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Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

chrisholdgraf.com

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Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#211

Post by glzone1 »

ghaff wrote: post #166
emseetech wrote: post #7

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.

I feel like twitter / x being called dead has happened a lot since Elon's purchase (they fired folks which lead to claims to was going to be going down etc etc).

Is this really the case now that it's dead (for real)? Are folks going back to NBC/MSNBC etc for news?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#212

Post by dartos »

swed420 wrote: post #96
dartos wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This hasn't said anything of value, since everything is political. I really disagree with this statement. Many things are political, but not everything. (Unless you’re abstracting the word political to the point of it meaning any human relationship. At which point the word isn’t useful) Some choices are just convenience. Most people with an iPhone don’t choose to text on messenger because of a political opinion, it…

> Some choices are just convenience. > Most people don’t know they’re limiting their interaction. Sure, but they often carry political implications (even if the choice/chooser was unconscious of them) > Most people with an iPhone don’t choose to text on messenger because of a political opinion, it’s just because it’s the default app on their phone. That's not the best example to make your point considering many peopl…

> by using platform Y instead of Z does not exempt one from being political

That’s… exactly what I was saying with “ any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political”…

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#213

Post by tqwhite »

BodyCulture wrote: post #64
ChocolateGod wrote: post #48

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?

I was in a discussion with someone and the instance just booted me out. No explanation. No appeal. I still had a handful of windows open to various conversations (I’m a slob) and could not find a single reason.

I shopped around for another home and found fussy rules. I got rejected for reasons that made no sense.

It encourages narrow minded balkanization and it retains your identity so you have to form a new one.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#215

Post by tqwhite »

vidarh wrote: post #74
brightball wrote: post #34

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.

I agree with the sentiment, but I'd say specifically the Fediverse is the only real place for a truly decentralised option. It doesn't need to be Mastodon. You don't need to be on Mastodon to interact with the Fediverse or be part of it, and that is the key strength. Mastodon can be corrupted and the Fediverse is still there. That could include Bluesky over time - you can follow my Mastodon from Bluesky via a bridge…

This is absolutely true. Bluesky can become decentralized but it will take a fair amount of work.

What BLuesky does do is keep the door open for competition. If you want, you can stand up a version of its entire system (all open source). Or, you could write your own system that uses the AT Proto DID stuff to let people access their posts and follows, etc, in any way you want.

And, BLuesky also serves as a bootstrap for AT Proto writ large. The whole distributed identity thing has huge potential going forward and it’s use by Bsky is an excellent start.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#216

Post by pipeline_peak »

CartyBoston wrote: post #10

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.

The only thing missing are users willing to go out of their way to learn how to spin up fediverse instances and perform volunteer system administration in their free time. The type of work that otherwise would be paid to employees by said commercial entities.

Piece of cake

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#217

Post by tqwhite »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #194
brightball wrote: post #34

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.

> BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. I don't see this at all. Quite the opposite in fact. From what I've seen, BlueSky is trying very hard as a company to stay apolitical in an extremely naive way that's going to ultimately drive away users. There's simply no way to to be apolitical as a general social media platform today when soc…

I’m hoping that the problems caused by their effort to avoid viewpoint moderation will be overcome by their composable self-moderation idea. It is increasingly straightforward to control what you see (graze.social is a good example, along with number tools inside bsky itself), both for safety and for creating a well-tuned echo chamber.

Add some more tools to facilitate selection of people to block and the only real problem left will be people demanding performative loyalty acts.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#218

Post by BeetleB »

aftbit wrote: post #204
BeetleB wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like one instance banning another whole instance because that instance is not agreeing to the same moderation policies as the first. I think some instances block all Pleroma instances, because there is an association of Pleroma being used by right wing folks. Here are failed attempts to ban Pleroma instances outright: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues…

>mastodon.art is a safe space instance So don't join them if you don't want to be coddled. Anyone who does wants to engage with a different slice of the fediverse, and why do you care if they don't see you?

I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment or the one I was replying to.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#219

Post by amatecha »

ghaff wrote: post #166
emseetech wrote: post #7

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.

Mastodon is absolutely not dead, and will outlast both Twitter and Bluesky as far as I can tell -- as someone who has been an early adopter in every single social media platform (or precursor thereof) since the mid-90's. Why? There isn't some top-down capitalistic motive to destroy the platform. It will continue to exist, because it is a protocol defined/evolved by the community with zero incentive for profitability or pleasing of rich shareholders. It keeps plodding along, no noise, no ads, no algorithm, just people communicating with each other.

Especially as communities evolve and gain greater trust amongst each other, the platform will actually strengthen as far as I can tell -- this is already happening, as there are servers we know we can "trust" and those we know we can't (mastodon.social) because they have open-door policy and poor moderation.

I could go on about it all day, but ActivityPub is so far the absolute best technology for social communities I've ever seen/used (not that there aren't things that can be improved, of course).

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#220

Post by tqwhite »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #185
emseetech wrote: post #7

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…

I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance. What actual things are you worried about or unhappy regarding with Bluesky? It's not perfect, and if you have problems with its decentralization posture, Christine Lemmer-Webber has a fantastic post [1] detailing her problems with the protocol. Bluesky has the AT Protocol underneath it and has inf…

I’m with you. Every same conversation is about judgment and self-aggrandizement rarely about discussing problems, finding solutions or appreciating opportunities.

Bluesky is fine. It’s not perfect. It’s struggling to deal with demands for viewpoint moderation. It’s a public benefit corp so venture capitalists have less to complain about. It has good tools to deal with most things. The people who are working on it seem competent and sincere.

I like the phrase, karma farming.

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