Neat, I have an account on there already.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Why are they selecting BlueSky over the Fediverse?
BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.
also mainstream professionals are going to bluesky, like press and corp PR. big step towards critical mass.
And it's ridiculous because the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is minuscule.
I remember following some popular Twitter Head. Someone made a fake account on Mastodon and started getting followers but only posted once. Since then, his followers have grown to around 11k without any content at all! Imagine if it had been a real account. But the Twitter Head would rather switch to Bluesky instead. Such bullshit.
I don't understand why people ask this. Most people you talk to on Lemmy will say they don't want the userbase to grow much more than it has because with that growth comes the other problems that larger platforms like shitter and reddit have.
That's true by and large and we also don't have enough moderators here as is.
And for reasons I don't understand, people keep asking why mainstream media outlets, influencers, and other trust accounts don't transition to the fediverse, as if they won't bring with them an influx of users (at least a fraction of which would be considered undesirable).
Why do you want them to come here? (As someone who would like to see Lemmy grow, I'm curious about how you think this will rollout and what the consequences will be). I would like to see Lemmy grow but I'm not sure all of that growth will have solely good follow-on effects.
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it's still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.
Bluesky wants to tell people they're not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that's their key advantage.
The only thing that will guarantee they don't end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven't come up with a long-term revenue model, so it's not clear how they can avoid it.
The email experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
No that decision is, for most people, made for them. You use the server provided for you by your ISP/work/university or the one that's associated with logging into your smartphone.
For e-mail, it does not really make a difference.
Your email server doesn't also run the group email list and all the join/drop/approve/ban operations. And if you bring your own email domain name, you can go somewhere else and get no disruption. But if you sign up for [email protected] and hotmail bans you, you'll lose all your connections and conversation history.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board, or a messaging service group. It's apples and rocket ships.
Bluesky is offering simple one-stop answers to a lot of these concerns. Fediverse needs to answer all these, plus address the whole long-term financial sustainability question.
"How can I send Gmails?"
Depends on whether you have an Android or iPhone for 99% of people. Or, they use an email account that their ISP provider created for them when they signed up.
just tell people to join mastodon.social. problem solved
What happens when their server expenses aren't covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
And getting a whole community moved over... oof.
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies. It took two years to convince people on to Signal, and 2/3 of the people didn't make the jump. And this was with a small group of people who knew each other IRL. Imagi e doing that for tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide.
This is why people are hesitant to get off Meta/Twitter. They're not going to do it again.
What happens when their server expenses aren't covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
What happens when BlueSky does this?
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies.
Answering your own question there.
Just to be clear... I'm a massive Fediverse fan, and have concerns about BSKY's governance. But many communities streaming off Twitter seem to be heading toward BSKY because it's a shallower on-ramp.
Mastodon people recognize this and are working to smooth down the friction points.
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The fediverse just doesn’t have the audience nor ease of use to be the smart investment for most people, at least in the short term.
In the long term, I believe the fediverse would be the right move. However most people struggle to think long-term outside of their own fields, and scientists are not immune to this phenomenon.
Its too nerdy for its own good. The plebs want simple. Its the way of things.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
Probably because it has an algorithm
This.
Many people like stuff getting recommending to them algorithmically.
tech and age, need for investment.
- fediverse is complicated for scientists not doing computer sciency stuff
- senior researchers are less flexible with new tech, so similarity w twitter means they don't have to learn a new system
- Already present audience means there's little risk in investing time in BS.
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Isn't BlueSky part of a fediverse?
A fediverse, but not the fediverse (ActivityPub/the one you’re on right now)
Why is ActivityPub "the" Fediverse? "Fediverse" is very broad and encompasses multiple protocols, a lot of which predate ActivityPub becoming commonplace.
The original Fediverse apps are still around and don't use ActivityPub. For example, StatusNet / GNU Social use OStatus and Identica uses Activity Streams / ActivityPump (which was the protocol before ActivityPub). diaspora (if it's still around) used its own protocol too.
Some of the older apps have adapted to use ActivityPub, while some of them still exist in their own separate part of the Fediverse.
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nothing makes me more skeptical than seeing the word "scientists" in a headline.
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Good. Sucks that it took open fascism to get that to happen, but at least it happened.
Agreed, at least it's happening with Meta too.
from one monoplatform to another? OK cool, what could go wrong?
oof. blue sky was created by the guy who made twitter wasn't it? if he sells to the next bond villain, blue sky will just become twitter 2.0.
open source, decentralized.
i have accepted that most of the internet will be a vicious cycle of enshittification. go to cool new site, site gets too popular for its own good, monetization kicks in, site now sucks, rinse and repeat.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
I wouldn't say never, but fedverse projects will need to find ways to smooth off the rough edges. Also the more enshittifcation happens the more I think people will be willing and able to get past the rough edges. If any one of the services breaks through and becomes mainstream, it'll provide a roadmap to success for other services and people will be more comfortable with the concepts.
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Yes but it's also a good sign that he left the project some time ago. He's all about NOSTR now.
Proof that people rarely know much about anything outside of their field. They'll just be playing this song and dance again when the Bluesky owner cashes in.
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All these people - they don't learn.
For microblogs NOSTR is already better than everything else, right now. Provided you don't care much about keeping the same identity over years, cause an identity is a pubkey there, used directly (no temporary identities signed by it or something), so with more popularity those will be lost again and again.
I don't use microblogs, just it seems to have that functionality functioning perfectly and in distributed fashion.
If you don't like cryptobros there (less and less dominant over time btw), then BlueSky might raise even bigger suspicions.