Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

I'm wondering if you really mean "2015-era Tumblr" or are trying to evoke pre-Trump liberals on Tumblr (i.e. "manspreading is a micro aggression" pop feminism and teenagers creating fan lore about gender identities) by referring to it as that.

If anything, my experience of Bluesky has been the inoffensive vapid thought leadering of peak Twitter alongside the playful air-headed liberal self-help that is also fairly reminiscent of peak Twitter. In one word: bland. Being able to paint over the offensive things like nazis and porn by sweeping them under your personal rug rather than blocking or banning them only adds to this impression for me.

Twitter, your breath of fresh air, on the other hand is overrun by ChatGPT spam bots and shovelware drop shipping ads worse than the crypto "giveaway" scams and paid tweets of the immediate pre-Musk days and every even moderately left-leaning political tweet is filled with replies describing the violent acts they want to do to that person in excessive detail by accounts that openly post literal neo-nazi propaganda videos of Adolf Hitler denouncing "degenerate art" as a Jewish plot to weaken the German volk and national spirit and going "I don't agree with everything he did but he had a point". Political discussions about the Middle East in turn are split evenly between right wing calls for genocide of all adults and children in Palestine and right wing defenses of Palestinians for being victims of the international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the white race through mixed breeding with brown refugees.

We used to always call Twitter "the bad place", "hellsite" or "cesspool" before Musk but it certainly deserves those names now more than ever, arguably rivaling 4chan in its political takes although the depictions of gore are mostly limited to uncensored war footage and the porn is decidedly more tame.

The reason Twitter is called a "right-wing cesspool" is not because it's full of right-wing people (that would just make it a "pool"), it's because of the vicious explicit threats of violence and celebration of human suffering propagated by those people. For all its faults, the bland libs on Bluesky don't do much of that.

Granted, my experience of Twitter might be tainted by the fact most people I used to follow in the old days have either left or are no longer active and any time I visit the algorithmic timeline hits me at full blast. And a lot of the edgier posts (not replies) by right wing folks the avalanche of drama RTs throw my way are clearly created to farm engagement in the hope of striking it big if the bluecheck authors make the payout lottery.

I think the reality is that it's a mix - but people tend to follow others with similar views.

I really like the fresh ideas in Bluesky, in this case especially the different ideas regarding federation in comparison to Mastodon. I've tried Mastodon extensively and it is lacking in so many ways.

There's no algorithmic feed other than "popular" (on large instances) which shows the same 10 people posting for months in a row, daily. Hence, discovery of people and content is very hard. No content or people are recommended and search is broken. Ordinary people not belonging to some cultish niche have a very hard time compiling a good feed, if they even understand it at all.

Federation itself is broken. The boosts and comments to a post do not accurately synchronize across the network, it depends on some complicated logic regarding whom from your instance follows anybody else from the other instance. The bottom line is that you may see 3 boosts whilst the original has 12. You may not care about boosts, but it's a disaster for comments/replies. Everybody is seeing a different subset of replies to the same damn post. It drives the OP mad because there will be 20 people replying the same thing because they cannot see that others already said it.

Instances have too much power over moderation. They control whom the instance federates with server to server. You may be following somebody on another instance but your instance owner defederates and now your connection is gone. This ability to not just moderate content but heavily impact your social graph isn't seen anywhere else. And this ability is heavily used as Mastodon is a network of activists.

Combine this over-use of moderation with the idea that instances go under all the time, and the only sane thing to do for most people is to join the default instance. Here you'll have reasonable "mainstream" moderation and the biggest federation reach with other instances/services. Which kind of defeats the point of a distributed social network.

I'm still impressed by what Mastodon has accomplished given its grass root origin and shoestring budget, but it's no social media of the future.

I don't know if Bluesky is, but at least it has a better design regarding nomadic identities, a user's ability to self-moderate, content protection, etc.

Yeah, that's what I do, was just pointing out that the loudest mastodon users are like.

When you share a public post on Mastodon, you are by implication licensing that content for redistribution. Because other Mastodon servers have to redistribute it in order for anyone on another instance to see it. Hope that helps you understand the basic stuff here.

(Either that or every Mastodon server in existence is a massive copyright violation, which is frankly quite possible given how bad copyright law is)