Bluesky now has 30 million users

If people cared about decentralization then we would not have seen the consolidation that we've seen. That's true even for technologies who pitch decentralization as a core feature, as we saw with cryptocurrencies -- the original argument was that cryptocurrencies allowed a decentralization of finance, but then we saw a handful of platforms centralize the trades, and most people who bought cryptocurrencies were pleased to have this convenience.

From moxie.org:

"Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan."

They also make this point:

"I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway."

For a variety of reasons, people have not felt that it is worthwhile to fight for decentralization.

People don’t really care about decentralisation.

Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.

What put me off from mastodon is the fact that you can't migrate your account easily.

Yes, Bluesky is more centralized, but I feel like it is decentralized in the ways that matter for a Twitter/X Alternative use case :

- Self hosting of data, easy migration - Automatic verification via DNS - Custom feeds, Custom moderation, but you can still use the official ones

Just use all of them, don't hold yourself to one system.

We already have a wildly successful open protocol for communication, email. People also want the advantages of centralization.

In theory Bluesky is not centralised. In practice there's only one company operating a relay.

The model of "identity backed by domain ownership" is a nice one, and deals with the Mastodon identity portability issue.

This misses the point much like saying people should use Linux because it's open source. Open source is great, but at the end of the day, people will use software that they're both capable of using and that solves their problems. If you don't tick both of those boxes, the rest of it doesn't matter. Social media is the same, owning your data is nice, but if the barrier to both entry and maintenance is too high for a regular user, it's not going to happen.

You don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy.

Doesn't mean anything. Facebook used to support XMPP.

shallow knowledge on my side, but it seems that the AT proto requires some fancy relay node that, as of now, are only hosted by big corps, so no one has a a fully independent bsky instance

Just creating a protocol specification does not create a standard. You need politics for that...

You cannot run a bluesky instance on your own. The AT protocol isn't really a protocol in the same way that matrix or mastodon is. It's just an API, you know like all platforms used to have?

They all start neutral.

Can you prove to us that it is possible to interact with someone on Bluesky without being registered on Bluesky?

Threads use e ActivityPub but we know it's bullshit and that they will shut down the network as soon as possible. Bluesky is the same shit. AT protocol is just a honey pot.

AT Proto is heavily developed by BS and BS is itself the major consumer of AT Proto.

It was a few months ago, but when X was banned in my country I tried Bluesky for a while. It took a lot of effort (adding blocklists, muting words and blocking individual accounts) to cleanse the timeline of k-pop and furry content. I am not interested in either type of content and didn't follow any such accounts, but still, the "Discover" feed kept showing that stuff to me. It was the strangest onboarding experience I've ever had in social media.

I haven't seen a single nude, dick or otherwise on my Bluesky feed. Perhaps your wife doth protest too much? ;)

...how? What feed? Is she following people who post dick pics?

Not doubting her experience, but I've never experienced this (accidentally).

The number of times I've seen straight up porn and OnlyFans content on Twitter in my feed in the recent months is 100% higher than what I've ever encountered on BS.

I think it might be what she’s searching for or subscribed to? I’ve never seen cocks or genitals on BS but I don’t go looking for them either.

My experience was the same but I wanted to get rust news. In my opinion social networks are failed concept because they want you to have one account for everything. They should encourage people to have multiple accounts for different audience. It is normal to talk about different things with friends, colleagues, family etc.

I follow people mostly from the JS/TS web development community and have a pretty good balance of tech takes and some lighter life updates/humor in between. I mostly the "mutuals" and "popular with friends" tabs to check things out.

Every now and then there's too much US politics, but it's hard to escape nowadays.

That's just the state of devs these days.

total: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Can I share my experience?

I registered bluesky account for the second time last Friday and I've pick no interests during first login. Last year I had Discovery feed filled with drawn porn despite of my settings. And now on a fresh account it's mainly American politics - while setting are more liberal regarding adult content. I followed nearly 60 people but only few of them are active. The global stream overall seems to be much "slower" than public federated one on mastodon. My partner complains he gets furry porn in Discovery while having a zero interest in that - he follows only 11 accounts.

I haven't bumped on screenshots from twitter so far.

Then perhaps you’re following the wrong people? I’ve not had that issue.

I haven't seen a single such a screenshot, not one.

Exactly. I saw way more Elon and Trump posts on Bluesky than I saw on Twitter.

I wish there wasn't a need for a business-model to begin with for social media. Honestly, being business-driven is what turns them all to shit, as far as I'm concerned.

That being said, the lights need to be kept on somehow... some model similar to what Signal or wikipedia does might be a solution. Content-moderation is probably the big challenge though that they do not have to deal with to the same extent, so not quite sure how that could fly either...

Not yet, but in the echo chamber I dwell in, a lot of orgs are joining Bluesky, and most actually left X. These are mostly journalists, scientists or people involved in politics.

At some point, it may become impossible for some of these groups - probably starting with journalists - to do their work and not be on bluesky. They will be on X and bluesky. Maybe. If it happens, then bluesky will eventually replace X. Because it will not be long before it will also be possible to leave X, probably the last to do so will also be journalists. Its more efficient that way. Then it will be just nazis and shitposters on X, and X will go the way of Digg and MySpace.

Alternatively, Twitter could also fragment completely and we'll never have an equivalent network again. There's no law stating we must have a single such network where are the celebs, news orgs and scientists hang out.

Can we make a meaningful comparison between the two, given that they're both private companies that could just be saying whatever they want people to hear? I mean, I have no doubt that Twitter is an order of magnitude greater in popularity, but there are so many factors at play here, especially given the number of bots and duplicate accounts in existence.

How do you know that number?