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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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).
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.
Normal people can’t reasonably spin up a mastodon server either.
Everyone here seems to vastly overestimate the general public’s technical knowledge and desire for this kind of thing.
You have technical knowledge hurdles, financial hurdles, ISP hurdles, government hurdles (in some countries), bandwidth hurdles, storage hurdles, and more.
Running a server even on a raspberry pi takes a decent amount of effort, and when your server is down, because regular people aren’t going to have HA and battery backups and multiple Internet connections, etc, your service goes down.
Most people, like 99.9999 percent of people don’t Want to deal with any of that, I mean hell, regular people don’t use ad blockers, know what linux is, what a raspberry pi is, what a server is, how any of this works, or care at all. So many people here or so drastically out of touch it’s wild.
Why aren’t there a bunch of bluesky instances? Genuinely curious, cause after a couple searches I found guides on how to self host bluesky
Because they didn’t turn on federation until last year, and at that point it was still limited to fewer than ten users per alternate server, and you had to manually request federation through a Discord server from an actual human. This year they’ve automated the federation process, but you still have to start with a tiny server, and they claim they’re going to raise the user limit gradually as new servers remain federated with the main server.
But yeah, the upshot is bsky.social has 13 million users, and there are no other servers with notable numbers of users. That’s a pretty notable difference from ActivityPub.
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.
