Ok, I may have written off the use of Bluesky too soon. There are both pluses and minuses to its decentralized nature (especially if an external federated server that you utilize goes offline for some reason). There’s also a bunch of really slow federated servers (like just trying to browse their respective feeds was taking forever to load). But there are alternatively some really decent ones. I’m trying to look at this from the mindset of how to get info quickly for things like major events (like say an outage of service, some type of weather event, an unfolding emergency, etc). In the past, Twitter was useful for getting that sort of information. Musk’s takeover of the platform has turned it into crap though (no, he isn’t a genius — just a rich kuck who bought companies like Tesla and SpaceX, kicked the original founders/creators out, and took credit for everything the actual smart people created).
I never bothered with Mastodon previously except to keep track of ActivityPub; the open protocol used which at one point, many other servers were looking to implement since you could post on one ActivityPub site and have it propagate to your other profiles and/or have accounts on other ActivityPub platforms follow you (one interest I had was Pixelfed; an Instagram like photo sharing service where you could use the main server, or setup/host your own federated photo album server). Besides downloading the source, I never got around to test setting one up (have to build all of the other components/dependencies). I decided to check Mastodon (the main server) and noticed my nickname was still free there (a rarity so I grabbed it, but probably don’t intend to use it to post things from – the nice part about being part of the fediverse is that Bluesky and Mastodon can see/interact with each other via a bridge bot).
Bluesky uses its own open protocol (AT) and yes, there was concern earlier (about the platform being a potential deadend) given the ties between Twitter and Bluesky prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition of the former (along with original Twitter CEO and Bluesky founder Jack Dorsey potentially assisting Musk with that acquisition; Dorsey is no longer on Bluesky’s board of directors). The AT source is also being further opened up since it has been submitted to the IETF (aka an actual open Internet standard which will increase the level of its interoperability). Bluesky is also now an independent public benefit corporation (PBC). PBC’s are meant to strike a better balance (unlike the existing out of control corporate structures that prioritize the shareholder value at all costs mentality; PBC’s are still for-profit but have to take into account many other factors including social benefits, taking care of their employees, etc). It remains to be seen if those values are upheld over time (or if Wall Street chooses to devalue such companies because it doesn’t fit into its own greed driven modus operandi).
Digressing, Bluesky also maintains a feed of trending topics that you can simply choose by yourself to pin (it’s not forced on you, nor does it affect you algorithmically) onto your feed. The Discover feed is the primary one that is driven by an algorithm and I am slowly trying to push out the political bullshit because I don’t need to have it shoved in my face to know the idiocy that is taking place and will be in full force post January 20th in the US where that crap is also going to overflow to the rest of the world (I mean, Musk and Trump are already at it with the Los Angeles wild fires; that is the sort of sick lying divisive bullshit the world will need to put up with in less than 2 weeks with these mentally unfit idiots that will run the US and its allies into the ground for their own ulterior greed oriented motives). <rant> I am just getting it off my chest before it starts since I’ll be sitting in my seat with popcorn post January 20th and giving those who allowed this mess to happen the middle finger because every one of those folks (voters, politicians, celebs, the media, etc) have lost independent thinking folks like myself from listening to any of this going forward because you all have reaped what you sowed. </end rant>
But I digress again… for the time being, this is more like a side experiment of giving it an openminded shot and seeing how the overall experience goes. The key is finding like minded folks and being part of those communities (since we’re really going to need each other in the coming years/who knows how long given the insanity we’re about to face) along with the quick notification angle for various events. The only thing is the Bluesky mobile app on an iPad is that small iPhone view (why these companies cannot build proper iPad apps goes beyond me; even Instagram/Threads doesn’t have proper iPad apps — but then again, that is Meta for you which has a smuck for a CEO).
