Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
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Sure, but the openness of the protocols, especially the portability of accounts, makes it hard for them to push negative changes on users.
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https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages/bsky
The old design was built to scale to a few million users. The new backend is revised to handle ~hundreds of millions. They'll releasing bits and pieces at a time.
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It still needs polish, but the biggest deficit is lack of adoption.
Platforms like Twitter encourage casual breaks between public and private space, but Facebook-like platforms are better for passively extending existing friendship circles. Or so it seems to me.
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I mean, I hate BlueSky too, but I think the reason it's more popular than Mastodon is that it's more centralized and in practical terms that means it's easier to adopt and engage with.
The biggest headache I have with Mastodon (and Lemmy, to a lesser extent) is defederation. I understand it's the most practical thing to do sometimes, but it's waaay overdone. Like, there needs to be a culture of only defederating as a last resort due to pratical concerns (e.g. bots I guess). Unfortunately the current culture is one where many instance admins treat defederation as a personal blocklist. I wish more admins would leave it to individual users to decide who to allow or not.
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Thanks. I'm now about 80% convinced he has no influence.
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They planned ahead to make it popular, twitter developed it while losing money, my conspiracy theory is their goal was always to transition to bluesky since its model is more sustainable for long term control
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What's blocking Mastodon's posts to be discoverable?
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That is also true to Bluesky, and to a lesser extent, even for the Lemmy-Reddit divide. I've seen people leaving the alternative platforms for the mainstream ones, because the alternative ones "didn't made them stay as long". For me, being less addictive was part of the reason why I prefer the alt platforms, although with reddit, I had to browse through a lot of garbage already, long before the API drama.
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Because Bluesky keeps to what made Twitter popular in the first place. The UX. You make a post and its syndicated to a federated feed that anyone can search for, and you can tag content using hashtags.
It's a great concept. There's a reason a lot of people use it.
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What we need are good algorithms
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The thing about federation is there isn't really any particular reason to even set up a community over simply using one that's already in existence except possibly to enforce your own moderating rules.
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Well there's two possible implementations of wireless power transfer.
There's the way we use to charge our phones, Which is just an electromagnetic effect with no real way to extend its range. That technology has progressed as far as it's ever going to get.
The other way is through power beaming using infrared lasers and special crystals. That technology does have potential but is nowhere close to being consumer ready yet. One day a router may include both features but not today and certainly not in 2016 when this happened.
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In order to discover someone’s posts on Mastodon, they need to be on the same instance as you, or someone else on your instance has to already be following them.
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People have been able to extend the electromagnetic effect to a few feet, but yeah, there's a reason why most just use the close range version we have today.
Here's a demo from 2009: https://youtu.be/MgBYQh4zC2Y
Microwave transmission has also been explored in addition to lasers, as you say, but either way both methods involve power loss in energy conversion, and they both are very directional, making it impractical for consumer use.
But anyway, just wanted to say that the tech technically exists since it's funny when normal people bring it up without knowing the limitations of current technology and physics.
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I've been using mastodon for nearly a decade now. The major thing I think is missing from ActivityPub is a decentralized/federated way of doing auth. The ideal for me in ActivityPub is having a profile/DID service provider that you then can attach to services. This would theoretically be like having just a federated identity (or however many identities you want) that you can then go to a lemmy instance or mastodon instance etc and "log in with federated ID" like log in with Google but not dependent on a corporation.
Auth and identity in general is definitely the biggest hurdle with ActivityPub. Right now it's a bunch of distinct and non-tied profiles, which isn't necessarily bad, but many people would like an easier way of doing this. Instead of saying "which lemmy do I want to join" it's just "which identity service do I want?" and then go to and use any mastodon or lemmy or Pixelfed service with that single account. There's many ways to do this, but it's definitely possible and it's being looked into.
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I never had a Xitter account so take what I say with a grain of salt, as I only interacted with the platform as a spectator.
For me it was funny to watch as I slowly saw people dive into madness over the most irrelevant things.
It didn’t matter if it was left or right people still lost all senses over unimportant things like Hunter Biden’s laptop or this week’s conspiracy theory.
I opened Mastodon and as I scroll through I see the following order:
- republican bad post
- republican bad post
- republican bad post
- something linux related (usually hector martin)
- republican bad post
And I get it, republican is bad, but after reading 3-4 republic bad posts my mental state needs a break or something different which is what Xitter was able to do. Some new music being announced/discussed, maybe a video game, maybe a joke.
BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.
I personally think that the problem is rooted in defederation, it’s being used willy-nilly like it doesn’t have effect on the people using the platform. But not becoming an echo chamber is essential to a platform’s long term health. If I know that a platform has the same message for me when I open the app I’ll just start using it less, which is what happened with Lemmy sadly, I open my feed and it’s full of dystopian and republican posts, I just don’t bother anymore.
Incoherent rant over.
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BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.
Isn't the whole thing about BlueSky that your feed is your feed though? You actively select and curate what you want. So if you want new music, games, comedy - follow new music, games, and comedy. Sure, those accounts might then post other things sometimes, but by and large, that's my understanding of BSky.
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In the first paragraph I mentioned that I don’t have an account, I never had one on Xitter mastodon or BS. That’s my point of view, and from what it seems it’s always politics.
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I haven't used Mastodon, but if it's anything like Lemmy, most people won't want to bother learning what an instance is or what federation means.
FOSS enthusiasts regularly overestimate how much hassle regular people are willing to put up with to do something, and how much they care about corporations.
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It costs time and money. The handful of times I published articles in an open access journal, I had to pay close to $5K USD per publication.
Theoretically, researchers can publish on Mastodon or something similar but that unfortunately won’t give us the reach we need. That might be fine with well established names, but for dumb-dumbs like myself who are still trying to make a name for ourselves in our field, we want the highest impact publisher we can find. Those typically come with a price tag.
Sometimes the grant also dictates acceptable publishers were you can submit your manuscript.
Sadly, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
