Sorry for the late reply, but I wanted to address your question – I think one misunderstanding is: in a sense there are no Bluesky accounts and there are no Frontpage accounts, there are only atproto accounts. Whether you make a post on Bluesky or Frontpage or Whitewind or Smokesignal, all of them get collected in the same repository. Here is a neat atproto browser which can display this, this is the account of Frontpage founder Tom Sherman and you can find all of his collections there: https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/tom-sherman.com

Bluesky still isn’t there yet on that side (and probably won’t, as it would prevent them from generating revenue if someone can just open a server and connect to their network)

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. As fas as I know there are no plans to inject ads, they are planning to create a marketplace for custom feeds (think “premium” feeds) and labelers and such where they would take a cut. You would obviously still be able to purchase access to them from other servers. But this goal seems kinda lofty, not sure if it can be viable.

To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized.

A number I’ve seen quoted multiple times now is ~$150 per month to host a relay (Source). Which explains why Whitewind, Smokesignal and Frontpage don’t host one, they are mostly still small projects by individual talented devs, but imo if that number is true, it really doesn’t seem too outlandish that someone might go for it.

There is Bridgy Fed, which bridges accounts over to the other side if they follow the respective Bridgy Fed account on their platform. This is opt-ín though, so you can’t just follow anyone, they need to have followed @ap.brid.gy on Bluesky. To have your interactions bridged you need to follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy.

If the account you want to follow is not bridged and you are okay with just reading their posts, you can also use a service like RSS Parrot as every Bluesky account also serves as an RSS feed.

Such gross weirdo-behavior to call 900k completely normal people looking to socialize online bots, get off your high horse

Zu den Autoren: Knut Bergmann und Matthias Diermeier arbeiten im Cluster »Demokratie, Gesellschaft, Marktwirtschaft« am Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (IW).

K.

Bei der Europawahl habe ich erneut vor aus Überzeugung MERA25 zu wählen, die Partei des ehemaligen griechischen Finanzministers Yanis Varoufakis. Wird aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach an der 2%-Hürde scheitern, aber gerade was “die Grünen nicht grün genug, die Linken nicht links genug” angeht, fühle ich vertritt MERA25 am besten meine Positionen.

Nice! I’ve been enjoying the “Quiet Posters” feed, which shows only posts by people I follow that don’t regularly post, so I might miss the rare times that they do! :)

If you want your timeline to be just a chronological timeline, you can also subscribe to that feed and delete all others. Bluesky isn’t Threads, no one is forcing any algorithm on you that you don’t want, this is part of the decentralized nature of Bluesky.

Also, I don’t think there is a clear line between “algorithmic” and “non-algorithmic” social media. If you use Mastodon with the Mammoth app and its “For You” feed, is it algorithmic or non-algorithmic? If I sort my Lemmy timeline by “hot”, do I not use an algorithm?

The algorithms/feeds are easily the best part about Bluesky because they can be custom-made. If you don’t like the feeds provided by Bluesky, you can just make one of your own that displays what you want to see. I use many such feeds.

They give you only so many free articles per month, I had to circumvent a paywall as well

I’m very curious how this will all shake out. I can understand all of you who want to block Threads and the only two instances that I am on myself are going to do exactly that, but it seems tremendously likely that the flagship instance of the fediverse, mastodon.social, will federate and it will have a massive impact on not just the culture, but also on the codebase. For example I wonder what services will go for feature parity and add features like voice notes which Threads added recently. Oh and culture-wise, with POTUS joining Threads, big institutions like the White House will suddenly appear on the fediverse.

Still holding out hope that a bunch of new users and new ideas will rejuvenate the fediverse, in any case 2024 should be a big year for it.

I have big sympathies for FireFish, but I feel like the target audiences so far are very different. Maybe call it the network effect, but it’s difficult for me to imagine a tumblr user who maybe is used to blogging about their SuperWhoLock fandoms moving to FireFish where there probably is no big audience for that. At the same time I would want to see these users and their niches in the Fediverse.

There is a very particular culture that is unique to tumblr which I don’t see moving somewhere else.

There were peaceful protests in Germany. Nobody had a problem with those.

Nobody? Really? You don’t think the right-wing Springer press (just to name the most glaring example) that is ideologically allied with ultranationalists in Israel had a problem with those? That they wouldn’t have cried foul even if the protests where utterly devoid of any radicals? That they wouldn’t have tried to censor even your imagined peaceful protests?

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People who disparage Marty forget or don’t know that he has been a fierce proponent and heavy financial supporter of film restoration through companies like Milestone Films for more than three decades now. If you ever enjoyed world cinema, the films of Kalatozov, Pasolini, Buñuel, Murnau and many more, there is a decent chance you were able to enjoy them in good quality through the direct efforts of Martin Scorsese and others.

“Because there are going to be generations now that think … that’s what movies are.”

should be understood in this context as well. We owe him so much gratitude for keeping the language of film alive.

Sure, I just meant if Threads and maybe Tumblr are serious about joining the Fediverse, maybe the whole AT Protocol that Bluesky is trying to build will fall into obscurity.

Perhaps I should clarify: by “good posters”, I don’t mean Wendy’s epically dunking on McDonald’s and I don’t mean “night water hits different” lowest common denominator posters, just ordinary people like you and me shooting the shit. I think it’s sad Mastodon seems to have the reputation that people can’t crack a joke there.

That’s fine, I just want either of them to actually kill twitter for good though and it just doesn’t look like it’s gonna be Mastodon. With Threads potentially joining the Fediverse, I guess who knows.

I like Mastodon and the Fediverse, I really do, but I just can’t deny that all the good posters that made Twitter enjoyable moved to Bluesky. My Mastodon feed is nothing but journalists, activists, developers, but very little fun shitposting.