The platform crossed the milestone last night, and it happened about a month and a half after the 25 million mark. Bluesky still has a long way to go to pass Threads, though; Meta’s platform has more than 100 million daily active users.
[Media: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3lgu4lg6j2k2v]
To anyone bemoaning BlueSky’s lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.
It’s a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary “relay” as an alternative to Bluesky’s that can still communicate across the same protocol (The “AT Protocol”) while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.
They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).
The only thing the Fediverse is missing is way to migrate from 1 instance to another
I feel like the reason the reason why it’s taking off so much is because it’s not federated.
It’s like people hear the term federation and they get afraid. I know it’s not that simple but still.
In other words, people don’t know what they actually need.
I don’t think 99% of people who have joined bluesky have any clue what federation is or means. They do know what “not twitter” is however.
I don’t personally think it’s because of that. Sure, federation as a concept outside of email has a bit of a messaging problem for explaining it to newbies, but… everyone uses email, and knows how that works. This is identical, just with it being posts instead of emails. Users aren’t averse to federation, in concept or practice.
Bluesky was directly created as a very close clone of Twitter’s UI, co-governed and subsequently pushed by the founder of Twitter himself, who will obviously have more reach than randoms promoting something like Mastodon, and, in my opinion, kind of just had better branding.
“Bluesky” feels like a breath of fresh air, while “Mastodon” just sounds like… well, a Mastodon, whatever that makes the average person think of at first.
So when you compare Bluesky, with a familiar UI, nice name, and consistent branding, not to mention algorithms, which Mastodon lacks, all funded by large sums of money, to Mastodon, with unfamiliar branding, minimal funding, and substantially less reach from promoters, which one will win out, regardless of the technology involved?
Exactly, it’s just packaged in a way that consumers are more familiar with with the backing of major celebs
People are not afraid of the term “Federation.“ They literally have no clue what it is.
It’s the instance concept I find consistently to be an issue. It’s an extra layer/barrier to entry. You don’t just create an account. You have to understand what an instance is and then determine which one you’re joining and what that means for your moment to moment usage of the platform.
Yeah I was confused on if it was connected, if I was explaining it to myself id say that the fediverse has interconnected forums that all serve the same content and can be accessed by making accounts on different websites or apps.
Lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected forum/threads side of the fediverse.
Mastodon, sharkey, plaroma, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected microblogging slide of the fediverse.
They all have different features, like mbin has account reputation, piefed has topics which let you sub to multiple related communities at once, etc., but the content is shared between those that serve the same type of content.
Since they’re all built ontop of the same protocol ppl can always come in and build on top of it or make hybrids while still letting everyone access the same content. Like mbin having both microblogging (tweets) and threads, letting you post and view both from the same account/website.
And it legit takes 5 minutes to sign up for 5 instances and see the differences, mine showed the same content for the most part, only lemmy.world was missing the piracy community, other than that it was all the same and any nervousness I had about it went away after seeing the feeds being the same.
Yeah but people don’t want to set up 5 accounts to understand alt-reddit. They want to download a clean app that takes seconds to set up and just go. Friction is friction.
Not everyone likes to tinker and poke and prod
there really isnt much friction either if you dont cate about piracy otherwise id have stayed on lemmyworld when vyjr reccomended it, they really just need to try it, I complained until I tried it
But even then you have to explain the whole subscribed vs local vs all situation. Then defederation, so they know that there is stuff they can’t access without creating another account on another instance.
No matter how much we simplify it it’s simply not that simple. At least not compared to traditional social media. And we can sit here and call them lazy for not learning how it works or we can do more to try to meet people where they’re at.
What I’ve been doing lately is pointing people a good app like Voyager, tell them not even to think about an instance and just join the one I tell them to join (For instance I tell my queer friends to join blahaj), then as they poke around I started explain explaining more things.
It’s kind of like Linux. People obsess over their first distro and then they realize it’s really easy to swap distro’s. So usually I just tell people to get something very simple like mint or pop and just dive in until they learn what they actually want.
they should understand by the 2nd one, I just wasnt sure where I wanted to commit, it became fun by the 2nd one to pick an instance like a club