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Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

beige.party

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Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#191

Post by exodust »

threeseed wrote: post #38
exodust wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I just tried signing up for X using a new account. 99% ultra-right wing political content with obscene amounts of overt racism, anti-semitism etc. Even though when it asked for my interests politics wasn't even an option.

"99%"... sure.

So just follow the accounts you're interested in? If you just signed up, how does the "for you" know what you like? You can spend all day on X and never see any of that stuff you mention.

Do you prefer "ultra-left wing" content? There's plenty on X, including angry marxists, anti-capitalists, de-colonisers, race-baiters, compulsive virtue-signallers, tantrum-throwers, Musk-haters, dis-information trolls, intifada-fascists, take your pick!

I remember back when Trump was president, every single post he made on Twitter had a torrent of abusive replies bubbling to the top. Even ordinary mundane posts about routine things happening in government were met with endless insult-memes. Surely you don't think Twitter was once a place where inflammatory posts were rare and everyone had good manners?

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#192

Post by defrost »

exodust wrote: post #191
threeseed wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried signing up for X using a new account. 99% ultra-right wing political content with obscene amounts of overt racism, anti-semitism etc. Even though when it asked for my interests politics wasn't even an option.

"99%"... sure. So just follow the accounts you're interested in? If you just signed up, how does the "for you" know what you like? You can spend all day on X and never see any of that stuff you mention. Do you prefer "ultra-left wing" content? There's plenty on X, including angry marxists, anti-capitalists, de-colonisers, race-baiters, compulsive virtue-signallers, tantrum-throwers, Musk-haters, dis-information troll…

> race-baiters, compulsive virtue-signallers, tantrum-throwers, dis-information trolls,

are hardly exclusive "ultra-left wing" users, arguably there's more of that to the far-right .. and that's just Tucker Carlson on a slow day.

> Even ordinary mundane posts about routine things happening in government

In your honest opinion, if Trump only ever made ordinary mundane statements about the routine day to day functions of government would there be anything like the level of anti-Trump anger exhibited?

Is it possible the insult-memes are an unsuprising result of a tendancy to praise Hitlers Generals, demonise the people he should work with as "the enemy within", suggest removing licences from news organisations he objects to, etc?

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#193

Post by exodust »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #152
bbor wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? AFAIK it is not more stable: https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/internet-report-twitter-to... Twitter appears to be an outlier in that respect. Instead of displaying the usual post-acquisition stability, ThousandEyes’ data indicates that the number and frequency of outages did increase commensurate with the acquisition. If we compare the two periods (pre- and post-acquisition), it’s apparent that there were fe…

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…

Don't forget community notes. While not perfect, it presents valuable context or counter-points. Musk's posts have been community noted a few times.

Grok is a nice feature, although for paid accounts only. It also seems slightly out of place on X. Most people are there to express themselves, not necessarily seek help or information from AI-gen. I tried it for some coding help, and it did fine.. but doing that task on X felt odd.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#194

Post by eadler »

exodust wrote: post #193
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…

Don't forget community notes. While not perfect, it presents valuable context or counter-points. Musk's posts have been community noted a few times. Grok is a nice feature, although for paid accounts only. It also seems slightly out of place on X. Most people are there to express themselves, not necessarily seek help or information from AI-gen. I tried it for some coding help, and it did fine.. but doing that task on…

Community notes was designed and shipped before the takeover. It was called "birdwatch".

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#195

Post by exodust »

eadler wrote: post #194
exodust wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget community notes. While not perfect, it presents valuable context or counter-points. Musk's posts have been community noted a few times. Grok is a nice feature, although for paid accounts only. It also seems slightly out of place on X. Most people are there to express themselves, not necessarily seek help or information from AI-gen. I tried it for some coding help, and it did fine.. but doing that task on…

Community notes was designed and shipped before the takeover. It was called "birdwatch".

Never heard of birdwatch, never saw it.

I'm in Australia, explanation follows:

From wikipedia: "In November 2022, at the request of new owner Elon Musk, Birdwatch was rebranded to Community Notes... and expanded to Europe and countries outside of the US."

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#196

Post by swed420 »

jrm4 wrote: post #190
swed420 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Probably?

In other words, what you call liberals probably are, but they're engaging with faux leftists who are just a different flavor of liberal, not actually left. If they were actually left, they'd be focusing on class based issues instead of amping up division with the race etc issues that you mentioned.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#197

Post by alexch »

openrisk wrote: post #60

It is interesting that nobody comments on the "ownership" data point of the post. > And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? Yet that is the only thing that matters. The technical pieces for a vast range of alternative designs for online interactions are already available. Decentralized, federated, distributed, peer-to-peer. Who cares? What matters is the outcome. What is entire…

[flagged]

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#198

Post by BlueTemplar »

eru wrote: post #100
gary_0 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're also using an algorithm right now on HN, to sort comments and posts by freshness, votes, and reply count (plus manual moderation fairy dust sprinkled by dang and friends). Some people have even criticized it or dislike it, because everyone has different criteria for things they want to see. It's easy to forget there's a gray area between "unsorted feed of all posts" and "nothing but insane rage-bait to maximize…

Funny enough, depending on your exact definition of 'algorithm' either essentially everything you can do on a computer is an algorithm or there some weird and annoying exceptions. For example many definitions include the requirement that an algorithm has to terminate for every input. And I suspect that there are probably some bugs lurking somewhere in the HN codebase that make it go into the occasional infinite loop.…

Using neural networks IMHO falls outside of the definition of an algorithm, because then it becomes something that not even its authors are able to inspect (understand/explain). (Which in some contexts is a legal requirement.)

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#199

Post by BlueTemplar »

j_maffe wrote: post #105
alpaca128 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing stopping a platform from being correct both ways by saying "we use no manipulative algorithm" or something along those lines. It may be pedantic to point out that "no algorithm" is wrong, but it is in fact wrong and it's not hard to communicate both clearly and correctly.

I agree that not using manipulative algorithms is the best, more nuanced, goal. However, most people would not trust such a statement from a platform with clear conflict of interest in manipulative algorithms. Chronological ordering is simple (and testable) enough that anyone can trust it is not tampered with in any way.

It does help a lot that Mastodon is not a platform.

Re: Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

#200

Post by afiori »

yewey wrote: post #158
pfraze wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep!

and will a bunch of hostile feminists be able to place derogatory "labels" on my self hosted account or put me on nasty and rudely named lists branding me a right winger or a transmysoginist or whatever like they currently do on bluesky?

My understanding is that users and third-parties can offer various moderation services that users can subscribe to.

So anyone can label/mislabel/ban/block anyone else, but everyone can chose whose labels/mislabels/bans/blocks to follow

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