85
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
(www.wired.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
85 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
38666 readers
355 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
What I don't get is why anyone would ever choose commercial social media again given there are Activity Pub clones for practically everything now, where you aren't the product. So many people learned nothing from the ongoing Twitter debacle and the zillion Facebook privacy scandals apparently.
Try using Mastodon and Bluesky at the same time. Bluesky is a twitter clone and perfect replacement. Mastodon is an excellent micro-blogging platform, but has none of the features people actually liked about twitter. People love recommendation algorithms and quote tweet dunking. That's the core of what it's all about. Mastodon is glorified RSS, which is great if you miss those days.
Perhaps open federated systems should have recommendation algos too, just optional and open
It would be cool to download different algorithms people created to see how it feeds
Doesn't PeerTube already do this? Maybe I am mistaken.
In any case there's nothing inherently preventing this, just because a platform gets some of its data from other servers instead of its own users, it doesn't mean it can't use that data to run a recommendation algorithm.
I don't want it though. I prefer choosing for myself what sources I want to get information from instead of getting any of it recommended by the platform operator.
Honestly I have used Blue Sky and Mastodon and Mastodon feels a lot more elegant to me, personally.
fuck people liking shit .. and fuck people going back to american corporate tech... yes, I'm mad like that.
Follow a few interesting hashtags and you have your recommendation algorithm, but one you're in control of.
Have you seen the average person recently? They like to be spoon-fed content in a passive way. Look at Instagram Reels or TikTok.
Mastodon is fine for geeks like us, but the average Joe would find it dead and boring. Bluesky managed to fill that hole left by Twitter.
In that case, I wish the "average person" a lot of fun on corporate internet. Meanwhile we'll have more fun on the federated indie internet.
Fediverse software tends to be kind of hostile to convenience features people have grown accustomed to. Recommendation algorithms, for example. Lemmy is on the cutting edge for having a "Hot" sort.
I know Mastodon has historically been pretty hostile to even more basic things like being able to search posts.
I get why they think like that, and I honestly agree with some of it, but it inevitably creates a culture shock for outsiders coming from corpo media. I think that plus the network effect means the fediverse will always be kind of niche.
Commercial software has advertising: people whose job is to advertise it. That means TV and web ads for Bluesky, influencers talking about it. It also means a team of software engineers building parts of the system specifically to draw people in, whereas non-commercial software often rejects that (lack of infinite-scroll on Lemmy's default UI, for example).
Activity Pub also requires a different mind-set that doesn't exist elsewhere on the internet today. You need to decide which instance to join, or maybe to host your own instance. But it doesn't really matter, because you can federate with other instances. But you have to drive some of that federation, so it does matter a little. It's pretty complex and confusing and its a problem that only exists in this one niche of software.
Bluesky gives you an infinite feed that feels like you're connected to the entire Internet without you doing any work. I think the AP service are doing really well, considering what they're up against.
Is Activity Pub integrated into Lemmy yet?
I thought it was built on activity pub.
I'm gonna go over to my Mastodon account and try to reply to you. One sec.
@60d @heavyboots It is supposed to be but I'm not seeing any mastodon replies showing up on Lemmy yet so I thought I'd give it a try. The fact that I can see your reply from mastodon and reply to it proves something 🤔
Don't you have to follow someone on Mastodon to see what they post? Are you already following 60d?
@sqgl Apparently not. I just searched for their username on Mastodon, saw their comment and hit reply. I noticed later that Mastodon does have a note below the comments saying something along the lines of All replies might not display, go to Lenny to see more.
EDIT to add that this time, this reply from Mastodon showed up immediately on Lemmy 😂
Cool! Yea I'm not on Mastodon. Replying on Lemmy via Voyager.
Wow, the delay is real LOL I replied from Mastodon but it hasn't shown up here so I'm replying from vger.app and will see what gets here from where and when :-D It's cool that it's possible though, even if it's not super practical.
EDIT to say that this comment showed up on Mastodon basically immediately but my Mastodon comment still hasn't shown up here 1-2 hours later?! Weird??
@60d Nice, so it definitely works but there is quite a delay so not perfect. But here I am replying again from mastodon after checking that it did finally show up on Lemmy!
The delay is real, lol.
@60d @heavyboots
Kinda? This is @andrewrgross tooting at you from Mastodon, but I had to search for your address to find this comment. And I couldn't find it from a different server. So... yes, but actually no.
Still, I find it fascinating the degree that they're connected. I'm gonna go see if this showed up on Lemmy now.
Your toot is here. Can you see my reply in Mastodon?
@60d
Yes!
I just "favorited" it and clicked reply. I believe the reply shows up as a reply, and the favoriting action looks like an upvote.
It's kinda silly. Like... is this useful? Unclear. But the ability for me to interact across two very different platforms seems like a technical achievement to me.
@60d
Also, I just took a screen cap and I'm embedding it in a reply toot. If this works, you can see what this conversation looks like in Mastodon. I'm interested to see if this shows up in Lemmy.
Yup, I can see the screenshot and the up votes, so it was already more integrated than I thought. Cool!
There really are dozens of us!
@60d hasn't it been?
They just follow the herd. I wonder who directs the herd...