[mozarella]

Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse.

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02...

Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...

[iteratethis]

"If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server"

He's completely wrong about how easy it is to move a Mastodon account to another server.

First, your instance admins can completely wipe your account before you even have a chance to move.

Second, you can't move an account, you create a new one on another server which produces a new handle. You can move followers over using some clunky process few users would understand. It can take up to 30 days to process and may require multiple tries. In case any blockage happens between your old and new server, it gets even trickier.

Worse, your content cannot be migrated. It is forever stuck at the old server and at the whims of whoever runs it. Same for the redirect from your old account to your new account.

If the point is to have a robust network where your account, content and followers/followings are safe...Mastodon is the worst.

[dredmorbius]

Any platform can wipe your account without notice, and so far as I'm aware, without meaningful legal recourse. Your only assurance against this is regular backups. There are tools you can use to automatically mirror your Mastodon / Fediverse accounts locally, as well as in-app content extraction tools.

Content migration isn't implemented yet, and as someone who's migrated a few times more than I can remember (three or four, possibly more), that's a bit of a PITA. But it is on the roadmap, and account migration in general has become far cleaner over the years, see note at bottom of:

<https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...>

I've been on the Fediverse since 2016, and in the several times I've migrated things have become far smoother.

At present you can migrate your followers, following, and blocked accounts:

<https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>

Note that there are few if any proprietary / commercial services which afford anything remotely close to what Mastodon does, though blogging platforms probably permit import/export of content to a greater degree.

[madeofpalk]

> Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server.

I'm not sure this is up to date, but Bluesky/AT Proto's architecture is pretty complex to wrap my head around so maybe I just misunderstand. The biggest difference is that unlike Mastodon, Bluesky doesn't really have a single concept of an 'instance' that represents an independent segment of the network like Mastodon does. Instead you have PDSs (which is a user and their data), relays (which centrally relay multiple PDSs like a firehose), and the app view (the frontend for visualising the relay and interacting with PDSs).

You can host your own PDS so you are in control of your own data and identity, and you can migrate away from Bluesky-operated PDS to your own, though at the moment you can't migrate back https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR... https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3l5ii332pf32u

Bluesky's AT Proto design has different trade offs to Mastodon. Bluesky seems like the more feature complete, technically superior, twitter-scale design, being expectedly more complex. Mastodon/ActivityPub is easier to boot up something completely decentralised, but hosters often complain about scale. The real test comes down to the resiliancy of the service is the main provider shuts down. At the moment I think Bluesky would suffer a lot more than Mastodon if the company just went away.

[laurex]

Recommend this deep dive article to understand some of these issues: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

[glenstein]

Thanks for the links! I think this perfectly captures my frustration here. It's like people have learned nothing and are, once again, making an aesthetic choice.

[hobs]

When you actually look at what people do instead of what they say, it often shows that that's really the only choice people want.

[akvadrako]

What does he mean there is only one "Bluesky server" ?

You can already run your own Personal data server (for your data), Relay (to aggregate all feeds), AppView (that holds a view of the data), or client (that talks to the AppView).

[socksy]

He's almost certainly talking about the AppView. Yes, people run their own PDSes, but afaik no-one is running their own AppViews. It seems prohibitively expensive. Even running a relay requires at a minimum terabytes of storage space (and presumably more when the network gets bigger?).

The AppView - controls the way you can search posts - has the ability to show or hide posts from everyone using that AV - has per-user data such as notifications, last skeet seen etc - is a CDN for media, and as such can filter there - is where the algorithms of what posts to show are implemented

In other words, someone who controls the AppView holds a lot of power in the AT Protocol world.

At the moment, it seems that Bluesky are doing a great job with their AppView, and they've rather magnificently scaled with the extreme load increases in the last months. However, for someone like Doctorow who wants independence from being on someone else's platform, there has to be a viable alternative AppView, or at the very least a documented process for how to host it.

However, it's my personal belief that it's only a matter of time until people do this. I don't know how practical it will be (and what level of resources would be needed to divulge if Bluesky go bad compared to a Mastodon server), but it seems like this is a priority for them, and everything else in the stack has been made easy to self host (see https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q).

[mozarella]

Can you seamlessly migrate your account (your id, followers, and posts) to another host without losing said followers? I think that's the main feature Doctrow is looking for?

[hypertexthero]

Tim Bray doesn’t trust it, either: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/11/15/Not-Blues...

[pessimizer]

Bluesky's only hope to be anything other than a twitter clone posing as a distributed protocol while hoping that Musk Diggs his own grave, was if it were a rich man's hobby and charity, and Dorsey has long left the building.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...

> This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.

> That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.

> Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.