31–40 of 561 posts
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.
>“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!” Yes, and choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@ibm.com are different email-people, too. This is not a hard concept.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but hopefully it is more free speech than om twitter where Elon wants to decide what you can and can't see. It is well known that he is obsessed that things that align with his own views get more visibility while things he doesn't like is suppressed https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
And that doesn't apply to the powers that be at other social networks (or management at Twitter pre-Elon)?
I'm happy to abandon BlueSky though as soon as it is revealed to be a shitsocket.
When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers). Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go throu…
BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. It has a future, but the branding in very tainted.
I've organically come across more mastadon instances than bluesky. But that's just me. I wish it was easier to surf mastadon though, where you have to log in to see content unlike bluesky.
You don't need to be logged in to see content on Mastodon. There are privacy settings that could hide content from non-followers, and mastodon users may be more privacy conscious, but log in is not generally required.
I think I had a flagged post on Bluesky, early on that just referenced something elsewhere - it was pretty harmless. And I remember a few X users trying the platform saying something vaguely controversial and getting a suspension. Or some such. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of censorship and free speech but you can get booted out the pub for saying something disagreeable in front of the bar hands or patrons. And I would be quite livid if I had invested in a platform and then got shut down.
The AT protocol gives you the ability to produce feeds. But it's actually the consumption aggregation and discover-ability that seems to the difficult bit. I feel we need a lightweight RSS style reader in browser to really get past this. There are weird hacks on Bluesky to subscribe to feeds. But it is messy. The feeds are where the magic potentially happens.
Twitter had become unpalatable before Musk bought it. And there were various crisis of confidence and herd threatening migrations, but people just couldn't be bothered. In its latest ungodly form people are still sticking around, or moving to silos and bubbles on other platforms, it's just a complete and utter mess at this point.
Platforms inevitably win out with convenience. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp succeeded as people just couldn't share or publish photos or files easily. Combined with some magic discover-ability.
Twitter's collapse has been painful. But weirdly it was incredibly influential though low in membership.
My personal consumption of social feeds has been obliterated to nearly zero. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I published for myself rather than an audience and had used Twitter just because it was easy. I have a broken computer at the moment and my entire dev stack / environment is in chaos. And although I think the barriers to publishing and self hosting are low there are still inherent obstacles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but hopefully it is more free speech than om twitter where Elon wants to decide what you can and can't see. It is well known that he is obsessed that things that align with his own views get more visibility while things he doesn't like is suppressed https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
And that doesn't apply to the powers that be at other social networks (or management at Twitter pre-Elon)?
I've spend hours building a website (1) that counts which members of the French parliament still actively tweet on X, and which actively use Bluesky.
The "analyse.ts" script for X did have to go through scraping, in a real browser connected to a real account. It got blocked every 30 or so profile views...
The Bluesky script was a delight, using the open no-credentials API (2).
Of course the Bluesky company can shut down their website or their API. But still, what this openness permits today is a significant difference from what X ever permitted. Their abstractions will stay and could be leveraged by another company with a team of 10 experimented developers.
1. The website is https://politix.top. Feel free to fork it for your own country. 2. Here is the Bluesky script https://github.com/laem/politix/blob/master/analyseBluesky.t...
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.