It's not about the code, it's about control of the servers and feeds. Decentralization doesn't just mean multiple servers. It means no single entity has special authority over the user community. That isn't the case with bluesky from what I can tell.

That's how I see nostr

Navels, but federated!

You don't have to be a developer to use Lemmy, yet it has similar features to reddit including search. Maybe there are sociological issues in growing its userbase, but not serious technical ones, as Usenet showed 40 years ago.

It sounds like mastodon still has technical issues . If Lemmy's were solvable, mastodon's are too. Otherwise, how did mastodon get built in the first place?

The entire point is that your pds can interact with multiple "instances" of bluesky or whatever other apps people build on the protocol.

For example there is a reddit/hn clone that people can post on (keeping their same identity) when the official bluesky service goes down. The reddit clone is fully independent from the twitter clone, but they use the same protocol and (unlike AP) the same hosting and authentication infrastructure.

Whereas on Lemmy and mastodon, my accounts are totally separate. And unlike AP, your data lives on your own pds and is never hostage to the owner of the instance that actually runs the load bearing interactivity. If they become compromised or shut down you can switch to another. No cooperation from the old owner required (unlike activitypub).

Thank you very much.

Unfortunately I feel like people have stopped looking for a Twitter alternative already

tech people hate algorithms

Language is so silly sometimes

I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them.

I think this is also true for why people gravitate towards places like Bluesky in more general terms as well. Without even getting into the details of whether or not a platform has an algorithm or whatever other features, whether or not a platform is federated means nothing to the average person and the benefits of the decentralized servers are a disadvantage to onboarding people. When the Reddit exodus happened, I was describing Lemmy to a friend, and when I told him that anybody could spin up their own instance, his response was "why the hell would anybody want to do that." And this is a guy who ran his own TeamSpeak server for like 20 years.

People don't want an alternative to Twitter - they want Twitter without the rightwing extremism. Bluesky offers exactly this with an easy and straightforward onboarding process and a familiar UI. There's even browser extensions to search the people you follow on Twitter and find their Bluesky handles to make the swap easier.

I've also seen people praising Bluesky's algorithm being entirely optional as well as a plus for discoverability. People really like the chronological timeline that doesn't bury posts - especially artists. I haven't used Mastodon, and I only used Twitter because all the artists jumped ship after Tumblr banned the porn, but I can say that I have enjoyed how Bluesky works similar to Tumblr in that regard. I've never liked algorithmic based feeds, so a chronological feed of the people I follow and the stuff they reblog from other people who I can then go check out as well is exactly the kind of experience I want out of a platform.

Yea the Mastodon devs are seriously underestimating how lazy the average person is lol

Drag agrees. Drag has fiddled with Lemmy's API, and there's so much redundant and unnecessary information on every post. No wonder it's such a resource hog. If that redundancy is part of ActivityPub, then drag would be happy to dumb AP for a lighter protocol.

You could say the same thing about why they made Bluesky when Mastodon exists

24 millions users