I've spent significant time on Bluesky and Mastodon for the last few months. They're very different experiences, and I like them both for different reasons. But I think they are headed in different directions. They're going to continue to diverge in terms of what they offer.
@polotek How, when it's controlled by the same guy, who himself is not great on the open web and forced the sale of twitter to the bigoted and narcissistic megalomaniac? And it's not like Twitter was headed in a great direction before Musk. He just escalated the process and Dorsey knowingly supported that. That's why I am currently not even investing anytime in #bsky, because it just feels like a waste of time and effort and a repeat or similar outcome to Twitter is likely.
So OK I keep trying to like #atproto / #bsky, lexicons specifically but they make it so hard. like... let's see, OK we're going to reinvent RDF and JSON-Schema such that
there is some concept of a "namespace authority" rooted in DNS ownership of a domain name that is supposed to maintain a set of lexicons and do things like make sure there are no duplicates (eg. lexicon IDs are case sensitive but you are not allowed to have IDs that differ only in case, which a ns authority has to ensure)
but there is no means of using the domain to retrieve a schema, so eg. it is explicitly not spec'd to require com.example.myLexicon be at myLexicon.example.com - so the whole goofy Javabrained reverse-domain name thing as the ID is pointless
Accordingly, lexicons have to be sourced ad-hoc and by convention, and the convention is bonkers!!!! According to their reference implementations, the way you are supposed to use lexicons is to autogenerate their json schema definitions and version them locally everywhere they are used. I can't express how baffling this is to me - like the atproto monorepo has a top level lexicons directory, and then their Makefile then goes through several of the subpackages calling each of their (separate) code generation scripts, resulting in local, vendored copies of each of the lexicons - and by copies of the lexicons i mean both generated code AND typescript interfaces AND an entire copy of the whole schema.
This is presumably because there are REFERENCES between lexicons EVEN WITHOUT those lexicons having a meaningful notion of location or dereferenceability - how would you know what 'app.bsky.feed.defs' is referring to unless you packaged and built all lexicons together? the method for resolving references literally requires them to all be locally present at runtime as far as i can tell, idk the lexicon code is unreadable to me.
There is no means of versioning, so "Once a schema is published, it can never change its constraints" and the only means of changing is to change its freaking name, so com.example.myLexicon.FinalFinalv2 is explicitly encouraged. The reference implementations repeatedly violate this, though, so whatever.
Again, there is no actual mechanism of "publishing" a schema, though, so it's completely unclear what that's supposed to mean - how do people know the schema has changed names since they just have it hardcoded in their clients?
and the entire spec documentation is just a bunch of harebrained ideas that amount to, as far as i can tell, just literally being JSON-Schema just different? And they compare it to RDF but there's literally nothing to compare there except for the absence of an explanation as to why they didn't just use JSON-LD. I literally cannot tell how this is supposed to work as an interoperability/extensibility layer if there is no means of resolving terms or lexicons and all definitions have to be known in advance.
Strange that lots of #academics on #bsky are not really engaging with anyone, except perhaps with few other academics and they just reposting their original twitter material. Huge majority anglo-american. Probably some of them are on #threads too.
Not sure what the actual point of such activity is all about though
By the way I'm just doing a bit of looking into bsky, once I finish that I'll be off!
#bsky is really interesting
fundamentally a dead virtual space, for Europeans at least (and even more so for academics)
Americans (USA) seem a bit more engaged
..only English-speaking users..
looks and feels like (early) #Twitter
buckets of accounts with no posts, some just with the odd re-post, or posts that are days or months old
some people (like here) are just re-posting the same material they have on Twitter
I'll post some more on bsky if there's anything new /1/ #tech#socialmedia
there's alternative front ends and apps for #bluesky now -- like https://kite.black/ -- which would presumably let people opt-out on ads, even assuming #bsky could get advertisers on board
how in the world do they monetize this product? this is a for-profit company with investors. they're either geniuses with a never-before thought of way to monetize an open platform, or it's going to be a slow motion wreck
Oh snap. Just noticed that CNET editor @peterbutler liked my comments on journalist Talia Lavin's "g'bye! Going to #bluesky!" post, pointing out all their posts are compromised.
Obvs this isn't something many journalists know there, because it was exposed by a techie over here. Which is a GREAT argument for the #fediverse, btw. Sure would be a shame if journalists covered the issue, or security experts dug into it. @badlogic deserves cred for exploring #BSKY brokenness!
At least, I think those are familiar names. But because Bluesky’s only equivalent of Twitter’s now-ruined verification system is changing DNS settings to set your domain name as your handle there, I can’t assume that somebody popping up on Bluesky with a username, profile picture and bio matching their Twitter self is actually the same person.
My first move in those cases is to check the Twitter profile of the person whom I think has jumped into the Bluesky escape pod. If their Twitter display name, bio or pinned tweet shows a Bluesky handle, I’m all set. If it doesn’t, I’ll search their tweets for “bluesky” or “bsky” (the latter being part of a standard Bluesky handle).
If that doesn’t work but I’ve already confirmed that this person is on Mastodon, I’ll check their profile on that federated social network for a Bluesky mention. If that doesn’t yield any confirmation, I’ll check the person’s Web page, blog or author profile.
But if you want to make it easy for potential followers on Bluesky, don’t make them do all that research. Tell people how to find you there in some public and obvious way, whether it’s a tweet, an update to your Twitter profile, or an edit to whatever corner of the Web you can rewrite at will. And on that note: Yes, I really am robpegoraro.com on Bluesky.
on pense ce qu'on veut de #bsky niveau contenu, mais #mastodon est bien plus solide techniquement
je l'ai pas dit mais scroller sur bsky est execrable ; après on peut imaginer que ça va s'améliorer, ou pas d'ailleurs, le scrolling sur #tumblr ne s'est jamais amélioré
I "parked" my Bluesky account, I'm not really in dire need of another channel to track, let alone one that seems skewed towards popularity that it seems to be.
That said, it's not really for me. If you'd like to use it, I do have some unclaimed invites: