Ah okay, I agree that you need to trust Bridgy Fed from a privacy and security perpective. Also agreed that most people don't know Bridgy Fed exists, and that's a problem. And yes, it would be better for the platforms to have more support for opt-in federation, but alas Mastodon's documentation describes allow-list federation as opposed to their mission ... I asked Renaud a while ago whether that was likely to change and he said no. So, yeah, it's certainly far from a perfect solution.
Dorsey's not involved in Bluesky any more but I agree that there are lots of reasons not to trust them (including Dorsey's original involvement).
Bluesky's currently a much better Twitter alternative than Mastodon but I totally agree, there's a lot more to social networking than that. I talk about ways I see Bulesky as complementary to the ActivityPub section in the last section, "It's the end of the Fediverse as we know it – and I feel fine"
Personally I think that the connectivity via Bridgy Fed and Friendica are strong enough that it makes sense to consider Bluesky an instance on the ActivityPub Fediverse. Threads currently has less connectivity, and people in general consider it part of the Fediverse. For what it's worth, in a discussion on Social Hub, Evan Prodromou also said he saw Bluesky as an instance in the ActivityPub Fediverse.
I also think that the ATmosphere is fediverse (descentralized social network) in its own right. So is Bluesky, as well as being part of the AcivityPub Fediverse and the ATmosphere.
But others define the Fediverse differently, https://privacy.thenexus.today/is-bluesky-part-of-todays-fediverse/ goes into a lot of detail on the different views.
Thanks very much, fixed now!
You're not the only one who thinks that way -- opinions differ!
Agreed that Bridgy Fed is opt-in ... I see consent as a good thing, but not everybody agrees.
And yeah, Bluesky's just ike any other instance, you have to trust them with privacy. I think the argument that Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, and Wordress.com-hosted blogs shouldn't be considered part of the Fediverse is intellectually consistent, I just don't see a lot of people making that argument. But, "the Fedivese" means different things to different people, the followup post Is Bluesky part of today's Fediverse? goes into a huge amount of detail on that ...
For people who want to join a twitter clone there aren't any good ActivityPub options -- Mastodon's good at other things, but isn't a good Twitter alternative let along clone. And ActivityPub's version of "true federation" isn't the only kind of federation. That said, I agree that AT isn't an option for people who want to join a federating-in-theActivityPub-sense-of-the-word Twitter clone,
Correct. Dorsey's early involvement is certainly grounds for concern -- the way I think of it, he's gone now but his stench lingers on -- but he's not influential there going forward.
Yep. And that's far from the only way it could work out badly. I talk about this a bit in the section on "Bluesky is a useful counterweight to Threads"
Bluesky is far from perfect. They're venture-funded, so likely to end with an exploitative business model. They've got a surveillance-capitalism friendly all-public architecture. It's great that Jack Dorsey's no longer on the board but he was.
Agreed that Bluesky's run by a single corporation so it's different than today's ActivityPub Fediverse, but the Fediverse's historical approach to "open federation" isn't the only approach. Even in the ActivityPub world we're seeing more and more experimentation with allow-list federation.
Blueksy's approach to decentralization is very different from ActivityPub but it's definitely decentralized. (Also that article's over a year old, and some things have changed since then.). But, like I say in the article, not everybody is so welcoming!
I personally wouldn't say so -- crossposting isn't the same as two-way communications -- but others might.