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Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and more testers are gaining access. Though the app is still only available as an invite-only beta, its App Store arrival signals that a public launch <br />could be nearing.

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 04:09:32 +0100

atomicpoet@mastodon.social

Remember Bluesky?

That's the de-centralized social network backed by Jack Dorsey that's supposed to compete with Mastodon.

Instead of using ActivityPub, it uses the competing AT protocol.

It's on the App Store right now in closed beta, and @Sarahp speculates that a public launch may be nearing.

Thing is, development of Bluesky has been slow as molasses. This was announced all the way back in 2019.

A whole lot has happened since then!

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/28/jack-dorsey-backed-twitter-alternative-bluesky-hits-the-app-store-as-an-invite-only-app/

@fediversenews

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Wed, 01 Mar 2023 09:43:17 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Chris Trottier @Fediverse News The only advantage #Bluesky will have over 13-year-old federated jack-of-all-trades #Hubzilla that has had #NomadicIdentity since 2012 and even over younger and sleeker #Streams will be the availability of an iPhone app, especially one that bears the same name as the project itself. Hubzilla and Streams can only be used in Web browsers, and especially Hubzilla has a less-than-optimal UI for its overwhelming pile of features.

In all other regards, everything that Mike Macgirvin has made since #RedMatrix (that's seven project names) would mop the floor with Bluesky, not to mention that almost all of it has also supported #ActivityPub and therefore federated with Mastodon; Hubzilla (optionally) and Streams (by default) still do. Bluesky probably never will; it isn't meant to complement the Fediverse, it's meant to replace and destroy it.

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:50:59 +0100

Kristian

z428@loma.ml

@Jupiter Rowland Stumbled across this following around hubzilla and nomadic identity (which seems cool but recently totally failed for me), I'm a tad bitter here but I see what definitely would become an advantage of Bluesky same as it became an advantage for Mastodon in the Fediverse: Thinking "product" first, not technology first. And not "product" as in stuff that requires marketing to sell it to someone but actually a piece of technology in which its creator has taken enduring care to ensure it suits a particular purpose as good as possible and even better, that it works for a certain user group, is not just technically neat but also offers a decent user experience, a stable network and a clear idea of what to use it for (and what not). The Fediverse is cool. The protocols are neat, maybe. There's a load of great ideas and a load of dedicated folks out here. And yet: Yes, it's been seven project names since #RedMatrix it seems. It's a software that used to be a fork of #Friendica at some point. We have way too many projects, too many names, too many "half-baked" solutions that have been driven to some point, and at this point eventually been left open, given up or replaced by something newer, more "up-to-date", more interesting, more shiny. Bluesky, same as Twitter (or Tumblr, or maybe on another note cohost) will not suffer from that "problem". These are structures where someone has an idea of what to build and most likely will try to, in a planned and structured manner, try to achieve that goal at some point in time. The Fediverse mostly lacks this dedication, this clear vision. This isn't bad per se for the Fediverse, but if, as an end user, I were to choose an ambitious, technically interesting infrastructure (the Fediverse) or a purpose-built tool that works for me without too much ado (Twitter, Tumblr, maybe Bluesky), decision in most cases might be ... easy and obvious. And I wonder, with all the time that passed, why we didn't manage to fix _this_ particular problem. I mean, it's the same for virtually every decentralized solution ever since XMPP was mostly rendered irrelevant at large by messengers such as WhatsApp or Telegram...?

@Chris Trottier

friendica

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 10:20:41 +0100

Chris Trottier

atomicpoet@mastodon.social

@z428 @jupiter_rowland It’s too early to say that AT fixes anything. Right now, only one app uses AT, and it is in closed beta. I will only believe it when federation happens.

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 11:17:17 +0100

Kristian

z428@loma.ml

@Chris Trottier I don't think AT _fixes_ these things. But I'm afraid the #Fediverse won't either because Dorsey and his crowd will focus on making this "usable" by their target group way more than the fediverse (maybe except for Mastodon) ever did... .?
@Jupiter Rowland

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 11:31:17 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Kristian @Chris Trottier Free, non-corporate, decentralised projects have different intents and purposes than non-free, commercial, corporate, centralised silos. They're created by different people for different people, for different target audiences. And even the huge corporate silos don't start with a shiny iPhone app and then develop the server backend around it.

If it's free (as in, for example, Affero GPL), decentralised and distributed, it's made by geeks for geeks first and foremost. #Friendica first became available in 2010, and unlike Facebook, it never had the intention of becoming the next Internet for everyone in the world. Also, behind Facebook stood a huge megacorporation. Behind Friendica stood only one man, @mike, all alone, with zero budget. And yet, he managed to release something that was more powerful than Diaspora*, where at the same time only the crowdfunding campaign was running, would ever become.

Friendica's target audience were geeks. The same people that also used Linux as their main OS. Friendica wasn't made for the same people as Facebook or the iPhone. In fact, your typical Friendica user wouldn't touch an iPhone or any other Apple product with a 10-foot barge pole. They'd rather have a Nokia N900, and that was a clunky QWERTY slider that ran a modified Debian GNU/Linux.

#Redmatrix, the direct successor of Friendica, was experimental. Its sole purpose was to work on the brand-new #Zot protocol and the concept of #NomadicIdentity. It still had a small number of users and an even smaller number of instances, but they were generally voluntary guinea pigs. At this time, Friendica was already maintained by its own community which is about as far away from a Silicon Valley gigacorp as you could possibly get.

Redmatrix wasn't declared ready for prime time until late 2015 when it was renamed #Hubzilla. And even then, it didn't come with the "vision" of rolling over the mass market and replacing Facebook, WordPress, MediaWiki and the various GAFAM cloud services in one fell swoop. Again, Hubzilla was developed pretty much only by Mike Macgirvin.

#Osada and #Zap were both largely experimental again. Mike had forked them off Hubzilla because he still wasn't satisfied with what Zot could do at the time. However, the development of the new version #Zot6 couldn't happen on that monster named Hubzilla that was in everyday use now. That's why these two new projects were launched.

There's a good reason why they were two projects. Zap was there first. Zap was the actual Zot6 testbed, and thus, Zap was Zot6-only. Osada retained compatibility with Friendica and Hubzilla to test how well Zot6 would interact with ActivityPub with had meanwhile appeared as a draft and, IIRC, adopted by both Friendica and Hubzilla. Eventually, Osada and Zap ended up having the exact same codebase, and the difference between the two was an admin switch: ActivityPub on made it Osada, ActivityPub off made it Zap. As this was non-sense, Osada was axed, and Zap got ActivityPub and was declared the next stable one.

First, Zap's main killer feature over Hubzilla was Zot6 which had introduced #OpenWebAuth. When Zot6 was finally backported to Hubzilla, the remaining advantage was that Zap wasn't nearly as bloated with a somewhat less overwhelming UI. By the way, Redmatrix continued to exist with one user until Mike Macgirvin upgraded his own instance to Zap.

Now, again, you can't tinker with something that's stable. And tinkering continued. #Mistpark, Friendica's early name, returned in 2020, as did Redmatrix and Osada, all as Zap forks at various stages of instability and being experimental, none intended for a wider audience. And all created by Mike Macgirvin again. You could happily switch back and forth between Redmatrix, Osada, Zap and #Misty by simply rebasing your server code. (Installing either usually involved "git clone".)

He actually had a very good reason for this maze of names: He is opposed to big mass products with big brand identities. He wants to offer people technical solutions, not cool stuff with a sleek brand on it.

Anyways, on top of all this came #Roadhouse, another fork from somewhere in this conglomerate which was created in 2021 and solely intended for the development of the next Zot version, originally named Zot8, now known as #Nomad. Roadhouse was so experimental that there has never even been an official text saying what it actually was.

Also in 2021 came #Streams, a Roadhouse derivative that started out just as mysterious but was eventually intended for the public. It's often also referred to as (streams) because it's different from its predecessors in one point: It's even less of a brand. It isn't a product to be used as-is. (streams) is not a "Fediverse platform" that's waiting for its own iPhone app. (streams) is a code repository on Codeberg. And its purpose is for others to take the code and make something out of it. It isn't meant to be run as-is, although you can do that, and some people do. And even then, it comes without a fixed brand and kind of asks you to "rebrand" it, even on a per-instance basis. Most (streams)-based instances don't identify as (streams). Mike who is still involved in the project has his own instance based on (streams) but, probably deliberately and intentionally, still has it identify as Zap.

Another interesting fact: (streams) uses a wild hodge-podge of free licenses. Most of it is in the public domain, but parts of it are under various free licenses which aren't compatible with each other. This is fully intentional, too. It makes using (streams) for commercial products pretty much impossible because no corporate legal department will be able to figure out how to legally comply with all these licenses at the same time. Free use stays basically unlimited, though.

By the way: As of January 1st, 2023, Redmatrix, Osada, Zap, Misty and Roadhouse are EOL and discontinued, and their code repositories were closed. Instances running them can and shall be upgraded to (streams). All that's left is Friendica (the old faithful one), Hubzilla (the nomadic monster) and (streams) (the one for the tinkerers).

Now there's still the question: Why do all these projects, in fact including #Mastodon, use this approach? Why do they start with a server platform plus Web frontend instead of doing as big corporations do and start with an iPhone app and develop a server backend around it? Why appeal to a small bunch of Linux nerds rather than to a mass-market of billions?

Because if you want to go free and decentralised and distributed and federated, you'll need those Linux nerds before everyone else.

First of all, you'll need someone to run instances. Thus, you'll need people who are willing and able to do that. This requires Linux knowledge. The ability to use the command line. The ability to set up and configure a Web server. Network knowledge to connect it to the internet. You can't set up a Web server from zero with three taps on a mobile app.

In fact, when Diaspora* was young, it only ran on Mac servers. All four creators were Apple fanbois who didn't care for anything without the Apple brand on it. The Diaspora* server application was built against macOS. The result was a dire lack of public pods (instances) and everyone piling on the official pod. Mac users don't run Web servers at home, and I guess there were no hosting companies that offered Web hosting on Macs. The devs eventually had to make the server app at least halfway Linux-compatible to get more people to run pods, and you still had to compile Ruby on Rails from sources on Debian stable because Diaspora* depended on a newer version.

Also, you'll need these tech geeks to spot and report bugs. Your typical Windows or Apple user doesn't report bugs; they only complain about them or switch to a competing product. In stark contrast, many Linux users even know how to file a good and informative bug report. Some are even capable of submitting pull requests with bug-fixing patches through git.

And at least in the case of Mike's projects, you'll need a community that's capable of taking over the project itself and continuing its development. You'll need people who know how to code. You'll need people who know how to use git. And so forth. You'll hardly find such people amongst the masses who have spent all their digital lives in the cosy world of corporate-designed GUIs.

If, for example, Mastodon had started out with iPhone and Android apps and gone from there, appealing to a rather tech-illiterate mass audience, it would probably never have become decentralised. At least not beyond the federation between mastodon.social, mastodon.online and whatever more instances Eugen Rochko would have had to launch because these two were full.

And why not? Because Mastodon wouldn't have appealed to people who know how to install and run Mastodon instances. Mastodon would have only had the Windows/Mac/iPhone/Android crowd as users. All the geeks who would have known how to set up and run a Web server would have stayed on Friendica and Hubzilla. Some may have used ActivityPub to connect to Mastodon, but hardly anyone would have switched to that actually inferior platform with a wholly different crowd on it.

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 11:40:30 +0100

Ahri Boy (old)

zakiuem@mk.absturztau.be

@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu @syuilo@misskey.io built Misskey, was initially made for Japanese language speakers, and is now made for everyone. Misskey was founded a few years ago.

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 11:58:23 +0100

Kristian

z428@loma.ml

@Jupiter Rowland Thanks for the very in-depth write-up, greatly appreciated.? Some was new to me, some familiar, but I guess .... at the very end it boils down to the problem of not having really "reliable" organizational structures for building technological alternatives. At the end, it's all about attracting a communty crowd close to Linux and its ecosystem that's doing this kind of work mostly in a volunteer way for free, with a very fuzzy distinction between altruism (wanting to build better tools), technological enthusiasm and the mere desire to tinker with tools in their spare time. This is okay, but it raises certain problems. I dislike a lot of the things Mastodon did but as far as I am concerned, they did something rather good, maybe for the first time in this fediverse history: They created a structure able to handle and distribute money, in order to pay developers to work on Mastodon, to pay admins to work on hosting Mastodon instances. That's what Bluesky, what Dorsey and all of his VC-backed dudes do: Get money to build products. And that's where they most likely will make some success, because they have at hand people that do work because they're paid for that. The Fediverse doesn't have or do that. And, off hand, I think this is pretty bad. Also for another reason: All along with the demise of Twitter, it seems quite a bunch of great people have been laid off. People who most likely are skilled and trained and know their job, both as programmers and as designers. At the same time, the fediverse saw an influx of new users flooding instances and raising issues regarding stability, usability, ... . These two things could be very interesting to line up: Why don't we get the former Twitter employees to help making the Fediverse thrive, to help run instances and build code? Most likely, at least to some degree, because they can't live off building Mastodon or any other Fediverse system? This feels tough and I don't really have an idea to fix this - other than making the Fediverse throw money at these people and help them "getting started somewhere". ?

@Chris Trottier @mike

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 12:08:26 +0100

Kevin Davidson

MetalSamurai@mas.to

@jupiter_rowland @mike @z428 It may be helpful to think of the Fediverse as an anarchy that inter operates either through agreement or forcible reverse engineering of protocols. There’s a wild, experimental fringe with people keen to try out new ideas and not afraid of things failing, throwing it away and starting again. There’s also a more mainstream core (currently Mastodon and close ActivityPub relatives) that more people use.

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 12:08:39 +0100

Kevin Davidson

MetalSamurai@mas.to

@jupiter_rowland @mike @z428 That mainstream will need an app for mobile use - that’s what’s in their hand all day. Mastodon currently has a great array of different apps that all compete on features and behaviour. It’s an ecosystem within an ecosystem. Apps are essential as the best mobile web apps usually come somewhere between shonky and janky. Fine for playing with for 5 minutes, but infuriating to use all day.

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 12:11:47 +0100

Kevin Davidson

MetalSamurai@mas.to

@jupiter_rowland @mike @z428 As long as the successes from the experimental fringe migrate into the mainstream core, everyone benefits. More Lamarckian than Darwinian evolution - passing successful traits on to others.