@cwebber The bluesky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As sunlight enters Earth's atmosphere, it collides with gas molecules that scatter shorter wavelengths (blue and violet) in all directions more than longer wavelengths (red and yellow). Although violet scatters most, the sky appears blue because the Sun emits less violet light and human eyes are more sensitive to blue.

When the light scatters, it federates social media posts.

@cwebber I think you have it backwards...

Mastodon is the protocol (specifically, it's a decentralized blockchain protocol), and Bluesky is just a Layer-2 dApp built on top of it. The underlying tech you're trying to reference is ATProto, which actually stands for Asynchronous Token Protocol.

It’s honestly a pretty elegant stack if you actually understand distributed systems, but I get why someone would be confused by the nomenclature.

To really wrap your head around this, you need to stop thinking about it like a social network and start thinking about it as a fungible data layer.

@cwebber well, when a personal data server, an activitypub actor, and a JSON document love each other very much, sometimes they form a polycule

@cwebber talked about it already, bluesky chat is just like email, but centralized

@cwebber so first you need at least 3 teapots in series

@cwebber I think it works by bouncing signals from your computer off of the atmosphere (hence the name "blue sky" it can only work well in clear weather). If it's cloudy it instead saves your messages in the clouds until the weather becomes clear, that's why we call it cloud storage.

@cwebber 😄

@cwebber oh dear.. `w;7[)

@cwebber

Well, first of all, you need a pigeon who is from some place near the recipient's house. You take your tweet and attach it to the bird's leg and let it go, and it flies across the blue sky towards home, where it knows it can find food. There it joins its home feed and the message is received.

Be sure to trade a few pigeons with your friends whenever you go calling, so you can keep using the blue sky protocol.

@cwebber it’s kind of like email, but for social media

@cwebber It's like, when you go outside and the sun beams messages straight into your brain. Except there is only one sun and it is owned by corporations, just like in the real world.