Nice! I’ve been enjoying the “Quiet Posters” feed, which shows only posts by people I follow that don’t regularly post, so I might miss the rare times that they do! :)

If you want your timeline to be just a chronological timeline, you can also subscribe to that feed and delete all others. Bluesky isn’t Threads, no one is forcing any algorithm on you that you don’t want, this is part of the decentralized nature of Bluesky.

Also, I don’t think there is a clear line between “algorithmic” and “non-algorithmic” social media. If you use Mastodon with the Mammoth app and its “For You” feed, is it algorithmic or non-algorithmic? If I sort my Lemmy timeline by “hot”, do I not use an algorithm?

The algorithms/feeds are easily the best part about Bluesky because they can be custom-made. If you don’t like the feeds provided by Bluesky, you can just make one of your own that displays what you want to see. I use many such feeds.

I’m very curious how this will all shake out. I can understand all of you who want to block Threads and the only two instances that I am on myself are going to do exactly that, but it seems tremendously likely that the flagship instance of the fediverse, mastodon.social, will federate and it will have a massive impact on not just the culture, but also on the codebase. For example I wonder what services will go for feature parity and add features like voice notes which Threads added recently. Oh and culture-wise, with POTUS joining Threads, big institutions like the White House will suddenly appear on the fediverse.

Still holding out hope that a bunch of new users and new ideas will rejuvenate the fediverse, in any case 2024 should be a big year for it.

I have big sympathies for FireFish, but I feel like the target audiences so far are very different. Maybe call it the network effect, but it’s difficult for me to imagine a tumblr user who maybe is used to blogging about their SuperWhoLock fandoms moving to FireFish where there probably is no big audience for that. At the same time I would want to see these users and their niches in the Fediverse.

There is a very particular culture that is unique to tumblr which I don’t see moving somewhere else.

unfortunately it’s limited to what Bluesky wants which is just microblogging while ActivityPub is more flexible (see: Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale, PeerTube, Wordpress, etc.)

One of the bsky devs has clarified that they do want peertube/wordpress/lemmy type sites to exist on the protocol as well

You are correct, however I want to point out they have stated they want to hand over the governance of the protocol to a standards organization like the Internet Engineering Task Force:

Development of atproto to date has been driven by a single company, Bluesky PBC. Once the network opens to federation, protocol changes and improvements will still be necessary, but will impact multiple organizations, communities, and individuals, each with separate priorities and development interests. If the protocol is successful, there certainly will be disagreements and competitive tensions at play. Having a single company controlling the protocol will not work long-term.

The plan is to bring development and governance of the protocol itself to an established standards body around the time the network opens to federation. Our current hope is to bring this work to the IETF, likely as a new working group, which would probably be a multi-year process. If the IETF does not work out as a home, we will try again with other bodies. While existing work can be proposed exactly “as-is", it is common to have some evolution and breaking changes come out of the standardization processes.

Source

Sorry for interloping as a new lemmy.ml user – I wanted to share my perspective because I was one of the very early adopters of hexbear (then called chapo.chat) after the ChapoTrapHouse subreddit got banned. I no longer have an account there because despite the mods best efforts to uphold “left unity”, I at best felt tolerated as an anarchist and just stopped browsing eventually. The reddit strike coinciding with hexbear federating convinced me to create a lemmy account to maybe reconnect with some of the communities there.

The great strength of the old subreddit was that it was a safe haven for leftists of all flavors, practically the first of its kind as comparable places like /r/DankLeft did not exist yet. After a few years of relative isolation, I think it’s fair to say that hexbear has become more staunchly ideological (and I’m sure some would say for better) and at least to me it lost some of its more broad appeal. My hope for federation was to see some of the more calcified beliefs over there shaken up a bit with an influx of new users. I guess it’s also fair to say that that hasn’t happened yet, but it’s only been a few days so far.

My hope is still twofold: for Lemmy as a whole, I think it’s good that there is a strong leftist presence somewhere to avoid the complete flattening of opinion one can experience on, say, /r/worldnews or /r/politics. I’d hope to see more voices that are critical for example of US hegemony, the two-party system and capital as a whole compared to reddit. And for hexbear I still hope that they can reclaim some of their former big tent appeal, they have always advertised themselves as welcoming to everyone broadly on the left and despite my many criticisms, I do think the mods there do indeed stand by that. These hopes may all be a bit naïve, but I do believe defederating from the biggest leftist instance that (at least in theory) is non-sectarian will only lead to more calcified beliefs on both sides. A lot of that is also for hexbear to decide though, they will have to choose what role they want to play in the fediverse.