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Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

beige.party

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Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#181

Post by innocentoldguy »

Natanael_L wrote: post #177
innocentoldguy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing game-changing? How about: • Long-form content • Video streaming • Grok • Ability to edit posts • Bookmarks • Communities • Better verification system • Encrypted direct messages • Cashtag feature • Bold and italic text formatting • Open-sourced algorithm • Premium features • Improved search • Improved analytics for content creators • And most importantly, less First-Amendment violations in secret partnership…

Most of that doesn't deserve to be called an improvement. That message encryption is one of the worst designs I've ever seen. The algorithm isn't open enough that anybody can see if what it's doing matches the code. And instead of censoring "secretly" in partnership with the US government they do so in partnership with the Indian government as well as individual Republican politicians.

> Most of that doesn't deserve to be called an improvement.

Hard disagree. The platform is objectively much better than it was under Jack Dorsey.

> The algorithm isn't open enough that anybody can see if what it's doing matches the code.

Fair, but more is available than before.

> ...in partnership with the Indian government as well as individual Republican politicians.

Would you prefer X break India's laws, specifically Section 69A of the IT Act? I suppose they could do that and then the Indian government would shut them down in India.

Also, are you talking about X suspending Ken Klippenstein's account for doxxing JD Vance? X's rules explicitly state that doxxing people will result in a suspension, so maybe Klippenstein should have thought of that before posting Vance's home address and most of his social security number.

Here's X's policy against what Klippenstein did, which applies to everyone: https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-informatio...

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#182

Post by swed420 »

relaxing wrote: post #157
jrm4 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is another issue entirely, but also very often wrong and misses the point. Roughly, e.g. -- Twitter (nope not calling it X) is still overwhelmingly the most useful and productive place for Black+US Politics discussion. Despite, or even perhaps because of, the presence of bad guys. The thing I hate the most about Mastodon (despite being the right model) is people trying to make it nice, but end up making it…

What’s some of this disagreeable speech you’ve been shut down on.

Yeah, it would have been more accurate for GP to say "liberal" instead of "left" since mastodon (and large parts of lemmy) have been overrun with liberals who label any leftist a "tankie"

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#183

Post by jacooper »

bowsamic wrote: post #5

I'm not really sure what the benefit of BS over Mastodon is anyway. Everyone interesting is on Mastodon

Sure, if you don't care about sports, news, anything other than tech.

Bluesky literally just started and it already covers more things than mastodon ever did while providing a better UX without stupid technical limitations like not implementing global full text search.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#184

Post by dbspin »

kalleboo wrote: post #109
dbspin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutey rock hard disagree. I'm old enough to remember when twitter and facebook used to both have a chronological feed without algorithmic sorting. Facebook (trash today of course) was an incredibly useful way to find out what your friends were doing on a given day by just reading the chronological feed. You could also trivially see which events were going on in your locality and which friends were attending. At t…

I also remember when Facebook originally added their algorithmic timeline. At the time everyone was complaining that Facebook was just "people posting their lunches" and from that PoV I thought it was a great addition to promote the things people found important in their lives instead of the noise. Of course that didn't last long.

I was in college at the time, and the wall went from incredible social affordance to spambait advertising platform essentially overnight. It's likely that the 'people posting their lunches' weren't leveraging the platform to its best utility. Either way the change literally made the kind of passive socialising use I've described above impossible. No replacement has emerged in the years since, which really surprises me. Since location aware social networks existed in the mid-2000s, which is now, checks notes - twenty years ago.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#185

Post by dbspin »

lukan wrote: post #69
dbspin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutey rock hard disagree. I'm old enough to remember when twitter and facebook used to both have a chronological feed without algorithmic sorting. Facebook (trash today of course) was an incredibly useful way to find out what your friends were doing on a given day by just reading the chronological feed. You could also trivially see which events were going on in your locality and which friends were attending. At t…

To quote the sibling content: "And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm." Apparently people understand different things by "algorithm". I also use the general one and not "algorithm" as a special algorithm that tries to find things I might like based on my past interactions, but mainly tailored to keep my engagement high so I watch more ads" I would like th…

You've missed two key points

> I would like the possibility of creating and tweaking my own algorithm for my feed.

This would be really useful, and I think actually should be a right - like data portability. However it doesn't address the issue with the default view not being linear, and hence breaking the utility of such services as a public or community notice board.

> "And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm."

An algorithm is being used to serve content in that context, but content is not being removed, substituted, inserted or filtered by an algorithm in (the platonic version) of displaying a linear chronological feed. The are the issues which 'the algorithm' has been criticised for in the modern context. If we can acknowledge that's the intended usage here then we can move beyond semantics.

What happened on Facebook in 2012 is that Facebooks product changed from being one that served the affordance 'connecting people', to one that effectively divided people and charged to connect them in more limited ways. The impact of that one change (on FB and mirrored on other services) in creating the sensitisation and polarisation which followed, as well as removing the one major utility of social networks beyond pure entertainment, cannot be overstated.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#186

Post by stevenicr »

Natanael_L wrote: post #174
stevenicr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a thing that is easily discoverable in settings where people can choose to use a different directory? OR is this buried and hard to find or know it could be a thing?

It's currently built into the applications, not configurable by default. It's preferable if everybody in a thread / space / community uses the same one because otherwise differences can cause validation failures and conflict and thus break threads, resulting in that people can't follow many discussions, thus applications don't really expose it. It's the kind of thing where it's preferable that either everybody switch…

That's too bad, it made me think if there were easy to switch user perferences then it would be truly decentralized..

Is there a way to clone the app and make this easy to find as a button to switch?

(unfamiliar with the licensing and the app in general, some things I have seen make me excited that it's possible to be uncensored and decentralized, then things like this come up and I wonder if I should put time into it or something else to promote)

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#187

Post by jrm4 »

swed420 wrote: post #182
relaxing wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s some of this disagreeable speech you’ve been shut down on.

Yeah, it would have been more accurate for GP to say "liberal" instead of "left" since mastodon (and large parts of lemmy) have been overrun with liberals who label any leftist a "tankie"

Oh no, I do mean that the lefties are the problem. They're the ones making it sterile. I'm glad the libs are pushing back.

Disconnected keyboard lefties who don't touch grass calling me a Nazi because I also still use Twitter, being completely clueless as to the fact that a lot of Black folks like myself are still there because, well, we're used to surviving and thriving in hostile spaces.

(and then also snowflake hard-left Black folks who -- and I've literally NEVER seen this in my life until Mastodon -- really do "play the race card." It's wild)

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#188

Post by swed420 »

jrm4 wrote: post #187
swed420 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it would have been more accurate for GP to say "liberal" instead of "left" since mastodon (and large parts of lemmy) have been overrun with liberals who label any leftist a "tankie"

Oh no, I do mean that the lefties are the problem. They're the ones making it sterile. I'm glad the libs are pushing back. Disconnected keyboard lefties who don't touch grass calling me a Nazi because I also still use Twitter, being completely clueless as to the fact that a lot of Black folks like myself are still there because, well, we're used to surviving and thriving in hostile spaces. (and then also snowflake ha…

It sounds like you're using the liberal definition of leftist.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#189

Post by jrm4 »

hoidofyolen wrote: post #153
jrm4 wrote: post #141

Bluesky's claims to why they're better than anything always sound like crazy pill stuff to me. Other services both centralize identity AND algorithms/operations. This seems to centralize identity WITHOUT the second thing, which strikes me as the worst of both worlds. It's just, we've already mostly "solved" the centralized identity problem with EMAIL. As often, the key is "fail elegantly," not be bulletproof. Email,…

I don't have the energy to put all of the advantages and argue for them here, but take a look at https://atproto.com and maybe look around at other blog posts and articles that contrast atproto and ActivityPub. Might just have to do some research, since it's been talked about ad nauseam already in other spaces.

I promise I'm not intentionally trying to play gotcha or anything like that, but if you're literally unable to rattle off something in a short space, my skepticism only deepens?

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#190

Post by jrm4 »

swed420 wrote: post #188
jrm4 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, I do mean that the lefties are the problem. They're the ones making it sterile. I'm glad the libs are pushing back. Disconnected keyboard lefties who don't touch grass calling me a Nazi because I also still use Twitter, being completely clueless as to the fact that a lot of Black folks like myself are still there because, well, we're used to surviving and thriving in hostile spaces. (and then also snowflake ha…

It sounds like you're using the liberal definition of leftist.

Probably?
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