universities and other orgs should do their own federated servers. they should also take back and manage their email if they let a third party handle it.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Is this possible on Bluesky?
not in the way im talking. I want them to take back their infrastructure and control it themselves and not under someones umbrella.
That seems like a bad idea
Bluesky enshittification has already started. You needed 3rd party clients to use it properly from day one and they have central control over the whole platform. It will only take some politically controversial event and they will quickly show their true colors.
And most users will move to the next closed platform again.
The average user just doesn't learn from this shit because they don't know.
People did originally move to Mastodon, but they got tripped up when they had to select a server and the whole exodus failed until bluesky opened up.
The concept of home server in Mastodon is not great. I think servers should show content from all over Mastodon with most servers giving the same experience. Expecting people to pick a server and then mostly talk to the same people is silly.
Lemmy is much better in that regard since content is organized by community.
I still don't understand why that's the barrier to entry for many people. It's like people want to be enslaved to a monopoly on purpose.
In case it helps you understand: barriers of entry to Mastodon, from my perspective as an ex-Twitter user and current Bluesky and Mastodon user (note it took me 4 tries over 5 years to actually "enjoy" Mastodon)
- Lack of content discoverability: Bluesky has programmable feeds and starter packs (although the latter is pretty flawed), Twitter has The Algorithm. When you first create a Mastodon account, you're not given much.
- The primary reason Mastodon "stuck" with me on the 4th go around was this. I manually imported a bunch of my connections from Bluesky.
- Choosing the right server: on all my previous attempts, I was overwhelmed by server selection and went with generic all-purpose instances. Having a local timeline with things that might actually interest you is very helpful.
- The network effect: I don't think I really have to elaborate on this one
Bonus things that probably don't serve as barriers to entry but are real issues for active users:
- Lack of features: it's not possible to search for posts on ActivityPub at any reasonable scale. I don't know all my Mastodon lore and think I've heard that search was intentionally not made good in the past for privacy or something, but if you're posting something on the "blast my posts everywhere" protocol, well... it's still out there.
- There's also no quote posts, which haven't been implemented for similar privacy/anti-harassment reasons. But instead, other software like Pleroma works around this by simply giving a link to the original post—the worst of both worlds, bad UX and not even an option to attempt to detach or prevent quotes.
- Fedi meta / sudden defederations: If you picked the wrong server—or any of your friends did—and you end up with a tempermental admin, you could unexpectedly lose contact with each other due to defederation, and you might not even notice.
This is not to say other platforms are perfect. There are plenty of things I don't like about Bluesky. This comment is specifically about Mastodon.
Because it has a huge impact on the user experience. You primarily see content from the home server.
So first of all, the commercial platforms had a lot going for them that the Fediverse doesn't.
- Ad campaigns that manipulated people's emotions into being excited and motivated to join. The Fediverse has the same insufferable neckbeards that Linux uses for its marketing team.
- business opportunities, marketing or creating businesses, becoming an influencer. The Fediverse is anti-commercial
- new capabilities or formats, new ways of doing things. Frendica, Mastodon, Lemmy and Pixelfed are just incomplete worse copies of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.
People showed up to the commercial sites with enthusiasm and motivation. People show up to the Fediverse as reluctant emigrants, rats swimming away from a sinking ship.
Then you hit them with "Choose a server. Your choice doesn't matter because you can get to all content from them all, but you have to choose one." People don't like making pointless choices, being told "this choice doesn't matter. make it." doesn't grok. Feels frustrating and suspicious, especially when you're told it doesn't matter, and then they try to give you reasons to choose one over the other.
So when presented with a choice they're told doesn't matter, people are going to freeze and/or say "fuck this" and just go back to the thing they've already got set up. They don't have a lot of push to make this work and they just hit something they don't like before they've even gotten in the door.
I see two ways to fix that: Eliminate the choice and randomly assign newcomers to a server automatically, or make the choice meaningful and express that meaning to them.
People saw the servers and it reminded them of how world of warcraft worked
The more effort we put into making Bluesky and Threads good
While I somewhat agree, I don't think we should be putting "Bluesky" and "Threads" in the same sentence.
Also, I think Threads is a cautionary tale around this whole protocol argument, where a federated technology does not automatically mean it's safe.