[DeepPhilosopher]

Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally around Bluesky and its AT Protocol, which is promising federation but has yet to deliver. Not to mention it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.

Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.

And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.

To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?

[bruce511]

Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.

Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling (because most of the current mouths are, um, the same people ranting about the incumbents. )

I don't disagree that the same process leads to the same outcome. I personally don't think bluesky will ultimately be any different to the rest.

But the no-money approach of mastodon means its a very very slow burn, which will take a decade or more to succeed, and even then may not be what we expect when a billion people show up.

[dmje]

IMO what kills Mastodon is what us nerds say is the single important point about Mastodon: federation.

Stay with me...

So: federation is very cool in principle, and it's extremely cool in that it in theory means we don't have Just One Batshit Master of all our content... but in the way it's being done with Masto, it IMHO makes for a weak proposition.

Why?

Mainly because people (normal people, not us lot) don't understand or care what "federation" is. They expect (because it's been the norm for every other service), a SINGLE place where they can go to find their mates and celebs and politicians.

What they instead get is a thing where:

1) They can't search a global place and find all those people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't have this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)

2) They find someone on one "instance" (not understanding what an "instance" is) and then can't (easily) follow them from their own instance without having to think about namespaces and all that

3) They naturally gravitate towards the biggest one - probably mastodon.social - and then we're right back at the beginning, with everyone on a single instance, beholden to the possibly loony who might shut it down / monetise it / etc

Moving between instances is much harder than it is claimed to be (you lose all sorts of stuff like your history, or at least you did when I tried it).

Federation also brings all manner of hard things to those trying to run an instance - I tried, as "medium level nerd" and ended up walking away from the complexity of just not understanding why some content didn't seem to be getting from my instance to others, etc etc.

If I was the Mastodon team, I'd be focusing all my attention on global search, and on never using the word "federated" in any of their marketing ever again. It might well be the coolest thing, but it's a non-marketable thing.

Of course all this is predicated on "a good outcome" being "everyone on Mastodon" and I do appreciate those who don't want that. It's definitely the case that less people tends to make for better online social spaces, and maybe small niche groups leads to better things all round.

[metabagel]

> They can't search a global place and find all those people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't have this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)

Amen and hallelujah! This is why I gave up on Mastodon. I read that not allowing full text search across instances was actually a design decision in order to discourage brigading. But, more crucially it undermines discovery.

[wizzwizz4]

Full-text search is now allowed, but it only searches for posts you've interacted with (in:library) and those associated with accounts that have opted-in to it.

[WorldMaker]

Only available on instances willing to pay the hosting costs for an Elasticache cluster.

If someone want full-text search across the entire fediverse, who is going to pay for it? Bluesky has a business model that makes that attractive to them as a value add to pay for. ActivityPub has instances running on RPis in a shoebox. (This is a great thing, it's part of where ActivityPub federation works well.)

Of course, that's also before you get into the sociopolitics that many instances don't want full text search and are concerned about brigading and pulling old microblog posts out of context for nefarious reasons; some of which is why some instances left services like Twitter and have no interest in services like Bluesky.

[sussmannbaka]

> They find someone on one "instance" (not understanding what an "instance" is) and then can't (easily) follow them from their own instance without having to think about namespaces and all that

The people you describe wouldn’t use Mastodon in a web browser and this is a solved problem on the apps.

[bookofjoe]

Not one non-techie in a thousand knows or cares what an instance is.

[nozzlegear]

That seems like a strange premise. Are you saying the average person doesn't use e.g. Twitter in a web browser?

[h3half]

I can't find data for it but my prior would be that the overwhelming majority of "normal" users use Twitter primarily through the smartphone app as opposed to the web interface.

The only person I know who regularly uses Twitter says she has never visited the site in a browser and is quite sure that everyone in her circle uses the app. But that's just anecdote

[Yeul]

Is that a strange premise most people use apps on their smartphone?

[nozzlegear]

No, that's not what I meant. What I found strange is the premise that most people use websites so little they'd be confused by what amounts to a URL or email address.

[mariusor]

> Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.

Which is a good thing from the spec point of view but maybe bad from a user adoption point of view. Even for the later you'd be wrong, as Threads is supposed to be an ActivityPub application.

[wkat4242]

I don't really care whether it's got a ton of people though. I do care if it's truly free and federated.

It's for the same reason I don't recommend Signal to anyone in my circle. I don't want to trade one walled garden for another (Signal still refuses third-party clients for example). I use Matrix which is truly open.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Wasn't the encryption on Matrix cracked and a bunch of criminals were caught?

[Arathorn]

no; that was a different thing: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/12/unrelated-cybercriminal-netw...

[seba_dos1]

> Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.

You mean, it lacks centralization?

[robertlagrant]

It lacks a patron, shall we say.

[Dalewyn]

>Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling

While I think Mastodon's irrelevance is deserved, let's also be fair to the "incumbents": Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, et al. gained and maintain their critical mass from word of mouth.

Many other would-be upstarts in history also usurped thrones by word of mouth, foremost example being Firefox against Internet Explorer.

Mastodon's problem with becoming relevant (and also BlueSky's problem with upending Mysterious Twitter X) is far more fundamental than lack of awareness.

[EGreg]

TruthSocial is a forked Mastodon

[treyd]

They've disabled federation and replaced the frontend with an alternative. They just needed something that worked out of the box.

[timeon]

I do not think that for service to be dependent on some particular company is successful way to do it. It is successful to deliver some kind of service but, as we have many examples from and post- web2.0, that service does not have desired outcome.

Anyway I have checked several social medias today (HN included) and everywhere except one place there was too much noise about TikTok - only place that my feed was without it was Mastodon - it is quite slow there but i consder it to be good thing. However I think that there is no good social media - Mastodon included and my days would be improved without any of them. RSS feeds feels like more then enough. Discussion seems to be mostly point-less. Maybe even this one, but those enhanced with algorithmic engagement and endless scroll are net-negative.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Try slowsocial.us or something then?

[logifail]

> The diversity is astounding

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that there are people who say they are in favour of diversity but underneath only want their kind of diversity, not genuine diversity.

Diversity of opinion would definitely be a feature, not a bug.

[intended]

Over the years I’ve come to realize that coders will argue about protocol and what that says about someone’s personality - anytime, anywhere.

[sumeno]

It's because people don't care about federated services, they care about services that are easy to use and have people on them and that's bluesky right now

[DeepPhilosopher]

Sure, average people don't care about federation, but what about the techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge who write these kinds of articles? They love to point out Bluesky's (yet to be seen in action) federation thanks to the AT Protocol, so you know they see the value in federation that the average person doesn't, but these reporters choose Bluesky, a platform with all the same warning signs as Twitter that barely has federation, something they purport to value despite the fact that ActivityPub and Mastodon exist and are much more developed and open?

[sumeno]

Perhaps they recognize that a perfect decentralized platform without users doesn't matter as much as pushing the platforms being used to improve

[dartos]

> techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge who write these kinds of articles

It’s called “marketing” and “paid-for articles”

[pfraze]

We didn’t pay for this, coordinate with this, or have any idea it was coming out.

[mschuster91]

> To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?

Mastodon has many MANY MANY issues.

The first is that instance operators regularly abuse their users as hostages in personal petty fights. I don't care too much about drama, but there has been a lot of it regarding Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia and instances defederating from each other as a result of said drama.

The second one is instances can go down for whatever reason - the admins just being unable/unwilling to cope with moderation, running out of money, getting into trouble with the legal system, ... - and users can't move their post, DM and media history to another instance.

And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.

[api]

The tying of identity to one’s home instance is IMHO a fatal flaw. Absolutely fundamental error in a decentralized system, making it effectively not decentralized.

It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today.

I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.

[jsmith45]

AT protocol currently supports two different schemes for base identifiers based on w3c's DID system. The DID:PLC scheme is centralized, but not inherently tied to any one host. It is currently hosted and run by the Bluesky PBC, but they want to spin it off to help protect against themselves turning evil. This system lets users change their handle and move to a new personal data server seamlessly.

There is also DID:Web. This one has the downside that you need to continue to control the domain name in question indefinitely, and it can be argued that the domain name system is still a form of centralization. Like PLC users can theoretically change handles to another domain name with this scheme (but must contrinue to control the original domain name). Users can freely move to another personal data server.

AT Protocol can add new DID schemes in the future to avoid these downsides, with the caveat that users cannot change from DID type to a different one seamlessly, and adding new DID types may potentially require updates by multiple other parts of the ecosystem.

[numpad0]

Nostr sadly doesn't scale. IMO it's a better system for decentralized account identity lookup but not great for content delivery. It needs something else for the content part.

ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".

[api]

Hmmm... if Bluesky owns identity then it's just another centralized SaaS play which I guess is to be expected.

There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or both).

I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a client-server system with a network of servers. Making all traffic go through it that way is going to cause scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth.

IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower experience because you have to relay.

[rapnie]

All kinds of innovations of the network stack would be easier when IPv6 has that penetration. I saw a very cool vid by Brett Sheffield of Librecast [0] titled "Privacy and Decentralization with Multicast" [1] (btw, it is hosted on a decentralized PeerTube instance) and it was an eye-opener for me, as the average tech person not deeply into this stack and taking the one we have for granted (mostly).

[0] https://librecast.net

[1] https://spectra.video/w/9cBGzMceGAjVfw4eFV78D2

[api]

I've wondered if this might not be a reason for some of the slow rolling. It might reduce the all-important role of cloud and centralized services in facilitating connectivity, which is almost mandatory in IPv4 world due to the existence of symmetric NAT.

[pfraze]

Your referring to the ID registry (PLC) which is intended to be moved to a separate org.

[lifty]

Why doesn’t nostr scale?

[shafyy]

> And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.

Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me

Put another way, they were structured in a way that doesn't allow them to compete.

[acjohnson55]

Bluesky also has but a handful of engineers

[zimpenfish]

But was initially started internally by Twitter with millions of dollars of funding and since being split out has taken several million dollars in outside funding from VCs. Which does help grease the wheels somewhat, no?

[acjohnson55]

Yeah, probably.

[shafyy]

I don't know how many engineers work at Bluesky, but my guess is that their yearly budget is at least 10 times of Mastodon.

[grepfru_it]

so... it's IRC all over again. I wonder why we need a new protocol for that

[TulliusCicero]

Because no one's actually going to Mastodon. It's really that simple.

If you wanna delve into the details of why people so often avoid the platforms that FOSS enthusiasts tend to recommend, that's an interesting question, but we gotta be clear here, we already knows who's successful and who's not.

[bflesch]

People one go where the technologically literate tell them go. If it wasn't for me, my family and friends wouldn't have gone on iOS, WhatsApp, Signal, you name it. If we give the thumbs up they know it's not bad if they migrate. Of course they can still decide against something if they don't see the value, but we can have significant impact on what platforms they use or not.

[TulliusCicero]

> People one go where the technologically literate tell them go.

No they don't. If this was true, my wife's family would be on Telegram or Discord, haha. We actually did go into Telegram briefly, but they all dropped out. What got them to switch from SMS to WhatsApp was her parents temporarily moving to Austria.

[darthrupert]

Technologically literate people don't recommend Telegram or Discord.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Technologically literate people don't recommend Telegram or Discord

No True Scotsman is Exhibit A for why technology-first platforms tend to fail.

[BobaFloutist]

What videocall service other than Discord lets a normal user individually adjust other call participants' relative volume or even mute them? Because for me, that's the killer feature.

[bflesch]

Maybe you don't have a lot of credibility with them ;) If someone would recommend me to Telegram I'd also doubt their credibility.

[metabagel]

I tried so hard to like Mastodon, but discovery was actual work for me. On BlueSky, discovery is natural and easy.

I think part of the issue is that you can’t do full text search across instances. You can only search on hashtags, and people don’t always use hashtags.

[numpad0]

I think Mastodon lost the herd trust when it pivoted away from global federation and made confession of allegiance a firm requirement. They killed the canary and people left.

[EGreg]

What confession? Link? I haven’t heard of this

[numpad0]

I'm referring to mass defederation, defederation list sharing and mutual surveillance that followed it.

[dartos]

That’s literally the moderation model of federated networks at work.

Each instance chooses to adopt defederating lists.

If you don’t like that make your own instance.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's doing this at the instance level rather than the user level which is the problem. The long-term result of that is a few large instances that default-block smaller instances, so then people switch from the smaller instances to the larger ones that aren't blocked, creating new instances becomes unviable and the market concentrates into an oligopoly susceptible to capture by ideologues.

[unshavedyak]

There’s a similar issue with server priority and federating too. At least last I saw, maybe a year ago.

Eg if I run a small server I have a difficult time getting my updates federated quickly because other servers have a lot of fire hoses to manage. You end up low on the priority list and less likely to be seen. In my experience from last I tried, at least.

[dartos]

> It's doing this at the instance level rather than the user level which is the problem

It’s always at the instance level. They own the machine.

The difference between federated networks and decentralized networks is that the main control is with node operators vs cryptographic key holders.

You’re looking for a decentralized solution, not a federated one.

[WorldMaker]

Most instance block types in Mastodon affect the "public feeds"/"shared community" on an instance, but allow individual users to follow users on "blocked" instances in their own feeds.

User decision making is still very much an entrenched thing.

Most decision making on blocks in small-to-medium instances is democratic, in my experience, with users voting on them together. Also, as pointed out there's the obvious "vote with your feet" of switching to a different instance if you don't agree with its policies and/or how other instances don't agree with its policies.

There's definitely a risk of large instances trying to strong arm smaller instances with blocks and/or threats of blocks. But so far it's more a philosophical risk than a real risk from what I've seen. At least in my parts of the Fediverse small instances are "the norm" and it's is more likely the blocks are against the larger instances because with size they are more likely to allow spam registrations, they are more likely to have users that don't respect cultural norms like CWs or Alt text/Image Descriptions and don't feel a need to respect them because their mods won't enforce them, or yes they set up an ideologue as a mod/admin and shift to a gross direction. As a "telegraph network between a lot of small villages that mostly ignore the big cities", ActivityPub can be rather nice.

[kemotep]

Why is everyone required to federate with everyone on ActivityPub? What if I want to only see Wordpress, Peertube, and Pixelfed content but nothing from Mastodon or Lemmy? How is that problematic as an ActivityPub client? Or I only want Spanish language content?

[numpad0]

Because otherwise social graphs and organic exchanges don't work. I'm not joining a Mastodon server to passively consume curated collection of serfs owned by benevolent server admins offer. Yet, that's the model of users and communities in Mastodon as it is.

[kemotep]

Is there any kind of social media that doesn’t become a serfdom in your opinion? I mean Hacker News falls under that definition as well yet here you are consuming a curated feed.

[beowulfey]

I'm not sure I follow you. It sounds like you expect to receive from every instance, and in turn expect all to receive from yours?

I don't see the appeal; it sounds like it would devolve into white noise

[dingnuts]

in practice that's not the kind of content that is defederated. what is defederated is usually for ideological reasons, but sometimes it's because of illegal content (there's a lot of Japanese Misskey instances that will happily federate images to you that are questionably legal to possess in the US whether you want them on your drive or not) or out of spam control / distrust (small instances often have trouble federating)

ironically when I used Mastodon, while dealing with these issues, I was unable to filter out other languages. So in addition to extremely questionable content, a lot of it was simply in another language.

ActivityPub is a really half baked protocol and the sooner we realize that and move on from it the better. Personally, I didn't feel that defederation was an adequate defense against those MissKey instances and I decided running an instance is a very big liability.

[kemotep]

I guess I just have a unicorn of an instance because I never see these issues. Yes there is a large list of servers defederated but many of them are at best 4chan tier content which I can easily find on 4chan no need for my mastodon feed to have everything under the sun on it.

Like I get that moving instances or between applications isn’t really possible on AP and there is concerns with moderation and so on but it’s been the best internet experience I’ve had. It’s a bubble but I easily just come here or to 4chan or reddit to see outside that bubble.

[Gud]

Link please?

[likeabatterycar]

99% of normies don't want to decide what dictatorial fiefdom (server) they wish to belong to.

[mjmsmith]

99% of normies use platforms that offer only one dictatorial fiefdom. Picking the biggest server is better than that option. Picking a server at random is better than that option.

[archagon]

99% of normies can just pretend that mastodon.social is “Mastodon.”

[jghn]

I never understood why people even cared to choose a server. If you're only looking at posts from people you follow, it doesn't matter. Who cares what other people you don't know on your server are saying

[numpad0]

Because 2 out of top 3 servers and half of top 10 were in Japan and filled with content that they couldn't politically handle.

Cutting that off and "just walk into the brightest place" couldn't happen at the same time, so the core devs and ops switched to the "Mastodon's strength is in small servers, pick any of the right one" narrative.

[wkat4242]

Can you tell more about the Japan thing? It's the first I've heard of it. What kind of content? I can't think of anything political about Japan that's super hard to handle.

[zimpenfish]

I believe there's a fair amount of content on Japanese Mastodon servers that would land me, as an admin in the UK, in extremely hot water[0] if I was letting it be stored on my servers (whether I looked at it or not.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_...

[numpad0]

And that was okay until they started the whole "choose the politically right one out of thousands and good people should have nothing to fear" thing.

[btreecat]

> Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.

The same can be said about the atproto as different apps are being developed for specific users like picture video only feeds and 3p clients for bsky.

> And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.

I'm not sure I get your point. I run my own bsky PDS, and federation is working fine for me and my users. I see plenty of posts from others.

> Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?

Are you asking if perception of difficulty is really impactful to people's choices?

W/ bsky the hardest choice was the domain name purchase. And I didn't have to host my own server to do that either.

[JKCalhoun]

It kind of doesn't matter why people are rallying around BlueSky but simply that they are.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Disagree.

I’ll take this all seriously when people admit what the real drivers are. Admit why people are actually looking for an X alternative.

It’s a mix of ideologues, performative outrage, foot stomping, and wanting the 2020 status quo.

[moritzwarhier]

I cancelled my Twitter account in 2021 or so.

I tried X again at some later point, I think even twice.

A fresh account bombards you with far-right propaganda and outright lies. At the time at least this included hateful and incoherent rambling by Musk himself, which you couldn't unfollow (or ignore, it simply didn't work).

Call it ideological, but I'm not going to spend my free time with this "content", especially when the platform clearly disregards repeated signals that I don't want to read hateful ideological propaganda comment no 73646445 by some alt right shill.

I'm all for open discourse and dealing with other peoples differing opinions.

But at this point, the "ideology" accusation by the far right against any other opinion is nothing but laughable. Well, it would be, if people didn't still pay it credibility.

And no, I'm not a "leftist", "transgender activist", or whatever group gets to be public enemy of the day for these people.

I did notice that Bluesky seems to have more politically left people.

This kind of content is not very interesting to me, we already have Reddit.

But for Bluesky, the platform bubble phenomenon didn't seem that strong to me.

Appreciate the new features to build my own (interest) bubble.

For political content, I think actual journalism and real-life discourse are most valuable.

[toofy]

personally i think there are two significantly larger reasons:

1) terrible experience: a lot of people just don’t have fun on twitter, it’s just an awful experience. why spend your free funtime in a place that you just don’t enjoy? we don’t go to restaurants that we hate, why on earth would we go to a website that we don’t enjoy?

2) too crowded. take a music concert for example, a lot of people absolutely prefer a music venue with 2,000 people over a concert where there are 100,000 people.

[archagon]

It sounds like you’re saying that Bluesky users are actually just throwing a giant fit.

That has not been my experience at all.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Doesn’t have to be your experience to be true for the vast majority.

[mapt]

Yes. And so complex to explain that it still isn't obvious what federation does or is after an afternoon of research by a tech enthusiast. Where does the data live? How does it spread? Who has control over it?

You could tell me that, but don't. The answers are very much besides the point if you can't explain it and the advantages of the arrangement in five minutes to somebody on the opposite end of the normal distribution of technical understanding to your average HN account. Network effects dominate most social network pros and cons, so if you can only educate five percent of the general population there isn't much point.

[diggan]

> Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally around Bluesky and its AT Protocol

I think one of the major parts that resonates with people is the focus on data portability. AFAIK, ActivityPub doesn't help with wanting to move your data somewhere, without having to manually perform a async migration.

> which is promising federation but has yet to deliver

They seem to surely but slowly make headway on the federation stuff, there are more and more successful experiments of people hooking into the network.

> it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.

That is true, hopefully the network will be resilient enough by that point, because I'm wary of that too. I guess time will tell how that goes.

On a more optimistic note, there seems to be more and more efforts of trying to fund other non-Bluesky projects, including for core infrastructure. Example, not an endorsement: https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com