Great post by Ben Werdmuller about Bluesky’s popularity and the fediverse. To his list of what works well at Bluesky, I would add this: Bluesky usernames are domain names and millions of people are cool with it. I consider that a win for the IndieWeb.
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Agreed. Also a big improvement on the way Mastodon completely missed the mark with the opaque duo of silly username and "pick your server".
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That's a great piece by Ben. As it happens I wrote about it as well torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/is-bluesk...
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@manton — Do you find it weird that they’re domain names but you can’t put them in a browser? I find the same thing with Fedi usernames too. Has me thinking that everyone should get a personal DNS to map usernames to actual URLs.
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@manton great post. I feel similarly where I like Mastodons model better and I think the fediverse is a great base to build a bunch of different platforms that all connect but Bluesky is more user friendly and is seeing a lot of adoption.
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@paulca Yes, ideally all Bluesky usernames would work in a browser too, either to load your profile or as a blog with mostly the same content (which is what I do). Even if we’re not there yet, it’s still possible, whereas with email-style usernames it can never work.
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@manton — Yeah, exactly. I actually hacked up a little Rails app to put at paulca.com to play with some federation stuff (it's just a nothing proof-of-concept right now)
I did get to thinking that links link https://paul@paulca.com do actually work ... it would be possible to intercept the username there via basic auth and redirect it to paulca.com/@paul ... Actually I kinda want to do that now...
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@paulca That is clever! I guess the problem is that without the https, if you just paste the username in, browsers are probably going to do a search instead of trying to load it. But I like this experiment a lot.
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@manton Worked locally, but not when I deployed. I wonder if it's something to do with SSL.
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@manton — Yeah, but I guess if you managed to convince folks to adopt it, it could become a standard.
I think ActivtityPub handles are silly because they're “email addresses associated with a feed”, and BlueSky ones are silly because they’re "domain names associated with a person”, and neither are bloody URLs that you can just click 🤣
I'll noodle a bit more to see if i can get it to work.
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@manton Seems to work on Firefox, but not on Safari or Chrome https://paul@paulca.com
I was testing locally on Firefox, so maybe there's a way to get it to work on the other browsers too.
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@manton — Looks like it's a great big mess https://danq.me/2021/09/07/http-basic-auth-urls/
Makes me think that the solution is petitioning for some new kind of URL that links to a handle rather than a website.
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@paulca There was a suggestion for something like a fediverse:// scheme, but I think the best solution is to move away from email-style handles. Bluesky's hostnames are much better.
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@manton — Do you think that's viable this far down the road with Mastodon?
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@paulca To clarify, I don't think migration of all accounts is feasible, but domain-name handles could be added as an option. ActivityPub supports it. Fediverse software that hasn't been updated might get a shorthand like "_" for the username part, for compatibility.
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@manton — Oh, that would be an elegant workaround. An optional migration makes total sense. Almost feels like moving from @paulca.bsky.social to @paulca.com ... not exactly the same, but similar enough.
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