While I generally avoid politics on this blog, it’s hard to ignore the political biases permeating X and BlueSky. X has veered heavily toward far-right ideologies, while BlueSky is often associated with far-left communities. This polarized landscape doesn’t work for those of us seeking a neutral space for meaningful interactions.

lol

Unpopular opinion here, but: as opposed to other twitter clones like Hive Social and such, that also look sleek and are simple, but didn’t go anywhere, Bluesky did manage to attract a sizeable crowd of creative and talented open source indie devs that are passionate about it and build cool stuff on atproto. Whether it’s custom feeds or star sign labelers or alternative clients that add more features or entirely new appviews like the oekaki board PinkSea, you get the feeling it is a pretty vibrant ecosystem and this has sustained it all these months.

While this is true for the Fediverse as well, I think it’s fair to say that there have been rumblings here about lack of direction and proper stewardship of the Fediverse and if you want this place to succeed you can’t just sweep it under the rug, shrug your shoulders and say “well, people who pick Bluesky over Mastodon are just stupid”.

Why not self-host your Bluesky personal data server?

Been there for over a year now and fwiw, this wave feels more sustainable than before. In previous waves, a lot of people went back to Twitter after a week because Twitter still had “the juice” and Bluesky didn’t, but with 15 now million members and decent engagement, this is starting to turn around.

Ah sorry, bad timing, the handle stopped working a few hours ago, maybe the person has changed it, here is the same link with the handle-agnostic DID in the url: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:by3jhwdqgbtrcc7q4tkkv3cf/post/3l47yhps2xv2c

Ah sorry, bad timing, the handle stopped working a few hours ago, maybe the person has changed it, here is the same link with the handle-agnostic DID in the url: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:by3jhwdqgbtrcc7q4tkkv3cf/post/3l47yhps2xv2c

I haven’t even found anything suggesting one could realistically selfhost it

Check this out, this person self-hosted one for fun

If we’re talking about self-hosting your own personal data storage (PDS), a few hundred people are doing that, here is a list. Apparently a Raspberry Pi is sufficient to host a PDS.

Increasing the price by almost a fifth under a “center-left” government means this thing is just doomed once the right gets into power next year

Sorry for the late reply, but I wanted to address your question – I think one misunderstanding is: in a sense there are no Bluesky accounts and there are no Frontpage accounts, there are only atproto accounts. Whether you make a post on Bluesky or Frontpage or Whitewind or Smokesignal, all of them get collected in the same repository. Here is a neat atproto browser which can display this, this is the account of Frontpage founder Tom Sherman and you can find all of his collections there: https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/tom-sherman.com

Bluesky still isn’t there yet on that side (and probably won’t, as it would prevent them from generating revenue if someone can just open a server and connect to their network)

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. As fas as I know there are no plans to inject ads, they are planning to create a marketplace for custom feeds (think “premium” feeds) and labelers and such where they would take a cut. You would obviously still be able to purchase access to them from other servers. But this goal seems kinda lofty, not sure if it can be viable.

To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized.

A number I’ve seen quoted multiple times now is ~$150 per month to host a relay (Source). Which explains why Whitewind, Smokesignal and Frontpage don’t host one, they are mostly still small projects by individual talented devs, but imo if that number is true, it really doesn’t seem too outlandish that someone might go for it.

There is Bridgy Fed, which bridges accounts over to the other side if they follow the respective Bridgy Fed account on their platform. This is opt-ín though, so you can’t just follow anyone, they need to have followed @ap.brid.gy on Bluesky. To have your interactions bridged you need to follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy.

If the account you want to follow is not bridged and you are okay with just reading their posts, you can also use a service like RSS Parrot as every Bluesky account also serves as an RSS feed.

Such gross weirdo-behavior to call 900k completely normal people looking to socialize online bots, get off your high horse

Bei der Europawahl habe ich erneut vor aus Überzeugung MERA25 zu wählen, die Partei des ehemaligen griechischen Finanzministers Yanis Varoufakis. Wird aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach an der 2%-Hürde scheitern, aber gerade was “die Grünen nicht grün genug, die Linken nicht links genug” angeht, fühle ich vertritt MERA25 am besten meine Positionen.

They give you only so many free articles per month, I had to circumvent a paywall as well

I’m very curious how this will all shake out. I can understand all of you who want to block Threads and the only two instances that I am on myself are going to do exactly that, but it seems tremendously likely that the flagship instance of the fediverse, mastodon.social, will federate and it will have a massive impact on not just the culture, but also on the codebase. For example I wonder what services will go for feature parity and add features like voice notes which Threads added recently. Oh and culture-wise, with POTUS joining Threads, big institutions like the White House will suddenly appear on the fediverse.

Still holding out hope that a bunch of new users and new ideas will rejuvenate the fediverse, in any case 2024 should be a big year for it.

I have big sympathies for FireFish, but I feel like the target audiences so far are very different. Maybe call it the network effect, but it’s difficult for me to imagine a tumblr user who maybe is used to blogging about their SuperWhoLock fandoms moving to FireFish where there probably is no big audience for that. At the same time I would want to see these users and their niches in the Fediverse.

There is a very particular culture that is unique to tumblr which I don’t see moving somewhere else.

There were peaceful protests in Germany. Nobody had a problem with those.

Nobody? Really? You don’t think the right-wing Springer press (just to name the most glaring example) that is ideologically allied with ultranationalists in Israel had a problem with those? That they wouldn’t have cried foul even if the protests where utterly devoid of any radicals? That they wouldn’t have tried to censor even your imagined peaceful protests?

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