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Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

chrisholdgraf.com

61–70 of 561 posts

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#62

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…

IMO Mastodon is the only real place for a truly decentralized option. 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.

“Political” and “decentralized” Are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political, as the only ones that care about decentralization are the ones who care about politics.

Everyone else is just trying to see what the famous person said last week or what their friend did on vacation.

Corpo social media does solve for that.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, people are confused by it. I think this is at least partly because there's even less to differentiate the different mastodon domains than there was to differentiate gmail and yahoo. And, of course, there are a lot of people growing up now who don't really use email, so the analogy can't be taken for granted.

they may be confused by it yet it is not a hard concept

Therefore it's a bad concept.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Mastodon is the only real place for a truly decentralized option. 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.

If you think BlueSky is political, Mastodon is worse. Mastodon ends up creating significant echo chambers where admins ban communication with other instances for having people with different opinions to them (rather than just delisting in the public feed) and on can ban you and stop you moving your data to another instance. On Mastodon, admins can also be pressured into banning users by other admins under fear of hav…

Can you please give some more details about the pressure methods in mastodon you are writing about, this is very interesting and important.

Is there any systematic study going on about the mechanism of censorship in the fediverse?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#65
post #16

>“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.

Yet, people are confused by it. I think this is at least partly because there's even less to differentiate the different mastodon domains than there was to differentiate gmail and yahoo. And, of course, there are a lot of people growing up now who don't really use email, so the analogy can't be taken for granted.

What is the evidence for people being confused about that? Did any scientist some research about this, are there any facts or studies about this issue? Or does just someone think it is an issue?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#66
post #16

>“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.

You can say it’s “not a hard concept” as much as you’d like, it doesn’t change the reality that it is confusing and hard to understand for end users used to Twitter (which is everyone)

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#67

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…

>their fans follow them on that platform

A percentage of their fans, and it can be a small percent.

You see this phenomenon all the time on people leaving X to Bluesky they expect their audience to just follow them and the engagement to be comparable and when it just isn’t you see them either quietly come back or just cross post and pretend they’re not back.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Self-hosting sounds good but the security concerns are just a bind. Plus you need stability. Like having a home. Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live. Yes I could use batteries, but no, I can't be bothered.

Batteries are a pretty set-and-forget solution though. Out of all the maintenance/thought I put towards my server, the UPS takes the least amount of attention. Though it really is only good for outages <2 or 3 hours. If it’s longer in your area, then it’s a bigger concern

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think BlueSky is political, Mastodon is worse. Mastodon ends up creating significant echo chambers where admins ban communication with other instances for having people with different opinions to them (rather than just delisting in the public feed) and on can ban you and stop you moving your data to another instance. On Mastodon, admins can also be pressured into banning users by other admins under fear of hav…

Can you please give some more details about the pressure methods in mastodon you are writing about, this is very interesting and important. Is there any systematic study going on about the mechanism of censorship in the fediverse?

Eh, I don't have any links to hand, but I vividly remember when I used Mastodon an instance of an admin being tagged and pressured to remove an individual off their server or be blocked.

was around a year ago

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#70

This seems like a rather poor excuse to not try and integrate with the Fediverse/mastodon. Yes, managing your own space is more complicated than using a manager solution, but like, isn't that always going to be the case?

Yes, especially when the author says they care about control.
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