this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Not the person you replied to. But I think they meant that Bluesky is using a protocol that only the company uses.
Sure its a federated and decentralized protocol, I guess. But if they're the only platform using it, it's still rather centralized in that regard.
Federation on the protocol was opened about 3 weeks ago so its not surprising no other company is using it yet. Theres many users running their own tiny instances and also people working on a Lemmy style app for the protocol and there’s already a Clubhouse type app and a couple different mastodon style apps.
Sorry, that's not what I meant. The AT protocol has been available since they began. So anyone could have built apps on it all this time. Federation isnt required for their protocol to be used.
I just haven't seen any entirely working apps (made by non-Bluesky devs) using their protocol yet. And they totally ignored using or improving ActivityPub. So it comes off as their just kind of building their own thing, which is a centralized way of thinking.
They would've been better off building Blusesky on ActivityPub, an open protocol that's already battle-tested and in use by a number of different apps and made my different developers. But building a whole new protocol that no apps are using has the same net effect as if a centralized company like Instagram Threads were to do it.
If you're saying there are non-Bluesky apps using their protocol, can you link to these apps here in a reply? Totally open to being corrected.
Yeah i wish they improved activitypub but maybe competition will cause activitypub to improve. As far as I understand there hasnt been updated features to the protocol since it started and bluesky has some really cool features not available on activitypub (data portability, custom feeds, layers of moderators to choose from)
Some 3rd party apps that already exist are: Graysky, Skeets for Bluesky, Sora, and SkySpaces (the clubhouse version) is still in closed beta. Im sure theres more that I dont know of and some that are still not public like the reddit/lemmy style app. There’s a lot of developers very interested in the protocol and its still extremely early in development. One of the main devs at bluesky is pfrazee who made Beakerbrowser which was a p2p browser on the Dat Protocol back in the day.
It would be more fair to say that they approached the problems that need to be solved in federation with different priorities than ActivityPub.
People on ActivityPub based networks seem to want more independent niche communities with their own control over the community's content.
The AT protocol makes it so that the users, themselves, are able to control their content.
Philosophically it's an alternative to the Nostr protocol more than ActivityPub, and I don't know that you could wedge their prioritized solutions into this protocol's ecosystem.
While practically there are limitations to Bluesky federation (the cost of running a general purpose relay is not likely to be user supported), there is only one piece of their tech stack that currently is centralized (as far as I'm aware).
Sadly itself the ID generation and authentication portion.
And I wish we had a solution to that problem in the ActivityPub fediverse. There is no way to keep yourself if your instance is shut down, so you don't have any control over yourself as a user.
If that problem were solved in a way that still enabled communities the way we do I would prefer it to any of the current options.
That doesn’t make much sense, doing their own thing is a centralized way of thinking ? Like people had to build ActivityPub. Also, she explained the cultural aspect of why they didn’t. They got paid to research and do work for a protocol and platform people would use. They heavily looked into AP and felt it didn’t suit their needs especially culturally . Also, just out of some weird principle people hate Jack Dorsey and since he’s associated would’ve not used Bluesky, they didn’t get paid to build things people wouldn’t use. Technology filled with standards and protocols of people “reinventing the wheel” sometimes for really trivial issues they had with some tech.
Could you link to the Lemmy style app please, I haven't heard of this before
Its still in closed alpha the developer is in the bluesky pds discord