Seeing some discontent here on Mastodon with people indicating that Bluesky or other options might win.
They’re probably right. I don’t know that Fediverse is necessarily the best place for most people, as there is a bit of a lag to get started and some big server admins have been struggling to keep up with moderation. Oh, and that same issue of admins leaping to defederate instead of using the limit option is causing problems again…
That said, I like it here. #MastoAdmin #Fediverse
Well to be clear, the debate over Fediverse vs Bluesky is it just about the people or the environment. Anybody can fork their own Fediverse after all.
These other options offer features and technology that this platform just can't offer, even with modifications around the edges.
Today I came across somebody helpfully sharing this link, where the developers gave a nice one paragraph overview of why they didn't just use ActivityPub, the protocol behind Fediverse
Basically, the core protocol and design of Fediverse is all based around instances. All the trust goes to instances, basically all the power goes to instances.
Bluesky at its core protocol design empowers users, having users keep hold of their content and identities and stuff like that.
The important part is that this isn't just a minor feature difference like the design of the onboarding experience. It's not like the homepage is blue and we might want to change it to purple.
In the very core of the two platforms there were engineering decisions made differently. Maybe both have their own advantages, but the instance focus instead of user focus is a difference I've always held against Fediverse.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/255#issuecomment-1287953987
@volkris thanks! I’ll take a look.
I do thing you make a good point about user vs instance as the nexus of the design. I’ve lost posts twice due to my instance crashing (when I was running my own)… so a system that empowers users is attractive
And heck, It might even be a good thing in some cases to make it harder for users to move between instances. It might be good for growing communities If people stick around for a little bit.
On a different note, we have seen scalability issues with ActivityPub where instances have taken a lot more computation and storage resources to run than was expected, again because of the core engineering designs of the protocol.
I hope Bluesky is designed to be more efficient, but I haven't looked into it enough to know whether it would be.
@volkris not trying to start a debate, just curious…
What do you see as a feature that Bluesky, etc. can offer which Fediverse doesn’t / can’t?
(Other than centralized search, algorithmic timeline, being a single sign-in provider, and easy onboarding for newcomers?)