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.
Nothing is wrong with it. Fediverse bros are just salty that it’s getting all the traffic instead of mastodon.
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
what? so there’s nothing wrong with centralized commercial services? please explain what’s good about ANY centralized commercial service.
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.
….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.
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.
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 has some flaw, but overall it’s actually usable.
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/
Isn’t it Twitter before musk?
I remember the olden days when people said Twitter was shit and it wasn’t intentionally bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You need to follow people on mastodon
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.
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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Is twitter again. Algorithms, adds, pay subscriptions
None of these are the case except it being Twitter again.
It’s full of pedos
