Mastodon, bluesky and the blue bird
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of —annoying— noise about the little blue bird (which is no longer a bird, nor blue), the blue butterfly (Bluesky, I guess), and the Mastodon.
Sure, every now and then, I open my Twitter account in a tab and take a quick look. I sometimes get that feeling of missing certain profiles that are still active over there, writing and feeding the X. But then, with the ads, the algorithm, and all that visual noise cluttering the timeline, the feeling goes away.
Yesterday, I was tempted to create a Bluesky account. In fact, I ended up making one because reasons, but I have so many doubts that I don’t see myself going back to it. From what I’ve read, the project started as an idea by Twitter (ouch1) to create a public conversation protocol (AT Protocol, nothing to do with ActivityPub, ouch2), Open Source, and with the possibility to build both the server and the app, but the instructions are not so clear (ouch3). Tsk…
«A bird and a butterfly were arguing about who could fly higher and who had the best view of the sky. The bird insisted its flight was fast and precise, while the butterfly bragged about its beauty and grace as it glided through the clouds. Suddenly, an elephant appeared, walking calmly on the ground, and said: “Keep arguing up there, while I already have my feet firmly planted on what really matters."»
I don’t know, maybe it’s just that I’m getting older, or maybe I’ve already mastered using and managing a Mastodon instance —which, by the way, still has plenty of room for optimization and resource improvements— or maybe it’s that I’ve already built my bubble and I just don’t feel like starting over. But for now, I’d rather keep my feet on the ground.
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2024-10-23 Update — After a chat with @juanlu and reading here and there about ATProto, I’ve decided to host my own PDS and give it a try. My initial strictly technical impressions are overwhelming—1GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space are more than enough to get it running. However, it’s tricky to make it work within a Proxmox environment while routing through nginx-proxy-manager. I’d recommend running it with its own dedicated IP.