What is the appeal of Bluesky? I'm surprised to see how much traction it has, when Mastodon already exists and works quite well technically - it seems that Bluesky is simply better at marketing?
It's a much better protocol in practice, in my view.
Mastodon is server/instance centric and permanently anchors your identity to a given server. On Bluesky, you can use any domain you control DNS for as your handle, since content hosting and identity management are decoupled at the protocol layer.
On top of that, hosting is also decoupled from aggregation/discovery, which allows for things like global search that are intrinsically hard on Mastodon.
> Mastodon is server/instance centric and permanently anchors your identity to a given server. On Bluesky, you can use any domain you control DNS for as your handle, since content hosting and identity management are decoupled at the protocol layer.
What does this mean? I can host my own fediverse instance, and have, three times.
It means that your identity is tied to the server. If you ever got tired of running your server and decided to just use someone else's server, you can not just bring your keys and make a DNS change to point to the new place.
Just because there isn't such a mechanism in use currently, doesn't mean that there's something preventing ActivityPub actors using the same type of DNS pointing to DID, or IRI mechanism ATProtocol is using.
There are some extensions proposed, but to this day all AP actors are controlled by the server. No ActivityPub software today is built in a way where the client can provide their own keys. They are all generated in the server.
Even the "Client-to-Server" AP spec is written in a way where the "client" does not interact with the outside web, but always initiates every interaction through the outbox hosted by the server.
I'm not saying this just for pedantry. I'm saying this because I actually wrote a server that implements ActivityPub according to the spec [0], and realized that identity portability is not possible unless you deliberately break away from the AP spec.
I am not convinced that it can't be done. (Saying this also as someone that wrote a spec compliant ActivityPub server: https://github.com/mariusor/fedbox)
Nothing says you can't extend an actor to provide for a did: based identity which gets stored wherever you want to. I think the main dev of Mitra[1] is someone that's exploring very strongly in this direction.
Allowing for extensions to the current ActivityPub/ActivityStreams vocabulary is one of the tenants of the specification. Nothing says everyone must implement everything.
We are talking about ActivityPub tying identity to the server. ATProto is designed from the ground to separate user data from your identity (through its Personal Data Servers), so the answer to your question is "many. There are many servers out there."
Bluesky has many issues (and I for one still think it has fundamental flaws that still make me prefer AP), but identity coupling is not one of them.
I think i just don't understand the distinction. I have a domain, so i set up my domain so i have an identity on bluesky. I'm with you on that part.
and then what? i can take my identity and do what with it? change PDS? but bluesky itself shows everyone that i am the same person?
i didn't move the goalposts, i just don't get the distinction everyone is making here with "identity", of course if i prove i own a domain i can verify, but i can do that on mastodon, too, I can add the below to my domain that will checkmark my username on mastodon. I assume if i move servers and want people to follow me, i will just do the same on that server, too; they know it's me because the service says so.
that is all i have to do to prove i own that username on that instance - put that on a domain i own and add it to one of the user editable fields on my public profile.
so maybe you understand my confusion. i never received a bluesky invite nor do i want to pay (a couple mentions here of paying for it).
> Verifying your identity on Mastodon is for everyone. Based on open web standards, now and forever free. All you need is a personal website that people recognize you by. When you link to this website from your profile, we will check that the website links back to your profile and show a visual indicator on it. The link on your website can be invisible. The important part is rel="me" which prevents impersonation on websites with user-generated content. You can even use a link tag in the header of the page instead of <a>, but the HTML must be accessible without executing JavaScript.
i can also export all my followers, so when i join a new instance, i can direct message them all and let them know i've moved, and they can see it's the same person because the service says so, because i own the same domain.
Can and Must are two different things. Wikipedia has a website, and owns the domain to that website. Their domain is the way they verifiy themselves on Bluesky. But they don't have a reason to run an instance, so they don't run one, and never will.
Had enough of shitty self hosted mastodon servers getting linked, makes me wary to click any mastodon link because they are so likely to be dead
Imo that's a complete killer to adoption. The vibe people get from it is that it's always down, they don't care that "oh just switch to another shard" that's too much effort
Yeah, it should be content addressable and replicated by Favourite (Like) similarly how IPFS pining works, then your post would die when the last hoarder forgets about it.
Bluesky/AT Protocol hits a much better balance of mostly decentralized while having an intuitive user experience.
On the other hand, ask the average social media user to try to do the below tasks on Mastodon/ActivityPub, and you'll quickly see how half-baked and disjointed of a user experience it is.
- Search for posts or a user.
- Interact with a Mastodon post that's on a different instance than the one they're registered to.
- Figure out what to do if one day, they wake up and their instance has shut down.
I also find Bluesky's underlying tech interesting. The more i looked into Mastodon the less interesting it felt. I especially didn't like that as a small Mastodon instance i'd struggle to get my updates fed into the larger instances and struggle to get updates as quickly. Instances prioritized updates to/from larger instances.
This was all quite early though and i'm sure i misunderstood things. Just answering the question as i personally perceived Mastodon.
On the non-tech side, i find Bluesky's model for moderation to be really neat. I hope it continues to expand in features/implementations.
Now, Bluesky has this great API that allows you to do cool automated things on top of it.
Twitter had it too, but they decided in the last 2, maybe 3 years, to play with the API so many times that there are no new coding tutorials that use Twitter API as an example. So except social media platforms, there are probably no more tools built on top of Twitter API as they damaged their reputation among developers. And they deserve it being so unfriendly towards developers.
Mastodon is fragmented by design, federation is mostly theoretical even if mastodon.social displays many other instances' content and lets you interact with it.
You can't search across instances nor can you (afaik) maintain identity across them.
Bluesky implements algorithmic feeds so content is easier to find. Mastodon mostly is original Twitter model - you have to follow accounts yourself. It's significant friction and filters 90% of normal people.
Centralised so easy to use. Why don't more people use PGP and web of trust? Convenience and security rarely align, and people will choose convenience every time.
Mastodon is server/instance centric and permanently anchors your identity to a given server. On Bluesky, you can use any domain you control DNS for as your handle, since content hosting and identity management are decoupled at the protocol layer.
On top of that, hosting is also decoupled from aggregation/discovery, which allows for things like global search that are intrinsically hard on Mastodon.