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Is Bluesky part of today's Fediverse?

It depends on how you define "the Fediverse"

Jon

• 14 min read
Is Bluesky part of today's Fediverse?
Join the discussion on Bluesky and infosec.exchange!
"the Fediverse" is a fediverse whose boundaries, culture, software, protocols, and over time and means different things to different people but typically include a network organization based on instances ....

But is Bluesky an instance in today's Fediverse? It depends on how you define "the Fediverse"... a topic I'll discuss in much more detail in the next post in this series.

– I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!, September 9
Note: I originally included this in the first post in the series ... but decided it makes more sense as a separate post. Because of the footnote numbering is a bit strange. Sorry about that!

Fediverses are often defined by their protocols, and the AT-centric ATmosphere (a term coined by Shreyan Jain) fits very much into this tradition. That's also how some define the Fediverse. Sean Tilley's September 2017 A quick guide to The Free Network, for example, defines the Fediverse in terms of the OStatus protocol and contrasts it with the Federation (the Diaspora protocol) and the ActivityWeb (ActivityPub).

The Fediverse has always supported multiple protocols6, so while protocol-specific definitions can be useful, they're not the only way to look at it. Leonora Tindall's The Fediverse is Already Dead (March 2023), for example, defines the Fediverse in multiple ways including as "a place, with a culture" and an ideoform: "a very particular way of thinking about federated social media that encompasses technical, social, cultural, and mythical elements".

But before we talk about the Fediverse, let's talk about a few other interesting fediverses, and look at how they're defined.

  • the "freeze peach" fediverse is made up of "servers whose anti-authoritarian operators take a principled stance on freedom of expression" (ideologically-defined) and filled with harassers and racists and TERFs and channers who endlessly whine about how they're just engaging in their stereotypically over-simplistic definition of "free speech" (cultural).7 Nostr fits in well with the freeze peach fediverse.8
  • the Threadiverse is built around "a topic-centric model of content representation" (structural) and is made up of forums, link aggregators, blogs with comments, and other threaded discussion groups (functionality-define).9
  • the corporate fediverse includes Meta's Threads, Flipboard, and other fediverse servers run by corporations (a governance-based distinction(ownership).
  • jonny saunders talks about "olde fedi" as "fedi as she was, fedi as we wish she was, fedi that we're glad she aint anymore" (poetic and mythical)
  • the free fediverse is defined in opposition to surveillance capitalism (an political definition)

As Marco Rogers says, it's messy and the lines are gray and blurry. Flipboard and Meta's Threads are clearly in the corporate fediverse – and, at least in my books, so is Bluesky.9 But what about corporate-owned Mastodon instances like bbc.social, me.dm, and vivaldi.net ? For that matter, what about mastodon.social, owned by Mastodon gGmbH (which lost its non-profit status in April but hopes to regain it)? Good questions. Opinions differ.

Is BlackSky – whose creator Rudy Fraser describes its goal and vision and purpose as "to de-center whiteness as the default and to provide a space for Black folk to discuss the Black everyday in a way that feels affirming" – a fediverse within Bluesky? It matches the definiton for "a fediverse" in the previous post – "a decentralized social network of interconnected servers, and the people and organizations with accounts on them" (see A sophisticated exercise in Blackness for more on BlackSky's decentralized architecture), so it certainly could be. So could Oliphant's recent proposal of "island networks", opt-in federated networks whose all federate with each other, or other concentric federations of instances.

Then again, maybe it's not useful to think of BlackSky et al as fediverses ... or maybe it's not useful today but once somebody connects them via bridges to other fediverses it will be. Time will tell!

Definitions of "the Fediverse"

"In recent years, in the context of sustained criticism and general fatigue that surrounds large-scale corporate social media platforms, the desire to build alternatives has grown stronger.... These projects introduce themselves by emphasizing what makes them distinct from corporate social media, whether it is their ethics, their organizational structure, their underlying technologies, their features, their source code access, or the special interest communities they seek to support..... These platforms are colloquially known as the ‘Fediverse’, a portmanteau of ‘federation’ and ‘universe’. "

– Aymeric Mansoux and Roel Roscam Abbing Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of F/LOSS (2020)
"For me the Fediverse has to include all social media apps and protocols as long as they have some way to communicate with each other."

-- Gnu social co-creator Dr. Matt Lee

Like I said, sometimes it's very useful to take a protocol-centric view of "the Fediverse." Tilley's 2017 article, for example, is key background for understainding Mastodon's adoption, non-standard extensions to, and then abandonment of the old OStatus protocol as a classic embrace, extend, and extinguish maneuver. It is very hard to talk about that (or Mastodon's ongoing dominance thanks in part to its partial adoption and non-standard extensions to ActivityPub) without centering protocols! Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta’s plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the Fediverse (December 2023) similarly takes a protocol focus.

But the Fediverse is also frequently defined without centering protocols – especially since it's always been multiple-protocol. Seven Theses is a great example. As well as the excerpt above, it discusses several of the Fediverse's characteristics, also including its ongoing critique of openness, its possibilities as a site for agonistic pluralism (or perhaps bastard agonism through pillarization"), and a way out of data sharecropping and free labor. And while it does mention protocols, it doesn't use them to limit the Fediverse. Instead, it describes ActivityPub as "one of the most popular and most discussed protocols of the Fediverse".

Some other examples:

Some non-protocol definitions are intentionally much vaguer, such as Allie Hart's 'large, nebulous social-media network colloquially known as “the fediverse”' (Mourning Mastodon, 2017) and EFF's "expanding ecosystem of interconnected social media sites and services that let people interact with each other no matter which one of these sites and services they have an account with" (The Fediverse Could Be Awesome (If We Don’t Screw It Up), November 2022).

Today's Fediverse as a whole certainly is nebulous and an ecosystem, but doesn't align particularly well with some of these other non-protocol descriptions. For example, today's Fediverse is generally seen as including the corporate fediverse, and Flipboard is a corporate social network run by a public company that doesn't release its code open-source. Threads is by Meta, whose businesses on Facebook and Meta is built on data sharecropping and free labor and lawbreaking and hate for LGBTQIA2S+ people, and don't even get me started on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta's "ethics"

Still, just because today's Fediverse is generally seen as including the corporate fediverse, things could change. It might turns out there's not as much money to be made from the Fediverse as everybody hopes, or Meta finds it more expedient to describe their decentralized approach in terms of the "open social web" or some other bland marketing-speak and the tech press goes along with it. Time will tell.

Is Bluesky an instance in today's Fediverse?

The Fediverse is a network-of-networks, where each instance is potentially a network. So even though Bluesky as a fediverse doesn't have an instance structure, Bluesky as a whole – the PDSs, Relays, AppViews, Labelers, and Feed Generators in the Bluesky fediverse – functions as an instance.

But is Bluesky an instances in today's Fediverse? I'd say yes:

  • Bridgy Fed and Friendica (which understand AT as well as ActivityPub) allows two-way communication with people on other instances in today's Fediverse
  • While Bluesky doesn't align particularly well with some of the non-protocol definitions of the Fediverse in the previous section, neither do many instances currently part of today's Fediverse.

Most obviously, Bluesky's a corporate social network. But so are Flipboard and Meta's Threads (and for that matter so was StatusNet back in 2009).

Still, there's the Fediverse most people talk about today, and the Fediverse we want to have. So I'm also sympathetic to people whose definitions of the Fediverse excludes Threads, Flipboard, and the rest of the corporate fediverse as well as Bluesky. Reasonable minds differ.

Opinions also differ among people with a protocol-centric definition of the Fediverse

  • People who focus on the Fediverse's long history of being defined in terms of multiple platforms don't Bluesky's use of AT as a reason to exclude them.
  • People who take an ActivityPub-centric view of today's Fediverse, and see bridging like BridgeFed and/or non-Mastodon platforms like Friendica as valid connectivity, include Bluesky.
  • People who take a ActivityPub-only view and don't see bridging and/or non-Mastodon platforms like Friendica as valid connectivity exclude Bluesky

Why choose a narrow, gatekeeping, ahistorical ActivityPub-only definition of the Fediverse?

"In my view the fediverse is the network of platforms that speak ActivityPub. Anything else dilutes the usefulness of the term, because no matter how federated XMPP or Diaspora are, I can't communicate with them directly from a Pixelfed account like I can with Mastodon or Misskey."

– Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, responding to Marco, February 2024

It's worth looking a little more at the ActivityPub-only (and bridges don't count) protocol-centric definitino that excludes Bluesky. Eugen's not the only one who has this perspective. Fediverse influencer Evan Prodromou (one of the five co-authors of the ActivityPub spec, author of an upcoming book on ActivityPub, and co-lead of an Ethereum Project-funded project to implement end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub) agreed with Eugen in Marco's thread. In 2023, Evan similarly argued anybody working on brand new protocols "should stop immediately. They are going to do more harm than good" and added "Blue Sky in particular is a bad project."

I get it. Many ActivityPub loyalists remain resentful that after considering ActivityPub, Bluesky went on to develop its own protocol AT. By contrast, Meta endorsed ActivityPub's value as platform for its new surveillance capitalism platform Threads, and Eugen described it as a "huge victory for our cause". But while I'm sympathetic to people who prefer a values-based definition of the Fediverse that excludes Bluesky and the rest of the corporate fediverse ... I personally have far less patience for a gatekeeping, ahistorical, ActivityPub-only argument for excluding Bluesky. They decided ActivityPub wasn't the best choice for them. Get over it already!

Oh well. If Evan and Eugen want to choose a definition of Fediverse where history stopped with Mastodon's 2017 adoption of ActivityPub, erases earlier Fediverse history, and ties the Fediverse's success to a protocol that has major issues and hasn't moved forward significantly since it was standardized in 2018, they can do that.

"The Fediverse" means different things to different people.

Bluesky feels like a part of today's Fediverse (at least to me)

More subjectively, I've spent a lot of time on different instances in today's Fediverse running a variety of software10 ... and Bluesky feels a lot like the Fediverse to me. Bluesky's culture certainly isn't fully aligned with "fedi culture', the set of cultural attributes that came to the fediverse with the 2017 Mastodon/Glitch wave, but then neither is the culture on other platforms people certainly think as part of the Fediverse. For example, Bluesky's all-public approach clashes is the expectation of consent that many people (including me) associate with fedi – but Lemmy is also an all-public environment.

Then again, Bluesky does have some very fedi-like aspects. For one thing, there's combination of very visible LGBTQIA2S+ posters and an overall pro-LGBTQIA2S+ vibe with anti-LGBTQIA2S+ bigotry, transmisogyny, transmisogynoir, transmisandry, and tensions within LGBTQIA2S+ communities. Bluesky doesn't have defederation (yet) or #FediBLock or shared intsance blocklists but it does have labelers and blocklists for individuals ... and I gotta say, the weeks-long drama surrounding the Aegis labeler's meltdown a few months ago was very fedi. Also there's lots of anti-Blackness on Bluesky, and plenty of reply guys. so Fediverse folks should feel right at home!

There's also a shared sense that we've got an opportunity to learn from the mistak es of Twitter – including its centralization, and all the power that conveyed to Jack Dorsey and his soulmate Apartheid Clyde. Just like on many Mastodon, Glitch, Hometown, and Akkoma Fediverse instances, the vibe on Bluesky has a combination of relief and happiness at not having to deal with the horrible parts of Twitter, determination not to recreate the problems ... but also old habits dying hard (and irritating people reappering) that lead to some of the same problems being recreated. And there's got a very similar sense of loss for the (intermittently) wonderful aspects of Twitter that aren't yet recreated and may never be ... and possibilities of creating something new and better. Which doesn't mean it will happen, of course, but it might!

Cultural aspects aside, my Bluesky account can follow, boost, like, and have a two-way conversation with the Nexus of Privacy's Mastodon account – and with any other Mastodon account that's opted in to Bridgy Fed can follow, boost, and reply to my Bluesky account. Sure, it's not perfect: longer Fediverse posts get truncated on Bluesky; editing a Mastodon post doesn't update the bridged post on Bluesky. Then again communication between other fediverse software is also often very janky and imperfect, so even the imperfections are very reminiscent of my other Fediverse experiences. And, apps like SoraSNS let me access my Bluesky, Mastodon, and Sharkey timelines – a great example of what Laurens Hof of Fediverse Report calls "federation in the client".

Again, these are all subjective, so your mileage may vary. But subjective perspectives can be useful, and at least to me, Bluesky feels like the Fediverse that I thought it was worth discussing.

Stay tuned for more!

"But whether or not you see Bluesky as part of the Fediverse, the waves of BTS Army and Brazilians joining Bluesky and the ATmosphere over the summer highlight that the (Mastodon-centric) Fediverse as we knew it for so many years is over."

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

There's still a lot more to talk about, including synergies between Bluesky and the rest of the Fediverse – or between Bluesky and the Fediverse if you see it that way. It's also worth going into AT's architecture more deeply and looking at the possibilities of the ATmosphere. So stay tuned!

Here's a couple of excerpts from drafts of upcoming posts in the series to whet your appetite.

And it's not just that AT is much much simpler for people developing new public decentralized social networks than ActivityPub. AT's architecture – which splits the ActivityPub-style instances into multiple components, and adds some new ones – also has some clear improvements over today's ActivityPub for creating public "big world" social networks.

Of course, these issues can conceivably be addressed in ActivityPub-based systems.11 As a result, many in the Fedierse characterize Bluesky's decision to develop their own protocol (as opposed to Meta's approach of exploiting the existing ActivityPub protocol) might just be not-invented-here syndrome, and/or or a greedy corporation looking for a different way to control the ecosystem.

Still, AT clearly already has a lot of advantages over ActivityPub for building scalable public social media platforms. And while AT has some big open questions – including whether it will ever move beyond its current all-public focus or domination by Bluesky – it can evolve too!

Bluesky's rise also needs to be considered in conjunction with Meta's plans to Embrace, Extend, and Exploit the Fediverse with Threads. Bluesky is a useful counterweight to Threads highlights that new people looking for a Twitter alternative joining Bluesky is a much better outcome than them jioning Mastodon, having a bad experience, and going to Threads. And with Threads' representatives now on the W3C ActivityPub SWICG standards group, there's a lot to be said for the existence of an alternate protocol that Meta will have a harder time influencing.

At the same time, Bluesky also complements some of the positive impacts that Meta's arrival has had on the fediverses. Most obviously, just as Threads' federation creates opportunities for people in the Fediverse to follow journaists, entertainers, politicans, athletes, and celebrities who have accounts there, the wave of people joining Bluesky creates similar opportunities. With Flipboard also providing access to thousands of media organizations and curated magazines, it's now much easier for people to use Mastodon or GoToSocial to plug into the cultural or political zeitgeist. Of course, not everybody wants to do that, but it's a big attraction for those who do.

Notes

6 Many people don't realize this, but it's true. Wikipedia's Fediverse page lists multiple protocols, and includes Imke Senst and Mike Kuketz's diagram A view of the Fediverse (2023) which lists DFRN, Zot, and Diaspora along with ActivityPub. DDFON's Federated SNS (Fediverse) Historial Timeline also lists multiple protocols. Aymeric Mansoux and Roel Roscam Abbing's Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of F/LOSS (2020) talks about "fediverse protocols", plural. fediverse.party and fediverse.observer both include Diaspora, ; FediDB did as well until spring 2023.

7 The Receipts section of Seirdy's Blocklist Page have summaires of and links to examples of this "freeze peach" on the worst-of-the-worst of these instances. They're the kind of places Jack Dorsey would approve of!

Derek Caelin 's Decentralized Networks vs The Trolls (2022) and the Gab section of Mastodon: a (partial) history discuss the Fediverse's 2019 encounter with a far-right freeze peach social network. The community reacted strongly, and Gab was quickly isolated. As Pixelfed's lead developer Daniel Supernault said at the time, "Fascists and Nazis can h*ck right off and are NOT welcome on our platform." Yay Fediverse!

But other Fediverse platforms are more welcoming. Alex Gleason's Soapbox, for example, is used by Truth Social, and is also popular with "freeze peach" fedivere instances like the spinster.xyz, run by Gleason and his partner, well-known "gender-critical" feminist (aka TERF) M.K. Fain, Gleason – former head of engineering at Donald Trump's Truth Social and a "gender-critical" TERF – was kicked off the Pleroma project back in the day, but like the proverbial federated bad penny keeps turning up, most recently implementing the Mostr bridge and Ditto, both of which link ActivityPub to Nostr.

8 Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is a fediverse too, also initially funded by the odious Jack Dorsey, who now sees it as more in keeping with his vision than Bluesky, and is designed to make it impossible to ban fascists, racists, and TERFs (or anybody else). Shreyan Jain's Nostr and ATProto is an interesting look at similarities and differences between these two projects.

Nostr's pseudonmyous founder fiatjaf's profile tag line is "leftism is a virus." In On Nostr, fascism, and the ability to build an inclusive digital space, Nos founder Evan Henshaw-Plath's optimistically suggests that a protocol designed by somebody who supports fascists is a good platform for a "user-first" approach. Color me skeptical.

So I for one do not welcome Nostr to the fediverses ... but others, unsurprisingly, do. Conspirador Norteño's Federation and political spam, lookis at how fascist political spam originating on Nostr travelled through the Mostr bridge through the Fediverse to Bluesky. Good times.

9 FrontPage.fyi, an AT-based link aggregator, isn't considered part of the Threadiverse today ... but if somebody bridges it to current Fediverse ink aggregators like Lemmy or Piefed, maybe it will be.

10 What about the ATmosphere? Today, it seems like a corporate fediverse to me: Bluesky's by far the largest player, Bluesky PBLLC controls the AT protocol, and other ATmosphere social networks FrontPage rely on Bluesky's services. That could change over time. Venture-funded StatusNet was dominant in 2009's identiverse, and defined the OStatus protocol that dominated the early Fediverse, but the 2013-2016 Gnu social Fediverse (which also used OStatus) wasn't a corporate fediverse. So it'll be interesting to see how the ATmosphere evolves.

11 Mike Macgirvin recently implemented nomadic identity over ActivityPub in (streams), and the LOLA working group working on data portability has made progress this year. Small-to-medium instances in today's fediverse rely on relays (although unlike AT Relays, ActivityPub relays currently require storing everythig locally so you better have a lot of disk space). Flipboard and Newsmast are doing some interesting work here with custom feeds.