My experience is that fundamentally there's nothing better with Bluesky or Mastodon when compared to Twitter. They're all toxic doom scrolling applications and if one does use them, it will be a good idea to control your usage as if it was cocaine.
I use none of these, and generally agree that the world would be a better place if we could magically get rid of all social media.
But Twitter is filled with much, much more hate and disinformation than its alternatives. I'd say it is definitely worse than the others.
My experience is that fundamentally there's nothing better with Bluesky or Mastodon when compared to Twitter. They're all toxic doom scrolling applications and if one does use them, it will be a good idea to control your usage as if it was cocaine.
I think Mastodons API-centric approach has lead to user-friendly results that feel fundamentally different. Mastodon gives me an in-order timeline of just the accounts I follow. I configured it to hide images by default, reduce animations, and to require user action to load more posts (no infinite scroll). It feels so much more tuned to my well-being versus apps that are tuned to maximize adverisement views by trapping you in doom scrolling.
My experience is that fundamentally there's nothing better with Bluesky or Mastodon when compared to Twitter. They're all toxic doom scrolling applications and if one does use them, it will be a good idea to control your usage as if it was cocaine.
"The toxicity is coming from inside the house!"
I agree. These platforms are best when the communities are smaller. The main tipping point will be when it becomes perceived (just perceived, even) as a viable option for advertising/monetization.
The only real option is to just keep pushing to the next frontier...
It's quite interesting how much Musk's taking over Twitter damaged a lot of small businesses, where the person's personal brand on Twitter actually generated a decent amount of their business. What was even more interesting was seeing those semi-large accounts 20-100k followers move over to Bluesky post the same material on both but get more engagement on Bluesky with 1/10th of the audience.
I understand a blog on your own domain is your land in regard to microblogging platforms. But what would be my land in regard to community software, like Telegram or Discord? Is there any software like this that I can host on my domain?
Matrix/Discourse? But like all self hosted solution, it's harder to use than a managed product. I think they're both excellent though, and pretty common in some circles.
But will anyone come?
Plenty of the people I follow, Jeff Geerling for example (hi!) have their own sites/kingdoms but I don't make the rounds of their personal sites every morning.
A similar but I think simpler approach is to just act like a celebrity or a brand. When X celebrity joins a social network, their fans follow them on that platform. When the celebrity leaves and goes elsewhere, the fans follow. The value follows the celebrity because the celebrity’s value isn’t in the content on the social network, it’s in their personal brand itself. Therefore if you’re going to invest in creating v…
The blog post (and your comment) presumes someone is a celebrity, has a kingdom. A lot of us are just busking on the street corners.
Not necessarily. I think it’s perfectly possible to be a random non-famous person that builds a following because they have insightful tweets/images/content. But the risk is that if you don’t give yourself a reasonably memorable publisher name, you won’t be able to transfer that audience to another platform, because no one is going to see your name and recognize it from elsewhere.
Twitter sucks because it's commercial. Threads sucks because it's commercial. Bluesky will suck because it's commercial. If only there was a pattern we could detect. Learn about the Fediverse (not just "Mastodon"), it's the only solution worthy of you.
Twitter sucks because it's commercial. Threads sucks because it's commercial. Bluesky will suck because it's commercial. If only there was a pattern we could detect. Learn about the Fediverse (not just "Mastodon"), it's the only solution worthy of you.
I wonder if a tree blogs in an obscure, infrequently traveled forest will anyone read it?
Don’t build castles in other peoples kingdoms That is why I devote my energy to enriching my home file server with custom software that I can access anywhere via domain name mapped to a IPv6 address. It is my kingdom and its not going away. I can demo on there full stack applications that would be challenging to demo otherwise. If I had a blog on there I could say what I want. I could host a personal email address on…
I'm not trying to be rude but are you serious or being sarcastic? Because on here it could go either way. There are definitely people who would build everything themselves just because they can. And there are people who would mock someone for doing so.
If you're being serious, how much time does it take and how much custom software do you actually have?
I stil don't understand why none of these sites counts downvotes for their algorithm. Look at HN which does; the best comments are at the top which means that the user sees the more interesting posts first. And troll posts would never rise to the top. There's a lot of tinkering that could provide which is the best up/downvotes-algorithm but imo it simply does not work without downvoting. E.g. Tiktok allows a lot of o…
Social media orgs discovered a while back that what they want is "engagement", not "good content". Enraging content is as good as "good" content in terms of clicks, and downvotes would bury that enraging content. Making you mad is as good as making you feel any other thing in terms of engagement.
yeah that's the story that I read a lot. But it doesn't make sense. E.g. I don't use Twitter because it's just a shitshow (e.g. even before Musk took over). Of course the algorithm from Twitter doesn't see it like that because it never analyzed me. It only analyzes those who are there not those who are not there. Thus, there's a hole in their algorithm. Or in other words: It's a short-termin optimizing algo (for those who are already there), not a long-term optimizer (long-term user growth).