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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Someone has been working on a bridge between BlueSky and Mastodon, and uh, it has generated a TREMENDOUS amount of controversy on the Mastodon side.

I have my own biases so I don't want to describe it further than that, nor link to it directly so as not to cause even more disagreement, but the controversy does not seem to faze the developer, so I believe you will have your wish.

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Can you at a high level explain why people are mad about this? Is there a difference in the sort of people on Bluesky vs Mastodon, or is it a technical disagreement?

Again, please keep in mind that this is my perception of others' arguments, and so may have some bias. I am going to try and counteract that with my wording here, but maybe someone who holds this position can drop by and give their own summary.

I have seen two main complaints:

* This is opt-out not opt-in, and I don't like that.

* BlueSky is bad because it is run by a company (sometimes with a suggestion that Jack Dorsey owns and runs the place), and I think the fediverse should be free from corporate influence, and so I object to the idea of a bridge.

In my experience, the former was the majority of the complaints. The common sentiment I saw boiled down to "if I wanted my posts to be on Bluesky, I'd have posted them there." I agree with that completely. It wasn't so much that it was Bluesky in particular, as that someone made an opt-out system that would re-publish all their content elsewhere.

It is worth noting that being indexed by Google is also opt-out on Mastodon.

Anything run by someone like Jack Dorsey should be away from something like fediverse. He literally killed third party ecosystem on Twitter after multiple times begging developers to come and revive the platform. Without those third party apps Twitter would not have been anywhere close to the size it reached.

Yes, he, Dorsey, did it. I don’t should discount that one bit!

Should we give him or people like him another chance? Fuck no. History is filled with examples of embrace and extinguish. Let’s wish him luck for AT Proto (actually BSKY; he is not interested in AT; AT is the bait, the lure, because he knows well people will just flock the first and the biggest).

Bluesky isn't run by Jack Dorsey BTW. It kind of looks like he disowned it.

BlueSky isn't run by Jack Dorsey. I'm not a fan of him either. Luckily, he's doing nostr instead.

Got it. Thanks for correcting me. I was ill-informed.

(He’s on the board of directors though it seems - there are two people there I think).

People don't like the perception that someone is doing something to their posts without them opting in.

Mastodon is very sensitive to that.

People will still bridge the two in various ways.

People will also bolt on more direct bridging to Mastodon if there's any demand from Bluesky users.

Basically, unless Bluesky totally fails, it will be embraced and extended by the broader broader Fediverse, because why not?

A global bridge isn't a multi-protocol social server. The guy is free to do as he likes, but I'm saying I don't think public bridges like that are a good architectural decision for decentralized networks. The individual nodes should implement multi-protocol support instead.

Some probably will, but I think a fairly substantial part of the Fediverse will ignore Bluesky other than via global bridges unless/until it has a lot of traction.

I have two Mastodon instances, and I don't know if I'll bother. If I were to it'd be mostly because I feel that ideologically I think it'd benefit the Fediverse to embrace Bluesky real tight, take their best ideas, extend them, and ensure it feels like Bluesky is just another corner of the Fediverse with some pointless differences.

Just in practical terms, global bridges will see extremely high traffic if they become popular. I've watched people struggle to maintain operational bridges for single high-traffic channels. Not to mention the hosting cost of being a single point of failure for inter-network translation.

I think the future of decentralized social media is bright. I'm critically supportive of all the work being done and I'll be happy as long as we don't repeat the mistakes of email and xmpp.

Assuming they operate the same way Mastodon itself handles federation and only relay the content people follow, there's no reason you can't fairly straightforwardly scale it by just running more of them. But frankly I'm not convinced Bluesky has much of a future. It needs to 1) offer something significant over the wider Fediverse - which is far more than "just" a Twitter-like and they only have a partial answer to the Twitter-like part - and 2) prevent being embraced and extended. E.g. nothing but inertia prevents the same level of indirection to provide smooth migration as Bluesky offers, and so if users care it will come to other services over ActivityPub too. The good parts of Bluesky will be copied. Then what? Especially if you're on the Bluesky side of a bunch of bridges where people on a lot of the instance on the other side look at you with suspicion and lock you out from their communities.

The limitations on filtering on Bluesky and the culture of filtering on Mastodon where this ability is seen as a community good means that if you want a 'global' view of the combined network, you're going to need to be on the Fediverse side of those bridges. That's not a good position to be in for Bluesky.

I know not the details, but all power to that developer.

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