Bluesky now has 30 million users.

[bizza@lemmy.zip]

And that's the kicker. Bluesky can never be meaningfully decentralized.

[bizza@lemmy.zip]

The masses will either eventually migrate to ActivityPub, or have their entire digital lives consumed by oligarchs. It's just a fight between finally deciding that maybe ease-of-use doesn't mean "good," and losing every ounce of your identity and ability to express your thoughts and feelings.

[arc@lemm.ee]

Maybe it will, but for the time being it hasn't. The experience is so vastly better than Twitter, that it's a no brainer to jump over.

[thisphuckinguy@lemmy.world]

No clue. Never found those platforms to be useful, just toxic.

[gluca23@lemmy.world]

They have an addiction to that kind of socials.

[jhex@lemmy.world]

Same here... even when Twitter was not even in the sights of fElon I found it to be super toxic. I signed up because "it was the best way to get the news" and left in about 4 days

[uniformly9@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Because it isn't just Twitter.
Nobody can buy the network, the same way nobody can buy email.

• Anyone can host a server.
• Anyone can make an app.
• Anyone can make an algorithm.
• Anyone can make a moderation service.
  Users can freely pick a server, app, algorithm, and moderation service.

[deczzz@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Decentralized FOSS socials are great technical achievements but I feel like the actual product that users will interact with are worse copy cats of already established social platforms. Mastodon is a Twitter clone, Lemmy is a reddit clone, peertube is a youtube clone. I love these FOSS/decen. platforms but the frontend that users actually interact with are just copies of already popular platforms, just with another backend. What innovative FOSS/decen. social platforms exist? Not talking about the backend but the user experience.

[dnzm@feddit.nl]

Yeah, no, not anybody can host a server. Sure, you can host a PDS, but the AppView still wasn't open source last time I looked, and hosting a relay requires tens of terabytes of storage, not to mention the bandwidth to keep up.

Meanwhile, people host actual activitypub instances on repurposed routers and their car entertainment system...

[erincrush@lemm.ee]

While you can't follow hashtags you can follow "topics" like movies, tech, etc. They should do a better job of explaining how to use that feature though.

As for pixelfed, I'd love to use it. But the only use I have for Instagram is following local bands. Although there is a new site that's popped up recently that's like Instagram with a forum but only for bands and musicians to communicate with their local scenes. Very cool, old Internet kind of feel to it.

[naught101@lemmy.world]

Yep. Already true to a large extent. But it doesn't take a majority of the world to make the fediverse work. We just need enough for it to become broadly attractive to a critical mass of people. It's big enough to self-sustain now, so I think it's just a matter of time until it hits that point.

[supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz]

*an incomplete subset of Bluesky is opensource

[uniformly9@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Ngl thanks for the detail, I went and had another look so correct me if I’m wrong.

• Anyone can host a open source PDS like the Bluesky PDS.
• Anyone can make an AppView to view these PDSs.
• Someone with many resources needs to host a relay.
• Also it seems that Bluesky is able to gatekeep access to its federation of PDSs on a per AppView basis? The details are a bit confusing.

So if we wanted to undermine Bluesky’s currently - hopefully temporary - centralised state, we would need multiple community modified PDSs, a widely rehosted open source AppView webapp & iOS/Android clients, a very expensive relay that is community controlled via non profit or something, and then we would be federated with each other and the bluesky infrastructure too?

Sounds like a lot of work just to recreate the user-end functionality of ActivityPub Very confused why they felt the need to invent ATProtocol? I have heard some vague praise of it over AP but I think I’m not technical enough to really properly make that comparison. It’s nice that ATProtocol gives you ownership of your data though.

Perhaps Mastodon/ActivityPub-apps need to improve their onboarding process and user experience. Maybe include the custom feeds feature for Bluesky too. Something has to have gone wrong for Mastodon to have failed where Bluesky succeeded.

[markalalvarez@lemmy.world]

what do you mean by incomplete subset ? The code is available on Github and can be compiled