> The internet doesn’t need to be like this. As luck would have it, a new way is emerging just in time. If you’ve heard of Bluesky...
Why do they write as if activitypub and mastodon do not exist?
Why do they write as if activitypub and mastodon do not exist?
1. The platform is outright hostile to discovery. You generally can't even index posts in a search engine. This is not what I want, at all.
2. Moderation is awful. Letting individual servers control moderation at their whim is not what I want. In contrast, Bluesky's idea of labelling services and opt-in moderation sounds amazing.
3. After point 1, it probably goes without saying that Mastodon is outright hostile to algorithms. While I agree that algorithms can be very problematic, Bluesky's approach to opt-in algorithms is an interesting approach.
4. I think the ship has long sailed on Mastodon. It's failed time and again to gain enough critical mass for non-tech people to adopt. Clearly the combination of above issues, or even maybe the confusion of onboarding, is too much.
Overall I'm glad Mastodon exists, and perhaps Bluesky wouldn't be what it is without first seeing what worked and didn't work with Mastodon.
But the others seem to be very much at home. They are not millions. They are probably prioritizing the small communities that have formed over maximum reach.
That's a per-instance setting in an easy to find place in the Administration section. It's not doing anything more complex than swapping ROBOTS.txt files.
If on per-instance, there are also per-user settings to opt-in. (Again, it mostly just tweaks ROBOTS.txt.)
The off-by-default nature makes it seem "hostile" if your intent is to roll your own Fediverse index, because you actually have to read ROBOTS.txt files and abide by them. On the other hand, it is nice because it sets an ecosystem norm that indexes and bots should respect ROBOTS.txt and are considered bad actors to destroy if they can't be bothered to do the simple thing of respecting a ROBOTS.txt file.
The off-by-default nature makes it a little bit harder to find an instance if you do want your posts indexed in a search engine, but that's a part of why good federation means a diversity of instances.
Also, if they are your posts you want searchable nothing is stopping you from using an API to repost them to any other website you control with search engine indexing. I've seen several bloggers include their microblog posts from ActivityPub on their blog. That's my "eventual" plan for my own ActivityPub posts; I don't want the "live feed" search indexed, but I may want to eventually curate "best of" stuff, add context, do some revisions/editing, and upgrade them to blog posts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostr
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/
Is that because of it being crypto adjacent?
Relays can and do filter notes by pub key. To fight spam, and problematic content. But you as a user can always change the relay set that you post to. And, of course, host your own relay, which is pretty straightforward.
You create the content on your device and then send it to many of these relays (usually 10-20) and other users pull the content from also 10-20 relays. So if one relay decides to block you, then people still get your content from other relays. If all relays decide to block you, then you can (quite easily) run your own relay and tell your friends to pull the data from it. You own your data and you can resend it to wherever you want (it's signed by your private key, so it's verifiably from you).
I would have been happy on Mastodon too, and I don't know why it didn't catch on with non-tech people, but it just hasn't. So Bluesky is our main opportunity for an open social web, at this time.
The number of dead links I've had where the shard is down or overloaded is way too high
The design simply doesn't work imo
Labeling another post as deceptive and then trying to use just one demographic (and not a very large one at that) as proof for whether mastodon is "large" in percentage terms is not very reassuring as to the level of discussion on Mastodon tbh.
Plenty of stats websites for both, you should check them.
Data isn't tied to an instance in mastodon, it resides in an instance and can be easily migrated. If you either host yourself or subscribe to a reputable service that offers mastodon, like omg.lol then it's a safe bet your data will live long after the other proprietary services get shut down.
1. This is true for did:web but less true for did:plc identities.
2. For did:plc identities to survive a full "bluesky PBC" death, you'd need to to transfer master authority for your PLC identity to a set of keys you control. If you don't then ultimately bluesky PBC would still have final authority over your identity. But if you transfer control to your own keys ahead of time then you can use those keys to make changes long after bluesky PBC's death.
This is a tool that allows you to create new recovery keys: https://github.com/renahlee/manual
Post about said tool: https://bsky.app/profile/renahlee.com/post/3lcbnab6rl22h
An article on how to do this manually: https://whtwnd.com/fei.chicory.blue/entries/How%20to%20get%2...
It's generally pretty sparse docs because everything is fairly "beta" still and because it is cryptography if you fuck it up you permanently lose control over your account forever. This is one of the reasons they don't advertise non-custodial recovery keys super aggressively.
And the protocol that is used for maintaining a ledger of key changes isn't exactly ideal or to my knowledge final but rather is in a "it's good enough until we douse the other fires" state.
Same goes for identity (albeit in a different way)