Your actions' consequences are not limited to benefiting from the thing like it would for a product - with social media, you improve the networking effect for the soon-to-be bad. (Nothing against bluesky, I don't know or think it will do so)
Not everything good becomes bad. That premise is wrong.
Bluesky accepted VC money. For a social platform that means its death certificate has already been signed.
What you're ignoring with that framing is that we can use social media that operates outside the VC startup pipeline and doesn't have enshittification baked in from the start.
The fact that you have to be on “the” relay to meaningfully participate on the network.
If you instead claim that users can always choose to use other 3P relays, then you immediately lose all the nice things that Bluesky is able to do well today (search, discoverability, a “discover” algorithm). Indeed, you fall back to the same old problems that every other decentralized social network has.
Bluesky is just a shittier version of Nostr, except that the people over at Nostr don’t pretend.
It's not that it is "better" but that the choice is individual, not up to the mastodon server. In Mastodon, you trade Elon for some other group of individuals, so what happens if they make decision on moderation or content you do not agree with?
ATProto is designed around accounts that are independent of data host, application, and moderation, all in the name of giving users individual control over these things. It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server, but without the overhead
Create an account you own instead of having someone else run it. Maybe you can get your data, maybe you can ask Bluesky for a review (there were bugs and scaling issues against bot networks that cause false positives)
I'm not seeing that handle resolve in the normal places. Do you have the DID? You should use a custom domain so that you can control the the reference and lookup.
You can run your own PDS and manage complete account lifecycle
So after you're banned from Bluesky you create another account on a different server and hope the admins of your original server, which still hosts all the people you want to follow, don't block your new account from interacting with their server?
You said it was different from Mastodon, but how is this different from Mastodon?
To be fair, with ActivityPub your account is always tied to a given server.
However as you have rightly noticed, the person you are responding to here is being disingenuous. Controlling the account doesn't fix the fundamental issue caused by network effects. An account that can't interact with a large portion of the network is no different than Mastoson in practice.
The Mastodon equivalent would be running your own single user instance which gets defederated by one of the big players.
> does not account for users banned from Bluesky by Bluesky for breaking the ToS or PDS abuse.
Then you are missing the point. I am asking how much censorship power the largest node in the network has.
If being blocked by the largest provider means 95% of users can't see me anymore then the situation is strictly worse than Mastodon vs ActivityPub-at-large.
What did you do to get banned? Most people who make this claim are unwilling to share the behavior that led to it. Bans are not arbitrary, nor is anyone obligated to host or show your speech
ATProto is young compared to the alternatives, give the network time to build out an ecosystem and the resilience we need.
First you made incorrect and misleading statements. Then when I point it out you try to rhetorically shift blame on to me.
To answer your misleading and irrelevant question, I have never been banned by Bluesky. What did you do to get banned on Mastodon? Do you understand that "moderation" and "banned for violating the ToS" are one and the same?
ATProto is not any better than ActivityPub (ie Mastodon) regarding the impact of network effects on moderation. The "big few" retain their outsized influence with both protocols, at least as far as I am aware. If there is a technical misunderstanding about this on my part then do please point it out.
Moreover, the current situation is significantly worse on ATProto because the vast majority of the network currently relies on a single provider.
To be clear, I am not opposed to ATProto. I am only opposed to inaccurate technical comparisons.
The question remains misleading and irrelevant whether it was addressed to me or the room at large.
I am well aware that ATProto makes improvements to both account migration and end user moderation. Those are of course good things in my view. As previously stated I have noting against ATProto.
This entire subthread started because I responded to your claim that "It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server". That is highly misleading at best, outright wrong at worst. It is only equivalent to that scenario if every ATProto user manages their own account as well as every single other required service, at which point you might as well just have run your own Mastodon instance as it likely would have been both simpler and less resource intensive.
The reality is that this is never expected to happen. ATProto is expected to be like Mastodon, with the improvements that you can share a single account between multiple servers and there are tools to apply additional filtering so that you don't have to see (as much of) things you don't like. Those are certainly welcome improvements but they do nothing to address the outsized effects on censorship that large nodes have in federated networks.
Purely in theory, you could simultaneously use a single account with a full set of politically correct ATProto services (such as Bluesky) and a competing set of politically incorrect ones operated by someone else. However, if history is anything to go off of then this will quickly get you banned by either one or both of the operators. Merely interacting with those guilty of wrongthink has always been an easy way to get kicked off of a surprisingly large number of Mastodon servers.
Even supposing that the above doesn't happen to get you banned by either node, the potential still remains that it could. Whether or not a large node chooses to exercise its outsized influence doesn't change the fact that it possesses it. ATProto doesn't fix that.
Every user in ATProto gets their own database that amounts to a tar file (technically sqlite with car export format)
This is nothing like having a single server for every user. Perhaps you are confusing Bluesky (one app) with ATProtocol the shared network? There are already independent servers and apps operating separate from Bluesky
Twitter was always... not great (there's a reason it was affectionately known as the Hellsite), but it had 16 years of being _tolerable_ for most people (the real exodus only really started with Musk's changes, though there had been a couple of smaller ones previously, mostly over Twitter messing with the API).
Frankly, if I get 16 years out of Bluesky before having to move onto the next one, I can live with that. Social networks _die_; it has always been so. USENET, livejournal, Tumblr, twitter... nothing lasts forever.
My bluesky feed is somehow even more abhorrent than my twitter one, except that instead of right wing hate it's Facebook memes about "reading banned books"
Bluesky's 'Discover' feed (the default algo feed that you get when you create your account) is based on _likes_, not follows, so if you never like anything you'll get random nonsense.
You can try using other algo feeds from here: https://bsky.app/feeds and remove the discover feed, or of course you could just use the chronological one.
This is such a lazy, uninformed take that people just love to repeat. 1) the left on Bluesky is full of in-fighting because neolib left are convinced that Harris lost because of racism/sexism and the progressive left spend a lot of their time trying to educate (and dunk on) them for their braindead takes, and 2) any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your sentiments. As long as Bluesky isn't actively censoring and suspending journalists and other public figures, there is no equivalence to Truthsocial or X and only a clown/shill/psyop would suggest as much.
It's really not that hard to find enriching content from all walks of life on Bluesky -- if somebody can't find it, they just suck at the internet.
To be clear, I do have grievances with Bluesky, and I do not have high hopes for its future -- but that's because I personally believe that social media in general is both fatally flawed from the start and detrimental to society, and will never not devolve into ad-riddled or otherwise enshittified services. I am not a Bluesky shill, I'm just here to call out the silly false equivalence with Truthsocial, etc.
yes, the right is full of infighting too as shown by the recent H1B debate, that doesn't contradict my point.
> any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your sentiments
bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing. There is literally no one else to follow, at least for now. X still has non-political content, I mainly follow AI, technology and cryptocurrency, and I couldn't find similar content on bluesky.
> bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing. There is literally no one else to follow, at least for now. X still has non-political content, I mainly follow AI, technology and cryptocurrency, and I couldn't find similar content on bluesky.
Not op, but chiming in. There's a lot of content regarding aquatics and home automation (separate topics). I avoid the politics stuff entirely, and much of the crypto stuff on X tends to be promoting scams and rug-pulls.
> bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing.
A big contributor to this feeling is their default "Discover" feed being very mediocre. "Less of this" and "more of this" do not seem to impact what it gives you, neither do what you like, respond to, follow, or who you block. Some days it's entirely cat pictures, other days it's entirely politics (my suggested accounts to follow are 100% of the time in this category). Finding the good content is very difficult, and the handful of accounts I follow are largely accounts I had to manually search for or was given a direct link to somewhere else, which would never have come up naturally. And to try to fix it, I took the advice to use the block feature, er, liberally, and I think it made the problem worse.
I even wouldn't mind the politics being in the feed if it didn't show me the exact same things repeated again and again. I get that determining if two posts are too similar is difficult, but it could at least not show me the same image again and again and again...
Isn't that the whole point of bs? Empowering users to take their data where they want. It's completely open-sourced and well-documented. If someone buys bluesky you can move all your data to a different service that follows the same protocol
Can I move my followers/following graph as well? Moving the actual content is barely a consolation prize if you lose your entire audience in the process.
But the users are not. The app and the AppView can be bought and then you are in control of what people can see. Good luck trying to move them to the alternative.
I honestly am annoyed to use websites and services like this. Annoys the crap out of me and everyone else, but since it's petty much forced down their throats, the "eventually" is "eventually everyone stops complaining".
