urusai.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A friendly and non-toxic English-first Mastodon community for anime, manga, and other otaku subjects.

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I've had a lot of people ask how BlueSky compares to Mastodon and the Fediverse. I've tried to make the answer as simple and easy to understand as possible:

🦋 BlueSky is designed to give corporations and wealthy people full control of the network. All of its traffic has to flow through expensive-to-run corporate relays.

:Fediverse: The Fediverse is designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.

@FediTips

My favorite part is when people say "Bluesky has no algorithm" (as someone who studied computer science, I hate that "algorithm" has become this dirty and evil word). This is false. It does has a bunch of algo feeds that one can subscribe to (bsky.app/feeds). Things like "Discover", "Popular with friends", and so on. You're not forced or nagged to look at these feeds, but they do exist for anyone who wishes to use them.

Furthermore all Bluesky posts can be boosted by algorithmic feeds; there's no "unlisted" post setting. Forced discoverability is not good for someone who just wants a quiet social media presence.

Finally, blocks are public, which is a world of drama waiting to happen. There's even a block leaderboard clearsky.app

Bluesky SocialBluesky
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@FediTips

ALSO ALSO there is no way to "softblock" someone on bluesky! Blocking someone doesn't make them unfollow you; it just sets a block flag that takes priority over that, so that when/if you unblock them, they are following you again. There is no explicit "remove this follower" button either. The only way to get a follower out is to hard block them, with the fact that it's a public action that entails.

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@rinmari @FediTips

I'm not there, so this is the first time I've heard that blocks are public. Perfect recipe for Jr. High School-level snubs and cliquishness.

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@rinmari @FediTips
well, I wouldn't mind, if Mastodon had better and more transparent "Explore" algorithm (I checked source code, so I know it is not really blackbox, but it is not really easy to understand how it works and I would like it to be more user configurable). So I don't think this is what the problem of BlueSky is.

Also, there is stuff like brid.gy, which I like and which I think is not run by corporation, so the diagram is technically incorrect. People can have PDS on AT Protocol, only Relays are so huge that they have to be run by corporation.

Also, Fediverse instances are usually (not always, like in our case) hosted in huge datacenters which are run by huge corporations, which charge monthly fees, and so. So in a way, some kind of scalability is not necessary a bad things, because we may need someone to run some kind of powerful proxies for federated content too, one day.

The diagram of Fediverse is also not accurate. Yes, instances form mesh, not hierarchical graph (it is even more meshed, than the diagram shows - all nodes connect directly) - but it is true only for full instances. End users are leafs, so the actual topology is much like the first diagram shows.

I am all pro-Fediverse, but we should be the competent ones, who can explain properly how the things really are and how they really work. I don't really like propaganda... it is kinda even worse, than advertising...

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@rinmari @FediTips This is really funny!

Public

@rinmari In regards to the algorithms, it's the same with Mastodon: A feed sorted by time is also an algorithm, even though most don't call it that.
And to me it's not the best choice ... it makes me stuck with people in my time-zone for example. And those that post the most often. Why should that be a good outcome?

I like it very much that bsky gives the users the choice ... for example you can chose the "quiet posters" timeline, which shows users you follow that don't post often.

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@oxpal

When I used Twitter, I was following a large number of accounts (despite best efforts to prune out accounts whose tweets were no longer of interest of me), so anything tweeted more than 30 minutes ago was basically ancient history.

So I did not mind the "For You" tab from time to time, if it meant I could catcn up more easily and find interesting posts from friends that I missed because it was posted 12 hours ago while I was asleep or at work.

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@rinmari @FediTips Same applies for Mastodon regarding the « algorithms ».

A program or a service without algorithms is not a program or a service : it does not exist.

But, anyway, even Mastodon has automated content suggestion algorithms.