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To bridge your Mastodon account to Bluesky, just follow @bsky.brid.gy. That account will then follow you back. Accept its follow and your Mastodon posts will get sent to Bluesky. If your Mastodon account is @[user]@[instance], your bridged account will have the handle [user].[instance].ap.brid.gy in Bluesky.

(2/n)

To bridge your Bluesky account to Mastodon, just follow @ap.brid.gy. If you're a Bluesky user and your name there is [user], your bridged account will have the handle @[user]@bsky.brid.gy on Mastodon.

I've been saying "Mastodon" but all this should work for other fediverse accounts too.

(3/n)

The system is clunky in some ways, e.g. if you reply to my posts on Bluesky I definitely won't see the replies here unless you bridge your Bluesky account to Mastodon. Also the character limit for me is 1729 while on Bluesky it's a measly 300. I'm keeping these posts short, but often I ramble on.

Why don't I just go to Bluesky?

(4/n)

While the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has good intentions, she doesn't own the company. Bluesky's operation is funded by investors who are pumping in money now, but hope to get more back eventually. At that point, Bluesky will start getting worse.

(6/n)

I can't do better than quote @pluralistic:

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

(7/n)

I urge you to read @pluralistic's essay on Bluesky:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

I'll quote a bit, in tiny bite-sized nuggets that fit on Bluesky.

(8/n)

"I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it."

(9/n)

"But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/"

(10/n)

"When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess "

(11/n)

"I appreciate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere:

https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/ "

(12/n)

"But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they'd never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped."

(13/n)

"I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.

They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils."

(14/n)

And that's how it goes. Read the whole story here:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

So I'd rather not hop onto the next sinking ship, even though lots of my friends are there, and I hear the buffet and entertainment are great... for now.

(15/n, n = 15)

@johncarlosbaez Makes sense. They're not mutually exclusive, but it's totally worth thinking about where the effort goes. There is a "hello again" energy about Bluesky just now which is fleetingly nice, and I'm shallow and desperate enough to feed from that.

@pigworker @johncarlosbaez I’m skeptical about the technical viability of Mastodon, but maybe it won’t matter and not that bad to have some heterogeneity. It has a bit of the old internet vibe - IRC, ICQ, AIM, haha. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

@cosmin @pigworker - Mastodon seems to be working fine now.

@johncarlosbaez @cosmin @pigworker Mastodon has been working great for 10 years $+LaTeX$

@whophd @pigworker @johncarlosbaez I should write a blog post and address John’s concern with a proper argument. I’ll try make a brief point here.

Linux and mastodon are not related. One is a single node kernel - *software*, the other one is a distributed *service*. They are at the extreme ends of the stack and other that they are both OSS, there’s nothing to compare.

I’m not assessing the last 10 years, nor challenging whether it works now - clearly it does work now, and it will continue to do so, *if* nothing changes too much.

I’m saying it it’s unlikely to be an alternative to Twitter / Bluesky / Threads (this is the topic) and possible not a great long term option regardless (won’t go into details, but suffice most OSS software simply dies after the maintainers carry on with life).

And yes - technical viability - mainly scalability - is one concern in conjunction with the operational model, but the list is longer if we want to assess long term viability.

Mastodon globally has 0.9M total users (https://mastodon-analytics.com/). Elon Musk alone has 200M followers alone. Bluesky is adding 1M users *daily*. That’s both technically challenging but also expensive to operate. Think what it means to deliver one message to 200M users in realtime. Now think about the fact that *one* user with many followers and think of the scale of the problem with 10M, 100M users. Simply put, neither the software nor the operational model and even any consumer grade hardware is suited to handle that scale. It doesn’t take servers, it takes datancenters, across geographies. (1/2)

This said, it’s likely going to be a good option for small communities, as long as both the servers are operated and the software continues to be developed - but again, there’s nothing intrinsic to the model that guarantees that either

Finally, I’m not advocating for commercial services either, the reality is that the original take on how these turn from good to bad is true - but that’s again a money problem. (2/2)

@cosmin - thanks for your analysis. I don't trust Mathstodon (my instance of Mastodon) to survive either, so I copy all my better posts to my online diary and/or my Wordpress blog. It would be a pain in the ass if I didn't use this process to expand the articles and - the fun part - learn more about the topics I'm writing about. So I must be a quite unusual case of social media user. Right now I'm wondering how to maximize the survival time and accessibility of the thousands of pages of explanations I've generated, after my death. I tend to put off working on this, which is a bad habit people have.

@johncarlosbaez Long term conservation is one of my side concerns as well. Not being able to properly preserve content such as yours would be a tragedy.
This is a good read on the subject btw https://content.cooperate.com/post/internet_history/

There are IMO multiple aspects. First -the simpler one is the format - and I’d apply Copernican principle here - older standards are going to last longer than newer ones - so text-based from text to Tex, HTML, markdown are more resilient - although I believe representation will soon be less of a problem and envisioning we’ll be able to compress and represent things with minimal concerns on the underlying formats soon. Second, content preservation - the hard problem, I’d argue archival should primarily focus on the “differential” aspect. Your snapshots are going to survive, but we need to save the full web of deltas if we want to have a history.
I never envisioned this would be a problem, but recently with all the Internet Archive issues realized how frail it actually is. We need to directly support the Internet Archive at any cost.

Finally, locally, for *source* content (and content in general)- I’d say, git is the single best choice for safe, decentralized persistence - it’s easy to push to both GitLab, GitHub as well as private servers. I’m assuming you already know all of this, but I’d be happy to help anytime,

@johncarlosbaez + @jimcowie

@johncarlosbaez Somewhat related issues http://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

@cosmin - Thanks! I used to use Physicsforums! I'll check to see if there are now fake posts by me. It's disheartening to read Greg Bernhardt was in on this.

@johncarlosbaez But also, I think the pluralistic blog post and your thread are spot on. Bsky feels fun right now, but the fundamentals of it aren't any different, and despite the best intentions, it is a VC-backed business, and those investors will seek to maximize the profit out of it eventually.

Will they find a business model that's not ad-based and ultimately antagonistic to the users? Who knows. Either way the thing getting monetized is attention and that's a pretty poor incentive.

@johncarlosbaez so mastodon is a bit slower and less exciting. And I think mastodon is in a difficult place where development can't necessarily keep up with the needs for privacy and safety of various users (which bsky is also struggling with to be fair).

But mastodon does feel more optimistic, and genuinely different.

@johncarlosbaez social networks need content, and by putting your content here you're helping push forward a different vision for the future, and that feels pretty cool.

@dlants - thanks! Yes, I'd rather spend my morning microblogging time help a new vision of the future, not the old corporate stuff.

@raymondjohnson - Bluesky will no doubt be very charming, so just remember that it's getting money from a lot of investors, including blockchain companies, and they will want to get a return on their investment, and you're the product.

"The Series A round is led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Darkmode’s Amir Shevat, and Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda. The presence of a crypto-focused firm might alarm skeptics, especially since CEO Jay Graber used to be a software engineer for a crypto company, Zcash, but Bluesky has proactively assured users that the company is not pivoting to web3."

The Series A round is led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Darkmode’s Amir Shevat, and Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda. The presence of a crypto-focused firm might alarm skeptics, especially since CEO Jay Graber used to be a software engineer for a crypto company, Zcash, but Bluesky has proactively assured users that the company is not pivoting to web3.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/24/bluesky-raises-15m-series-a-plans-to-launch-subscriptions/

@johncarlosbaez Yeah, that was not the direction I was hoping they'd go!

Ultimately, I think the thing that will give me the most satisfaction is blogging, and let the links fall where they may.

@raymondjohnson - Yeah, blogs are great. Lately I've been writing short posts on social media, and then expanding the better ones into blog articles. The advantage of writing something short first is that it forces me to be really clear about the main point. Then I can add detail and curlicues later.

@johncarlosbaez I still remember you mostly from your Google+ days! Talk about a service that had potential but got bungled in one (or three) too many ways. It didn't seem to know if it wanted to be Facebook, Blogger, Google Reader, Reddit, YouTube's comment section, or a souped-up identity service. There was a lot of quality content posted there, and lots of people I met who helped guide me through grad school. And it's all gone.

@raymondjohnson - yeah, such a bummer!

@fgoehrig - I'm not an expert on this either! An AI summary tells me:

"Yes, you can export your data from Bluesky, but currently, this process primarily involves using the Bluesky API and Python code to access and download your data in a format like JSON, as there isn't a direct "export" feature within the Bluesky app itself; you would need to utilize programming methods to extract your data from the platform."

Take this with a grain of salt, but a truly federated system has a lot of "instances" and it's *easy* to take your posts and move it from one instance to another. Thus if one instance starts being annoying, you can easily move. This in turn puts pressure on the instances to stay nice.

@johncarlosbaez thanks for the clarification!

@fgoehrig @johncarlosbaez If you want to understand to what degree Bluesky is or isn't decentralized, this is perhaps one of the most illuminating explanations I've seen:
https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

@tautologico - Bluesky could become truly open, but it's funded by venture capitalists who will start to demand returns soon, and I don't see how they'll profit more from it becoming open. If many users demanded openness and said they'd leave if it's not provided, maybe the company would prioritize openness. But that seems completely unlikely: most of the users seem to be flocking in like eager sheep, blissfully unaware of the whole issue.

@johncarlosbaez the idea is that the team is still small and in control. they (the team) have a motto "the company is a future adversary" to remind themselves of what they need to accomplish. if they'll make it or not remains to be seen, of course, but I can say it's much closer to being completely federated today than 1 year ago

@tautologico - Interesting, thanks. I hope it works.

@urlyman - Yes, Cory Doctorow's main point here was that regardless of what she claims, things will go sour.

@johncarlosbaez ooh sorry, I missed the rest of the thread. I very much agree with Cory’s thread. Especially in light of Dave Troy’s analysis. This post seems to me a decent summation of the situation https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/113477787132333873

@urlyman - thanks, that's a very informative account of the dark underbelly of Bluesky!

@edvin - no, I am not more protected against the whims of the admins here, except insofar as they are people whom I respect and who know me personally, not corporate overlords who treat me like dirt. The most likely failure mode here seems to be, not takeover by a fascist as with Twitter, but rather the admins just quitting at some point. For archiving my better posts I still need to use my Wordpress blog and my personal diary:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/diary.html

There are definitely problems with moving between Mastodon servers at present, but I can imagine them being solved, because the people here seem committed to the idea of federation.