Yes but in this specific case the author owns up to using Claude for “editing” of the blog entries.

Pretty funny to see this here because this blog post seems like written with AI assistance (“it’s not just x, it’s y”, etc.) and also its author advocates for Nostr instead.

Evan Prodromou commented to say he “disagrees with the purpose of this statement”.

I don’t understand what he gets out of being so antagonizing. Lovely statement though, nice to see so many signatures.

you need thousands of dollars

no you don’t

Search up “Mastodon instances” and then “Bluesky instances”

Bluesky has a different architecture, there are no “instances”, it’s PDSs, relays and AppViews, all of which can be and are already being self-hosted.

they’re just jumping on the train with the billionaire who runs it

If you mean Dorsey, he has had nothing to do with Bluesky for well over a year now because he resented them implementing moderation tools

well I mean technically not, Kuba is self-hosting his account at https://lab.martianbase.net/

I might be wrong, but feeds get their data from relays, correct? So if you are using any of the Blacksky feeds, presumably you would indirectly be using the atproto.africa relay?

The main difference between Threadsky and Frontpage is that Threadsky is just yet another Bluesky re-skin, it’s just regular Bluesky posts presented in a reddit-like format, whereas Frontpage has its own dedicated lexicon and doesn’t ingest the Bluesky firehose at all. I think Frontpage is really neat, but it has been shown little love unfortunately, it hasn’t meaningfully changed in months.

While I generally avoid politics on this blog, it’s hard to ignore the political biases permeating X and BlueSky. X has veered heavily toward far-right ideologies, while BlueSky is often associated with far-left communities. This polarized landscape doesn’t work for those of us seeking a neutral space for meaningful interactions.

lol

Unpopular opinion here, but: as opposed to other twitter clones like Hive Social and such, that also look sleek and are simple, but didn’t go anywhere, Bluesky did manage to attract a sizeable crowd of creative and talented open source indie devs that are passionate about it and build cool stuff on atproto. Whether it’s custom feeds or star sign labelers or alternative clients that add more features or entirely new appviews like the oekaki board PinkSea, you get the feeling it is a pretty vibrant ecosystem and this has sustained it all these months.

While this is true for the Fediverse as well, I think it’s fair to say that there have been rumblings here about lack of direction and proper stewardship of the Fediverse and if you want this place to succeed you can’t just sweep it under the rug, shrug your shoulders and say “well, people who pick Bluesky over Mastodon are just stupid”.

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.

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.