Bluesky posts are finally open to the public::Bluesky remains an invite-only decentralized Twitter alternative, but now, you don’t need to be logged in to be able to see posts on the platform. The app has a new logo, too.
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You can tell that technology is advancing rapidly because now you can type short-form text on the internet and everybody can read it. Truly innovative stuff.
I wonder if it’ll catch on only to get destroyed by political operatives and bots
I got sent an invite ages ago. I’ve jumped in every so often but I am always shocked by how crap it is. Mastodon is so much better.
IKR? I’m disappointed that most of my favorite artists went there, instead of something like Mastodon
People like to pretend Mastodon is confusing
Mastodon is confusing mostly because it doesn’t help you in any way, it just sits there and goes “you have no feeds”. Well what am I supposed to do about that?
There doesn’t seem to be a “discover” feature so you have to just magically know the usernames people already on the platform and then add them.
This is at the top of all of the mastodon servers I have an account on. If someone lacks the curiosity to click the word explore, then that is on them, not on the tech.
If someone lacks the curiosity to click the word explore
The cries of every dev throughout programming history. Why are the users so stupid?
But the thing is, uses are stupid. People get confused if you put “sign in” instead of "log in’. If lots of people think that Mastodon is confusing then Mastodon is confusing. The consensus cannot be wrong. You might disagree with it but it cannot be wrong.
It requires a UX overhaul by someone who actually understands UX and researches it. I used to do UX as my job specialization and trust me everyone thinks it’s easy and it isn’t.
I actually don’t disagree much about the Dev/UX parts of your comment. But you should take note that I was replying to the statement:
There doesn’t seem to be a “discover” feature
It isn’t a consensus, though. If it were, nobody would be debating it.
Consensus doesn’t require everyone in the world to agree it just requires the majority to agree and clearly the majority do otherwise the comment that it’s confusing would not have been made.
It’s not up for debate, people find it confusing.
There is a discover people feature on my app at least.
I also kind of like it not to be bombarded with a useless algorithm just so i can doomscroll more. If you curate your feed with nice people and hashtags you get lots of traffic and if that gets too much you just make lists of topics within them.
I’m pretty sure at least when I started using Twitter that there was a kind of what are you interested in questionnaire. You’d fill that out and it’ll give you a list of people you might be interested in you then select the ones you wanted.
Is it’s a bit difficult to work out how you’re supposed to start
Ah well afaik there is no such thing but i started looking for hashtags of my hobbies and found some nice profiles.
After you follow a few of them you can look into the recommended tab and will see quite a few similar people.
Someone here also told me about LisaMelton. She will throw many cool things into your timeline if you follow her.
Pretend? I’m a computer nerd and I put off signing up for Mastodon for months because of how complicated it is. I completely understand why normies nope the hell off.
What people don’t understand is that you’re the algorithm on mastodon. You’re doing the work.
I’m on it and it’s actually my best experience on social media for a long long time. People are nice and discussions aren’t toxic like on others. But, it comes with the cost to be the algorithm.
Yeah once you’re on it it’s pretty great, although still a bit confusing with how the federation works. But learning what you should think about when choosing an instance, benefits of niche and general instances, big and small instances, what to do if you end up regretting your choice, how to find and add your friends and if they’re on an instance that federates with yours or not, learning about Mastodon privacy when it comes to posts and “DMs”, instance security etc etc etc. It’s a lot.
Im an idiotic old man who can barely repair my PC anymore and it was very easy to make an account here and on mastodon. Dunno what people are on about.
It’s not creating the account that is the problem. It’s learning what you should know about the instance you choose, then choosing an instance, and understanding how the federation of posts work. Etc.
The downvotes on this are just strange. What impetus could there be for continuing to push the narrative that mastodon or lemmy are ‘difficult’ to sign up for and use? My wife(46) and mother(67), who are both technically impaired, signed up on the same day I did…
The process is so simple: All we did was google ‘mastodon canada’ and ‘lemmy canada,’ Then signed up for mstdn.ca and lemmy.ca.
Next steps? Nothing different than any other social site… Fill out the profile (like any other site) start looking for people and tags to follow (like any other site) and then bookmark the main page (like any other site).
This is ridiculous. Please turn in your nerd card.
More like people like to act smug and pretend it isn’t.
I found it and Lemmy frustrating to get started tbh. Besides the flagship instances early on finding a server I could actually join was a lot of research and trial and error.
As an amateur artist, mastodon is really not friendly to newcomers like me.
I had to figure out what an instance was and pick one (I chose mastodon.art since I was interested in that)
After wondering why I couldn’t find other people’s accounts, it turned out that I shouldn’t have picked that instance because it had defederated from almost anyone else.
So now I had to create another account in another instance, which turned out to be so full my posts were not getting any traction.
With Bluesky I just created an account and I immediately gained a few followers
It is just not worth the hastle.
Disappointed that you’re downvoted, because you’re right.
And it actually made me remember my experience few months ago on that exact same Mastodon instance, mastodon.art–they blocked almost every other instance!!! Even something like kbin.social mind you! I don’t even know why they did it, I think they said something like alt-right content (CMIIW), but in my experience using kbin.social, I’ve never seen those kind of content. The worst thing I’ve seen from kbin.social is just… porn. It’s a good instance over all
Sometimes I think defederation is what’s going to ruin fediverse. I get that it’s necessary, but if done like this, it’s a bad thing.
I think if I’m gonna recommend Mastodon, I’m going to just recommend them the most popular instance. IMO the best thing about fediverse is that many different instance can talk to eachother, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to be “centralized”
Mastodon.art is well-known for being trigger-happy at blocking and usually even frame false accusations, their trch.lgbt block has made people lose any trust on them, but there are still people still think they are doing good while in fact they cause more harm tho
at least now we can just subscribe with RSS to get updates and actually have the links be usable
I don’t get the hate, I’ve been there for a year and the place is pretty cool with many writers and artists that aren’t on Mastodon. It feels like twitter on the good days. Maybe if you curate your friend list better you would get a better timeline?
I had the exact opposite reaction when I got my invite a few months after jumping ship to Mastodon. Mastodon just doesn’t have good discoverability and didn’t have a lot of the people I used to follow on Twitter. Bluesky’s feeds feature solves the discoverability problem; I’ve already found way more people I want to follow on there than on my entire time on Mastodon.
Mastodon is great if you want a social media site that’ll have people shout at you for not putting a Content Warning on a post about you eating a ham sandwich.
When I do something that offends you: this is real life and you need to accept it bigot
When you do something that offends me: PUT A WARNING ON THAT
Same, it seems like a bunch of people that want to get off twitter but don’t pull the plug so bluesky is thier backup plan in case it doesn’t work out.
They missed their chances. When I got the invite a few weeks ago, I did no longer care, because I already switched to Lemmy. There’s no place for Bluesky anymore, they missed the Twitter exodus and the Reddit one. They should’ve send my code years ago but didn’t. Such a fail of a company.
I deleted my Bluesky account because no one who i invited used it. And bluesky invites are not even hot anymore, the last time i posted a bunch online no one grabbed them.
Mastodon and Lemmy fills my void enough i don’t need extra places to go
I only got on Bluesky a couple of months ago after a long wait, and honestly I don’t think I’ve been on there once since setting up the account. A trickle of my Twitter contacts seemed to move over there in the early days but the trickle dried up and it doesn’t look like many people are on there.
I hope it still finds a niche for itself, but the ridiculous invite rationing thing really does seem to have killed the momentum for them.
I’ve also lost interest in Mastodon, although again I’m willing to give it another go if it continues to grow. Mostly I’ve just found that I don’t really need to replace Twitter in my life; I’m just fine without it…
I’ve noted a lot of folks finding the same. Once you remove the addicting algorithm feeding you, you realise it gets boring once you’ve checked on it for a few minutes. Not that having a fedi account is a bad thing, if orgs and govt dished out updates via a fedi account (on their own server) I’d get behind that. I hate having to log into fb or wherever to find out info that should be on a website; a fediverse account would be a nice compromise IMO.
The thing that made Twitter a legitimately interesting platform to be on was really the way it enabled direct communication with “big” names. Celebrities if that’s your thing, but for me it was more journalists, commentators and politicians (being the circle my interests move in).
There was nowhere else like it for having a national TV journalist post something, replying to them, and them having a conversation back with you on simple equal footing. Similarly, I had several “big names” follow me or follow people who follow me, who’d occasionally see my posts and comment or react; not something that could happen without it.
If Bluesky or Mastodon had the same wide traction and the same culture of communication maybe it’d capture my interest again.
The reason why I’ve found Lemmy so much more appealing is because fundamentally Reddit didn’t rely on that sort of culture at all. The Reddit culture is one that transfers much more easily to a smaller community like Lemmy, and it scratches that itch for me just fine.
I got the email a couple of days ago. I got halfway excited, I went to install the app, I got distracted, and I haven’t bothered to finish logging in yet. Back when I put in the application I was genuinely wanting to check it out but it seems like now there’s enough on offer that network effects are going to kill it whatever they do.
Sounds like someone’s upset they weren’t invited earlier lol.
Do any of the babies downvoting want invites? Figured I’d offer out of charity.
Lol
Can someone explain to me how Bluesky is different than Mastodon and if it’s not different why they bothered creating it when Mastodon exists? I truly don’t get it.
It’s likely that when Bluesky rolls out in full, advertisers will have the ability to place ads in networks or user interest groups similar to Reddit’s framework. This user self-selection will be extremely useful to businesses running targeted campaigns.
https://marketvantage.com/blog/what-does-bluesky-mean-for-advertising/
So…Mastodon…with ads?
i don’t see what similarities to mastodon it has
They built their own federated protocol and it’s a microblog
it isn’t very federal at the moment
If AT protocol goes public, other software might federate with existing Bluesky servers. Bluesky servers should have a set of filters that would keep safe for everyone joining the chosen server.
Give Gargron time he’ll add ads and buddy up with Meta while signing mystery NDAs
He can add ads if he wants, and you can simply move to another ad-free instance.
That’s a serious accusation. Got anything to back it up?
They’d have to do that in custom feeds (which people can ignore) or on 3rd party account servers (which people also can ignore, just like in Mastodon)
less confusing to sign up and use, nice clean looking app, same look and feel as the OG twitter
You could build all that on top of Mastodon too though. E.g mozilla.social uses Firefox accounts to sign in and the Elk theme.
And equally requires an invite code.
Original Twitter had a shit app, that was always the case too people used third party apps which became a cause for the exodus when that Twat stopped them working.
Mostly just the protocol. Mastodon uses ActivityPub. Bluesky uses some other shit.
Atprotocol.
Mastodon and activitypub is very much like social media implemented in the form of public email lists implemented over HTTP (push massages between servers).
Bluesky uses content addressing (think magnet links for torrents, but for linking to post data) and pull mechanism with notifications, plus public shared archive nodes (CDN-like servers).
The main difference is that you’re much more independent of individual servers and can easily move your account around, since your account ID is tied to a cryptographic key belonging to your account which you bring with you along with your post archive, and your handle can be based on a domain name you own (also works as a verification mechanism you don’t have to pay extra for).
It has a data salad which has the benefit of making it marginally easier to migrate accounts and also makes it much more resource intensive and unsafe.
I got my “early” invite code a couple weeks ago and it was pretty cool finding accounts I’d previously followed on Twitter… and seeing how they haven’t posted in months
its kind of crazy to me how many people are moving over to that place. on one hand i appreciate that it’s somewhat containing twitter culture
protecting much better new socials like cohostbut on the other, it is frustrating to have no access to so many people who switched to blue sky’s with its bizarre and abrubt popularity as an alternative platform despite being diet fediverse.They’re planning to open up public federation this year
Seems like everyone and their mother has a code they’re willing to share in this thread, at least.
i was offered one but im not really interested in making an account unless i can do it on a different instance. i do not trust the official one a single bit, lol
Now everyone can see how shit it is.
Still better than Threads
That’s not a very high bar to exceed
Yeah but note by “public” they really mean “if the post doesn’t require you to login”. They recently implemented a feature that lets users choose for their posts to be “public” but still require a login to see it.
The API is pretty much fully open, look up the firehose api for bluesky. This change just allows easy linking
I hope Mastodon implements a feature like that. That and account locking a la Twitter, or at least the ability to update a post’s visibility after creation.)
(Inb4 “but federation” etc: it’s better than nothing.)
Hope you like furries and dicks
You have my attention
👀 Anybody got a Bluesky invite?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Sounds better than Twitter, and I dont care for either one…much
Why are people here, on this federated platform, excited for a centralized twitter clone that will eventually, inevitably, succumb to the same fate?
A billionaire proof social network run by a billionaire. Federated only with itself. Has a .xyz domain name.
I feel like I’m living in an episode of Silicon Valley.
Jack isn’t involved anymore iirc. He got bullied off the platform & now just does his thing on whatever Nostr is
I wonder why they keep their platform so closed off. It’ll never ever go anywhere if people can’t even use it.
All it has to do is copy Twitter when it was good some years ago, and do it very reliably. That’s it.
Because the moderation tools aren’t ready for opening it up fully. You can already clone the code and run your own servers
tbh they are too late at this point. they could have came in early when their invites were a hot thing or when threads opened up.
I wonder why they keep their platform so closed off.
Pretty normal for any kind of new software.
What do y’all think we can learn or adapt from Bluesky’s protocol(s)/innovations?
Invite codes for so instances dont have to be approval only it can be approval and invite
Subdomain based usernames instead of two @‘s like @nix.merv.news as my username so every OS doesnt think its an email when clicking. Plus its easier because I can just share nix.merv.news and people can just click it and go to it.
Being able to change your @ without losing your posts. Being able to keep your followers if your instance goes down
To do better.
What do you think they did wrong?
oh good
First time I’m seeing what it looks like. Looks exactly like Twitter.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you want to prevent people who aren’t logged in from seeing your posts, you can “discourage” that by clicking a toggle in settings.
But Bluesky notes that “other apps may not honor this request” and that the toggle doesn’t make your account private.
Previously, the app’s logo was a blue sky with clouds, but “early on, we noticed that people were organically using the butterfly emoji 🦋 to indicate their Bluesky handles,” Graber says in the blog post.
And, as spotted by my colleague Parker Ortolani, the app has a fun animation that will feel familiar to fans of Twitter.
With the increasing momentum behind ActivityPub — including the very public support from Meta’s Threads — I’ve worried that Bluesky, which is based on its own AT Protocol, might get left behind.
But every time I hop over to my Bluesky account, it seems like people are having a lot of fun — the platform seems to be growing quickly, too — so hopefully the protocols can co-exist and usher in a fediverse future.
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