171–180 of 561 posts
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…
How has Bluesky degraded?
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How many people are running their own mail outside of large orgs or privacy/security niche? How many of those have had trouble sending mail to eg gmail?
It's easier to run your own Mastodon server than your own mail server (for the exact reason you cite).
Just install some software from your distro PM and go through some configs. Nothing stopped some hacker from bundling configs with a point and click installer for android eg - A mail server doesnt need 100% uptime - or for servers.
As for reaching others, ive never had problems because my domains had dkim and whatever else was available set up - could be easily automated like web certificates were, and i never send spam... How is that inherently more difficult? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to argue - just citing my own experience.
What's to stop major servers ("gmail" and "hotmail" of AP) from blocking you? Obviously some aspects are different from mail as it is geared for wide distribution rather than directed communication, but it's not obvious to me that the decentralization problem is solved by a model that seems superficially close to email.
Again, im not trying to troll you as im unfamiliar with AP - i genuinely don't know.
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.
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-...
It actually seems more open to me now, only that people who got used to being able to ban people they didn't like so they left. Yes, Musk does things are suspicious, but overall I've found the experience better, as someone who holds moderate views.
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, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. There's just so much fragmentation or migration away generally that none of it is very interesting. I think a lot of people took the Musk Twitter takeover as an excuse to re-evaluate their whole relationship to that sort of platform which basically led to a death spiral.
Define "alive" and "dead".
As a Mastodon user, it certainly is very much alive to me. I follow a lot of well known people, and that number isn't dropping.
This reminds of almost every Emacs thread here. People claiming it's dead/dying because of VSCode, whereas if you're active in the Emacs community, all you can see is growth.
Mastodon is going to hit a peak - it may already have. But as long as it maintains a healthy number of users, it will always be alive. At the moment it's more resilient than Bluesky, where almost all the users are on one instance.
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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.
Have you used Bluesky? I’ve been on it since it was invite only and I don’t see any politics on my feed. It’s basically just posts from friends, friends of friends, and artists for me. Bluesky seems the least pushy with rage bait content of all the social media’s.
i’ve also found that due to shareable ban lists, im often already banned by someone i want to follow (merely on the basis of who i follow, i don’t think i’ve ever posted on bkuesky)
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I think that is federation working as intended. These instance admins are exercising their right to free speech by not federating with instances that contain content they disagree with or disallow on their instance. I think it's not at all comparable to a corporate entity like X being in full control and able to censor any content. You may create your own instance and federate with the instances you want. If an insta…
> I think that is federation working as intended My email provider doesn't prevent me from sending an email from someone at Gmail because someone at Gmail happens to have opposite views to the admin. Yet email is still federated.
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Mastodon is worse if you pick servers that insist on being activist, and bother to care about the drama, sure. You don't need to do either.
But then you need to research the severs, shop around, and a bunch of other shit people don’t have time for. A bad user experience is just that: bad.
The only reason there was even an opinion about Twitter was mainstream news started reporting "what was on Twitter" and it's still centralized in that way - it "felt" non-optional.
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Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. There's just so much fragmentation or migration away generally that none of it is very interesting. I think a lot of people took the Musk Twitter takeover as an excuse to re-evaluate their whole relationship to that sort of platform which basically led to a death spiral.
> Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. Define "alive" and "dead". As a Mastodon user, it certainly is very much alive to me. I follow a lot of well known people, and that number isn't dropping. This reminds of almost every Emacs thread here. People claiming it's dead/dying because of VSCode, whereas if you're active in the Emacs community, all you can see is growt…
I predict Bluesky will add some form of targeted advertisements in the future once the user base has grown to a certain size. Isn't that obvious? I'd assume that's also why investors are willing to invest.
Yeah, and then experts will use ad-free alternative clients and most people won't. But it will still be better than other social media systems that ban alternative clients.
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"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.
I found it a lot easier to set up my BlueSky instance than Mastodon. Mastodon to me feels like it was built with the explicit goal to keep out anybody non-technical, and for technical people, only the type that wants to corner you at a party and discuss the deep philosophical and moral choices of your Linux desktop environment.