Is the appview part of Bluesky open source? If so why not? How does that not make saying “Bluesky is open source” an inaccurate statement, or at least an incomplete statement? Can somebody reasonably run their own relay while handling a realistic amount of data from interactions?

Also there’s bridgy so you can talk across Mastodon / bluesky by letting bridgy mirror posts and replies between the two networks

A bridge is something you build and maintain, requiring constant maintenance, that joins a place that is connected with a place that is not.

is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing as on users What

Typo, sorry I meant to put *ads in there

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-reshaping-social-media-but-advertising-isnt-off-the-table/

It has investors, those investors are going to want money.

gulps

It doesn’t make any sense for the University or specific professors to officially host a fediverse community in the first place, it is the wrong system of governance and community ownership here. Something like a student club or independent association of professors and students should host fediverse communities that then become unofficially associated with the University and the University should be hands off unless something really egregious happens.

The only reason to create a fediverse server directly under the auspices of a University or under an official capacity for the University would be to use the fediverse server as a public communication tool (like how Universities and other institutions might use Twitter), which actually isn’t a bad idea but is totally separate from what people are suggesting here…

Not required to join the fediverse, only to host your own community yourself, which is NOT what scientists need to do (unless they want to).

No, aspects of the Bluesky system are open source. The moderation and filtering layer is effectively centralized, is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing ads on users, and even if you could theoretically run your own Bluesky network… it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.

To create or experience?

No, it is a good question with the usual simple ugly answers but also interesting nuanced ones too.

For example, one of the first civilizations Sumeria had a very prominent female deity named Ianna

She was especially beloved by the Assyrians, who elevated her to become the highest deity in their pantheon, ranking above their own national god Ashur. Inanna/Ishtar is alluded to in the Hebrew Bible[citation needed], and she greatly influenced the Ugaritic goddess Ashtart and later the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who in turn possibly influenced the development of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Her cult continued to flourish until its gradual decline between the first and sixth centuries CE in the wake of Christianity.

Inanna appears in more myths than any other Sumerian deity.[9][10][11] She also has a uniquely high number of epithets and alternate names, comparable only to Nergal.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna

Being a scientist also kinda means understanding what are your strengths, and how you can combine them with other people who are smart along very specific narrow vectors.

Being a scientist means understanding that if you work together with the right kind of smart, curious people you can build amazing things that will improve the world.

Being a scientist in 2025 means understanding the modern business world is utter bullshit and will rot any science it touches to the core.

Being a scientist, like truly living that ethos, means being someone who believes the truth is important and that there are power structures who will fight tooth and nail to subdue that truth or hoard it to themselves for personal gain.

Being a scientist thus effectively means that I would expect that after having a brief conversation with you that you would at least understand the grave danger that entrusting science communication in another for profit social media company poses and how it doesn’t seem sensible to take that risk when the actual material barriers to creating Fediverse communities as alternatives aren’t actually that high no matter how much it feels like the barriers are impossible and the network effect is unbeatable.

Don’t get me wrong, those hurdles are real, the fediverse can be confusing, there are lots of growing pains here… however, not every scientist needs to become an expert in selfhosting Fediverse software, and not every scientist needs to become a Fediverse evangelist (although it wouldn’t hurt), but we do need to connect boldly and clearly the tragic hypocrisy of supposedly truth valuing people (scientists, science communicators and leaders that defend science) all shepherding dutifully onto another platform that will silence and betray them violently.

Scientists are inherently aligned with modern progressive politics, or rather scientists need to understand they are at everything up to physical bodily danger from being hurt by conservatives now and they need to understand that makes them fundamentally aligned with modern progressive politics.

There is no “I don’t want to get political here” and the failure of the science community at large to recognize how embracing Bluesky as if it was a genuine solution to the unfolding catastrophe of science being defunded and destroyed is embarrassing. Those of us on the Fediverse should be kind, but also we should make fun of them for not using their brains. They clearly have them. Fucking use them you fools.

Bluesky is a for profit corporate venture, the same EXACT incentives that now have placed us all very much in danger and have placed the very funding structures of science in danger the world over (at least in US/European connected science communities) are at play in Bluesky and Scientists betray the begrudging respect the public has for their intelligence (even if they pretend to hate Scientists) by treating Bluesky like it is safe. Bluesky is not safe. This is no different than scientists endorsing any other thing that is fundamentally a threat to the health and safety of innocent people. It is just new, people are scared and scientists are largely too overwhelmed to see things for how they are.

At the end of the day, every Scientist needs to hear to their face that Bluesky is a threat to science, science education and the free access to knowledge in general the world over, they need to defend their choice to go on Bluesky anyways instead of Mastodon (both is fine tho) along the terms of what motivates their pursuit of studying and doing science. I don’t care if scientists are already overwhelmed and scared, they along with everyone else have all the information to understand why choosing Bluesky to throw the weight of science communication behind is dangerous, and it is unacceptable to give them a pass because 2025 is a terrifying mess. 2025 is a terrifying mess for reasons DIRECTLY RELATED TO THIS DISCUSSION. Scientists should understand that better than almost anyone else if they are paying attention, and many do which is why Mastodon is full of scientists!

May not be much, but it’s a start.

Actually, when you tell people something is a start but it is actually a false start that doesn’t deliver on the fundamental promises at all, it is much worse than having a much slower start…

At least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation

🤡 🤡 🤡 🪴 🐶 👶 🤡

^ people that think that actually matters in 2025

Yeah, honestly Friendica has been around for ages at this point and I assume is pretty damn mature in terms of most features… what is exactly missing here that it isn’t even worth mentioning by name when talking about replacing Facebook?

I mean, again this doesn’t surprise me, Bluesky not only has the money (and promises of future money if things go well) to go viral, it has to in order to survive.

If Bluesky grew at the rate Mastodon grew in the beginning it would already be dead and abandoned by investors, that isn’t a knock on Mastodon it is a statement about how problematically unstable and fragile the traditional approach of building for profit corporate social media spaces is that Bluesky embodies.

Damn given that Bluesky has millions to burn on marketing I would say the Fediverse is clowning on Bluesky seeing as it the Fediverse has a $0 marketing budget.

For all the money and prestige Bluesky has access to, they still have only managed to double our size? That is kind of sad really, it must be because they keep adding things people actually don’t want.

The discussion isn’t really about the virtues of each social media platform, the question is why does Bluesky appear at the top of the list and not Mastodon. And the reason is that Mastodon refuses to provide the service most people want from a platform like this: a well-tuned suggestion algorithm.

Why are you ignoring the fact that Bluesky has a MUCH larger marketing budget AND it gets basically free unlimited (barely critical) coverage from the tech press??

You are drawing conclusions left and right on incomplete information and it destroys any semblance of a point you are trying to make.

This is why so many highly intelligent people devote as much time in their lives to art as they possibly can.

It is only through art that you can begin to subvert an architecture of stolen and foreclosed futures.

In another world maybe Pynchon just became an unbelievably good editor for aeronautics technical journals.

Let us not forget that the rich, even on the allies side of WW2 (insofar as the rich keep up the theater of needing to pick a side) would rather not have had even a single Alan Turing if they could not impose a conservative trauma upon him and make him deny his basic self, and so he was executed and bigotry was preserved at a terrible cost we can never know the full extent of.

History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

edit I am imagining the person who downvoted me was like “hey, I feel excluded as a homophobic computer nerd by this statement” -> downvote