With Bluesky’s apparent rise after the elections, I’ve heard a lot of criticism about Bluesky on the Fediverse. I’m starting to feel the Mastodon vs Bluesky war is a new standards war, one that is analogous to the cellular standards war.
While Gen Z readers are used to LTE and 5G phones which is based off the historically more popular GSM branch, there was another cellular technology CDMA which was a fierce rival and chosen by carriers like Verizon pre-4G days.
The Fediverse (Mastodon, Threads, et al.) is GSM: the open, Europe-centric social media protocol. In many ways, it’s clunky but it also has a big ecosystem. There are many client and server implementations.
Instead of using Mastodon-proper, I self-host via Akkoma. Heck, the reason why I didn’t join Threads is because I (hope I) could just use self-hosted Akkoma to reach Threads users. And if you don’t want to self-host, you can join a public server like mastodon.online or hachyderm.io or any other server, the way (outside of carrier locked phones) you could take your GSM phone almost anyehere.
Bluesky is CDMA: the so-called “open”, centralized American social network protocol controlled by one company. CDMA was controlled by Qualcomm the way Bluesky is controlled by Bluesky itself. A lot of “normies” who rejected Mastodon have joined Bluesky, but that is analogous to CDMA having better radio tech than GSM and CDMA being historically more popular in the US.
Many of us know Bluesky originated from Twitter which I feel is like CDMA being backwards compatible with AMPS cellular networks making it an easier fit for people who grew up on Twitter (or for carriers AMPS), but good luck trying to move your AMPS/CDMA phone to a competitor.
There were also other platforms, the way I like to see it is:
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Twitter/X is AMPS: the first-generation, corporate but rather shitty platform/technology. Once upon a time it was your only real option, but will eventually die.
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Nostr is WiMAX: a rather obscure but truly decentralized technology without much of an ecosystem, the way WiMAX was internet-centric as opposed to telephone-centric yet failed.
There is still a difference between cellular tech and social media protocols: I grew up with CDMA phones and could still call and text my dad who got a GSM phone from work. Mastodon users cannot directly see Bluesky users’ posts without a bridge.
But with cellular protocols the lowest common demoninator is the PSTN which standardized phone calls. IP doesn’t specify how higher-level protocols should work which is why Mastodon and Bluesky are incompatible. This is also how we also had Gopher vs HTTP, even when HTTP eventually won.
That’s not to say that Bluesky can’t win, after all ATM networks lost to IP and Ethernet, or cloud computing is mostly in the domain of Big Tech despite the best efforts of OpenStack. It could also be like Linux vs BSD where despite the fact that Linux “won” BSD never died, and maybe Bluesky will become the major platform while the Fediverse is a niche technology.