Thinking about fiatjaf’s Bluesky is a scam post. Some of the criticism seems fair, some feels premature, and “scam” is too loaded. Let’s see how it goes. My opinion hasn’t changed since AT Proto was announced: domain name usernames and data portability in Bluesky is interesting and worth exploring.
@manton (I care less about whether Bluesky is a scam, and more that people understand that tech “luminaries” like Jack Dorsey are repeat scam artists, that’s all)
@manton For me, the other shoe has dropped as far as AT’s compromises in the form of how blocking has to be implemented to achieve their desired level of account portability. It requires block lists to be publicly queryable.
My take is, if what you WANT is a broadcast medium for shitposting, that’s fine. If what you want is a defensible neighborhood social network, it’s not.
And this is a cleanly articulable difference between the needs served by the two protocols, to me.
@manton definitely scam is too strong but the article makes good points. Still, MB shouldn’t be the judge and gatekeeper and I’m ok with MB supporting the protocol for cross-posting and keeping an eye on how it develops. It should be up to the authors to decide where they propagate their content.
@manton From the MB perspective it probably doesn’t matter if it’s a scam, at least from the “it’s an open federated thing”. You support cross posting to other closed platforms and that’s fine.
@manton Someone compared AT protocol to Matrix, I have no knowledge of Matrix stack, but at least someone thinks the tech has something good.
@manton The most inexplicable thing about that to me is the tone — it reads as bitterness because a ton of cool people found fediverse-based tools too obtuse or unusable, and that’s getting presented through technical ranting.
@anildash Agreed. Even just the word "scam" bothered me. We should be able to discuss the technical (and usability!) merits of different approaches without throwing around accusations like that.
@manton I agree with you. I think having portable identities is the big thing Mastodon / ActivityPub is really missing.
And, while I agree with the post that Bluesky isn't as open as I would like it to be; if I'm hosting my posts, (theoretically) something else could come and distribute them outside of `BSG`.
@anildash @manton I’m a little befuddled why a lot of the discussion treats Bluesky v Mastodon as a zero sum game. It’s not. There will always be multiple networks. They will be built on different technologies and community standards. Choose your own adventure. Don’t worry about the cool kids. Love the one you’re with, etc.
@manton domain name usernames are also the reason I have zero FOMO about Bluesky and no rush to get there. I’ll get my name no matter how late I join. Wonder if it’s a good strategy for them?
@karppinen Yeah, minimizing FOMO is nice. My guess is they are fine with it because they still need to scale up fairly slowly while the API evolves.
