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Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
111–120 of 561 posts
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#112When 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.
Mastodon isn't true decentralization to begin with, it's just federation like email, where every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none. I find that approach a waste of time, as it's just replicating past mistakes verbatim.
On top of that, the whole Fediverse is extremely political. Email providers don't care much what you write or with whom you communicate outside of spam, so it works quite well. Meanwhile Fediverse is blocking people and servers left and right, it's completely unusable unless you follow the group-think on whatever server you are on.
Real decentralization is what Nostr is doing, where serves are just dumb relays, user-ids are public-key pairs and all the intelligence is in the client. BlueSky's AT-protocol should be capable of similar stuff, though in practice is still very much focused around the main BlueSky server.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#113Twitter 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.
IDK how this applies to Bluesky. The underlying infrastructure is only loosely tethered to Bluesky the company. If you want to pull all your shit and run it separate from the bluesky stuff you can and there's really nothing they can do to try and stop you or ban you.
They can limit your reach on their stuff but if you don't want to use their stuff it doesn't actually matter and you can continue to exist completely independent of them if you want.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#114Earlier 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-...
Before the other side took hold of a major platform and started doing it to their ends, "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach", "you don't have the right to a megaphone" etc. were maxims that were regularly fielded by pundits in defense of shadowbanning and any thumbprints being discovered on the algorithmic scale (though they were never so confident in it as to make the manipulation explicit upfront before it w…
it wont work well bc ppl need enemies to fight for engagement. without that ppl just get bored
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My team uses Matrix and I must say I'm not satisfied. There are messages that I get a notification for every time I open the app, and "mark as read" buttons that do nothing, especially if you use threads. This is something that has supposedly been fixed many times, but it's one of these persistent issues that keep coming back. Also, as far as I can tell, there is no real diversity in clients even though Matrix is in…
Something isn’t right here; thread notif problems should have been solved a year or so ago.
And most apps are not element forks - eg FluffyChat, Nheko, Cinny are all great fully featured apps and separate codebases. The only Element fork i can think of is SchildiChat. Meanwhile matrix-react-sdk doesn’t even exist any more.
Are you on a stale build for some reason?
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#116>“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'll be surprised how many people think they can just use first.lastname@gmail.com and have email magically appear in their account. And even more people have no idea what the @gmail.com/@ibm.com is about. All they know is that some of their emails don't reach their contacts, probably because "the computer broke again". It's not a hard concept, but it's a concept that was only ever explained in school to a sliver o…
I have my own domain, and have email set up so that any email to that domain goes to me.
You'd be surprised (well, nobody here on HN would be) to know how many times I tell a business that my email is "their-business@my-domain.com", and they ask me how I got that email address, whether I work for their company, etc.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#117Earlier 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
It's not a hard concept, but it is a stupid one. Phone numbers for example you can take with you when you switch providers. Email has the provider hardcoded into your email address, thus every new provider means you have a new email.
The Web still lacks a first-class concept of a user identify that you can take with you across servers.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#118This is true but still, Bluesky enables things that X just cannot. 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 op…
The feature you're describing is only supported by BlueSky "for now". It isn't an essential element of the design of BS.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
they may be confused by it yet it is not a hard concept
It's not a hard concept, but it is a stupid one. Phone numbers for example you can take with you when you switch providers. Email has the provider hardcoded into your email address, thus every new provider means you have a new email. The Web still lacks a first-class concept of a user identify that you can take with you across servers.
But if you own your own domain and use it for your own mail, you do take your identity with you? Isn't this what AT protocol is promising with Bluesky's identity system?
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#120Earlier 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.
Mastodon isn't true decentralization to begin with, it's just federation like email, where every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none. I find that approach a waste of time, as it's just replicating past mistakes verbatim. On top of that, the whole Fediverse is extremely political. Email providers don't care much what you write or with whom you communicate…
"every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none"
So run your own server.