I recently had a discussion with a friend on Bluesky who knows more about the inner workings of the platform, and it pretty much solidified what I already thought was going on behind the scenes with ATproto, which seems to be a lot more complex than the system behind AP, however it did seem to improve on it to an extent simply by splitting up different parts of the “social media pipeline”. I was curious what people here think of it
Ps: I really don’t mean to proselytize about one or the other!! I think it’s good that both exist. Although it does raise me the question of wether protocol diversification is good…
I mostly agree with your comment, but want to nitpick about this part:
This one is something I must disagree with. I’m using the instances (servers) I am precisely because the people running those servers choose to do things in a certain way. If they did them in a different way, I would be on a different server. In the Fediverse it is extremely easy to vote with your feet. The admins have very free reign over their instances, but that doesn’t mean that they have a free reign over the users of their instances.
The Fediverse is fine as it is. But some people hope that it is the future of social media which isn’t likely at all.
The Fediverse is called decentralized because no one instance has a majority of users. But the only way to make sure that this state continues is if the most popular instances close registration for new users. That’s an easy choice to make for the volunteers running instances. More users mean more expense and more work. That’s what I mean by choices. A growth-oriented company would not do that.
I don’t see what’s so special about being able to make new accounts. You can do that anywhere. What you can’t do is take your followers, communities, or posting history with you. For many people, that is not acceptable, and not just influencers, for whom their accounts are their business capital. That’s a big part of what enables social media monopolies.
I don’t see how the Fediverse solves any of the problems with social media. The hobbyist driven Fediverse isn’t going to take off. Any professional, growth-oriented instance would have all the familiar problems.
Yeah it really only takes me an hour to setup a new account to my liking, easier now with piefed.
It does take a while to join all the communities you were subscribed to from your old instance, but I don’t think it took close to an hour. Of course, my new instance accepting my application did take its time. And I think that was several hours. But still: You give a few details today and continue tomorrow by subscribing to a bunch of communities.
You can import your subscription list from a previous account, be it Lemmy or Piefed