thenexusofprivacy

Thanks for the clarifications!

Yeah, it's somewhat useful but certainly not a great solution. It's great that they went the opt-in route, but there aren't any good existing frameworks for how to do it, so they had to roll their own. There's certainly room for improvement, it would be great if either Bluesky or the Social Web Foundation (or both) or somebody else invested in it, but hard to know if and when thta'll happen.

There isn't direct federation between Mastodon and Bluesky; instead, Bridgy Fed connects them - https://fed.brid.gy/docs#fediverse-get-started

Have a look here https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17718832/11190856

As Strypey acknowledges, there's a lot he didn't know about at the time and left out. Before Mastodon: GNU Social and other early fediverses includes a lot of that.

For what it's worth, the guy who mostly maintains the Wikipedia page agrees with you. And yet even so, at least for now, the Wikipedia page states "The majority of fediverse platforms ... create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol" -- which pretty clearly implies that not all fediverse platforms use the ActivityPub protocol.

Anyhow whether or not you agree to disagree ... we disagree. Time will tell how broad usage of the term evolves. In the original article I pointed to examples of TechCrunch and Mike Masnick using the term in the broader sense, but maybe those will turn out to be points off the curve. We shall see!

Yep. And also, like I said in https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/

For one thing, most of the people who came to Mastodon in late 2022 didn't have good experiences ... so didn't stay in the Fediverse.6 Flash forward to 2024, and Mastodon still hasn't addressed the reasons why.

Bluesky, by contrast, has put a lot of work into onboarding and usability – as well as giving people better tools protect themselves and others, and find and build communities ... So today, BTS ARMY and millions of Brazilians, and everybody else looking for a Twitter alternative are more likely to have a good experience on Bluesky than Mastodon.

Great point. And Jay won the power struggle with Jack, which almost nobody gives her credit for.

Yeah, it's a great name.

Kuba's link i that thread is good, it looks like there's currently about 370 PDS's -- Bridgy Fed got an exception from Bluesky so is the only one that currently has more than 10 uses. https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses I know some people who just run the open-source code for Bluesky's PDS (which is pretty straightforward) and some run other implementations.

You're not the only one who sees it that way. Historically the Fediverse was always multi-protocol but some people don't think it shojld be today. I talked about this view some in https://privacy.thenexus.today/is-bluesky-part-of-todays-fediverse/

"Anyhow, if Evan and Eugen and SWF and fediverse.party want to choose a definition of Fediverse where history stopped with Mastodon's 2017 adoption of ActivityPub, erases earlier Fediverse history, and ties the Fediverse's success to a protocol that has major issues ... they can do that. "The Fediverse" means different things to different people. It's still worth asking why they choose that definition."

You didn't miss it, I didn't go into detail on it in the article ... one big reason is that because of how ActivityPub works you only see a fragment of the overall conversation (instead of everything). If you're on a big well-connected instance like mastodon.social you see more of it but still not all; if you're on a smaller not-so-well-connected instance you miss most of it. This comes in conversations (the "missing replies" problem), with search, and with hashtags.

Another reason is that Twitter's got a lot of journalists, activists and organizers, politicians, government agencies, athletes, etc ... and Mastodon for the most part doesn't. That's not a technical issue, but for most people, following one or more of those groups is something they're used to from Twitter, so Mastodon doesn't fill the same role.

Again, there's plenty of stuff Mastodon is good at! And Twitter clones replicate Twitter's problems as well as what people like about it. But for people who are sick of Twitter and want a similar experience elsewhere (as opposed to trying something different), they're more likely to get what they want on Bluesky (and in many cases even Threads, especially if they already have an Instagram account and don't want to see political stuff) than Mastodon.