look around the app. Like Mastodon I do not prefer microblogging platforms. And that’s all I know about Bluesky.
So, what can you tell me about this project?
It’s twitter except for the old guy instead of the new guy. If you left twitter for bluesky then you are likely just going to run into the same issue down the road where the old guy sells it for tons of money to whoever will pay. Those willing to pay are likely not great at managing a social media platform.
Came here to comment this. Spot on.
We should use Mastodon instead.
I wanted to like Mastodon but couldn’t. The only reason I used microblogging services like Twitter was to shitpost about Vampire: The Masquerade. Said game includes lots of death, blood, and other topics that make some folks uncomfortable. On Twitter, the atmosphere was very “don’t like, don’t read”, but Mastodon has an intense culture about using content warnings on anything that might make someone marginally uncomfortable. I’m cool with that, but I can’t do it on my shitposting or it sort of ruins the joke. Bluesky doesn’t have that atmosphere.
I know folks usually skew that way but it’s server to server. Frankly, I don’t use any warnings because I can’t be bothered and my instance is fine with it.
That misunderstanding proves how we need to review the user experience of federated projects, or at least do a much better job of explaining it to everyone.
Spot on. I do understand that there’s a bit of difficulty to it considering its a fairly significant paradigm shift from where we were.
Did you try it this time last year?
When everyone migrated there were a lot of “helpful” newbies enforcing rules that simply don’t exist. There are too many people like that still but not so many you can’t mute them all.
It’s caused by refraction of the sun’s light by the atmosphere
It’s actually caused by scattering of the light in the atmosphere not refraction. Refraction is what makes rainbows tho.
It’s just Twitter run by the old CEO. There’s some promises that it’s going to be decentralized at some point, but no real motion towards that yet AFAIK. Anyone on the Fediverse should just pick Firefish or Mastodon over it.
Bluesky is “decentralized” in the way that crypto is in that the biggest fish (bluesky.social) controls everything.
It’s a microblogging service (similar to Twitter), ran by a small dev team and backed by Jack Dorsey (of Twitter origin). It’s been in “invite-only” closed beta forever so it has never really gone super mainstream. Some communities have kinda made their way over there but for the most part it seems threads and mastodon will run away with things in terms of being heirs to Twitter (imo). Bluesky is building their own platform (AT) that will allow others to stand up their own “bluesky” instances that federate with each other, similar to how mastodon works on the Fediverse with ActivityPub. Not sure what the progress is with that but am skeptical it will ever actually be a popular choice given the success of AP/Fediverse and the fact that threads and other large platforms (Wordpress, Tumblr, etc…) have already implemented or committed to building in AP support.
Could Bluesky not just implement ActivityPub too? Is there a reason why they are not doing that?
They chose not to after researching options. Pretty sure they decides account portability was a key feature needed and AP doesn’'t do this. As in taking your account and all your posts and data witj you to a new server. I assume there is a technical reason why this would be very difficult to add to AP/Mastodon otherwise they could have just added it themselves.
Yeah the not being able to fully move your account and all its history is one of the biggest shortcomings of AP for me. I hope they shore that up eventually.
100% agree, without it, the decentralization aspect is severely weakened
It’s nothing to do with that, they made the AT protocol because is structured in a way that ensures that bluesky (the company) will always control the network. They wouldn’t be able to keep control with ActivityPub, it’s the same reason Threads will never implement it.
All the stuff about account portability is a distraction. Think about it: where would one move an account to anyway? Another BS node? Why? Unlike Mastodon instances there is no functional difference.
They could but they are developing their own protocol.
AT is not truly decentralized like activitypub. It’s similar to crypto where the majority stakeholder (in this case, bluesky the for profit company) controls the network. There are not “instances” run by community leaders, just free hosting.
Ah interesting. One more in the “negative” column for Bluesky then imo. What Mastodon gets right (perhaps in a sea of things that it gets wrong) is that it relies on people to build and maintain their communities, rather than hoping that technology can solve all the issues of moderation, etc… Yeah, there are improvements that we hope will get to AP. It’s obvious bsky is just not the future.
Yes, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s contextual moderation that makes a space worth being on. This is a good piece that sums up the differences.
This is the best reply so far. Also worth mentioning both the platform and the protocol are open source.
If you don’t like micro blogging then you won’t like this micro blogging site. That’s all you need to know!
I heard it was pretty much twitter with even less moderation, but it’s a smaller so you’re slightly less likely to run into open neo nazis, but only slightly. I only have hearsay to go on, as it never really interested me, but most of the people I know that went to it have stayed.
From what I saw it was quite left leaning when I used it
Yeah honestly hearing it describes as being full of neo Nazis is wild lol, it’s almost more left leaning than Lemmy
I’m glad to hear it’s turned, but all I was hearing about was racism and transphobia that is at modern Twitter levels.
I see more transphobia on Lemmy than BlueSky, but that might be because Lemmy is more oriented towards what everyone is saying while BlueSky you mostly see stuff from people you follow. There isn’t an algorithm driven feed there (yet)
So far the people there have been pretty good at bullying neo nazis so much they leave. Otherwise it’s pretty chill.
Weird to call a place “chill” that gives Nazis a home in the first place imo.
…you say that like they are being invited and not sneaking in against everyone’s wishes. Even the Lemmyverse is not entirely free of them, unfortunately.
My instance doesn’t have Nazis
The guy you replied to was me. It’s wild you take fact that bad actors are pressured to leave and try to make seem like that’s being welcoming of them??? That makes absolutely no sense.
Personally I don’t even get to see any of them, I mostly see mentions after they are driven out. As much as the moderation there could stand to be improved, I doubt even your instance can actually match your standards of if you can’t make absolutely sure not a single bad actor makes their way in, you are actually enabling them. The thing about Nazis is that they lie and play coy a lot, and the more that instances grow, the harder it is to identify all of them. it’s not like all of them show up wearing swastikas.
the more that instances grow
If an instance grows beyond it’s ability to quickly identify and ban Nazis then it’s bad at moderating itself and will probably be defederated from by instance admins that are good at moderating.
If the users are driving out Nazis as you say, then it kind of implies that the admins are either OK with them being there, or didn’t get to them quickly.
So now you are just repeating yourself.
Even though the userbase is effectively driving them away, you are trying your hardest to try to spin that as a bad thing, ignoring the growing challenges of moderation at scale for an idealistic perfection that is not nearly as unblemished in practice as you want to pretend.
I don’t know what’s your beef with BlueSky, but this level of self-righteousness is just tiresome. And we are not even talking about actual Twitter which is overrun with nazis, This is not a problem in BlueSky. I’m starting to doubt that they are the actual reason for all this fuss.
If you don’t want to be there, that’s up to you. But I’ll probably stick with it, many people that I’d like to follow are there.
A lot of people here are being cynical about it, and to be fair I totally get being suspicious of corporate platforms, but these places are at least half as much about the userbase than they are about the owners. So far it seems to be a much more chill place even compared to Lemmy. People there talk much more about things they are passionate about than having endless toxic arguments, and the general atmosphere there seems pretty open to diversity, as far as I see.
But if you don’t care for microblogging I don’t think that will change your mind.
Mastodon has significantly more active and diverse users than BS and none of the garbage.
Yeah, but it’s “confusing”, and “not owned by some rent-seeking narcissist”, so no one seems to care.
Ugh so true. I frequently describe Mastodon as “community-led nonprofit” to help get it through to the people who think Threads or BlueSky will be different.
It depends what you’re using it for. If you want to old school mid to late 00s twitter that was just random anonymous people microblogging random thoughts and sharing links and pics then you’ll be happy to be back home.
If you followed twitter because it was a way to get direct contact and access to industry professionals, celebrities, reporters, breaking news, specific niche communities that just dont exist or barely do on mastodon, then you will be unhappy with it. Mastodon will get you uh, George Takei, Zach Weiner, and the technologyconnections guy.
For example of the difference and why many people just dont care for jumping into mastodon I’ll use My wrestling feed as an example. On mastodon it is mostly one guy who’s enthusiastic about womens wrestling(seriously if he stopped my feed would die), one news reposting site(which honestly isnt a bad thing cause wrestling news is awful), and a handful of other people. Twitter has lots of memes and clips from the fans after episodes air, lots of links to primary sources and news sites, and the actual wrestlers interacting cutting kayfabe online promos, promoting themselves, and interacting with fans.
This applies to a number of niches, hobbies, and fan interests on twitter. Bigger isnt necessarily better but the size and adoption of twitter is a huge strength.
There was a mass migration of furries to Bluesky recently, they now have a sizable presence there. Enough so to make you wonder if that’s what it’s intended for, unless you just stick to the “For You” or "Discover* feed.
I’m sure Jack Dorsey had this envisioned the whole time
So either go to lemmy flooded with tankies or go to blue sky flooded with furries
It’s initials are BS and so are their promises. Anyone thinking it isn’t just going to become twitter in a year are sorely mistaken.
I’d love to try it, if they’d ever give me an invite code. Twitter was pretty cool back in the day and I’d like something similar as a place to post what I’m working on.
Since you are already hanging out here, why not give Mastodon a fair try :)
Every Mastodon client I have tried to use is way too confusing. There are plenty of people using it, but it feels like a wasteland because connecting with people is too high friction. Maybe I’m using it wrong /:
Android or iOS?
iOS
I hear good things about the Mona app on iOS. Also consider the official app. On Android, the official app is good but is active in an enhanced version called Megalodon, which is what I use. All those I listed should be user friendly.
here you go bsky-social-g7ivv-vqbuf
bsky-social-5h6ss-753kn
bsky-social-gywyf-jocqt
First come first served!
i joined beehaw and bluesky in the same week. i think it’s fun! lots of artists and indie game devs on there. i didn’t use twitter and don’t really like mastodon, so i don’t have any point of comparison. seems to me that moderation is lacking and/or apathetic. there’s been a heavy focus on US political issues. there’s a lot of stuff that i don’t want to see, but i mute often and that has improved my browsing experience. it’s been more friendly and welcoming than pretty much any other social media site i’ve tried so far. i also do not prefer microblogging platforms, but i’ve been having such a hard time with hateful comments across various platforms in the past few months, bluesky has been refreshing for me in that sense.
It’s alright, just basically Twitter 2. It’s useful for some things. A lot of creatives chose to migrate there, which is nice so that I can network with fellow Twitch streamers and keep up with news on the platform. As much as I like Mastodon, I just wasn’t getting that there. It’s also nice that a bunch of artists I used to follow are there.
I’d say that it is the Twitter clone with the best chance at replacing Twitter. It already feels like Twitter (in a good way).
It’s still invite only but everyone has an excess of invite codes at this point.
It already feels like Twitter.
Still full of Nazis then, I take it?
And no rules against it apparently
A few podcasts I listen to have switched to calling their bluesky handles out instead of their twitter handles in their outros. I’ll probably install it and delete ex/twitter when I get an invite.
Go with Mastodon. Bluesky is just Twitter but run by crypto fanatics. It’s not decentralized or nonprofit or safeguarded against enshittification.
Who cares?
Just a heads up, on Beehaw we do our best to comment things that are actually helpful.
