How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse.
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/45188740
arewedecentralizedyet.online/
Are We Decentralized Yet?
A site with statistics regarding the decentralization status of various web servicesarewedecentralizedyet.online
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James R Kirk
in reply to tfm • • •like this
DaGeek247, FerretyFever0, yessikg e ammorok like this.
tfm
in reply to James R Kirk • • •GitHub - bluesky-social/pds: Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation
GitHublike this
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James R Kirk
in reply to tfm • • •like this
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Rivalarrival
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Yes. The relevant metric:
99.55% of posts are on a single instance. That is not "federated" in any meaningful sense.
James R Kirk
in reply to Rivalarrival • • •roofuskit
in reply to James R Kirk • • •f314
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Seems like it
GitHub - bluesky-social/pds: Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation
GitHubJames R Kirk
in reply to f314 • • •f314
in reply to James R Kirk • • •AT Protocol
AT ProtocolNatanael
in reply to James R Kirk • • •tfm
in reply to James R Kirk • • •PDSes only store user data. These are full instances that can be used to browse the network. The idea is to make your account really yours. Bluesky is hosting most of them. But there are some people who do it on their own.
But bluesky controls much more important components in the network, namely the Relay and AppView.
If Bluesky decides to cut off your PDS you are pretty much alone.
Bluesky is pretty much a centralized platform like Twittler.
Bluesky's Moderation Architecture
docs.bsky.applike this
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Natanael
in reply to tfm • • •Zeppelin.social is 3rd party appview and you can host your own
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
Add using DID:Web and you're now fully self hosted
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
whtwnd.com73QjabParc34Vebq
in reply to tfm • • •like this
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tfm
in reply to 73QjabParc34Vebq • • •like this
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IninewCrow
in reply to tfm • • •So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
Bluesky is the newest iteration of privately owned and controlled social media
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supersquirrel
in reply to IninewCrow • • •Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.
Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don't get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.
The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though...
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LibertyLizard
in reply to supersquirrel • • •James R Kirk
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •LibertyLizard
in reply to James R Kirk • • •dubyakay
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •LibertyLizard
in reply to dubyakay • • •dubyakay
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •grrgyle
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •I'm with you. To my knowledge all my irl woke friends ride only mainstream social media.
I had a local anarchist reach out to me on my ancient FB Messenger of all things.
I get that it's not the most important part if you're doing prefiguration, but as far as I can tell most people just want to be where most people are, even if it is supporting actually vile corporations.
supersquirrel
in reply to grrgyle • • •Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.
Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.
Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra "stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions" endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.
LousyCornMuffins
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •explodicle
in reply to supersquirrel • • •Not weird at all; this was the case with cryptocurrency too. Otherwise qualified and intelligent people would invest in centralized scam coins because they had no understanding of economics, just tech.
It's sad but cool that it works the same way with social capital.
supersquirrel
in reply to explodicle • • •Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.
Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.
tfm
in reply to IninewCrow • • •They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.
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Rhaedas
in reply to tfm • • •"It's the same picture."
Always has been. The only difference is what they're selling.
LibertyLizard
in reply to Rhaedas • • •James R Kirk
in reply to IninewCrow • • •like this
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roofuskit
in reply to IninewCrow • • •like this
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James R Kirk
in reply to roofuskit • • •Yes exactly, it reminds me of the logic of cryptocurrency boosters. I just found out that the bluesky CEO (not to mention jack dorsey) are both crypto advocates so it makes a lot more sense now.
James R Kirk
2025-09-01 16:39:23
HappyFrog
in reply to roofuskit • • •roofuskit
in reply to HappyFrog • • •Blisterexe
in reply to roofuskit • • •Natanael
in reply to roofuskit • • •whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
whtwnd.comNatanael
in reply to HappyFrog • • •tomenzgg
in reply to roofuskit • • •sp3ctr4l
in reply to IninewCrow • • •irelephant [he/him]
in reply to IninewCrow • • •HappyFrog
in reply to irelephant [he/him] • • •It's not:
dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent…
How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
dustycloud.orgirelephant [he/him]
in reply to HappyFrog • • •steal_your_face
in reply to irelephant [he/him] • • •irelephant [he/him]
in reply to steal_your_face • • •whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
Check atproto.africa, app.wafrn.net, zeppelin.social and altq.net
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
whtwnd.comsteal_your_face
in reply to irelephant [he/him] • • •Natanael
in reply to HappyFrog • • •Hanrahan
in reply to IninewCrow • • •Parrot the marketing hyperbole.
The enshitification continies.
humanoidchaos
in reply to IninewCrow • • •LifeInMultipleChoice
in reply to humanoidchaos • • •knexcar
in reply to humanoidchaos • • •EldritchFemininity
in reply to IninewCrow • • •Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it's usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.
They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it's just a buzzword, I believe.
IninewCrow
in reply to EldritchFemininity • • •EldritchFemininity
in reply to IninewCrow • • •oce 🐆
in reply to tfm • • •Thoralf Will
in reply to oce 🐆 • • •tfm
in reply to oce 🐆 • • •Bitswap
in reply to oce 🐆 • • •oce 🐆
in reply to Bitswap • • •LibertyLizard
in reply to tfm • • •tfm
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
lemmy.fediverse.observerLibertyLizard
in reply to tfm • • •tfm
in reply to LibertyLizard • • •evujumenuk
in reply to tfm • • •If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.
And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that's entirely fair. But if you're looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don't see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It's a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.
But in the end, I think there is space for both.
flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
in reply to evujumenuk • • •This is only true of Bluesky because everyone is using Bluesky's infrastructure at the moment. If Bluesky ever deindexes someone and they start posting to an alternative relay, you suddenly don't have a guarantee of a full view of a post's replies.
Natanael
in reply to flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc) • • •Content addressing means you can make your instance pull from both their relay and the bluesky relay and trivially merge threads and views without consistency issues, so that's solvable.
The bigger issue is all those other regular users who doesn't, and still get confused (unless they manage to pick a client app that does it for them)
flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
in reply to Natanael • • •I mean, this would become less trivial the more replays go into use, where to get a full view you'd have to pull from all the relays that exist.
ActivityPub's solution to this is just IMO better, the original post has a replies collection attached to it that acts as the authority the replies the post has. This also allows creators to eject replies from the collection. There are issues with the way fedi software currently handles fetching from these reply collections, but the missing replies thing is very solvable in ActivityPub.
Natanael
in reply to flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc) • • •Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user's post goes viral.
And as for moderation bluesky also carries information with the top post from the post author and allows hiding replies too, etc. This gets enforced on the appview side, so the posting user's PDS is unscathed if it goes viral.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
Realistically, the relay network will likely end up voluntarily adopting a tree topology - hobbyist communities would run small relays bundling all activity from members' PDS servers, then a larger relay in front gathers everything from a ton of smaller relays and makes it available to appviews
flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
in reply to Natanael • • •Setting up caching in the reverse proxy layer would alleviate this a lot of this. Like, GoToSocial only recommends to set up caching for the key and webfinger endpoints, where having it set up to cache posts and profiles for like 60 seconds (or however long the
Cache-Controlheader says, Mastodon defaults to 180s) would alleviate the strain on the server so much.There are other thing you can do, like this post explains some other things for Misskey, but the defaults should be sensible so you don't have to be a sysadmin expert to host an instance and they're currently not. I host 2 Lemmy instances (ukfli.uk and sappho.social) from a £5/month VPS and they're able to handle bursts of hundreds of requests without issue.
People are already building small, non-archival relays so this assumption seems mute. It's also important to remember that relays are an optimisation, not a core part of the protocol.
How to optimize your fediverse instance
Latte macchiato (Latte's Blog)froufox
in reply to tfm • • •like this
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GreenShimada
in reply to froufox • • •But....I came here just for the gloating fediverse content.
What else could there be?
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dil
in reply to froufox • • •froufox
in reply to dil • • •second, even on this account my last post was 1 month ago.
MotoAsh
in reply to froufox • • •TheFogan
in reply to froufox • • •I mean I agree... it's kind of the constant crux isn't it?
The IT nerds pick a protocol that's uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because... well obviously that's kind of the definition of uncontrolled.
Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc... that most people care about flock there.
Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify... open communities announce "hey we've got our alternative here", they say "thanks but nah that's too complicated, and you don't have the users that I want to see anyway". People complain more... and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal... or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.
I don't really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter... fundimentally I don't see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say... a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that's actually... well hostable.
It's basically like exactly what happens out in the real world... walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors... local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down... half of owners, etc... forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.
sem
in reply to TheFogan • • •I think the difference is that while other services boom and bust, the fediverse keeps growing slowly because it is decentralized, and can't be enshittified in the same way.
It is not as easy or attractive as Bluesky right now, but it keeps growing slowly and getting more kinds of people.
Maybe it won't be the network of choice for journalists, metal celebrities, etc, like twitter and bluesky, but it already is making its way as something more like old school tumblr -- some people like it, some don't.
desertdruid
in reply to sem • • •CaptainBasculin
in reply to tfm • • •NickwithaC
in reply to CaptainBasculin • • •like this
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CaptainBasculin
in reply to NickwithaC • • •- YouTube
youtu.beFizz
in reply to tfm • • •like this
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Flax
in reply to Fizz • • •Fizz
in reply to Flax • • •Flax
in reply to Fizz • • •Natanael
in reply to Flax • • •It's doable on Mastodon but significantly more complicated.
You need crawlers to index posts across the Fediverse (and avoid getting them blocked), personalized recommendation models per user, and you need pre-emptive caching on the user's instance for anything recommended (ideally the crawler would make a cache on behalf of each of the opted-in users' instances, but without content addressing this is a security risk). You also need to poll for edits / deletions.
Flax
in reply to Natanael • • •Natanael
in reply to Flax • • •On Mastodon, your instance doesn't receive posts until somebody on your instance interacts with the account posting it (following the poster, browsing directly to the post, etc).
Feeds with recommendations requires fetching stuff in advance to not be slow and janky. Basically the feed service would need a bot account on your instance and retrieving all popular posts, given the current architecture. Having thousands of these bots across every instance do this would cause a significant performance hit on smaller Mastodon instances when one of their users posts something popular. So you need something different, like a server plugin where the bot fetches the content once and tells all participating Mastodon servers about their cached copy, so they don't all have to hit the hosting instance. But that's a security risk with the Mastodon design.
airportline
in reply to Fizz • • •ClearSky
clearsky.appNatanael
in reply to airportline • • •JoJo
in reply to Natanael • • •Natanael
in reply to JoJo • • •General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •How?
Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •Peergos
peergos.orgGeneral_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •They're implementing E2E encrypted social stuff. Voting privacy and encryption is linked.
Especially when you have users across multiple servers and both want voting privacy AND being able to deal with vote manipulation. You need stuff like pseudonymous commitments per account attested to by the hosting instance, etc. The only thing that's simpler but still private is having instances just digitally sign a total vote tally, which also means you can't detect vote manipulation on other servers at all.
General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •But accounts are already pseudonymous?
Here's where I am at:
I can check if my votes are federated correctly by checking if any of my votes are suppressed or votes in my name are made up. If my instance sends a different random token with each vote, I can still do that, as long as I know which tokens are assigned to my votes.
But vote tallies can also be manipulated by making up new votes through fake/bot accounts. If a vote can be connected to posts, this can be checked to some degree. Say, if an instance has a lot of voters that never post, that indicates a problem.
I don't see how the second thing with E2EE.
Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •The very very short TLDR is that anonymization is very hard, but there's auditable cryptographic voting schemes which preserves anonymity by using anonymous cryptographic commitments and one of a bunch of different techniques to count encrypted votes (homomorphic encryption, threshold encryption, etc).
You could set it up so you know which server each set of votes comes from but not which users on the server. You could also make it prove each vote comes from one real account and that no account voted twice. You could even make use of commitments plus ZKP to prove banned accounts can't vote!
It sounds complicated because it is complicated. And somewhat inefficient. But it's possible. And it would be fully encrypted and anonymous voting.
General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •How would it prove that the account is real? I suspect that the meaning of "real account" is not the opposite of bot or sockpuppet.
Natanael
in reply to General_Effort • • •General_Effort
in reply to Natanael • • •I assume it proves that there is a public key associated with each vote.
It doesn't sound like cryptography is able to add anything worthwhile. You have to trust the instance to police itself. Self-hosted instances still don't vote anonymously.
A group of users has to cooperate to hide their votes from others and each other. Only the tally is known, but you have to trust the group. On the Fediverse, such a group will be the users of an instance. The more users the instance has, the more anonymous the individual becomes.
You have to trust the instance admins to weed out bots and sock puppets, which is extra hard when they don't see the votes either. Presumably, compensating by collecting and keeping other data, such as IPs, for longer is undesirable. You have to believe that admins, volunteers all, are willing to do the extra work and that they don't actually favor manipulation for ideological reasons.
The only way to uncover untrustworthy instances is to look at aggregated data. I guess you'd have to get/scrape data for some community and then analyze by instance if the number of posters is out of whack with the number of voters. I wonder if anyone's ever done such a thing. It's certainly more challenging than looking at oddities among voters who brigade some topic.
Admins of large instances could get away with having many sock voters among the real users, if they wanted to manipulate discussions for, say, ideological reasons.
StupidBrotherInLaw
in reply to airportline • • •Cocopanda
in reply to tfm • • •tfm
in reply to Cocopanda • • •Captain Aggravated
in reply to tfm • • •It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.
Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of "Lemmy" could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.
Arthur Besse
in reply to tfm • • •ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀
It's a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.
otoh, atproto's PLC DID method is also not really decentralized... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).
Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
whtwnd.comjivandabeast
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •In the blog post you linked, neither the author or myself came to your conclusion:
Arthur Besse
in reply to jivandabeast • • •The blog post also says this:
My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more "decentralized architecturally" I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.
jivandabeast
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Okay yes this makes sense. Although, honestly i think I'd prefer the AP method of doing it because BlueSky sends ALL content to all nodes, so it's MUCH less cost effective to join with a private server.
I run my own lemmy instance, so i know the data volume since 2023 has been probably like a terabyte or so. But, with BlueSky I'd have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes (a guess based almost entirely on nothing).
So it really boils down to yes I agree that AP has problems with data accessibility, but I'd prefer that over unnecessary data redundancy
Arthur Besse
in reply to jivandabeast • • •I think this is a common misconception based on some critics' incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) "A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month" for some numbers.
If I understand correctly, to run a "full nework relay" does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren't interested in for any long period of time.
Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people's relays.
Disclaimer: I'm not an atproto expert, and I haven't set any of this up myself.
Protocol Overview - AT Protocol
AT Protocolirelephant [he/him]
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •You can design an appview that crawls PDSes directly, no relay needed.
AppViewLite does that
irelephant [he/him]
in reply to jivandabeast • • •James R Kirk
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •So like when bluesky starts having to pay back their investors I can portable my identity to.... one of the other equally populated blueskies out there?
airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Blacksky
Blacksky CommunityJames R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •There are already "other Blueskies" out there, and you can already port your identity to them.
However, most users haven't, and most users are not motivated to do so. Thus, OP created a website.
James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •We're counting hypotheticals as real now? I suppose your not-hypothetical girlfriend goes to another school too, right? Just not motivated to visit?
As you're no doubt aware, the reason 99.9% of bluesky users are on a single server is obviously not because "nobody is motivated" to create other servers.
airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •James R Kirk
in reply to airportline • • •airportline
in reply to James R Kirk • • •I'm just going to respond to what you said before you edited your comment to be a reaction gif.
Since (as of November of last year) a majority of Bluesky's user base is non-technical, they have don't have the knowledge or motivation to switch to another PDS. If 30 million users joined mastodon.social, the fediverse would also be centralized.
The only way for Bluesky to be decentralized by the metrics you use is for them to force users onto other PDSes.
tomenzgg
in reply to tfm • • •For those who enjoy in-depth write-ups, Christine Webber has looked at how decentralized BlueSky is really, before: social.coop/@cwebber/113527462…
Christine Lemmer-Webber
2024-11-22 16:06:44
Regrettable_incident
in reply to tfm • • •tfm
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •FauxLiving
in reply to tfm • • •Exactly.
Communities are not higher quality with a million people. Small communities where you can know who the other posters are are a much better experience.
ChaoticNeutralCzech
in reply to FauxLiving • • •jumping_redditor
in reply to FauxLiving • • •FauxLiving
in reply to jumping_redditor • • •There can be disagreement about anything.
I’m just not wasting my time trying to have a conversation with x_h1tt1er42069_x. I can find him at anytime on Reddit if I have a problem that only he has a Solution.
Having such a person in this community wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience.
Randomgal
in reply to tfm • • •Matt
in reply to Randomgal • • •Randomgal
in reply to Matt • • •roofuskit
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •James R Kirk
in reply to roofuskit • • •roofuskit
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Because they've been told it's federated and don't understand that it really isn't. My bluesky profile reads "Created a profile until you all figure out Bluesky is another Twitter."
All I use it for is to read post from people not on mastodon and to reshare my bridged posts from mastodon.
James R Kirk
in reply to roofuskit • • •EldritchFemininity
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about "not Reddit" and "not Twitter." I'm one of those users personally (not that I don't care about the idea, it's good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.
If I didn't dislike the Twitter format as much, I'd probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I'd probably be on Tumblr still if I didn't only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn't have such a horrible app.
People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn't care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by "newest posts first" went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.
The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you're into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants' company towns.
James R Kirk
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •Regrettable_incident
in reply to James R Kirk • • •Oh yeah sure. I'm here after all, jumped ship from Reddit a year or so ago and I actually prefer Lemmy.
I jumped ship from twitter to mastodon around the same time. And while I like the idea of mastodon and I like the interface, fact is that Reddit / lemmy is a different sort of usage from twitter / bluesky / mastodon. Twitter I mostly used to keep up with my favourite content creators, and occasionally shout at clouds. Those content creators just aren't on mastodon, they've mostly moved to bluesky. Those are the users that are the foundation of a platform like that. So yeah, I use lemmy and bluesky now.
TBH I'm not sure mastodon could scale up big anyway - it would be a nightmare trying to regulate bad content and comply with local laws etc.
Digitalprimate
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •daniskarma
in reply to Regrettable_incident • • •Sausager
in reply to daniskarma • • •General_Effort
in reply to tfm • • •vga
in reply to General_Effort • • •General_Effort
in reply to vga • • •The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?
It's the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren't federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.
vga
in reply to General_Effort • • •The same way you manipulate Twitter, by tweaking the algorithm.
General_Effort
in reply to vga • • •zaphod
in reply to vga • • •acargitz
in reply to tfm • • •Capitalists love interoperability when they can use it to disrupt other capitalists. When they get in a dominant position they hate it.
It's basic enshittification theory.
airportline
in reply to tfm • • •