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.
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.”
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.
None of these are the case except it being Twitter again.
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.
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.
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.
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 full of pedos
Less so than nostr and twitter, though. I mean, everywhere on the internet is full of pedos… Even the fediverse.
Is there ANY major platform that isn’t?
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.
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.
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.
Missing some minor features like editing posts.
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.
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!
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.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
It’s like Ben Dreyfuss minus the ambien in there.
“Literally Shower Thoughts: The Website (featuring Politics).”
Wasnt that basically the premise of Twitter anyways?
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.
