#Diaspora continues to shed servers, losing 11 (16%) in the last four months. There are more scheduled shutdowns coming too, as diasp.org is shutting down on 1 April 2025.
D* was founded in 2010 and by 2014 had 380,711 users. Today it has 5,371 users left (1.4%).
By 2014 it had 141 servers and today has 57 (40%).
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 to designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.
☝️ This is a great explainer of the difference between Mastodon and Bluesky, with one correction. At present there is only ONE corporate node, and the technology to create more has not been proven.
I've mainly put multiple relays on there so people can see even in the best case scenario, the AT protocol is still putting corporations in control of the network.
@mastodonmigration apparently several people have run their own relays for personal use but it's not for the faint of heart apparently you need several terabytes of preferably solid state storage and a very fast network connection and while the code for the relay server is public it isn't terribly well documented
@mastodonmigration definitely not technically feasible for most people or even for most technically skilled hobbyists (I'm certainly not planning on running a relaying myself)
@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" derstandard.de/story/300000024…
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:
Even if it was real, BlueSky could simply defederate from everyone as they have such a large share of the userbase. This is what Facebook did with XMPP interoperability, they kept it internally but switched off all external connections.
Returning to the #FreeOurFeeds (FOF) initiative discussion (for background see links below)...
@[url=https://mas.to/@Husseinkhh.rss]pluralistic has a new piece (pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap…) that extends his "fire exit" analogy and discusses how it is not corporate ownership, VCs or profit motive alone that causes enshitification. It also requires captive users, and FOF will make it so Bluesky users are not captive. It all sounds good, but it's not realistic because the assumptions behind it are based on vaporware marketing.
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.
This is only partially true. In bluesky the way it works is that you have to be connected to the relay. Posts must be "published" to the relay and while you can get a slice of the relay with an appview it still has to connect to the relay. This is something that is expensive to run and manage. Fedi works a bit differently because not every instance is talking to each other. If I follow someone on mastodon.social I am going to get their posts, not the entirety of mastodon.social’s traffic.
In fedi it’s impossible to have the same centralized relay because traffic exists between instances. We have relays but they do not operate the same as the bluesky relay. It is entirely optional to join a relay. Even if you do join a relay you are only going to see posts from other instances on the relay (ignoring the connections your instance establishes outside of the relay). There’s no real way for your instance to receive the entire network’s traffic which makes instances a lot cheaper to run and maintain.
My favorite part is when people say "Bluesky has no algorithm" (as someone who studied computer science, I hate that "algorithm" has become this dirty and evil word). This is false. It does has a bunch of algo feeds that one can subscribe to (bsky.app/feeds). Things like "Discover", "Popular with friends", and so on. You're not forced or nagged to look at these feeds, but they do exist for anyone who wishes to use them.
Furthermore all Bluesky posts can be boosted by algorithmic feeds; there's no "unlisted" post setting. Forced discoverability is not good for someone who just wants a quiet social media presence.
Finally, blocks are public, which is a world of drama waiting to happen. There's even a block leaderboard clearsky.app
well, I wouldn't mind, if Mastodon had better and more transparent "Explore" algorithm (I checked source code, so I know it is not really blackbox, but it is not really easy to understand how it works and I would like it to be more user configurable). So I don't think this is what the problem of BlueSky is.
Also, there is stuff like brid.gy, which I like and which I think is not run by corporation, so the diagram is technically incorrect. People can have PDS on AT Protocol, only Relays are so huge that they have to be run by corporation.
Also, Fediverse instances are usually (not always, like in our case) hosted in huge datacenters which are run by huge corporations, which charge monthly fees, and so. So in a way, some kind of scalability is not necessary a bad things, because we may need someone to run some kind of powerful proxies for federated content too, one day.
The diagram of Fediverse is also not accurate. Yes, instances form mesh, not hierarchical graph (it is even more meshed, than the diagram shows - all nodes connect directly) - but it is true only for full instances. End users are leafs, so the actual topology is much like the first diagram shows.
I am all pro-Fediverse, but we should be the competent ones, who can explain properly how the things really are and how they really work. I don't really like propaganda... it is kinda even worse, than advertising...
I am getting your point and of course, I promote Fediverse as much as I can.
But there are definitely reasons why users prefer BlueSky massively. I am not sure about their MAU, because they are centralized service, there is no way to verify independently, but they may be easily 10 times our MAU.
I think the need to choose the instance is not the main problem of Mastodon and Fediverse. It is quite easy to explain to newbies. The problem is quite simple and straighforward: it is UX focused on power users.
There are too many new concepts to learn. There is no reason, why end users should have to even know about federation: it is the implementation, that matters. Backfilling history of toots and timeline of other instances instead of "opening original page". Starter packs (ie. easy sharing of user-generated lists - no CSV imports). Propper scanning for all replies (somehow). Better search feature. Better explore feature...
Also, even if Mastodon may be the best ActivityPub client so far, it is definitely not for everyone. It is quite complex chunk of code. The frontend is written in JavaScript, which is of course very standard and it is my fault I am not more familliar with it. But Ruby is pretty oldschool server side language and not among the most popular. This makes the backend quite unreadable... although probably still better, than node.js 🙂
Anyway, it is not easy for me to participate in development of neither frontend nor backend of Mastodon.
Writing completely different Fediverse application would be probably hard and I definitely don't feel one should attempt it as one man show. The team would need to start with such ActivityPub implementation, which would fix the issues like replies, and then maybe work with W3C to standardize account list sharing, so other Fedi implementations can join.
Good cellphone app would be a must. It would have to come with good instance selector. Etc.
Cory Doctorow has written about the Sky one several times lately, but I think this piece is a decent verbal explication of what the graphic is representing visually (I'm not great with visuals; it took me a minute LOL): doctorow.medium.com/https-plur…
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: Of course you should do everything…
All I said is that many Bluesky users are quite nice and they have chosen the platform because lot of people went there and because it was straightforward to use.
I did my best, but Mastodon is simply not user friendly enough for most people. It offers some quite advanced features for power users, but at the same time, it lacks certain basics, which newbies would take for granted. The don't care about the architecture of the network, as long as they don't have to think about it.
We need to keep on trying and one day, Bluesky may seem boring to some and they will move here...
I replied that if MAUs are your main concern, you can get even higher MAUs on Twitter etc.
As for going down the path, it's a matter of fact that Bluesky has adopted the same structure as Twitter, Facebook etc. Pretending it hasn't doesn't change this fact.
If you care about MAU, why not just join Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc? They have much bigger MAUs than BlueSky.
What exactly is the point of joining BlueSky at all as it is going down exactly the same path as Twitter, Facebook etc? What advantage is there to users?
yes, BlueSky is going to be bought out eventually. But maybe people already got used to being digital nomads and they will just move again, when it happens.
I created separate list of bridged BlueSky accounts and they just seem to use it and don't think about it too much. Maybe we are too meta here...
(and also, the funding of Fedi instances is open issue... small instances are admin sponsored, but as the instances grow, they may easily reach the point, when they will be too big to be sponsored but still too small to raise funds... we will see.... I wrote python scripts, which crawl explore Mastodon compatible Fedi on various TLDs and and I am going to put the charts online soon...)
Ordinary users are attracted to a well-funded simple platform.
The trouble is this simplicity is what makes it easy for Musk etc to buy it out. And the massive amount of funding is what will eventually force it to start exploiting and manipulating its users, because the funding comes from selling itself to the funders.
There is no perfect solution, there are just a range of most or least worst options. It's up to each person to decide what is least worst for them.
@mackuba we have Elasticsearch here, and it really helps... but we had to set up second VPS dedicated just for Elasticsearch. It was crashing the main Mastodon VPS when we tried to run it locally.
So I am all for decentralization, but servers are also produced by corporations and datacenters are run by corporations (except us, we are anomaly, but our resources are not infinite...)
@xChaos @mackuba @janxdevil from my vantage point many of them didn't leave Twitter for so long. well after they were obviously hostages. it was a huge deal and took an insane amount of abuse to get them to leave.
when they went over the BlueSky they had to start over, and when they leave BlueSky they'll have to start over again. they chose it anyway despite many of us advocating otherwise
so they're not going anywhere. they are accustomed to abuse, and they will gleefully accept whatever blue skies terms are for far longer than any of us would
1,124,098 Active Users Nov 25, 2024 1,033,810 Active Users Jan 01, 2025 1,009,935 Active Users Jan 12
1,131,573 Active Users Jan 18 1,185,165 Active Users Jan 20 1,216,689 Active Users Jan 21 1,236,522 Active Users Jan 22 1,266,909 Active Users Jan 23 1,305,173 Active Users Jan 24 1,344,088 Active Users Jan 25 1,369,753 Active Users Jan 26
The Fediverse is to designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.
Mastodon Migration
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •Fedi.Tips
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •@mastodonmigration
Even worse then, isn't it! 😬
I've mainly put multiple relays on there so people can see even in the best case scenario, the AT protocol is still putting corporations in control of the network.
Complexity of systems
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •@mastodonmigration apparently several people have run their own relays for personal use but it's not for the faint of heart apparently you need several terabytes of preferably solid state storage and a very fast network connection and while the code for the relay server is public it isn't terribly well documented
Take a look at these links if you'd like to learn more
alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi…
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entrie…
How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) — alice.bsky.sh
alice.bsky.shMastodon Migration
in reply to Complexity of systems • • •These examples really just reinforce the technical infeasibility of the entire FOF scheme.
Complexity of systems
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •effariwhy
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •reshared this
Florian Schmidt reshared this.
Fedi.Tips
in reply to effariwhy • • •@effariwhy
Most of BlueSky's board is blockchain people. Their CEO's CV is mostly blockchain and cryptocurrency companies.
caos (moved to Sharkey) 🚀
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •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"
derstandard.de/story/300000024…
Bluesky: Wie finanziert sich ein "dezentrales Ökosystem"?
DER STANDARDFedi.Tips
in reply to caos (moved to Sharkey) 🚀 • • •@caos @effariwhy
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:
social.growyourown.services/@F…
This is in addition to their CEO being a blockchain/cryptocurrency person:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Grab…
AFAIK the board only has three people, so a majority are from blockchain.
American software engineer and the CEO of Bluesky
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Fedi.Tips
Unknown parent • • •@janxdevil
Even if it was real, BlueSky could simply defederate from everyone as they have such a large share of the userbase. This is what Facebook did with XMPP interoperability, they kept it internally but switched off all external connections.
reshared this
Nika Shilobod reshared this.
Mastodon Migration
Unknown parent • • •@janxdevil
Precisely! For more on Bluesky's "vaporware" strategy:
mastodon.online/@mastodonmigra…
Mastodon Migration
2025-01-22 17:17:31
Benjamin Sonntag-King
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •James Endicott
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •I still think Christine Lemmer-Webber's blog post on it is a worthwhile read for people a little more technical.
dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent…
How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
dustycloud.orgAmber
in reply to James Endicott • • •I also think it’s important to specify something.
This is only partially true. In bluesky the way it works is that you have to be connected to the relay. Posts must be "published" to the relay and while you can get a slice of the relay with an appview it still has to connect to the relay. This is something that is expensive to run and manage. Fedi works a bit differently because not every instance is talking to each other. If I follow someone on mastodon.social I am going to get their posts, not the entirety of mastodon.social’s traffic.
In fedi it’s impossible to have the same centralized relay because traffic exists between instances. We have relays but they do not operate the same as the bluesky relay. It is entirely optional to join a relay. Even if you do join a relay you are only going to see posts from other instances on the relay (ignoring the connections your instance establishes outside of the relay). There’s no real way for your instance to receive the entire network’s traffic which makes instances a lot cheaper to run and maintain.
Rin💖 (front) - Mari💙 (stby)
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •My favorite part is when people say "Bluesky has no algorithm" (as someone who studied computer science, I hate that "algorithm" has become this dirty and evil word). This is false. It does has a bunch of algo feeds that one can subscribe to (bsky.app/feeds). Things like "Discover", "Popular with friends", and so on. You're not forced or nagged to look at these feeds, but they do exist for anyone who wishes to use them.
Furthermore all Bluesky posts can be boosted by algorithmic feeds; there's no "unlisted" post setting. Forced discoverability is not good for someone who just wants a quiet social media presence.
Finally, blocks are public, which is a world of drama waiting to happen. There's even a block leaderboard clearsky.app
ClearSky
clearsky.appAnban Govender reshared this.
Chao-c'
in reply to Rin💖 (front) - Mari💙 (stby) • • •well, I wouldn't mind, if Mastodon had better and more transparent "Explore" algorithm (I checked source code, so I know it is not really blackbox, but it is not really easy to understand how it works and I would like it to be more user configurable). So I don't think this is what the problem of BlueSky is.
Also, there is stuff like brid.gy, which I like and which I think is not run by corporation, so the diagram is technically incorrect. People can have PDS on AT Protocol, only Relays are so huge that they have to be run by corporation.
Also, Fediverse instances are usually (not always, like in our case) hosted in huge datacenters which are run by huge corporations, which charge monthly fees, and so. So in a way, some kind of scalability is not necessary a bad things, because we may need someone to run some kind of powerful proxies for federated content too, one day.
The diagram of Fediverse is also not accurate. Yes, instances form mesh, not hierarchical graph (it is even more meshed, than the diagram shows - all nodes connect directly) - but it is true only for full instances. End users are leafs, so the actual topology is much like the first diagram shows.
I am all pro-Fediverse, but we should be the competent ones, who can explain properly how the things really are and how they really work. I don't really like propaganda... it is kinda even worse, than advertising...
Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •@janxdevil
For more on who actually owns Bluesky:
mastodon.online/@mastodonmigra…
Chao-c'
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •I am getting your point and of course, I promote Fediverse as much as I can.
But there are definitely reasons why users prefer BlueSky massively. I am not sure about their MAU, because they are centralized service, there is no way to verify independently, but they may be easily 10 times our MAU.
I think the need to choose the instance is not the main problem of Mastodon and Fediverse. It is quite easy to explain to newbies. The problem is quite simple and straighforward: it is UX focused on power users.
There are too many new concepts to learn. There is no reason, why end users should have to even know about federation: it is the implementation, that matters. Backfilling history of toots and timeline of other instances instead of "opening original page". Starter packs (ie. easy sharing of user-generated lists - no CSV imports). Propper scanning for all replies (somehow). Better search feature. Better explore feature...
Also, even if Mastodon may be the best ActivityPub client so far, it is definitely not for everyone. It is quite complex chunk of code. The frontend is written in JavaScript, which is of course very standard and it is my fault I am not more familliar with it. But Ruby is pretty oldschool server side language and not among the most popular. This makes the backend quite unreadable... although probably still better, than node.js 🙂
Anyway, it is not easy for me to participate in development of neither frontend nor backend of Mastodon.
Writing completely different Fediverse application would be probably hard and I definitely don't feel one should attempt it as one man show. The team would need to start with such ActivityPub implementation, which would fix the issues like replies, and then maybe work with W3C to standardize account list sharing, so other Fedi implementations can join.
Good cellphone app would be a must. It would have to come with good instance selector. Etc.
stux⚡
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •Yup!
Been saying this for a while
People flee from one centralized place to another making endless accounts in the menanwhile
But ofc the Fedi is certainly too much work
Sarah G. Carpenter, Ph.D.
in reply to Fedi.Tips • • •Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits - Cory Doctorow - Medium
Cory Doctorow (Medium)Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋
in reply to Chao-c' • • •bsky users total (Munin :: edavis.dev :: bskycharts.edavis.dev :: bsky users total)
bskycharts.edavis.devChao-c'
Unknown parent • • •All I said is that many Bluesky users are quite nice and they have chosen the platform because lot of people went there and because it was straightforward to use.
I did my best, but Mastodon is simply not user friendly enough for most people. It offers some quite advanced features for power users, but at the same time, it lacks certain basics, which newbies would take for granted. The don't care about the architecture of the network, as long as they don't have to think about it.
We need to keep on trying and one day, Bluesky may seem boring to some and they will move here...
Fedi.Tips
Unknown parent • • •@mackuba @xChaos @janxdevil
Ahh apoloiges 😳 My mistake, sorry.
Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋
Unknown parent • • •Fedi.Tips
Unknown parent • • •@mackuba @xChaos @janxdevil
You brought up MAUs as a reason to be on Bluesky.
I replied that if MAUs are your main concern, you can get even higher MAUs on Twitter etc.
As for going down the path, it's a matter of fact that Bluesky has adopted the same structure as Twitter, Facebook etc. Pretending it hasn't doesn't change this fact.
Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋
Unknown parent • • •Fedi.Tips
in reply to Chao-c' • • •@xChaos @janxdevil
If you care about MAU, why not just join Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc? They have much bigger MAUs than BlueSky.
What exactly is the point of joining BlueSky at all as it is going down exactly the same path as Twitter, Facebook etc? What advantage is there to users?
Chao-c'
Unknown parent • • •yes, BlueSky is going to be bought out eventually. But maybe people already got used to being digital nomads and they will just move again, when it happens.
I created separate list of bridged BlueSky accounts and they just seem to use it and don't think about it too much. Maybe we are too meta here...
(and also, the funding of Fedi instances is open issue... small instances are admin sponsored, but as the instances grow, they may easily reach the point, when they will be too big to be sponsored but still too small to raise funds... we will see.... I wrote python scripts, which crawl explore Mastodon compatible Fedi on various TLDs and and I am going to put the charts online soon...)
@mackuba @janxdevil
Fedi.Tips
in reply to Chao-c' • • •@xChaos @mackuba @janxdevil
Ordinary users are attracted to a well-funded simple platform.
The trouble is this simplicity is what makes it easy for Musk etc to buy it out. And the massive amount of funding is what will eventually force it to start exploiting and manipulating its users, because the funding comes from selling itself to the funders.
There is no perfect solution, there are just a range of most or least worst options. It's up to each person to decide what is least worst for them.
Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋
in reply to Chao-c' • • •Chao-c'
in reply to Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋 • • •@mackuba we have Elasticsearch here, and it really helps... but we had to set up second VPS dedicated just for Elasticsearch. It was crashing the main Mastodon VPS when we tried to run it locally.
So I am all for decentralization, but servers are also produced by corporations and datacenters are run by corporations (except us, we are anomaly, but our resources are not infinite...)
@FediTips @janxdevil
ɹ uɐp
in reply to Chao-c' • • •@xChaos @mackuba @janxdevil from my vantage point many of them didn't leave Twitter for so long. well after they were obviously hostages. it was a huge deal and took an insane amount of abuse to get them to leave.
when they went over the BlueSky they had to start over, and when they leave BlueSky they'll have to start over again. they chose it anyway despite many of us advocating otherwise
so they're not going anywhere. they are accustomed to abuse, and they will gleefully accept whatever blue skies terms are for far longer than any of us would
my 2c.