Seriously i have zero idea what is going on with bluesky. I never used it. Why are people saying it’s centralised? I also heard that a lot of people are joining it.
It’s corporate social media.
You’ll get ads. You’ll get your privacy invaded. You’ll have an algorithm pushing content toward you. Eventually, they’ll open the floodgates to fascists because pissing you off keeps your eyes glued to ads.
BUT, it’s also familiar, and that’s more important to people than having to do leg work, though personally I prefer Mastodon and it’s really not that hard to use once you’ve spent a few days there and gotten used to it.
Yep i like mastodon. I’ll stick with it surely for long.
Isn’t it Twitter before musk?
I remember the olden days when people said Twitter was shit and it wasn’t intentionally bad.
Nothing is wrong with it. Fediverse bros are just salty that it’s getting all the traffic instead of mastodon.
I disagree with saying there’s nothing wrong with it, just as I would disagree that there was nothing wrong with the original Twitter. It is creating conditions which lead it towards for-profit behaviour which will end up hurting users, unlike some other platforms which are not run for-profit.
This is a far-reaching difference with real societal impacts if the platform becomes dominant, not just some difference in taste that can be hand-waved away as nothing.
I mean, as long as Twitter goes down, who exactly gets to do the killing blow among all the individual blows doesn’t truly matter now, does it?
It absolutely does. What happened to twitter could happen to a successor. The successor matters.
Sure, but as you cannot know the future, it’s a bit tricky to pick a successor you want to support based on that, instead of absolutely right-now-essential things such as “Where people actually are”.
It’s also important to keep in mind how long Twitter’s run was: It was originally founded 18 years ago. I’d be okay if every 10-15 years I have to get a new Twitter, tbh. I buy a new phone every 4-5 years, a new car every 15-20, I’m alright. It’s cheap to go onto a new Twitter, I’m far less resistant to change with that.
That is to say: Sure, maaaybe (again, can’t truly know) Mastodon is superior on a technical level. But not only is that absolutely not how social media operates, and second it really doesn’t matter if a sucessor also goes down in 10+ years. People won’t be able to care any less if a successor lasts that long, and considering how quickly Mastodon has turned into a semi-ghost-town once Bluesky got big, I kinda know what I’d put my money onto.
Of course all of this ignores a central problem with the entire category of services: They don’t conduct conversations well, even stuff like Misskey or Mastodon.
Xitter wont die, it will just become even more of a far-right bubble for fake news and manipulation without resistance, just like Elon wants it to be.
Trump will close his own shit down again or rebrand it to Truth X? 🤣
Imo the fediverse should stay away from the Twitter format, following people is not a good way to do social media.
what? so there’s nothing wrong with centralized commercial services? please explain what’s good about ANY centralized commercial service.
Nothing is wrong with it as long as everyone realizes that it isn’t really resistant to enshittification as the network stands now and isn’t meaningfully federated or decentralized yet
Nothing is “wrong” with it. Its just a different platform.
The “problem” is that its just a different platform. Nothing is really different. It’s like choosing Pepsi over Coke. Its a choice and maybe one is flavored more to your liking, but they are both full of the same ingredients and unhealthy with continual ingestion.
I haven’t used it either, because I didn’t like Twitter or X. Today I suspect Bsky is fine, because it hasn’t been around long enough to become toxic or to censor discussions etc… Just give it time, it will get there.
The issue most people are bringing up is that there are “better” platforms (i.e. fediverse) that aren’t getting any traffic instead.
I can understand this, but the flip side is that the voices promoting the fediverse usually arent very compelling either in voice or ease. Think of it like somebody wanting to buy a PC. One person says to get Linux (and arch of course) because it’s the best and you’re a fool to get anything else. Here, take it and figure it out. Another person says to get a Mac, because it can do everything you need it to do, easily and without work, plus has added features you didn’t even think about that seem useful to your life. And if you get stuck they have a genius bar to assist. So people choose Mac. Similarly people are choosing Bsky because it’s easy and straightforward.
I disagree with saying there’s nothing wrong with it, just as I would disagree that there was nothing wrong with the original Twitter. It is creating conditions which lead it towards for-profit behaviour which will end up hurting users, unlike some other platforms which are not run for-profit.
This is a far-reaching difference with real societal impacts if the platform becomes dominant, not just some difference in taste that can be hand-waved away as nothing.
I get that, and I’m sort of saying that. The only difference is that I’m not calling for profit businesses wrong. In agree that its a non sustainable model for social media from the users perspective, but it’s a very sustainable model from the company perspective.
But that’s why I choose differently now. And others might choose differently when the platform gets to be in a poor state.
The key here is I can’t make that decision for others. Now or later. If you want people to go to another platform, then build a better platform and market it better.
it’s microblogging
I never used Twitter personally, only exposed thru osmosis, so a reboot is very underwhelming. Seems perfect for somebody.
Complians about microblogging
Comment doesn’t actually answer the thread question
Try it out, it seems like you might like it!
The problem I see with BlueSky is, what’s the difference between Bluesky and Twitter?
Did any learning take place? “Okay, clean sheet design, let’s do it again but better this time” what did they do to keep Bluesky from going the exact same direction Twitter did?
I’ve been using it a couple of weeks and loving it. It’s just the way Twitter used to be - fun, quality content, from the people you choose to follow.
No algorithm trying to feed you recommendations. No paid-for blue ticks. No hate-filled bile being ignored or endorsed by those in charge. If someone’s trolling you block/report them and they’re gone, just like that.
At the moment it’s more or less everything Twitter should be. It may or may not last, but for the moment it’s great.
The moderation and blocking on BlueSky set it apart from Twitter.
It doesn’t promote and endorse literal Nazis. Why y’all pretending like this isn’t a big difference?
Yet.
It’s a commercial platform, it’s going to enshittify because that’s what commercial platforms do.
Yeah let’s not confuse that for openly promoting and endorsing Nazis okay?
“Less nazi than Twitter for the next few months” isn’t good enough for me to adopt it. I’m not going to board a doomed ship.
Let me be perfectly clear here: Fuck Elon Musk right in the aorta. I am NOT endorsing Twitter here. What I’m mostly doing is endorsing abandoning both microblogging and commercial for-profit social media as concepts.
Bluesky is gonna get worse. They’re in attract mode right now just like any tech startup; they’re burning venture capital money operating at a loss in too good to be true mode to gather users and when they hit a certain adoption rate or simultaneous active user base all the shit Twitter and Threads do is gonna get turned on.
“It’s got moderation.” It’s got thought police in potentia. Either they’re going to start using their moderation systems as a political cudgel or they’re going to start letting scammers and shit through because they profit from the traffic whatever that traffic is. You won’t be able to say the word “poop” but commercials for anorexia pills will make it through to teenagers. Can you name a commercial platform that didn’t eventually do one or both of those? The only one I can think of that didn’t just die young was MySpace, which continued to exist into its irrelevancy.
I foresee a cycle of instability that goes something like “New platform just dropped, it’s like Facebook but it isn’t Facebook. It’s like Facebook used to be before algorithms fucked it up.” Early adopters join it, there’s a period where you still have to have Facebook because three of your friends whose ability to understand things doesn’t work won’t make the switch, eventually people leave those friends, everyone is standardized on the new thing, new thing does exactly what Facebook did, it fucks the world up again, “New platform just dropped, it’s like Screechbox but isn’t Screechbox, it’s like Screechbox before algorithms fucked it up.”
I’m kicking that in the head right now.
The problem is mostly that people see that as a natural progression of the free market, so they’re okay with it. That, and/or they’re totally blind to the fact that people like musk are symptomatic of a deeper problem with the system at work here. Myspace, early internet forums, any form of less explicitly centralized internet, those get blamed for not being “good enough” as a platform, compared to these other, more “successful” ventures, which inevitably use spam to make money or attract nazis to bolster their userbase in a short term bargain. It doesn’t matter to your average user that those platforms fell apart explicitly because larger market actors all swam around them like pirahnas and blasted them with spam and bots and all that shit in order to explicitly tear them apart and try to make a quick buck off of their shit.
In the market, that’s seen as a you problem, as a personal failing, if you can’t avoid that, or if you’re not willing to play along with that. That’s the average person’s view of any previous platform. These platforms rise and fall like, almost every decade or so at this point, more at the onset, obviously. People don’t have enough of a long term memory to remember why the last platform died and how it followed the exact same trajectory as the current thing.
You people are fucking insane. You act like what the Muskrat is doing is normal and inevitable. No, a billionaire owner of a website losing his mind acting like an infant and going online publicly promoting and endorsing Nazis it’s not the norm. It’s not the inevitable Next Step.
How many ethnic cleansings has Facebook been instrumental in? I can think of at least one in Myanmar.
Large commercial platforms being absolutely evil is NOT unique to Twitter. Again I challenge you to name me a large social media platform that didn’t either rot into a wasteland of scam bots or start committing atrocities.
Very bad people own almost everything and their solution to any rising star is to buy and ruin it.
Hell, I don’t want to adopt a platform that’s doomed to get as bad as Youtube let alone Facebook or Twitter. You’ve got to show me some low level structure that says “Here is why it can’t fall the way the last ones did.”
I don’t give a shit about the Bluesky stock you bought. Bluesky is doomed, don’t adopt it.
Ooh clever moving of the goal post there. Show me one example of Mark Zuckerberg posting to Facebook about how awesome a literal Nazi is. Personally unblocking said Nazi , and endorsing their message . That’s the discussion buddy.
People dislike it because it’s not federated, but hot take: federation doesn’t solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms. It doesn’t do anything to prevent the inherent problems that arise as a result of having everyone freeball a random moderation structure, where they can outsource their agency to some guy they don’t know, with the illusion that there’s some clear set of rules or useful tools that exist somewhere off in the distance, being used by the “correct” actors and moderators. Which in turn means that everything becomes vulnerable to any abuse of the static, singular, broad rules, inside of these walled gardens that people are basically locked into.
You get bait, you get ragebait, people taking advantage of the singular “algorithms” in order to game the system for maximum attention, and you incentivize that behavior because you make it way too easy to engage in. You get people paying to get on the front page of reddit, and you get eglin air force base being the most reddit addicted town. People think that AI abuse is some recent phenomenon, but it’s not, bots have been on the internet forever, and people have been incentivized to engage in bot-like behaviors forever. Eventually you get a huge, hollow system, where everything has the guise of legitimate human interaction at the surface level, but is really just subject to this huge system of incentives and planned interactions which people are made subconscious of.
You’d really need the ability to have account migration for a better decentralized network, and you’d probably actually just need self-hosting for everyone. You’d probably want blocklists to easily propagate around (+2 for bluesky), and you’d probably actually want those to have easily copied and pasted rules that could be shared between users to prevent spam and make it so abuse is less common and easily prevented before it happens.
Which is what the usenet already had/has. It’s just that the common consensus (which I believe to be false), is that the usenet is too hard to use, and requires demands too much intellectually from its users. If you decide to take this philosophy to the extreme, you end up with something like tiktok, where the idea is that people use their premade google account, scroll downwards forever, and that’s it.
I wouldn’t mistake this as being some sort of like, natural occurrence, though, that’s an intentional decision, made by businessmen, that want to maximize sales through an in-app store and control a massive cultural space. That’s a specific decision that they’ve made, and they’ve tuned their platforms to take advantage of people’s worst instincts in order to perpetuate that. Often with the assistance and explicit consent of governments which want these platforms to be used to track everything.
They pour money into that system, it’s an explicit decision they’re making to push that onto people as a result of current economic and political structures, and it’s due to those structures that they have that power to be able to do that, and due to those structures that these shit systems succeed, keep being cycled out in boom and bust cycles, over the better systems that people create.
but hot take: federation doesn’t solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms.
Enshittification, by definition, is a result of profit seeking, especially from venture-capital funded projects.
Shitty internet fiefdoms are shitty, but it’s got nothing to do with enshittification.
Yeah, the broader point I’m making is that the federation doesn’t solve the entire encompassing system in which this all exists.
Federated projects both have their own problems in those shitty little fiefdoms, as said, and are probably never going to succeed in this broader economic context where huge, profit seeking, venture capital funded market actors are able to spin up a new twitter ripoff in no time at all. This is while similar market actors in the form of spam farms, bot farms, adversarial influencers looking to make a quick buck, and moderators themselves, have incentives to game whatever systems are in place on any platform, not just the large ones. This then increases the strain on smaller projects, and decreases their ability to actually be sustainable long-term, especially in comparison to these huge market actors and their platforms.
The systems that are gamed, in the modern internet, are cordoned off and channeled by a bunch of moderators that we all trust to kind of do the work for the rest of us, apply the rules, use the tools to their discretion. Federation just makes it so you can jump from one moderated section to the other, one administrated section to the other, while on the same “platform”. But it doesn’t solve the inherent problems at play here, where moderators and higher level administrators are incentivized to make their platforms shittier with the invitation of advertisers, the invitation of more bad faith posters which can increase engagement, the adoption of shorter form, less substantive content, things like that. Those drive up traffic, and make more money, money they can use to then make their platforms “better”, or basically, to eat up more of the market share. Eventually you play the short term gains game long enough, and then your platform’s growth sputters out, and then venture capital dries up, and then you end up making the moderation more lax as a last resort, and then nazis come flooding in. Then the platform either dies, or mutates into a horrible shambling corpse.
Even if you were to cut out all of that as a possibility, say, by trying to make your stuff copyleft, then you just cut out the route towards short term growth for anyone using your particular platform, and then you’ll just get outdone by all of the other market actors which lean into that short term growth, while still filling your platform’s niche, while using none of the specific parts of your platform.
It’s basically not going to succeed as an approach because it, as we keep learning on the internet over and over and over and over, it exists in a broader material context, the context of the market.
Bluesky, as a user feels like Twitter used to be.
Threads is the most enjoyable, I feel.
Mastodon, I don’t get. I’ve been on it awhile but it’s becoming used less and less by me because I don’t see content I’m interested in our want to engage with and I don’t know how to change it.
Essentially, everyone is on bsky now. News organizations FINALLY decided to leave Twitter and are spinning up their bsky accounts.
I assume Mastodon is equally capable of recommending things, but if it’s a common problem that people aren’t patient enough with then it could be fatal. It’s still an open question whether federation as its been used thus far is really there yet. I’m not entirely convinced, I’m glad it’s being tried. I’ll take a stab at it, I’ve worked on P2P distributed key-value storage for years. No huge ambitions though, I don’t really care about this use case. My conception of federation is closer to newsgroups, ideally it’s a global namespace for a topic but the feed is controllable by, effectively, a federated moderator web-of-trust that users can selectively opt into and demote mods as a personal preference. Maybe someone else can do it because I’m so disinterested.
You need to follow people on mastodon
it works better than twitter
My only problem with it is that it’s boring. Literally Shower Thoughts: The Website (featuring Politics).
Supposedly there are people you can subscribe to to see some actual news and get away from all those boring text posts, but I can’t find them and don’t know where to look. I even used one of those websites that subscribe you to groups of people en-masse to help get you started, but that just made things worse. Now my feed is full of opinions from people I’ve never heard of, know nothing of, and couldn’t care less about.
I’m sorry but I just don’t understand the appeal of this whole Twitter/Twitter clone thing.
“Literally Shower Thoughts: The Website (featuring Politics).”
Wasnt that basically the premise of Twitter anyways?
It’s like Ben Dreyfuss minus the ambien in there.
It’s another oligarch owned platform?
JWZ » “I prefer to meet people where they are” says reasonable-sounding white dude holding court at a table in the back of a Nazi Bar.
It’s Bluesky. The Nazi Bar is Bluesky.
“Now that Dorsey has bailed as a board member and principal funder, Bluesky’s DNA is basically [TESCREAL / Effective Altruist] people. It gets worse. Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.”
It’s simply not a part of the fediverse and it’s centralized to a single instance. It’s not any different than Twitter, except no one interesting uses it.
I enjoy it, but I am fully aware that history could repeat itself, and I am ready to pack up and move if/when that time comes. For now, it’s big enough that I can follow communities I enjoy being a part of without worrying about the constant influx of racists/fascists.
Those people are of course present, but they’re easy to block and move on.
I don’t have strong opinions about BlueSky (I have an account, I prefer activitypub but it’s whatever), but to me I will view it as centralized until someone who is not BlueSky runs a second relay server that is federated with the BlueSky run one.
And based on the writings of one of the creators of activitypub, Christine Lemmer-Webber, there are some hurdles to that happening: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
