Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

I left Xitter about 6 weeks ago and went all in on Bluesky. Took time to give feedback to the algo, but it's doing much better these days. I don't feel like I'm missing out on much, you'll get the same news & events on Bluesky. A lot of people who were scared of losing their following are reporting more, better engagement with lower follower counts.

What I really like about it is the ATProto, which while imperfect, seems like the best current design for the next gen of social media built on a federated foundation.

- DID for identity

- PDS for data mobility

- algo feed & moderation choice, you can build your own and anyone on Bluesky can use it (https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...) If you didn't see, they recently added anti-toxicity features and are looking towards community notes

- Bluesky is the twitter like view, but you can build anything on ATProto and leverage the shared infra

I'm personally working on a "reddit" like view of the Bluesky network. Not a reddit clone, but a different way to organize the same information around topics, news events, and/or links. One could also design their own Lexicon and build something very close to reddit. One of the cool things is that all the objects for all apps are stored into a single SQLite database per user. So if you want to move your data to a different host, all of the apps, content, and connections survive that migration.

Blueskey seems to have all of these neat features that developers/nerds seem to like, but literally nobody else cares about.

A proper decentralized publishing platform would be content addressed not federated which retains all the downsides of centralization.

The bluesky team worked previously on IPFS and Dat/Hypercore and Secure Scuttlebutt. Whyrusleeping - one of the core authors of IPFS - has been an active technical advisor from the start. ATProto is basically those p2p & content addressed techs moved into the server stack. None of us are bullish on client side p2p for large scale publishing or social applications, and we spent 10 years each doing that.