"#Bluesky is hot.

Ecologia Digital

"#Bluesky is hot. It's popular. It's got steam. It's got gobs of cursed VC money. It's got some admittedly cool tech behind it. But it just isn't it.
If #FreeOurFeeds succeeds, stands up another instance and figures out a way to run it on the cheap, then I'll be the first to say "congrats" and "I was wrong".
Until then, I will remain skeptical, and I'll keep saying that this sort of money would be better thrown at building out the proven solution, #theFediverse."

https://malici.ous.computer/@shellsharks/statuses/01JHN5A9844W3SMPE2A39K0V4J

The Nexus of Privacy

@josemurilo There's certainly a lot to critique about #FreeOurFeeds but reducing it to "we're going to build another Relay so that Bluesky's 'fire exits' are real" is just silly. The overall approach they're taking is similar to #SWF: there's a lot of money potentially floating around the ecosystem but investment is currently low,; and, there's a lot of concern about one big player dominating (Meta for ActivityPub and Bluesky in the ATmosphere).

So there's a win/win opportunity for an independent multipolar non-profit entity to complement the dominant corporation. Bluesky benefits just as much from FoF as the AI-focused companies (including Mozilla) who are the majority of the FoF 'custodians'. The need for an alternate Relay is just a convenient artifact that many people have (for whatever reason) focused on.

BTW this from the article was hysterical:

"The "Fediverse" has been around for a while and though it has never been more popular than it is now,..."

No, actually, the Fediverse had more than twice as many active users two years ago than it does today. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of interesting stuff happening here, but let's be realistic!

shellsharks

@thenexusofprivacy @josemurilo I duno if "hysterical" is quite the right word . But I think popularity needn't only be measured by MAU. Sure, Fedi might be down from it's high from 2022/2023 timeframe, but with the buzz around Pixelfed (that's a significant jump in users in the past week alone) and our adjacency to the larger "Social Web" movement, I think you could consider our popularity and overall capture of mind share to be close to peak yeah? I mean hell, even in the context of Bluesky, more people are talking about "decentralized" social media than ever before and with that we are typically in that conversation. Also, the main point of that particular sentence was that we don't have mainstream appeal, now, at the peak, or whenever haha ‍️

The Nexus of Privacy

@shellsharks Fair enough, "hysterical" wasn't a great word choice by me, so my apologies. And I certainly do agree that there's another wave in progress -- and not just with Pixelfed, I was posting just last night about momentum in general. https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/113859291551534363

As to whether "the Fediverse" is more popular than ever ... I guess it depends on the definitions of "the Fediverse" and of popular. Is Bluesky part of the Fediverse? If so then sure, by any metric it's more popular than ever. But by that definition Free our Feeds would be throwing money at the Fediverse so I'm pretty sure that's not how you're defining things.

But if you're defining "the Fediverse" in terms of ActivityPub (which is what it seemed to me you're doing ... well, I'm really not sure what definition of "popular" this would currently be true for. I think mindshare was much higher in late 2022 (when Mastodon was seen as the major alternative to Twitter, as opposed to now when Bluesky is the new hotness). The current surge is exciting but at least so far noticeably smaller than November/December 2022, and June 2023 surges. Last time I checked (at the end of last year) the percentage of newcomers who stick around hasn't improved ... maybe things will be different with this new surge but we don't know that yet. And while I agree that MAU isn't the primary measure of a network's health (bigger isn't necessarily better) but personally I do think it's a reasonable measure of popularity.

So, while I certainly think that there's still plenty of potential, I also think it's important to be realistic. If you're writing about why people chose one platform over another for their investment, it's one thing if both platforms are growing (which is what your framing of "more popular than ever, but struggling to get mainstream appeal" implies) and another if one platform is growing and the other isn't!

@josemurilo

The Nexus of Privacy

@shellsharks also I added a link to "Cloudy with a chance of not enshittifying" to the Appendix of "links on Bluesky and decentralization that are worth reading even though they don't mention Blacksky" in https://privacy.thenexus.today/decentralization-and-erasure-blacksky-bluesky-and-the-atmosphere-2/ ... you made some good points in that article!