Fediverse

Going out on a limb, but the for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset. I personally would block such a service as I don't see these for-profit corporations as part of the fediverse, but as leeches out to Extend, Embrace, Extinguish.

The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?

It seems to me that anything that's being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don't want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don't post publicly.

I guess I just assume that everything I'm posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there's no way to ensure it's not. It's ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there's a conflict between the protocol and the culture.

The other thing, that I see even more people upset about, is that the bridge requires you to Opt-Out, rather than Opt-In for being included.

It’s totally fine if you want to be included, especially if you have friends on BlueSky. But, it’s just a shitty practice that is all too prevalent in new tech. AI companies are doing the same thing - if you’re an artist, you’re supposed to magically know all of these new, obscure AI startups and somehow find how to opt-out of being included in their training data set. It’s ridiculous.

Same concept here, I would have had no idea this was a thing, if not for people speaking up about it. Some people make a conscious choice to join Fediverse communities because they want nothing to do with big tech and want more control of their data and privacy and who has access to it. Why is such a big deal to respect that?

Bro some instances block other instances because those other instances don't block all the instances the first instance is blocking

i mean they literally used at proto because it did things that activitypub didn't do and refused to do.

Remember even large corporations standardising on truly open protocols can be reversed after whatever the situation leading up to it is resolved.

I just remember Jabber/XMPP federation which included Google. Once Google decided they got big enough, they abandoned it. Of course nothing happened to the protocol itself, it is well and alive both on Fortune 500 and selected as official choice for presence protocol on internet2.edu

From their website:

Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.

Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).

https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub

Sounds fair to me, although I am also not using either Mastodon or Bluesky.

rn not much. In the future there'll be properly portable accounts using cryptographic keys and once federation kicks in lighter servers making it probably more distributed.

“Lost”. its still growing, gaining more features, and more users. Its a growing protocol thats in its infancy while activitypub is 6+ years old. Theres such a weird elitism coming from mastodon/activitypub people like can we chill and improve activitypub instead of constantly trying to shit on the atProtocol?

Bluesky lost? I'm all for corporate social media losing, but I think Bluesky has a bigger chance than Mastodon to become as big as Twitter at its peak, because of the money behind it. At least for the short/medium term. Long term, when Bluesky inevitably also falls due to enshittification or what not, Mastodon might win, unless it has splintered into a bunch of defederated clusters of drama at that point.

Personally I'll never join another corporate social media platform ever again. But I'm in a miniscule minority.

When Twitter was bought by Musk I rushed to create myself a Mastodon. My hope was that most of the interesting, thoughtful people I followed on Twitter would eventually end up on Mastodon as Musk slowly ruined the platform. I kept my Twitter up just to keep tabs on them and grab their Mastodon handles as they shared them.

In the end, around half of them created Mastodon accounts that I follow to this day. All of them are inactive now.

At the same time I noticed more and more of them creating BS accounts. I think around 80% of them ended up in it. They're still quite active in BS to this day.

I open Mastodon and BS once daily. Former rarely has new posts, latter always has.

I really wanted all of them on Mastodon. I don't trust a corpo like BS. But the particular type of crowd I followed on Twitter (progressive essayists/humanities people, game journalists, artists, non-dev hobbyists, etc) seems to have mostly gone to BS, stayed on Twitter, gone to Cohost or back to Tumblr, or abandoned social media. I did find some interesting people active on Mastodon, mostly accesibility advocates, a couple of devs of games I loved and a few non brainrotten IT people. But the level of activity from my spheres of interest seems much higher on BS right now sadly.

Jack Dorsey doesn't "own" Blusky, he just gave them grant money in the beginning to kick things off, and is one of the board members.

"Prior to the seed round, Bluesky's website described the company as a Public Benefit LLC owned by CEO Jay Graber and other Bluesky employees. Post-seed round, the company describes itself as a public-benefit C Corp."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(social_network)#Company_history