Graber is “optimistic about human potential, even though I’m realistic about human nature.” When Bluesky launched last year, it filled a gap that was desperately needed by people who were looking for alternatives to X, as it seemed like the ship formerly known as Twitter was possibly sinking. (Against all odds, it hasn’t yet.)
Bluesky wasn’t as confusing as Mastodon and wasn’t owned by Meta like Threads. Bluesky looks and feels much like Old Twitter.
There was only one snag: It was available as a beta launch, only with an invite code, which was initially so hard to obtain that even Joe Biden couldn’t get one. Starting Tuesday, Bluesky is finally out of “beta” and will be open to anyone — no codes needed.
Like Mastodon and Threads, Bluesky is an experiment in a new, “decentralized” way of running a social app, where users can create their own communities and moderation rules. (Bluesky also has its own moderation team.)
Jack Dorsey was involved in creating Bluesky while he was still at Twitter and now sits on its board. It’s organized as a public benefit corporation.
Ultimately, it may not be a winner-takes-all competition between these X alternatives; the new approach to social may be to exist happily in smaller pockets without needing massive scale to survive. (Although Meta certainly would love to win the battle with Threads.)
More here - https://www.businessinsider.nl/bluesky-is-finally-open-to-everyone-but-will-anyone-come-we-ask-its-ceo/
I’m the opposite though. I could create an account but I still don’t understand how to be logged into other mastodon instances automatically and follow content
You don’t get logged in to other accounts. Just follow people at their address, like you’d send an email. The server does the rest.
If your question is about finding people to follow, that’s another matter. Folks on other instances won’t show up in your searches unless someone on your instance already follows them. For popular people, that’s usually no problem. For others, you might get their address from their web page. In any case, once you have their address, you just… follow them. No matter where they are, follow them from your instance and it just works. You don’t have to “log in” anywhere else; that’s the “federated” part of the fediverse.
What’s most fantastic about it is that you can often follow accounts on entirely different platforms. How well this works depends on how well the platform supports the AP protocol, and fundamental models of data. But you can easily follow PixelFed accounts from a Mastodon account, and it works pretty well. It’s as if you could follow Instagram accounts from your Twitter account; that’s the killer feature of the Fediverse, IMO. Discovery is still clunky, and how these things interoperate in “World” can be kludgy. But the possibilities are really very revolutionary.
Thx for the very clear explanation