Hey, I wanted to ask someone who has probably more knowledge than me about it - what’s the difference about these two services? I know Mastodon has ActivityPub, so it works with Lemmy, and BlueSky has it’s own kind of federation, but does it even has anything to federate to?
I’m asking not which one is better, I’m searching logical argument for one or other. I’m obviously more leaning toward Mastodon since I’m here, but I wanted to give my friend, who is thinking about joining, some real arguments.
Bluesky is the first app built on the ATProtocol, its protocol for federation, sort of like how Mastodon was among the first to use ActivityPub after the overcomplexity of OStatus. The ATProtocol is a few years younger than ActivityPub, so its landscape isn’t fleshed out yet. Currently Bluesky caters more towards creators, artists, and social togetherness, whereas ActivityPub tends to lean harder into attracting techies. Both protocols can be run as independent instances, but most people are still using bsky.social for now until more instances pop up and federate together. The process for hosting a Bluesky instance is still undergoing development, but all features of it have been opened up. There exist multiple bridge systems that can interweave ActivityPub with ATProto.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)
Is ATProtocol as open as ActivityPub in terms of content? Could there be a Bluesky equivalent of Peertube, for example?
Yes, assuming video content is stored across decentralized PDS instances
Blue sky is for people who want something that works. Mastodon is for people who think they know how to make it work.
Unfortunately, fair point, yeah. I wish it weren’t like this. I’m here, and both those places, and I have to say that my engagement with BlueSky is far higher. That said, Lemmy and Mastodon have the potential to be something very special.
Two of my friends who hate elmo and his version of twitter didnt stick with mastodon and they’re a senior developer and a sys admin, but now they’re both on bluesky. I no longer think the fediverse is too hard for people, I think people don’t want to deal with the way it works. The user expirence and onboarding in the fediverse is simply outclassed by, well everything more popular than it.
This sums it up
Bluesky is the Microsoft Word of social media, which I mean in the derogatory sense, as the fediverse is the LaTeX of social media, which I also mean in the derogatory sense
Bluesky isn’t federated (another privately owned monolith that’s promised it’s coming Soon™) and recently got funding from a company with “blockchain” in its name (and there’s already rumors that despite claims otherwise, ads will be showing up in the next year or so)
that being said, Bluesky does offer much better blocking, muting, and moderation options than Mastodon (Mastodon devs have been digging in their heels) as well as better on-boarding and curated follow lists
Search and discovery are a big deal. It’s much less effort to find people and content, and to be found on Bluesky than on Mastodon/ActivityPub. It takes work on Mastodon, and I don’t think Pleroma, Misskey, and their forks are doing much better (though I believe Akkoma has a decent search function).
This is, in part because there is a very vocal contingent of ActivityPub users who do not want working search and discovery. I think that’s equivalent to saying they don’t want the network to gain mainstream popularity.
It does look like it’s possible to independently host all the components of the ATProto network now, so I’m hoping we’ll see a bunch of services pop up soon such that the network becomes more resistant to enshittification. I’ve seen Whitewind and Frontpage, but I don’t fully understand the federation model and haven’t been able to cause one to display posts from another.
BlueSky is mastodon where the main instance has ads and a marketing team. Otherwise really similar.
