Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

chrisholdgraf.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 561 posts

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#231

Post by amatecha »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #90
sureglymop wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe. You'll frequently find many stores/communities/services saying "hotmail/yahoo/___ users, we haven't been getting your emails" because those services aren't quite as big as Gmail and are getting spam-holed or whatever. I'm sure spam filtering already gives a major hit to free email services. If a mail server started up that explicitly permits in its ToS propagation of hate speech and terrorist threats, it's probably going to get blocklisted by all major email services, no?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#233

Post by Gigachad »

everybodyknows wrote: post #195
whimsicalism wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for me it is extremely political and boring 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)

So your "follow" list is required to be public? Seems like a design flaw.

Your follow list is public on Twitter as well. But BlueSky being designed to be federated ends up exposing a whole lot of data which should probably be private.

The block issue could probably be resolved by a 3rd party server which could let you still follow users who have blocked you. All this data is publicly available on the api. Obviously they wouldn't see your posts still.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#234

Post by amatecha »

BeetleB wrote: post #193
BodyCulture wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

fyi mastodon.social is by far the biggest (almost sole) source of spam, thus more and more servers are "limiting" it (as opposed to outright blocking/defederating) so people only see posts from users they explicitly follow from that server.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#235

Post by oguz-ismail »

amatecha wrote: post #219
ghaff wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Mastodon is absolutely not dead,

It sucks though, I don't know ONE normal person who's on Mastodon.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#236

Post by amatecha »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #229
amatecha wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t see how it can be a Twitter replacement, at best a reddit/Discord/IRC replacement but even that seems very unlikely. e.g. Are there even guarantees that a bad admin can’t mess with someone’s previous posts?

I know the admin of my server and all moderators personally. I'm not sure what your point is. The people who run services you use can mess with your stuff - in WoW a GM stole items from my guild's guild bank using the account of a guildmate who was permabanned, for example.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#237

Post by Karrot_Kream »

tqwhite wrote: post #224
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My other comments expand on the biggest issue which is the advertiser-optimized engagement algorithm. A site which does not cater to advertising (using an alternative source of income such as a user-driven subscription model) can instead maintain a time-based feed. This is a much better user experience. It doesn't favor negative engagement, it's less addicting, and it doesn't create artificial virality. Thanks I pr…

There are increasing numbers of new ways to generate feeds that suit your needs. I use the list functions to segregate people I follow into categories. There are a couple of built-in feeds that help discover new people. But, the best thing is exemplified by graze.social which gives you a huge amount of ways to filter the firehose feed into whatever you want. Leave out the rage bait? It’s a filter sequence away. Me? I…

Yeah I'm aware of feed generation and as I said I wrote my own feeds to do some of this filtering. I really should use Lists more often, you bring up a good point.

I'm a huge fan of how easy it is to have editorial control of your feed on Bluesky and the concept of a standard Bluesky identity.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#238

Post by tqwhite »

I am a huge BLuesky fan. I have switched my entire social experience to it. I get good engagement, mostly with seemingly decent people. I almost always can find interesting things to read.

I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds.

I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun.

Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.

There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing.

But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms.

Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#239

Post by amatecha »

oguz-ismail wrote: post #235
amatecha wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Mastodon is absolutely not dead, It sucks though, I don't know ONE normal person who's on Mastodon.

Oh yeah? I know a few ppl who are on fediverse but aren't comfortable sharing their account, interestingly. Also, yeah, for now it's mostly techie/geeky/academic types who are on Mastodon, with a good slice of artistic/creative people coming in as well. I follow a couple artists who barely know how to use the software but are posting frequently and having lots of good discussions and stuff. Pretty sweet.

Oh also, it might seem more dead than it really is because some people post primarily "followers-only". I only have one or two posts a month that can be seen by "everyone".

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#240

Post by amatecha »

wmf wrote: post #203
piyuv wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess then Bluesky will ban alternative clients and start charging for API, a-la Musk?

They don't need to because the normies are profitable enough.

Could have said that at one point about Twitter or Reddit.
Post reply on HN