Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
Personally I wish there was a better way to link multiple accounts together to say they’re the same person. When I switched to hosting my own instance, I basically just abandoned my old account, but I would have loved to link them to have the history there.
We have the technology, it could be as simple as SSH keys, or like how bitcoin wallets are unique and don’t require internet to verify a match.
Edit: I actually just discovered that this is one of the main feature differences between ActivityPub and BlueSky’s AT Protocol. BlueSky has “account portability”, and now that you can self-host it, I’m seriously considering setting it up. It would be really nice if we get an update that lets the protocols federate with each other. I think that BlueSky has said they intend to support ActivityPub federation in the future.
ActivityPub actually has a similar mechanism of a “Move” activity. There are just very few implementations that support that kind of thing.
The main problem with that seems to be that the original server needs to be active to migrate. If the instance I’m on shuts down or is uncooperative, then my account history is gone. And for Mastodon, that’s even worse if you have a bunch of followers. These are all reasons I decided to self-host before I built up too much of a presence.
Right, of course. I don’t really see any way any protocol can get around that though. If the original server is suddenly just gone, there is no way to tell it to move your account elsewhere. Hopefully such a situation should happen very rarely though.
Supposedly BlueSky has solved this by separating the data storage servers from the “relays” and “app view” servers, and since your account’s posts are cryptographically signed, they can come from any instance as long as the signature matches.
That at least covers migrating followers and new posts, but I’m not really sure what would happen to old posts if a data server just went offline. I’ve still got more reading to do.