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I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS ARMY, millions of Brazilians, Black Twitter, and sex worker Twitter to the fediverses! (UPDATED)

Now also welcoming Black Twitter and sex worker Twitter!

Jon

• 28 min read
The Bluesky logo, a stylized butterfly; and the fediverse logo, a multicolored pentacle and pentagram

Originally published September 9, last updated November 16. See the Update Log at the bottom for details. Please don't be deterred by the length of this post, the majority of it is reference material (and a bit of snark) in notes and a very long appendix.

Join the discussion on Bluesky, infosec.exchange, and lemmy.world
A Mastodon post from Marco Rogers (@polotek@social.polotek.net): I still maintain that the at protocol means that bluesky should be included in the definition of "the fediverse". I know it will take people some time to come around on that. And certainly bsky still has some promises to deliver on. But the actual fediverse will be so much messier than what people have in their heads right now. The lines will all be blurry and gray. By design.

The first time I saw the suggestion that Bluesky should be included as part of "the fediverse" was in a pair of Mastodon threads from Marco Rogers early this year. I hadn't ever looked at it that way before. After all, Bluesky has repeatedly highlighted the differences between its Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol and the ActivityPub (AP) protocol used by almost all of the 25,000+ instances in today's fediverse.1

But Rudy Fraser's outstanding The Moderation article had come out just a week before, giving me a much clearer understanding of the possibilities of the AT architecture, and Marco's points resonated with me – as did the swift agreement by Dr. Matt Lee (co-creator of Gnu social). AT's approach to decentralization is very different than ActivityPub's (Alexia's Bluesky, and what Bluesky is not goes into more detail on this) but so what? The more I thought about it, the more I came around to the idea.

Then again, opinions differ. Some feel very strongly that Bluesky shouldn't be considered as part of "the fediverse." As Marco says, the lines are blurry and gray. The way I look at it is that there are many fediverses. Some include Bluesky, some don't. And different people mean different things by "the fediverse"3 (or "the Fediverse", as it's often written), so it's not surprising that there isn't agreement. And Bluesky is very problematic in some very important ways, so it's also not surprising that some people don't want to welcome them.

Note: If you're into wallowing in the details of terminology and definitional struggles, check out There are many fediverses,and Definitions of "the Fediverse"

Over the next few months, though, more and more people came around to Marco's way of thinking. When I first posted this article in early September 2024, I cited TechCrunch's Welcome to the fediverse: Your guide to Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and more, Bluesky board member Mike Masnick's podcast The Fediverse And The Future Of Social Media: What Policymakers Need To Know, Saskia's Answering ARMY’s Question: What is the Fediverse & How Do We Get Involved?, the Fediverse Report's Fediverse for Publishers. Not long after, in a discussion on Social Hub, even Evan Prodromou (who as his bio on Social Web Foundation's site notes is sometimes called “The Father of the Fediverse”) agreed that Bluesky is a Fediverse instance that uses AT Proto internally.

Hey wait a second, I'm noticing a pattern here.

And the technology has come a long way since Marco's original post. By sprint this year, Bridgy Fed and long-time fediverse platform Friendica2 both provided two-way connections between Bluesky and fediverse instances (servers) that only understand the ActivityPub protocol, allowing accounts on Bluesky and other fediverse platforms to follow and interact with each other. It's not perfect, of course – connections between different Fediverse software are often incomplete and janky – but it sure feels like being part of the Fediverse.

Meanwhile, Bluesky itself has improved significantly, to the point where it's now a much better Twitter alternative for most people than any Mastodon instance. Seven years later, is Mastodon significantly closer to being a good Twitter alternative? discusses Mastodon's lack of progress as a Twitter alternative since 2017; Bluesky hads addressed many of these problems, at least to some extent. Blacksky in particular has played in a incredibly important role, pioneering a new approach to community on large public networks. Rudy Fraser's three-part series Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space (December 2023) and Tarik Moody's Could Blacksky emerge as Black Twitter’s spiritual successor on Bluesky? on Hyfin (November 2024) give an idea of the vision and the progress so far.

Of course, there's a lot more to the fediverses than Twitter alternatives ... still, that's what a lot of people are looking for, so it's crucial to have a good one in the fediverses. As Sydette Harry says on Bluesky.

"Problem right now is Blue Sky, Meta and Mastodon keep talking like they’re just building a high capacity social network for a federated internet They are actually doing a large scale digital refugee project"

Yeah really.

When I published the first version of this article, in early September – right after a huge influx to Bluesky from Brazil – I wrote

So let's make it official.

I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS ARMY, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!

Since then, people have continued to flock to Bluesky. As of mid-November it seems like a lot of Black Twitter and sex worker Twitter are making the jump as well. Which is great – and incredibly important! So I'm updating the title.

And what better way to welcome everybody than a long post?

Contents

From the Fediverse to fediverses, communities, and Social Archipelagos

"“The Fediverse” needs to end, and I don’t think anything should replace it. Speak instead about communities, and prioritize the strength of those communities. Speak about the way those communities interact, and don’t; the way they form strands and islands and gulfs. I’ve taken to calling this the Social Archipelago."

– Leonora Tindall, The Fediverse is Already Dead, March 2023

A month after I wrote the original version of this article, Apartheid Clyde's harasser-friendly change to the Xitter block button led to another surge on Bluesky. In the aftermath of the US presidential election, the influx continued to ramp up. It's a stark contrast from November 2022, when millions of people dismayed by Apartheid Clyde's acquisition of Twitter flocked to Mastodon looking for a Twitter alternative.

And a good thing too!

For one thing, most of the people who came to Mastodon in late 2022 didn't have good experiences ... so didn't stay in the Fediverse; see Erin Kissane's Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’t for an overview of problems newcomers faced.6 Flash forward to 2024, and while there's some incremental progress, Mastodon still hasn't really addressed these problems.

Bluesky, by contrast, has put a lot of work into onboarding and usability – as well as giving people better tools protect themselves and others, and find and build communities. For example:

  • "Starter packs", collections of accounts and feeds to follow, help new people find interesting content quickly – and, in conjuction with tools like the Sky Follower Bridge, rebuild and expand their Twitter networks
  • The "nuclear block", shared blocklists, and moderation services cut down on how much harassment, racism, and transphobia people have to deal with.

Blacksky is a great example of putting the different pieces together: multiple feeds, a starter pack, a moderation service, and an in-progress personal data store.

So today, BTS ARMY and millions of Brazilians, and everybody else looking for a Twitter alternative are more likely to have a good experience on Bluesky than Mastodon.7 When Brazil reinstatated Xitter after a month, a lot of Brazliaians went back to Twitter ... but roughly 1/3 of them have stayed active on Bluesky, a remarkably high retention rate.

And as Blacksky highlights, Bluesky and that ATmosphere are developing new organizations for strong communities and how they interact, complementing the Fediverse's instance-oriented structure. These aren't (yet) as place-oriented as Fediverse instances but it's still useful to think of them as part of the Social Archipelagos ... and new topologies may well emerge.

More generally, the emergence of multiple fediverses, and the role of bridges like Bridgy Fed in connecting them, is very aligned with Tindall's perspectives on communities and their interactions. Strands and islands in the Social Archipelagos can participate in multiple fediverses. Bridges can make connections over gulfs between (and potentially within) fediverses. Some of the strands and islands might even be fediverses in their own right.

A caveat: Bluesky is very problematic in some very important ways

Bluesky is far from perfect. To be honest, I thought of calling this article something like "I for one welcome Bluesky (etc) to the fediverses .. at least for now" or "... but not without concerns." But why be churlish? (And also, the title is already too long.)

That said, there really is a lot to be concerned about. Where to start?

  • Bluesky's venture-funded, so is likely to end with an exploitative business model.
  • Bluesky's most recent round of venture investment included Blockchain Captial which as well as being a blockchain company that's made of bunch of sketchy investments was co-founded founded by Brock Pierce, a friend of Steve Bannon's.
  • Bluesky and AT are a surveillance-capitalism friendly, all-public, architectures
  • While in principle Bluesky and the ATmosphere's approach doesn't necessarily centralize power, in practice power today is heavily concentrated. Bluesky runs all they key servers and controls the open-source implementaions as well as the protocol. As the network expands, it's likely to be extremely expensive to have other full-network Relays and AppViews, potentially making the ATmosphere as a whole dependent on Bluesky's infrastructure. Today it's possible to host your own PDS's (personal data stores) but Bluesky currently puts a lot of restrictions on them and in practice almost nobody does. It's not clear that will change.
  • It's great that Jack Dorsey's no longer on the board – or involved at all – but he was.
  • The Protocols not Platforms paper that inspired Bluesky advocates a libertarian approach to free speech, and highlights that a benefit of this approach is that fascists like Alex Jones aren't banned and can still reach their audience (although hopefully "those who don’t wish to be bothered with his nonsense need not deal with it") – and Mike Masnick, the author of the paper, was Jack Dorsey's replacement on the board. Unlike Dorsey, Masnick does understand the value of content moderation and the threat of fascism (plus he's a lot smarter than Dorsey), so it's certainly an improvement ... but this is still very likely to remain Bluesky's philosophy.

With all of these very real issues, there's good reason for skepticism about Bluesky's long-term future. They could easily evolve into yet another evil big tech company whose claims to be different are just window-dressing.

In the short term, though, Bluesky hasn't yet turned evil – or if they have they're disguising it well enough that it's not getting in the way. So my attitude is that if everybody needs to move again in a year or to, oh well, so be it.

After all, Xitter currently is evil, and not even pretending to hide it – as Marcy Wheeler says, Apartheid Clyde has turned Xitter into a machine for fascism and a one-stop shop for disinformation. As Sydette Harry says, Bluesky is doing a large scale digital refugee project. There aren't a lot of barriers to signing up and getting started; the starter packs and Sky Follower Bridge let people reconnect with their networks, at least to some extent. That's got a lot of value!

Some people in the ActivityPub Fediverse very much do not welcome Bluesky

Needless to say, opinions differ and some people in the ActivityPub Fediverse very much do not welcome Bluesky. Michał "rysiek" Woźniak's BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization and Oblomov's A credible threat to (and from) commercial social network silos/2 are two good examples. And hostility coming from people who don't want any Big Tech or venture-funded participation in the Fediverse, and also oppose the involvement of Meta (and Flipboard, Automattic, Cloudflare, venture-funded The BLVD, etc) as well as Bluesky is intellectually consistent.2.3

The previous section above discusses a bunch of widely-agreed-on reasons for skepticism about Bluesky; even their own employees agree that the ecosystem needs to treat the company as a likely future threat. Some of the other reasons I've heard:

  • Concerns that Bluesky's values clash with the Fediverse's
  • A view that Bluesky isn't really decentralized or federated
  • Resentment that Bluesky's larger budget allowed it to swiftly respond and implement functionality that Mastodon users have requested for years but Benevolent Dictator for Live Eugen Rochko has never prioritized2.4
  • Fear that if another protocol gets established it could threaten ActivityPub's dominance (especially all though not exclusively from people whose ego and/or professional status is tied in some way to ActivityPub)
  • Knee-jerk racism and sexism from what I think of as the (mostly cis white male) "Fediverse old boys club" in response to their dominance is being threatened by a company led by a woman of color.2.5

Oh well. It's not surprising, really – opinions differ in the ActivityPub Fediverse about everything.

Like I say, it makes sense to me that people who are hostile to other venture funded, big tech, and/or surveillance capitalism attempts to corporatize the Fediverse would also be hostile to Bluesky. What's really bizarre to me is that some of the people who are most hostile to Bluesky actually support Threads. Sure, Meta exploits people's data without their consent, experiments on their users, breaks the law, supports authoritarian politicians and contributes to genocide ... but at least they use ActivityPub, and (for some people) that's what's important!

Anyhow, the reason I chose the title "I for one welcome..." is to make it clear that I'm speaking only for myself.

Bluesky is a useful counterweight to Threads

"The most likely outcome is a schism into anti-Meta "free fediverses", pro-Meta instances in "Meta's fediverses", and a lot of non-aligned instances connecting with Threads to some extent but trying to keep at arms length."

– me, in Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ!

It's worth highlighting that Bluesky isn't the only new Twitter alternative in the fediverses. Meta's Threads entered the Fediverse in April of this year, after some heated discussion of their plans to embrace, extend, and exploit ActivityPub. Erin Kissane's Untangling Threads is a brilliantly-written overview of some of the perspectives about the situation, and Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! has a lot more.

Guess what: it's messy and the lines are gray and blurry.

A schism still seems the likely outcome to me. Hundreds of instances have signed on to the Anti-Meta FediPact, many others are defederating (blocking) threads.net. Mastodon's founder, CEO, and Benevolent Dictator for Life Eugen Rochko declared it a "clear victory for our cause", and many other Fediverse influencers are also welcoming Threads.

From the perspective of the non-aligned and free fediverses, it's useful to have a well-funded direct competitor to Threads around. Bluesky also seems a lot more savvy to me about how Silicon Valley-based big tech companies operate than many fediverse influencers, who often strike me as somewhat naive about working with a company like Meta. And with Meta likely to play a role in the next version of the ActivityPub standard, it's useful to have another protocol out there.

And while Bluesky's problematic in a lot of ways, Meta is way way worse. Bluesky might shift to an exploitative surveillance capitalism business model; Meta's had exploitative surveillance capitalism business models for years. Bluesky's funders have very concerning links to fascism; Meta's worked with fascists and other authoritarians to put them in power – and help them keep power. Jack Dorsey used to be on Bluesky's board; Peter Thiel used to be on Meta's board, Marc Andreessen is still there, and so is Mark Zuckerberg. And Meta also has a long track record of discrimination, privacy invasion, lying, experimenting on it's users and contributing to genocide.

So it's good that BTS ARMY and millions of Brazilians and everybody else looking for a Twitter alternatives today have another option in addition to Threads. There's a lot more to the fediverses than Twitter alternatives, but that's what a lot of people are looking for today.

It's the end of the Fediverse as we know it – and I feel fine

"I was excited by Bluesky's version of "big world social networking" because it meant I could host an instance of Bluesky tailored to Black users, curate custom feeds tailored to Black users, and moderate content that would be harmful to Black users without any of those users missing out on the content and context of the broader Bluesky ecosystem. This detail alone makes Bluesky radically different than other social networks."

– Rudy Fraser, Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space (Part 2)
"[T]houghtfully governed, medium-sized Fediverse servers are especially well positioned to offer a model of high-context, culturally sensitive online community that outperforms most interactions with centralized platform governance;

*The Fediverse’s combined emphasis on the sovereignty of local norms and a federated form of network diplomacy can offer a real and optimistic challenge to the dead end of centralized content moderation at scale"

-- Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers, Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi

Then again even if people are looking for Twitter alternatives today, that's not necessarily all they're looking for. Bluesky's focus on the big world system complements other kinds of social networks that today's Fediverse is (at it's best) quite good at.

At it's best, today's Fediverse's networked communities model combines these small- and medium-size communities with a "fairly big world" view – not as big a world as the flat space of Bluesky, and with all kinds of quirks related to federation and defederation, but still (at it's best) pretty good. Unfortunately, most people in today's Fediverse don't experience it at its best. But that's fixable! And Bluesky is likely to remain all-public space at least for a while. Today's Fediverse's scoped visibility, while imperfect, is something that doesn't exist yet in Bluesky or the ATmosphere.

Not only that, thanks to Bridgy Fed, Bluesky expands and (hopefully) improves the "fairly big world" experience for people and instances that want Bluesky as part of their fediverse – just as Threads, Flipboard, expand and (hopefully) improve the experience for people and instances who want that as their fediverses. And Bluesky's community mechanisms potentially complement current Fediverse mechanisms, so the combination could potentially get even better.

And it's important to keep in mind that microblogging is only one aspect of today's Fediverse. A lot of good stuff is happening in the fediverses! has a bunch of current examples, including DAIR Institute's Peertube page (with videos of their Data Workers Inquiry and Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 for an example of what you can find there) and The Website League, a very innovative new approach to community that's completely different than Blacksky's approach. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. Pixelfed (images) and Mobilizon (events) continue to improve. So does the "Threadiverse" (federated forums, blogs, link aggregators, and other threaded discussion). The list goes on ...

The ATmosphere is already starting to develop non-microblogging platform, and the influx of energy and talent from Brazil is likely to accelerate significantly. We'll see how things play out but it's likely that the ATmosphere will be a better platform for building "big world" social networks, with ActivityPub Fediverse software better for people who prefer a networked communities approach with a fairly big world. Time will tell.

As Michael Foster says in Brazil, Bluesky & the Fediverse, Bluesky's emergence "means we can move on to something bigger and better." Citing Molly White's We can have a different web, Foster also suggests that "Fediverse 2.0" needs to get beyond "people vs protocols" to also focus on politics. Commenting on Foster's post in Fediverso 2.0: o fenômeno político que desponta no Brasil, José Murilo writes

"It reinforces the vision we have (at the Brazilian Institute of Museums) about the importance of the Fediverse as an ideal environment for digital public policies, as well as for activism and progressive media. Not to mention the huge wave of innovation in open source technology that is emerging from the possibility of customizing the open web through specific applications of the Fediverse in protocols such as ActivityPub."

AT's big-world approach, and Bluesky's attention to onboarding, usability, and stronger controls for people to protect themselves, are a welcome breath of fresh air in the fediverses – and hopefully to the Activitypub Fediverse in particular as well.

So I for one am very glad to see Bluesky and the ATmosphere – and millions of Brazilians, Black Twitter, sex worker Twitter, and BTS ARMY – joining the fediverses.

Bem-vendos aos fediverses!

Stay tuned for more!

There's a lot more to explore here on all of these topics. The next post in the series, Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse?, goes into more detail on some of the definitional struggles about how to define "the Fediverse" that leads people to different conclusions – and ways in which Bluesky's culture does and doesn't align with "fedi culture".

After that, I'll also discuss in more why Bluesky's a better Twitter alternative for most people, the AT protocol's advantages over today's ActivityPub for building scalable big world public networks, synergies between Bluesky and today's Fediverse, power dynamics in the fediverses, anti-Blackness, and more....

To be continued!

Appendix: Terminology!

There are many fediverses

  • a fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is a decentralized social network of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers, and the people and organizations with accounts on them, that communicate through one or more protocols, bridges, and hubs.4 Participants in a fediverse can be social networks (either centralized or decentralized) in their own right; participants can also be part of multiple fediverses.
  • "the Fediverse" is a fediverse whose boundaries, culture, software, protocols, change over time. and mean different things to different people but typically include a network organization based on instances, a specific kind of server . Since 2018 or so most people have used "the Fediverse" to refer to an ActivityPub-centric fediverse, and when I use the term, that's what I'm referring to that way – but that's not the only fediverse out there!
  • "today's Fediverse" is the Fediverse as it is now, as opposed to how it was in 2016 (before Mastodon existed), late 2023 (before Threads, Flipboard, and Bridgy Fed started two-way federation), or whatever comes next.
  • "fedi culture" is a set of cultural attributes that came to the Fediverse with the 2017 Mastodon/Glitch wave (although others use it more generally as "the culture of the fediverse"). Of course if you ask different people you'll get a different list of attributes – although many long-timers include things like pro-LGBTQIA2S+, defederation, #FediBlock, dislike for algorithmic feeds, and anti-Blackness in their list. 5
  • "the fediverse" can be a synonym for "the fediverses," "today's Fediverse", "the Fediverse"; I've occasionally even seen it used as a synonym for "fedi culture"
  • "fedi" can be a synonym for "the Fediverse", "the fediverse", "fedi culture", the community aspects of the fediverse(s), or (less frequently) "the fediverses"
  • the corporate fediverse includes Meta's Threads, Flipboard, and other fediverse servers and services run by corporations
  • free fediverses (or the "free fediverse"), by contrast, are in opposition to surveillance capitalism

Others use terminology differently (and sometimes so do I, especially in older posts or when I'm quoting or responding to other what people have said). For example:

  • Lady of glitch.cat.family draws on the definition of the Web and emphasizes the overall interconnectedness by defining "The Fediverse" as "the set of servers and resources on the Internet which encode social interactions and relationships in a linked, machine-readable, open(-protocol, not necessarily public), and interoperable fashion." I tend to use "the fediverses" or "the fediverse" for this, but it's certainly an important concept!
  • in The Whiteness of Mastodon, Dr. Johnathan Flowers uses Mastodon "as a metoynym for the Fediverse," and notes that this is "in line with the documentation provided by Mastodon, which itself acknowledges the conflation of Mastodon with the Fediverse."
  • "Instances" have many names; Erin Kissane's and Darius Kazemi's Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers and many other sources refer to instances as "servers", and other terms include "service providers", or "sites" – and some software platforms have different names for their specific implementations of instances: "pods" in Diaspora, "hubs" in Hubzilla).

And while I'm using "federated" in the general computer science sense of "servers connecting over protocols," it's a term that has different meanings in different disciplines. In particular, there are analogies or references to political meanings of "federated", "federation", or "confederation." For example, here's The Website League's explanation of why they call themselves a confederation: " it's a term used to describe a system of governance composed of independent communities cooperating, as described by the concept of democratic confederalism, a libertarian socialist theory intended to provide a framework in which "minorities, religious communities, cultural groups, gender-specific groups and other societal groups" can organize themselves autonomously." Robert Gehl and Diane Zulli's discussion of "covenantal federalism" in The digital covenant: non-centralized platform governance on the Mastodon social network is another.

And other definitions of "federated" (such as Lady's above) limit it to to specific kinds of interconnections or federated structure. L. Rhodes in Federated and mediated networks and Robert W. Gehl's in Decentralization or Noncentralization, Bluesky or the Fediverse? are two other good examples of this.

If all of this seems kind of messy and confusing ... welcome to the fediverses!

Under these definitions, I think the ATmosphere is clearly a fediverse (although not everybody agrees); Bluesky is an instance in the ActivityPub Fediverse as well as part of the ATmosphere. When I first wrote this article, I also thought of Bluesky as a fediverse ... these days, I'm more on the fence about that.

Are Bluesky and the ATmosphere really decentralized and federated?

"As the question ‘Is Bluesky decentralised and federated’ is the greatest thread in the history of forums, and the discussion is still not locked by moderators after 12,239 pages of debate, it’s worth taking a step back at what these concepts are meant to accomplish."

– Laurens Hof, A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub, Fediverse Report, November 2024

In the original version of this post I said I thought it was obvious that Bluesky and the ATmosphere are decentralized ... well, it clearly isn't obvious, so I retract that part! I still think they are, but the discussion's long enough that I'm moving it to a separate post.

As for whether they're federated, I also think the answer is yes: the network architecture involves autonomous servers, run by different entities and running different software stacks. That said, in Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold says

"Overall, I think federation isn't the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward, though I also don't think it was misleading or factually incorrect to use it to date."

And in Decentralization or Noncentralization, Bluesky or the Fediverse?, Robert Gehl argues that Bluesky "will never truly be federated." Then again, in Bluesky and enshittification Cory Doctorow (despite his overall skepticism of Bluesky) notes that "Bluesky has many federated features that I find technically admirable."

So it's all messy and confusing. Welcome to the fediverses.

Is Bluesky an instance in today's Fediverse?

I think it is, and these days more and more people are agreeing with me – and with Marco. Others disagree. It depends on how you define "the Fediverse"... a topic I discuss in much more detail in Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse?

Does the answer even matter? To me, the key is to think of it in terms of many fediverses and getting away from privileging any One True Fediverse. Still, I also sometimes find it useful to consider about how meanings for Fediverse have evolved over time, for example the role of fascist fediverse instances like Gab and corporate fediverse instances like Threads. And understanding different positions on the definition of the Fediverse and in particular whether it includes Bluesky can help also highlight power dynamics and key difference of opinion that shape current and future fediverses.

Anyhow, the Fediverse means different things to different people, the boundaries are gray and blurry, its meaning constantly evolves. To me, it seems like Bluesky is indeed an instance in today's Fediverse. So to anybody on Bluesky reading this, I for one welcome you to the Fediverse as well – if you want to be part of it.

Then again if you don't want to be part of today's Fediverse, I totally respect that. My observation in Lessons (so far) from Mastodon for independent social networks is just as true today as when I first wrote it in 2017:

"the existing “fediverse” is a two-edged sword"

A note to researchers

There's a rich tradition of excellent academic and independent research in the fediverses – and a lot more interesting research to do, so I welcome you on that front as well! Hopefully the references in this article and the followup are a good starting point. These are only the tip of the iceberg, of course, and there's a lot of other valuable stuff out there. For topics related to moderation and Trust & Safety, the IFTAS Connect Library is a valuable resource in general, and includes links to various moderation-related research.

That said, not all of the research interactions with the Fediverse have been positive – see for example An Open Letter from the Mastodon community (2020) after one especially unfortunate incident. So even if your IRB says it's okay, please don't be like that or I for one will unwelcome you – and so will many others.

Roel Roscam Abbing and Robert W. Gehl's Shifting your research from X to Mastodon? Here’s what you need to know (2024) explains key differences between the Fediverse and X, and ends with several recommendations: consider studying instances, not individuals; work with instance admins, moderators, and the community at large to discover mutual research interests; and use the principle of parsimony. Gehl's Researching the Fediverse: Instances and Individuals (2024) is a good companion piece. So is "The Fediverse as an Ongoing Critique of Openness", in Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of F/LOSS (2020), coauthored by Aymeric Mansoux and Abbing.

As KatLH said in Research Ethics in the Fediverse (2020), "there is a general expectation that the minimum bar to clear should be opt in via informed consent." Consent matters, even for public posts (2024) makes a similar point, focusing on developers. Unfortunately, there is no general consent mechanism; Abbing's what does toot:indexable mean for academic research on the fediverse? (2023) looks at the best-known consent mechanism, introduced by Mastodon in release 4.2 and also adopted by several other platforms.

Bluesky, by contrast, has made it clear that (with minor exceptions other than DMs and mute lists) it's an all-public network with no expectation of privacy built around access to a firehose. Of course, as privacy scholars Daniel Solove and Woodrow Harzog note in their recent The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping and Privacy, "the public availability of scraped data shouldn’t give scrapers a free pass." Norms on Bluesky may wind up following the expectation on Twitter that it's just fine for researchers to scrape and otherwise use data (as long as your IRB approves, of course) but then again more and more people are comming around to the idea that consent matters, even for public posts.

What about posts from other Fediverse instances that are available in the Bluesky firehose thanks to Bridgy Fed and other connectors? Bridgy Fed is opt-in (and only federates public posts), so one way of looking at it is that people have affirmatively consented to Bluesky norms. Other future connectors may take a different approach so this too may well get murky ethically. We'll see how thigs evolve, but today the lines are gray and blurry. Welcome to the fediverses!

Notes

I've moved stuff around in this article, so the numbering in the main text isn't consecutive. Sorry for the confusion!

1 There are around 70 active Diaspora instances according to fediverse.party; and a handful of Gnu Social instances listed on FediDB that presumably still use OStatus. In addition, Fediverse software including Friendica, Hubzilla, micro.blog, Wordpress (which also supports Indieweb via plugins) and BridgyFed supports multiple protocols. Still, almost all of the 25,000+ instances in today's Fediverse only support ActivityPub.

2 Friendica (originally Mistpark) launched in 2010, and with its support of the DFRN, OStatus, and Diaspora protocol was the first multi-protocol fediverse server; according to FediDB, there are currently around 300 Friendica instances with 1400 active users.

As Elena Rossini's recent The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 3: Friendica) discusses, Friendica's functionality remains much richer than better-known fediverse software like Mastodon. Friendica founder Mike Macgirvin went on to create Hubzilla, (streams), and now Forte; his Nomad and Zot protocols have long supported nomadic fediverse identity, and (streams) recently added nomadic identity over ActivityPub.

2.3 In A credible threat to (and from) commercial social network silos/3, Oblomov discusss how opposition to Bluesky can also be intellectually consistent with not opposing Automattic. In the fediverse discussion that preceeded his blog post, we agreed that Automattic is a large big tech company with hundreds of millions of venture funding whose CEO is currently abusing his power by attempting to extort revenue from a company in the ecoystem (at the expense of other companies and users in the ecosystem), and Bluesky is a smaller tech company with significantly less venture funding whose CEO could at some point abuse her power at the expense of other companies and users in the ecosystem. At the same time, though, the Wordpress ecosystem is huge, and most of it isn't hosted by Automattic. In Oblomov's view, Automattic "has very limited technical means to prevent an ecosystem shift", and there's a key difference between that and Bluesky's "choke-point redesign of “decentralization”, and choice for an entirely separate protocol." So his view is that Automattic isn't a threat to the fediverse in the same way as Bluesky.

2.4 For example, Bluesky's budget has allowed them to implmenen valuable safety-related functionality that Fediverse platforms Friendica and Hubzilla implemented a decade ago with no budget, and newer platforms like Bonfire and GoToSocial who have a much smaller budget than Mastodon have also implemented, but Mastodon has never prioritized. Hmm, so maybe it's not only Bluesky's budget that let them do this, and perhaps the negativity could insteady be directed at Mastodon's Benevolent Dictator for Life for not prioritizing this ... but in practice it's often expressed as resentment about Bluesky instead. That said, Bluesky's much deeper pockets do give them an advantage here, similar to corporate fediverse platforms like Wordpress and Flipboard, and even more than Mastodon's large-by-Fediverse-standards budget gives them an advantage over other Fediverse platforms ... so I certainly get way people why people are frustrated.

2.5 The persistent belief that "Bluesky is a Jack Dorsey thing is one example of this; the frequently-repeated false claim that "Bluesky didn't have any good reason other than greed not to use ActivityPub" is another. Don't get me wrong, Dorsey is odious; even though he's no longer on the board and deleted his account, his stench lingers on. But Jay Graber has always been the CEO, and her thorough 2020 survey of Decentralized Social Networks as well as subsequent events make it clear that Bluesky had lots of good reasons not to use ActivityPub. Show some respect, dammit!

For more about the ActivityPub Fediverse's persistent racism, see Dr. Johnathan Flowers' The Whiteness of Mastodon and the links in the first paragraph of 5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people5 things

3 For that matter, my own usage of the terms has changed over time, so please keep that in mind if you read my other writing!

4 This part of the definition is originally based on Wikipedia's Fediverse page. I genericized it ("a fediverse" instead of "the fediverse"), and added "people and organizations" and "bridges and hubs."

A broader definition in terms of social media, as opposed to just social networking, would also include chat systems IRC, XMPP, and Matrix as well as email. Of course, the lines are blurry: a with my definition, a Matrix-based decentralizsed social network would be considered a fediverse.

Others might broaden the definition to include multi-protocol apps. Fediverse Report's Laurens Hof, for example, talks about "federation in the client"; Flipboard CEO's Mike McCue's perception of fediverse that I quote later in this article includes being connected to ActivityPub via apps. I don't have strong feelings either way here.

5 "fedi culture" for me includes

Your mileage may vary.

6 Erin Kissane's Blue skies over Mastodon,  Notes from a Mastodon migration, The affordance loop, and Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn't all have great perspecgtives on the reasons why so many people joining Mastodon in 2022-3 didn't have a good experience. The Whiteness of Mastodon is also vital reading here. Frustratingly, many of the problems were similar to the ones faced by newcomers in the 2016-7 surge, most of whom also didn't stay.

Lessons (so far) from Mastodon for independent social networks (May 2017) was my attempt to sum up what I had in the April 2017 wave. A few of the highlights that applied equally well to 2022:

  • Even with a stated anti-harassment focus it can still be challenging for a network to respond well when people are actually harassed.
  • Even with an explicit anti-harassment, anti-fascism, and anti-racism focus, people of color are likely to be marginalized if the most influential people are white. Other patterns that are likely to occur as well (as elsewhere online):
    — cis men are likely to prioritize anti-harassment functionality lower than women and gender-diverse people.
    — harassment is more likely to be directed at women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.
    — impacts are likely to fall most heavily on women of color, and in particular queer women of color.
  • Instance-level federation choices are an important tool for sites that want to create a safer environment (although need to be complemented by user-level control and other functionality)

7

Mastodon forks like Glitch and Hometown and other platforms like Akkoma, Misskey, and GoToSocial are signifcantly better in various ways than Mastodon, but ActivityPub's design and the current structure of the Fediverse means that they're still not great Twitter alternatives – and that's what a lot of people leaving X because of Apartheid Clyde are looking for.

7.5 The closest analogy in fediverse history is Evan Prodromou's venture-funded StatusNet. StatusNet's identi.ca was the hub of the 2008-2012 "identiverse" (the largest early fediverse for a while), and as Nathan Willis noted in StatusNet, Identi.ca, and transitioning to pump.io "StatusNet never quite reached its original goal of becoming a decentralized, multi-site platform." Then again, despite its limitations, most people (including me) regard StatusNet as decentralized; in fact, Prodromou's 2008 post on identi.ca is often cited as the first post on the Fediverse, even though the word itself didn't start getting used until 2011 or so. So time will tell just how decentralized Bluesky actually turns out to be in practice.

Update Log

Ongoing: typo and wording fixes, additional links, minor cleanups

September 5: initial "draft preview" version, titled "I for one welcome Bluesky and the ATmosphere to the fediverses!"

September 8: first published non-draft version, originally also including most of what turned into the next post in the series

September 9: added A note to researchers , moved detailed discussion of whether Bluesky's a Fediverse instance to a separate post

September 10-11: revised definitions and section on whether Bluesky is an instance based on feedback in fediverse discussions.

September 12: continued revising definitional sections, revised closing section to include Threads (and reordered)

September 17: revise Counterweight and Social Archipelego sections

October 19: Update From the Fediverse to fediverses, communities, and Social Archipelagos including describing how Blacksky puts the pieces together and mentioning of latest Twitter influx. Also, move terminology and definitional struggle bit to the end. It turns out that's not the most interesting part to most people, who could have predicted? I should probably move this to a separate post at some point.

November 2: new sections on Some people in the ActivityPub Fediverse very much do not welcome Bluesky and Are Bluesky and the ATmosphere decentralized?, add reference to quote from Evan agreeing that Bluesky is a Fediverse instance.

November 16: added Black Twitter and sex worker Twitter to the title, highlight Blacksky's role, new section on A caveat: Bluesky is very problematic in some very important ways,

November 22: update discussion of decentralization to include Christine Lemmer-Webber's perspective, retract my original position that I thought it was "obvious" that Bluesky and the ATmosphere are decentralized (although I personally still think they both are).