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.
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.
it’s microblogging
I never used Twitter personally, only exposed thru osmosis, so a reboot is very underwhelming. Seems perfect for somebody.
Isn’t it Twitter before musk?
I remember the olden days when people said Twitter was shit and it wasn’t intentionally bad.
Centalised as in not federated. Which means we’ve basically set a timer until it starts acting like Google or Facebook, or even “X” if a crazy person buys it out.
That being said, I welcome any kind of actual competition.
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.
it works better than twitter
Thats a pretty low bar lol
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.
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 claims to be decentralized but normal people can’t reasonably spin up a server like you can for Mastadon.
Which means, if it goes to shit by whoever is holding the power behind it, then it will go to shit exactly like Xitter.
With Mastadon, you can easily make an instance and jump to different instances that haven’t gone to shit.
It’s full of pedos
Is there ANY major platform that isn’t?
Less so than nostr and twitter, though. I mean, everywhere on the internet is full of pedos… Even the fediverse.
Nothing is wrong with it. Fediverse bros are just salty that it’s getting all the traffic instead of mastodon.
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.
The problem is that bluesky pretends to be a fediverse platform but only as an aesthetic, the founders don’t understand the fediverse at all and they have made no real attempt to federate outside of lip service.
Fediverse is a specific type of federation.
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
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?
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? 🤣
Depends on your perspective. Would it be fine for Meta Threads to replace it? Threads supports ActivityPub, so in some ways it likely interacts better with the fediverse.
If we agree that Threads isn’t a suitable replacement, then clearly there’s some criteria a replacement should meet. A lot of the things that make Threads unpalatable are also true of Bluesky, particularly if your concern relates to the platform being under the control of a corporation.
On the other hand, from the perspective of “Twitter 2.0 is now a toxic, alt-right cesspool where productive conversations can’t be had,” then both Threads and Bluesky are huge improvements.
Supporting ActivityPub doesn’t excuse being owned and operated by META.
Will Bsky eventually shit itself like Twitter did? Sure, maybe. That seems to be the normal path nowadays. And when it does, I’ve still got my Masto account that I try to keep active as well. But at the very least, Bsky is a different company. I can have a bsky account without being dragged into an entire META ecosystem designed to put their chosen content in front of my eyes.
Even at it’s worst, the fact that Bsky is it’s own thing and not owned by a mega corporation puts it automatically about Threads, regardless of ActivityPub.
Plus is gets the idea into people’s heads that you aren’t married to a platform.
I wish, but I wager most people will immediately get married to Bluesky.
Well, there are some things wrong with it though?
It’s possible to criticize both Mastodon and Bluesky for their respective issues
The issue is that BlueSky is a for-profit company.
B-Corp. But as long as they don’t show any kind of sustainable business model compared to their costs, ye the result doesn’t differ much
It’s possible to criticize both Mastodon and Bluesky for their respective issues
Sure, they’re both Twitter-like and hence inherently unsuited to having a discussion for starters.
Yeah this is kinda what I’ve never understood. We have these sorts of, complaints about the demographic movements of these platforms, sure, but their actual core structure is inherently optimized to prey on people’s worst instincts, make discussion basically impossible. To prioritize pithy remarks and one-liners over productive conversations, they prioritize public facing ideologues blowing up much smaller individuals. Lemmy’s slightly better in that regard, but I feel like we’re always somehow descending in quality from what even a basic forum would be capable of.
Mastodon doesn’t have low character limits, it’s not terrible for having a conversation
Fedibros.
….She said on Lemmy, a platform provided for free and free of ads by volunteers.
Every day I’m more persuaded that in the main, Lemmy got the dregs of Reddit during the exodus, who are the nastiest most argumentative, most poorly informed shitheads the internet has to offer.
Anyway, that’s enough about yourself…
Feels like you never truly where on Reddit if you felt it was a beacon of warmth and friendliness. Did you ever share an opinion contrary to the prevailing opinion on there?
deleted by creator
Yeah, it’s just like old Reddit before the normies all got there! I love it!
The most recent and largest exodus was people protesting their apps going away. Imagine a person for whom site moderation leading to embracing Russophobic snuff films, excusing Nazi tattoos, genocide denial re: Palestine, and general censorship of the left were not reasons to leave but “my apps and app freedoms” moved them.
So yes these are people obstinately fighting over something they just made up but it sounds right to them and matches the vibes of their parasocial bubble. They might literally die if they spoke casually and acknowledged faults.
It’s slightly more than a green(blue?)washed Twatter.
The fact it’s getting such a stellar rise over Mastodon is imho a bit sus - people behind it have coin & reach (political), I’m sure monies are being pumped into the bluesky sensationalization, like influences & media articles.
Twatter has/had a lot of monetization potential & now is even more of a (really incredibly direct) political-tool, there are bound to be interest groups that would benefit from cutting it a bit. But all of them want more monies, so they ofc won’t help fossy things.
Having used both, here my view on why BlueSky is outstripping Mastadon:
- It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).
- There’s no messing around with instances to negotiate - you go to bsky.app
BlueSky.comand it just works. Hard to overstate how important that is in retaining people who take a look at a new platform. - There are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t feel empty like I have often found Mastadon.
- There are a lot of relatively influential people on it, media people, authors and actors and comedians, who have largely shifted as a single mass (probably due to the three above reasons) - so for non-famous people there’s a sense of being in touch with what’s happening.
- It’s riding a wave of positivity about itself, which Mastadon never had - this touches on your point about media coverage of it, but whether that’s really due to money being paid to news orgs or just due to journalists seeing what they are doing as being important for others to know about is open to question.
I think the various high profile organisational defections to BS have been a big part of it too. I only looked at BS for the first time when I saw the story about the Guardian newspaper quitting Twitter.
I took a look, created an account and was posting and following people within seconds, it was just really, really smooth. Again, that was not the case (for me) with Mastadon, where it took a while to figure some of it out, and it all just felt a bit fiddly and complicated.
Much like Lemmy in fact, after leaving Reddit - but again there was enough of a swell of new people shifting as a mass that it felt like it was worth the hassle.
This is the only take based in reality. Nobody (except us) cares about openness, federation or business models. What matters are ease of use and adoption.
Of course that doesn’t mean that the other takes are missing the mark in terms of history possibly repeating itself in the future. But if it does, that just means that (as is to be expected) the people don’t make momentary decisions with a bigger (collective) picture in mind. Design needs to address individual needs first and foremost especially when it comes to social media.
Nobody joins a platform to beat corporate ownership of people’s digital lives. BlueSky manufactured adoption by starting out as an invite-only cool kids club. Having to pick a fediverse instance is an entry barrier. There will always be a lot less money to throw around when you’re trying to create something under the umbrella of freedom and openness. I don’t see how these movements could ever win, even if they provide an arguably better product.
- It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).
Yup, pretty much. I tried Mastodon and found it very unintuitive, but BlueSky was immediately understandable as a former Twitter user. I don’t really use either that much, but I’ve spent way more time with BlueSky.
Honestly, it’s the same with Lemmy. I tried a lot of Reddit alternatives, both federated and centralized, and I landed on Lemmy because A) It has the only decently-sized user base and B) my preferred Reddit app, Sync, moved to Lemmy. Lemmy is similar enough to Reddit on it’s own that transitioning over wouldn’t have been difficult, but having Sync just made it that much easier.
- There are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t feel empty like I have often found Mastadon.
Mastodon isn’t empty. People just have to follow folks to actually get any content. Now, Bluesky definitely does the onboarding better in that regard, but this almost certainly comes down to people not knowing that they have to follow accounts to get content.
Well possibly - I do follow people Mastadon though, and it still feels quiet to me. I probably need to spend more time finding people to follow.
In order to get a similar experience to Twitter, you need to follow a lot more people on Mastodon than you did on Twitter, because you never get that algorithmic backfill (and, in fairness, because there are fewer people using it).
Yes, so the ease of the whole onboarding process & communities/groups that migrated there.
No arguments on the first one (tho stupid on both sides).
What my brainhole is telling me is that the second argument feels a tad too big seeing how Mastodon basically didn’t grew in the same timeframe. What they call “content” and “community” creation feels driven, the “wave” as you put it.
(But again, this is just imho & ‘a feeling’, I have no sauce, not even that much personal experience)
Its funny bluesky.com is not the bluesky website that most people are thinking of.
Hah, neither it is, my bad! I just assumed and didn’t bother to check. Will fix that.
ATProto Federation is hypothetical at best. Bluesky remains centralized for all intents and purposes.
Founders are all cryptocurrency dorks. The CEO got her start in selling shitcoins and peddling AI slop. Not a lot of confidence in their ability to lead a successful social media company.
It’s a for-profit company, and so far their actual profit-generating function has yet to be determined. Maybe it’s ads. Maybe it’s subscription fees. Maybe they just end up selling all your data off to their 1,000+ data broker partners. Nobody knows yet, but it isn’t going to remain free and open permanently.
ActivityPub is already fully federated with dozens of different services, and thousands of different instances. Every instance has its own leadership, and most are run by generous sysadmins, donations, and volunteers. It can’t make top-down decisions, it can’t go out of business, and it can’t be bought.
Maybe it’s ads. Maybe it’s subscription fees.
It’s subscription fees. They’ve already announced it. It’s literally on their blog, and they’ve talked about it in their Twitch (they didn’t do a VoD so here’s a link to a YouTube video) and Reddit Q&As.
“In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames. Bluesky will always be free to use — we believe that information and conversation should be easily accessible, not locked down. We won’t uprank accounts simply because they’re subscribing to a paid tier.”
Maybe they just end up selling all your data off to their 1,000+ data broker partners.
I don’t really see how they could, seeing as pretty much everything (including Likes) is already public.
its centralized because only a single board controls it, and it doesnt federate with literally anything but itself.
Someone could create an instance if they wanted right? The code is on GitHub
Maybe there’s more to it though, I dunno.
Caveat: Neither do most web pages.
right but most ‘websites’ dont go around calling themselves federating or decentralized.
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?
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.
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.
twitter’s recommendation algorithm keeps serving me absolute bangers and i actually kinda like it :/
Ha, fair enough - if it works for you, then ok :-)
The moderation and blocking on BlueSky set it apart from Twitter.
