sethgoldstein.me/in-my-opinion…

Seth Goldstein

2025-03-23 21:58:26

In My Opinion Bluesky Will Never Federate And That’s Concerning

What are we doing here folks? We all flocked to Bluesky because it resembled what we used love — Twitter from the 2010s, but with the hope that it would in the end be different.

The Bluesky team has promised to federate/decentralize for a while now, with nothing coming of it. Only empty promises (so far).

So many people have flocked to Bluesky because it’s familiar, but they don’t realize that it’s still centralized and can be taken advantage of like the other centralized platforms.

People constantly are telling me that Mastodon and the Fediverse is too hard to wrap their heads around, yet they all use email. It’s really not any different.

Admittedly I’m on Bluesky and participate from time to time. But what concerns me is that people will get so tied into it that they won’t leave if it goes south and we’ll be back to where we are with Twitter/X.

That being said, it doesn’t have to be this way. It can move beyond the centralized server. Hopefully people like Mark Cuban and other influential users will help push it in that direction.

What do you think?

#Bluesky #Dencentralization #Federation #fediverse #mastodon #Twitter

As you may know, having no doubt researched the long history of your family name, a "lemmer" was traditionally someone who worked with lemmings -- most often the trainer in charge of herding them over cliffs to enable dramatic footage for Disney nature "documentaries".

With the passage of time, this practice came to be seen as cruel and inhumane, and agencies dedicated to the preservation of wildlife began training workers to gently and safely capture the lemmers in web-netting and return them to their native habitats -- thus creating the role of "lemmer webber".

(In those days, of course, many individuals were known by their given name plus their role in society; as formal recordkeeping became more ubiquitous, however, these surnames became detached from social roles and were simply inherited. It is thus possible now for, e.g., a person with the last name "Webber" -- in olden times most commonly used for those who created web content or wrote web software -- to be in a profession which has nothing at all to do with the World Wide Web.)

This important part of our natural history is rarely mentioned and yet is essential to an understanding of how we have become a more humane society (until this year, anyway, but that's another story).

#SplainingAsAService #LowQualityFacts

Hi Christine,

I did some digging through some back issues of CU Amiga, and I think I've figured out the answer!

It turns out, this BlueSky thing is indeed part of a decentralised network, and it's called the Internet!

Now, I know what you're thinking: What is this internet thing, and how is it different to the BBSes that I've been dialling into, using my home microcomputer?

Well, it turns out that the files on your local computer user group's BBS are typically all stored on the one computer.

But the internet is like a worldwide network of BBSes!

People are calling it an information superhighway!

You can start "surfing" from one BBS to another.

You can be in Canada and connect over the Internet to a BBS in Germany!

Is your mind blown yet?

It's compatible with all the popular microcomputers, including IBM Compatibles, Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Acorn Archimedes, and Atari ST.

Beyond viewing overseas BBSes, there's a range of fun things you can find on the web, including newsgroups, gophers, MUDs, MOOs, and electronic mail!

And now... BlueSky!

Some people say the internet won't catch on. But I saw it running on one of the Solaris workstations at a local university, and I have to say it looked pretty spiffy!