Hey, I wanted to ask someone who has probably more knowledge than me about it - what’s the difference about these two services? I know Mastodon has ActivityPub, so it works with Lemmy, and BlueSky has it’s own kind of federation, but does it even has anything to federate to?
I’m asking not which one is better, I’m searching logical argument for one or other. I’m obviously more leaning toward Mastodon since I’m here, but I wanted to give my friend, who is thinking about joining, some real arguments.
Bluesky is the first app built on the ATProtocol, its protocol for federation, sort of like how Mastodon was among the first to use ActivityPub after the overcomplexity of OStatus. The ATProtocol is a few years younger than ActivityPub, so its landscape isn’t fleshed out yet. Currently Bluesky caters more towards creators, artists, and social togetherness, whereas ActivityPub tends to lean harder into attracting techies. Both protocols can be run as independent instances, but most people are still using bsky.social for now until more instances pop up and federate together. The process for hosting a Bluesky instance is still undergoing development, but all features of it have been opened up. There exist multiple bridge systems that can interweave ActivityPub with ATProto.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)
Is ATProtocol as open as ActivityPub in terms of content? Could there be a Bluesky equivalent of Peertube, for example?
Yes, assuming video content is stored across decentralized PDS instances