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Comment by fishgoesblub | Hacker News Reader

If only Bluesky could be as decentralised as the Fediverse [0] Trading one corporate overlord for another is not the smartest play.

[0] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

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Bluesky is a public benefit corp which at least nominally means they don't have to maximize shareholder value at the expense of everything else.

Decentralization is not a priority for most people. If anything, they actively want centralization, because it's easier. To get those people to decentralize, the solution will have to be dead easy and invisible. The AT Protocol being developed by the Bluesky people looks promising.

I don't work for Bluesky, I'm not on Bluesky, and I don't particularly care, but I found your comment unfair after reading about ATProto on HN literally yesterday.

How is this different than what OpenAI was structured as...until they weren't?

I have no idea and don't use OpenAI either. A quick search tells me OpenAI started out as a nonprofit and turned into the same thing Bluesky is, a PBC.

Opening an account on Mastodon was a pain even for me, a long-time Internet user and a nerd. I'm confronted with a choice of servers, but if I love cheese and golf, do I open my account on the cheese server or the golf server? What will be the disadvantages of choosing one over the other? Instant blocker right in the sign up process that made me actually give up several times. If it was like that for me, imagine how it could be for an average user.

The Fediverse will only be popular if someone releases a client that makes it as easy to use as X and Bluesky. Not sure if it's technically feasible (I don't know much about the innards of the protocol) but it doesn't seem to have happened at the moment.

How is it a pain when you can just skip the server selection process and use mastodon.social like pretty much everyone else?

Doesn't pretty much everyone using the same instance pretty much defeat the point?

We’re talking about the average user. They’re not going to be particularly passionate about federation. The point, to them, is to have a functioning Twitter-like social network.

The average user starts caring about censorship, AFAIK. And Bluesky has done very nasty ToS changes that only federation would have helped fight against.

But this is off-topic, because the ToS changes are mostly about porn, while this HN submission is about the professional use of Bluesky.

The only thing that would help with running sadly illegal in increasing parts of the world (including US) adult content servers would be not having a corporate entity.

It's difficult to fund rapid development at the scale needed, with that hobble.

Then why would the average user bother signing up for mastodon over something else

I'll be completely honest, as someone who remembers the internet before social networks, I have started caring less and less about being crammed into a single shared social space with every other person on earth.

No, because the point is that not everyone is forced to use the same instance.

When I started on Mastodon I created an account for each instance I wanted to post to, which was slightly annoying but not much more complicated than signing up for different subreddits. Now I have my own hosted account and follow whomever I like from there. Of course you can follow any account from any account (if the admin hasn't blocked it.)

I see that now the website shows a simpler choice - join mastodon.social or choose another server. I don't think it was like that when I joined (maybe 2 or 3 years ago), you were just given a list of servers or a search and told to choose.

This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?

I think there’s still value to having a long tail of independent instances, which can readily become more dominant if something happens to compromise the primary mastodon.social instance.

The time to have an opinion on which servers are cool and which host the fun people you follow is not the instant you go to sign up. Over time, you can notice which servers have buzz for bad moderation vs good, or where half your follow-list lives, and consider moving then

Having it take longer to form an opinion isn't exactly a negative either. The longer you take to pick a new server, the longer that server will have been around, and the longer it'll likely continue to be around.

This. I still don't understand why there's so much consternation over choosing a Mastodon server. It doesn't limit who you can follow. I suppose if you're the sort of person who actually likes seeing random content from people you don't explicitly follow it could matter, but that's not for me.

> It doesn't limit who you can follow.

That's simply not true. All servers maintain blacklists of other servers they don't like and won't federate with, including mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about (last section, "Moderated servers")

You could argue that it's normal to block problematic servers, but it's not you the user who gets to define what is problematic, it's your server. Therefore your choice of server may very well prevent you from seeing content you'd like to see.

Sure, and I did almost mention that. This is an outlier though. When people normally discuss this they act as if their choice of server has a huge impact on whom they can follow. Except for degenerate cases this isn’t true

> Therefore your choice of server may very well prevent you from seeing content you'd like to see.

How is this any different than users of different IRC networks being unable to communicate with each other?

If I'm on OFTC, I certainly don't complain about not being able to talk to people on Libera.chat. I just....join the server and start talking.

Because IRCs aren't social media platforms? Creating an "account" on an IRC server is trivial, and you don't have a permanent profile or friend lists, etc

Speak for yourself, but filling out a web-based form that asks for your desired username, password, and e-mail address is much easier than crafting a special registration request private message to an IRC services bot.

You solve the problem of multiple servers on Mastodon the same way you do on IRC - with a Mastodon client. If anything, it's _much_ easier to keep track of multiple accounts on Mastodon than it is on IRC.

I did sign up for a mastodon account, but the server I used simply disappeared a couple of months later. I haven't worked up the motivation to bother doing it again.

As for another data point, opening a Mastodon account for me was as trivial as choosing one random link from a webpage, choosing a username, password, and entering my email. If you get frozen on the choice of instance, that has more to do with your mental process than with an effective difficulty for the average user.

If you really cannot go beyond your inclination, and since you are a a long-time Internet user and a nerd, why not host your own instance?

> The Fediverse will only be popular if

There's already way more stuff on Mastodon for the hashtags I follow than I can possibly consume. If this is "unpopular", I'm happy with the way things are.

Maybe it _should_ be a little tougher to sign up for than the other mainstream options.

> a long-time Internet user and a nerd

This is the reason why it was a pain. You or I might think "this is a decentralized platform, I should look at all the servers and find the best one for me" and immediately get choice paralysis looking at who has what rules, who federates with who, who runs which one, etc. An average user will probably stick to the main instance and not even think about it.

> Opening an account on Mastodon was a pain even for me, a long-time Internet user and a nerd.

I was in the same boat as you, and my experience was completely different. Mastodon's federation model reminded me of IRC, except nowhere near as balkanized.

So how did I wrangle the supposed complexity? I started out on one of the main instances and just started people-watching. Over time, I took note of which server contained users whose content I enjoyed over time, then I just joined the server.

Joining the server got me a slower federated feed that was both more pertinent to my interests that also functioned as a de-facto community space. I also found the moderation to be more to my own preferences. But the bigger server wasn't _bad_, I just preferred the smaller server because it was more personable.

I don't use Mastodon much anymore, but that's more because a good chunk of my social circle left for BlueSky than any gripes I had with the platform. I don't know where they will go if BlueSky goes belly up, but I can tell you that it won't be back to Twitter.

They aren't exactly equal evils... and if a federated replacement for Xitter were going to win, I think it already would have. Ease of use (and comprehensibility) are both pretty important in this business, and nobody seems to get that.

I wonder why the Fediverse metrics don't count Threads, the single largest AP instance by several orders of magnitude?

Because Threads is Meta's attempt at bullshitting Mastodon users in welcoming a wolf among the herd. Search for "Fedipact": Meta is de facto cut off from many Mastodon instances.

Except the largest Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, does federate with Threads. I'm not even sure if the list you provided even covers most of the top instances either.

It really feels like an "eating your cake and having it too" kinda situation: you get the engagement and interaction with millions of Threads users but you don't have to count them in your decentralization metrics.

It's like when AOL was allowed onto USENET

The Twitter buyout should have made this obvious. When one company runs the whole thing, then some rich twat can wreck it on a whim, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

> Trading one corporate overlord for another is not the smartest play.

Only if you expect to be there for ever even as they inevitably enshittify. Be under no illusion that although BlueSky is having its "first they are good to their users" phase now, it is temporary.

So make the most of it now while it's good, but be prepared to move on when that changes. Embracing impermanence is a smarter play. This is nothing new, thus passes all social media.

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