It's great that Bluesky is gaining traction, but how sure are we that it won't turn to shit before other relays come online and make it actually decentralised?
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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I'd say that we're sure it will. It has begun making the same shady practices like redirecting all out going links through go.bsky*app 🙄
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My tenuous understanding from an article I read about the AT protocol but barely remember is that it can't be fully decentralized. I think you have to use bluesky for user authentication. And I think it said the hosting hardware requirements would be significant to the point where it's not very feisable. I welcome corrections/clarifications.
Point is, assuming that's reasonably correct, true decentralization isn't possible. And by it's nature as a big corporate owned site, enshittification is inevitable.
Yes, apparently their protocol sends everything to every node, so it would overwhelm anything but a very powerful and expensive server. The Fediverse's ActivityPub protocol is more efficient and only sends traffic where it is needed.
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It's federated in name only.
I blame ActivityPub. W3C didn't get their shit together when they invented the standard and now we are paying the price.
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What else is there though? Mastodon by design is counter-culture, so why then are people surprised when "culture" in turn does not like it?
As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person's followers could get confused. Throwing out right or wrong, famous people worry about stuff like this, which would require a level of coordination and communication across the Fediverse - i.e. a type of "centralization" (even if accomplished via possibly decentralized means?). I'm not sure if I am remembering correctly or not, but I thought there was even a fix submitted to the codebase, which has sat for YEARS without being reviewed or approved. If not this feature though, other features have definitely followed this pattern.
TLDR 1: you snooze, you lose.
TLDR 2: ideological purity ~~tests~~ beatings will continue, until moral improves.
TLDR 3: FAAFO means, it turns out, that if you entirely ignore everything / most things that the users that you hope will use your platform ask for, they might just go elsewhere, where they feel welcomed.
Is Mastodon behaving similarly to an incel culture, demanding that people like what a "nice" ~~man~~ platform it is, rather than do the work required to make people actually happy with what it offers? And if not (due to other reasons, perhaps funding), then what is the functional difference really, between that vs. whatever it is doing?
So yeah, Bluesky it is then. If we want something better, we had best get to actually building it.
As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person's followers could get confused.
Tbf, you can basically do this now - throwback to the start of paying for Twitter verification...
On Mastodon, the simple answer is you use the verification to prove it's you by using rel=me links.
It's not perfect, as you'd expect, but in an age where everything is suspect anyway...
Thank you for explaining about the relationship=me links.
Email ofc is the same - e.g. BillGates@google.123 just maybe might perhaps not be the same person as BillGates@microsoft.com. Nevertheless, Bluesky makes this stuff trivially easy, as too does Reddit, by virtue of centralization.
So the task would come down to convincing people to prefer more effort on their part vs. less effort somewhere else - while also at the same time doing this on top of all the other criticisms as well (none of my friends are there, there's barely any content, trying to find stuff is so very hard, why do the developers fight amongst themselves leading to an abysmally slow rate of improvements, and basically why should I care about this anymore then, if others likewise can't be bothered to care either?). And the vast majority of people are going to choose the latter over the former.
It's not even necessarily a bad thing, so much as it simply is, and we must make peace with it, or expend effort to overcome it ourselves, bc that's just how the law of entropy works.
How does reddit implement this? Afaik famous peoples accounts were known only by reputation and if they posted some form of image verification publicly, but there wasnt any identity verification going on on reddits end. Thats how it used to be everywhere, and how it probably should still be. If you saw an account claiming to be someone, you didn't believe it was actually them unless you could check it out and verify their identity in some way.
Should or shouldn't doesn't matter. The majority wants an account that doesn't require external verification.
Ignore the fact that that's not truly possible. People will go to whatever platform makes them feel it's true the best.
Being capable of effectively convincing people your platform will provide this is a baseline requirement to even start having this discussion. The anonymous Internet isn't something most people want
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We aren't sure. It's still a billionaire owned social media. For some reason people are too afraid of the freedom actual decentralized social media gives them and they want a billionaire behind the scenes running everything and coralling them to the correct opinions.
It's not fear of the freedom, it's choice paralysis. People want to go to one website, sign up for one account and then be part of a network with absolutely zero research beforehand. I like the fediverse, but the barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.
Internet services getting shitty and then dying is nothing new. Look at MySpace, Digg, or any BBS. people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They'll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing
Didn't you hear? Digg is coming back, now with AI!
And one of the muppets behind Reddit, kn0thing.
I think it's also a lack of tech understanding. I know how easy it is to fork a repo so I get how great the fediverse is with all the services being FOSS and anyone can create an instance. This major benefit makes no sense to someone who doesn't even know what a git repo is or the difference between free (but you are the product being sold) and FOSS.
Even if you understand the tech, the fediverse has a content discovery problem. The content you want to see may actually exist. However, your instance needs knowledge of the content that best fits you. That's what bluesky's model does better.
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Yes. This is the best explanation of why people choose the platforms they use.
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I don’t believe it has anything to do with people’s fear. More money means more marketing power. It’s that simple.
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