OK, this is basically just another one of these posts that have been popping up left and right over the course of the last couple of weeks: Yes, I am now also on Bluesky and I really like it!
That’s the tl;dr version and now to some details: I really enjoyed my time on Twitter up until a couple of years ago when they started to lock down the API. Before that it was a place full of experiments. All of my little bubbles also somehow converged there and it was like the one place I could be a learn new things every minute. Backchannels for every conference? Check. Latest political developments? Check. Sci-Fi? You bet! While some of that also happened on Mastodon, it never felt the same. Perhaps the sign-up process and fragmentation prevented some folks from joining, perhaps the account migration step meant that your posted needed to stay at your old place.
Because of all that I always kept an eye on Bluesky. Yes, it’s not totally decentralized, I get that, but at the same time, there is just nothing like having access to a central or at least centrally aggregated stream of all things happening on the network; like with Bluesky’s firehose. Combined with their approach to moderation through labelling services, decentralized content storage, and feeds the network feels like one large playground right now. It’s awesome!
At the same time, the ecosystem is still very young. While the official iOS app is functional, working with feeds and timelines in general could be better. I’m mostly missing a way to save my scrolling position and ideally even sync it across devices but I’m pretty sure this will eventually be solved.
I also would like to integrate ATProto/Bluesky with this blog. So, I’ve started to basically reimplement retoots. I also would love to eventually use my own PDS for storing my posts. Not yet sure about the timeline there, but hopefully soon 🙂
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂