I've had a lot of people ask how BlueSky compares to Mastodon and the Fediverse. I've tried to make the answer as simple and easy to understand as possible:
BlueSky is designed to give corporations and wealthy people full control of the network. All of its traffic has to flow through expensive-to-run corporate relays.
The Fediverse is designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.
@FediTips people flocking to bsky thinking it's going to be different has me shaking my head. Just look at their investors. Blockchain, lovely.
Most of BlueSky's board is blockchain people. Their CEO's CV is mostly blockchain and cryptocurrency companies.
@FediTips @effariwhy One day we'll purge anyone who has ever worked on a crypto project from working on anything ever again
@FediTips @effariwhy Do you have a link to the current status as a source?
I only know this article (in german) from November: "Bluesky: How is a ‘decentralised ecosystem’ financed? Bluesky was launched as a non-profit organisation, and controversial names emerged in the latest round of financing"
https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000245588/bluesky-wie-finanziert-sich-ein-dezentrales-oekosystem
@w_b @caos @FediTips @effariwhy I was like. I'll take a quick look at that.
Firefox read mode said that the estimated read time is 55 to 70 minutes.
I might as well start.
@w_b @caos @FediTips @effariwhy
So... BlueSky Direct messages all go through a central server. And are not encrypted E2E anyway.
I don't like that.
Never thought about it but DMs in Mastodon are not E2E either.
I'm just learning about ActivityPub. How difficult would it be to E2E DMs?
Could you provide encryption keys on both ends. And make it to where something like the users pass decrypts DMs?
@txtechnician @caos @FediTips @effariwhy
End to end encryption has been a problem in email that still is not solved. The problem is the key distribution.
I don't know how Signal, etc. do it but it would seem publishing the public key in the user profile would solve e2e for at least DMs.
@w_b @txtechnician @caos @effariwhy
Social networks in general aren't good for privacy, as far as I know none of them have E2EE. It's much better to use encrypted messaging systems such as XMPP with OMEMO, @briar etc.
There is discussion of how to bring E2EE to Mastodon at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19565 but it hasn't been updated in some time.
@FediTips @w_b @caos @effariwhy @briar oh man. I think that encrypting toots. Is Overkill. But I do see the need to encrypt private messages.
I mean the difference is obvious. One of those is meant to be public. The other one is meant to be private.
BlueSky is not a non-profit, it is owned by Bluesky Social PBC which is a for-profit corporation.
In October it announced that it had partially sold itself to Blockchain Capital, and the same announcement said they had appointed a blockchain/cryptocurrency expert to their board:
https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips/113364985280012085
This is in addition to their CEO being a blockchain/cryptocurrency person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Graber
AFAIK the board only has three people, so a majority are from blockchain.
@FediTips @effariwhy I don't think blockchain and cryptocurrency is automatically something bad, I just don't see it's place in a decentralized social media network.
@voxel @FediTips @effariwhy I don't think we've come up with a single use for blockchains that isn't zero-sum speculation though. Every cent "made" by anyone on Bitcoin was lost by someone else, it generates no value. And destroys value in production.
Yes, the technology itself isn't harmful. But we haven't found a non-harmful use for it yet.