Bluesky does federation-washing (thelibre.news)

submitted 3 months ago by tfm@europe.pub to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27143191

Why I recommend against Bluesky.

Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?

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[-] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

From the article ...

This effectively means that, if you get banned by the Bluesky company, you're out. Sure, you could still host your own Personal Data Server, wait for a non-existent independent Relay to fetch your data and interact with users of third-party Bluesky applications. But you won't: you're effectively at the mercy of the Bluesky company.

Point two, and more importantly: this approach provides an "exit strategy" in the event that Bluesky "goes evil". Right now, that's false: parts of the social network are still centralized and it's impossible to avoid that. But even if we limit ourselves to PDSs and Relay, the current situation is that federation is only achievable in theory and no one has done it in practice yet.

[-] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 months ago

Yep.

Its 'federated' as long as you ignore a single massive chokepoint controlled by one company that allows them to block/ban/censor users of any part of the system.

So functionally, their 'federation' system is actually just a false marketing/propoganda campaign that may also result in crowd sourcing some server costs.

It's psuedo-federation, along the lines of a psuedo-historian or psuedo-scientist: They pretend to be something they are not, in such a way that makes them seem trustworthy when they are in fact not.

[-] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 2 months ago

This is why I think ActivityPub needs DIDs for identity management like Bluesky has with AT-Proto, but in a true, user owned way: https://fedid.me

Give AP the benefits of AT, without Bluesky involved.

[-] koncertejo@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

It's just wild to watch Bluesky fans stumble over themselves to say it's part of a federated future and that it's decentralized yada yada, when it takes millions of dollars to do with it what takes me $80 for a Raspberry Pi and $15 for a domain name to do with ActivityPub.

[-] CMLVI@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Idk why anyone argues it. I'm on it, but only because I want to support Not Twitter®. I'm there to just be user no. 1663987 who doesn't want to be on Twitter. I post a stupid thought, some sports commentary, and scroll the feed for a minute or two. If it went away tomorrow, I'd have 0 negative effects on my life in even the most miniscule way.

Like...I like it there, and people seem to want an alternative to Twitter pretty bad, but idk if Bluesky is it. But I also don't care to join Mastodon, as this kinda format isn't something I care about or take seriously, and I'd rather get information here. If I get a Mastodon account in the future, though, I'd rather not have it tied directly back to my spite posting account lol