Decentralized FOSS socials are great technical achievements but I feel like the actual product that users will interact with are worse copy cats of already established social platforms. Mastodon is a Twitter clone, Lemmy is a reddit clone, peertube is a youtube clone. I love these FOSS/decen. platforms but the frontend that users actually interact with are just copies of already popular platforms, just with another backend. What innovative FOSS/decen. social platforms exist? Not talking about the backend but the user experience.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
900 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
61632 readers
3425 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Good with some competition. We need much more in that area.
why are people frothing over Bluesky? this is just Twitter but owned by a different oligarch
Because it isn't just Twitter. Nobody can buy the network, the same way nobody can buy email.
- Anyone can host a server.
- Anyone can make an app.
- Anyone can make an algorithm.
- Anyone can make a moderation service. Users can freely pick a server, app, algorithm, and moderation service.
Yeah, no, not anybody can host a server. Sure, you can host a PDS, but the AppView still wasn't open source last time I looked, and hosting a relay requires tens of terabytes of storage, not to mention the bandwidth to keep up.
Meanwhile, people host actual activitypub instances on repurposed routers and their car entertainment system...
Ngl thanks for the detail, I went and had another look so correct me if I’m wrong.
- Anyone can host a open source PDS like the Bluesky PDS.
- Anyone can make an AppView to view these PDSs.
- Someone with many resources needs to host a relay.
- Also it seems that Bluesky is able to gatekeep access to its federation of PDSs on a per AppView basis? The details are a bit confusing.
So if we wanted to undermine Bluesky’s currently - hopefully temporary - centralised state, we would need multiple community modified PDSs, a widely rehosted open source AppView webapp & iOS/Android clients, a very expensive relay that is community controlled via non profit or something, and then we would be federated with each other and the bluesky infrastructure too?
Sounds like a lot of work just to recreate the user-end functionality of ActivityPub :/ Very confused why they felt the need to invent ATProtocol? I have heard some vague praise of it over AP but I think I’m not technical enough to really properly make that comparison. It’s nice that ATProtocol gives you ownership of your data though.
Perhaps Mastodon/ActivityPub-apps need to improve their onboarding process and user experience. Maybe include the custom feeds feature for Bluesky too. Something has to have gone wrong for Mastodon to have failed where Bluesky succeeded.
They have an addiction to that kind of socials.
No clue. Never found those platforms to be useful, just toxic.
Same here... even when Twitter was not even in the sights of fElon I found it to be super toxic. I signed up because "it was the best way to get the news" and left in about 4 days
Yeah, why would I use BlueSky when I could just use my favorite platform named Threads?
Tap for spoiler
Just kidding
Because they learned nothing
Bluesky is like Twitter but with about 1/10th the idiots, and no mechanism that the idiots can elevate their racist, moronic hot takes above other comments.
Bluesky will follow the same enshittification trajectory Twitter did, it is just the beginning of the rollercoaster where the coaster is slowly brought up to the top to be launched... and everyone is exclaiming "wow I haven't even thrown up yet!" as if that was any indicator of how much they were about to throw up...
Maybe it will, but for the time being it hasn't. The experience is so vastly better than Twitter, that it's a no brainer to jump over. It also helps to have a decent competing platform that people like to suck users and influence away from the platform that Musk turned into a cesspit.
I don’t think it will go down the same path as Twitter, since Bluesky is open source and available on Github other devs will have the possibility to improve it or create a better version of it but with the more users joining it might necessary to monetize it to better cover the costs. I would love to see everyone switching to the Fediverse but it’s not very intuitive for the average end user with the instances and the fact that you need to target a user and an instance to follow it
*an incomplete subset of Bluesky is opensource
what do you mean by incomplete subset ? The code is available on Github and can be compiled
view more: next ›