How is you experience using them ? (I know BlueSky is invite only, but perhaps someone got lucky) I registered in Mastodon recently and i’m getting the same feeling(and problems) when started using lemmy.
How is you experience using them ? (I know BlueSky is invite only, but perhaps someone got lucky) I registered in Mastodon recently and i’m getting the same feeling(and problems) when started using lemmy.
Bluesky Cons: doesnt have videos or gifs. Its glitchy. Doesnt federate. Has VC funding that they will have to repay with huge interest meaning they will start the enshittificatiom process and betray users’ wants by forcing ads and other nonsense.
Bluesky Pros: the usernames system is better imo. having just one @ and working as subdomains or using your domains. In the future i can see people just placing their bsky subdomain places so you can just click it and go straight to their account where as on mastodon you list on your @user@instance.name and then they have to go to their own instance and copy paste it in search and then click follow (assuming theyre not defederated).
The custom algorithms that you can make and share is a great feature. Signing in to third party apps and other services that use bluesky (like the clubhouse type app) lets tou use your same account and you easily make different passwords for each separate app by using the official app.
More artists are going to bsky than mastodon and the main art mastodon instance is run by an admin that seems to get into a bunch of drama and defederates from other instances often and based on whims with no input from the users.
Mastodon Cons: no custom algorithms, no explore/For You feature to discover new things you’re interested in. Hashtags are ugly and its annoying to follow a hashtag and see every post in the hashtag which can easily be spammed. I would much prefer to have a chronologically order timeline that I can customize to show me a suggested post after every 4 chronological posts and have the recommendations based on by likes, users i follow’s likes, and topics I manually input that it detects using text/image recognition in the posts.
Mastodon Pros: it federates, has no VC funding, works well with Lemmy and pixelfed, community feel and less dunking for likes, lots of third party apps, AGPL, lots of forks and community development.
Cons for both: Neither are good in keeping up with realtime updates on news and breaking events like twitter was
Pros for both: open source, not fully controlled by any one person/group, no elon, no ads, no ragefarming for views and ad dollars, no shady practices like slowing down links to competitors and websites the owner doesnt like, no shadowbanning keywords from search like twitter and threads does.
I personally use Mastodon and have used it for years and I very very rarely check Bluesky anymore. I do hope mastodon adopts the custom algorithms, app passwords, and username setup from Bluesky though
the custom algorithms feature and usernames is absolutely the killer features of bsky for me… they’re a really amazing idea!
but not using activitypub is unforgivable imo… i’m sure there will be bridges eventually, but… come on; that shouldn’t be necessary… when you’re trying to shift the entire human population to federated networks, you can’t just break out on your own. is it perfect? no… is it a bare minimum spec that allows you to build on it? absolutely!
What if ActivityPub simply couldn’t support some of the federation features they implemented, like using a domain as your handle?
activitypub at its core is incredibly simple afaik… its just a set of defined APIs and that follow ActivityStream schemas
the actual user identifiers we interact with in software aren’t the same as what activitypub uses internally (they’re all URIs so look more like https://///)
it wouldn’t be difficult to use a similar mechanism as they’re using right now to direct a particular domain or subdomain to a user ID: it’s all rewritten anyway!
Thanks for the detailed break down! One thing I really do miss about old Twitter is how easily I could get a huge variety of great news sources at the same place.
There were always problems with the site, but nothing has come close to that level of centralized convenience (that I’ve found so far at least). It may just be the new normal since that same centralization makes any site vulnerable to the same fate twitter has met with. But man I sure underestimated how much worse twitter could get…
I’d love to give bluesky a shot for a bit, but their invite policy has me disappointed having waited for nearly a year now without any sign of opening up for regular users like me. Mastodon is good, tildes better (but tiny) so far, but I still miss having all the journalists who cared about journalism practices in one place…
Sigh…