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.
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. Fediverse bros are just salty that it’s getting all the traffic instead of mastodon.
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?
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.
If it needs a server to talk to others, that’s already bad. If it needs a server, but it can be my server, it’s palatable. That’s all the criteria you need.
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.
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.
what? so there’s nothing wrong with centralized commercial services? please explain what’s good about ANY centralized commercial service.
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
….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.
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.
If you move from twitter thinking it’ll not end up like twitter you’re wrong. It’ll go through the same growing pains process and you’ll end up right back where you started with nothing to show for it.
There’s nothing from a user experience currently that makes bluesky bad, it’s just that since it doesn’t seem to actually support decentralization, there’s nothing to stop it from eventually getting just as bad as twitter over time due to profit incentive. Misskey/mastodin are the only microblogging platforms that are truly immune from corporate manipulation and enshittification, which would mean it’s a long term solution (that while imperfect, can only get better).
it works better than twitter
Thats a pretty low bar lol
Works better than mostodon
Define “better”, first.
I’ve been using Mastodon for about 5 years now, and what I’ve seen of bsky, is that it’s not better: It’s centralized, owned by cryptobros, and subject to the exact same problems as twitter is for user safety.
It’s usable. Simple.
Mastodon has been usable, and simple, as well.
I signed up for my tildeverse account once they spun up an instance, and I followed people I saw posting. And now, I’ve collected a fair number of followers and people I follow to see what they say.
Works quite well.
So, what isn’t usable or simple?
Lets take football an example. It’s not niche, it’s quite popular. I searched football on mastadon and couldn’t by find more than one post in the timeline of 4 months. That’s unusable for regular folk.
I agree with what you are saying. But the regular folk just hate the void. They want more interaction and they see centralization as a feature and not as a problem.
Also in terms of UI, discoverability, content, starter-packs, custom feeds etc are all “better”.
People don’t care if ads roll out, I’m also surprised. But they don’t. Even their reasoning for twitter they state the toxicity and never ads.
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.
Isn’t it Twitter before musk?
I remember the olden days when people said Twitter was shit and it wasn’t intentionally bad.
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.
Just in general, people on the internet are haters. I don’t really have a strong opinion either way, but Bluesky could cure world hunger and make all dogs live 100 years and people on the internet would hate it.
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/
It has some flaw, but overall it’s actually usable.
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.
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.
When it converts to the profit extraction phase the cutting edge folks will move on. Then the content will slowly become dominated by corporate auto created content. And then eventually the average person will look for the next place to go.
This is just the new cool local bar hangout at scale. This is how human socialization works. It has worked like this for hundreds of years.
You say this as if it’s some inevitable law of society, but I disagree. The profit extraction phase isn’t an inevitability, especially online where digital hosting is relatively cheap and services can be run with 0 income, and many larger sites have run off unconditional donations only (and therefore without having to compromise for investors). The domination of content by exploitative actors can be combatted, especially when you aren’t desperate for income from corporations.
It’s obviously an uphill battle, but it’s been done at smaller scales for social media sites and had been done at large scale for other sites like archive.org and Wikipedia.
I think the big difference here is that to the average user they see archive.org or Wikipedia as being a onesided transaction. An Archive where folks store information for you, an encyclopedia where information is stored by folks for you. There is no expectation of engagement of the average user. It is rare for someone to wake up and think “Man I gotta put something up on Wikipedia today or people are going to think I’m not the person I act like I am”.
People go to social events to keep up appearances. People participate on social media to keep up appearances. Maintaining these types of things require you to effectively help people balance their ability to participate in society with their ability to communicate. A Wikipedia contributor is a scholar. A community moderator is a bartender and a bouncer rolled into one. It doesn’t have the stability because the work required to keep things going is high stress for the majority of the people doing the work.
Lemmy’s solution is nice because the smaller instances can just ban whole cloth the larger ones and everyone gets to move forward. It means you never are burdened by having a ton of users, but that then also defies the goal of some of the larger social media platforms.
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?
Bluesky is a platform by and for the most racist liberals.
You’ve clearly not been on the platform for any appreciable length of time, if at all.
Try criticizing liberal forms of racism and see how well it goes for you.
Try watching sometime merely being Palestinian and see how it goes for them.
Try looking into who funds and runs the platform.
Seriously all the posters I see and follow are far left and extremely pro-palestinian and are quite quick to criticize liberals, on multiple topics. Maybe you just followed a bunch of the wrong people and decided that was everybody.
Pro-Palestinian or by people who are in Palestine? Because Bluesky has beeen censoring the latter.
I viewed the public trending section and listed some of the racism there in another comment.
I’ve seen plenty of posts by people asserting to be Palestinians.
And what do they say about the people getting banned for fundraising?
Most of the Palestinian posts I see are fundraising posts. Seriously it seems like you’re just out there looking for what you want to complain about. There’s plenty of racism and bigotry on the fediverse if you go looking for it.
Let me see the first ten posts in my feed. (I haven’t opened today so let’s see…)
God saying why is radical left an insult?
Space view with a good picture of Pluto.
God talking about centrists and leftists
More space pictures
Someone talking about a free game on stream
Someone talking about how rpg fans love to insist pokemon isn’t rpg
Horror video game protagonist coming across ammo, yeah that isn’t ominous.
Some new video games called Anton
We asked A.I. to generate a peak Seahawks game, these were the results.
And
A picture of the helix nebula.
Yup lots of racism and traits.
Are you familiar with what liberal racism looks like?
Anonymously browsing the feed I rapidly came upon these posts:
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https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3lcbh7org5c2c - Russophobia and some other brainworms I don’t even want to get into.
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Multiple posts by this guy, one of the many lanyard wearing faces of liberal fascism. In this case, an actual functionary for terrorist groups, including Daesh.
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https://bsky.app/profile/euromaidanpress.bsky.social/post/3lc7vfobvqz2e - more liberals celebrating fascists, this time Azov members.
Bluesky is known in left circles for censoring Palestinian accounts and allowing liberal Zionism.
You’re I guess looking at a feed of everything there is with no anchor to the correct side of politics? Try that with ActivityPub and just ingest the entire ecosystem with no home instance or blocklist and you’ll get lots of this.
But I think you are right that the Bluesky PDS will not refuse to host you for saying things along the lines of “The US should continue to sell all kinds of weapons to Israel”, whereas a lot of Mastodon instances might be expected to kick you off for expressing this stubbornly common opinion.
But I’m not sure it’s quite fair to expect a public service to share exactly the correct Overton window that one has oneself. That sort of enforcement on Bluesky is meant to be at the level of the custom moderation service/labeler, not at the data storage layer, since users more or less are meant to control that themselves.
And if you pick a good labeler it will enforce that only the correct people are allowed in your view.
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