Mastodon is gatekept to hell and back, the technicalities of federation are exposed to the user for some reason (you already lose half your potential user base right there), infighting between instances means that you won't see the entire discourse of a post depending on which instance you're at...

And besides all that, bsky is not as "corpo" as mastodon fanboys make it out to be. They're on track to open up to privately hosted instances as well, and you can already run most of their backend stuff yourself.

[–] proton_lynx 50 points 1 month ago (2 children)

As much as I like the 'decentralized' stuff, the technical part of federation should NEVER be exposed to the end user if you want the platform to be mainstream. I still don't understand why a lot of federated projects think it's a good idea to expose that to the end user.

[–] simplejack 48 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Whenever Lemmy or Masto gets a flood of new users, a portion of them never make it past the instance selection and totally bail.

The user experience was designed by people who literally respond to user feedback by telling users to commit new code to the project.

It’s clearly designed by engineers who assume other users will be just like them.

[–] jaggedrobotpubes 7 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

This of the core of the problem. Github energy.

Fine for a hobby. Not good enough for a public-facing product.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

Now take all of these replies. THIS is what they don't understand. All of these replies tell exactly how I feel about this.

[–] simplejack 1 points 4 weeks ago

The project was started as an architectural thought experiment, not with the goals and limitations of the end user.

[–] naught101 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If bluesky ever becomes actually federated, won't it have the same problem?

[–] Carighan 9 points 4 weeks ago

Probably not. Currently it seems on track that you're always first on their main instance. If you're technically inclined you could then start hosting a federated part yourself (or joining one), but this does not change that the actual entry experience is exactly the same as on Twitter, hence why transition is so insanely smooth and painless.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

The way sign up currently is, probably not. It would still default to bsky.social and your average person isn't going to think about it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

But then it's not federated. It's all on one giant monolith of a server. Perhaps the traffic is shared between machines, but that's not the same thing as federated.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Below is how account portability work between servers, it is easy to migrate between servers.

Account portability

We assume that a Personal Data Server may fail at any time, either by going offline in its entirety, or by ceasing service for specific users. The goal of the AT Protocol is to ensure that a user can migrate their account to a new PDS without the server's involvement.

User data is stored in signed data repositories and verified by DIDs. Signed data repositories are like Git repos but for database records, and DIDs are essentially registries of user certificates, similar in some ways to the TLS certificate system. They are expected to be secure, reliable, and independent of the user's PDS.

Each DID document publishes two public keys: a signing key and a recovery key.

Signing key: Asserts changes to the DID Document and to the user's data repository.

Recovery key: Asserts changes to the DID Document; may override the signing key within a 72-hour window.

The signing key is entrusted to the PDS so that it can manage the user's data, but the recovery key is saved by the user, e.g. as a paper key. This makes it possible for the user to update their account to a new PDS without the original host's help.

A backup of the user’s data will be persistently synced to their client as a backup (contingent on the disk space available). Should a PDS disappear without notice, the user should be able to migrate to a new provider by updating their DID Document and uploading the backup

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

What other server is there?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

I don't think there are public servers, but there most likey are private server for users who don't want to share there private info such as email, birthday, etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1az2nrw/has_anyone_set_up_there_own_server_yet/lwthquj/

[–] witten 0 points 4 weeks ago

Dude, do you even email?

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