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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

#241

Post by amatecha »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #116
jeroenhd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I do this with a catchall domain as well. Indeed, I've had people ask if I work for their company -- too funny! So far the only company that has illegally added me to a mailing list I didn't sign up for is H&M (the clothing store).

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#242

Post by emseetech »

tqwhite wrote: post #227
emseetech wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky has not yet degraded. But the funding model it chose has proven to degrade the user experience of every other service.

Would agree except for the part where they have not said anything concrete about their funding model. If you’re talking about venture money, it’s a public benefit LLC. The demands that can be made on them are limited by that.

For the record, I am extremely skeptical that public benefit corps can resist market forces in any considerable way and I'm not alone in that concern. We're early enough in the history of benefit corporations that I may be proven wrong based on how enforcement and methods of legal accountability play out, but for the time being I consider them indistinguishable from standard corporations.

Non-profits are much more time tested and concretely structured.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#243

Post by x-complexity »

maelito wrote: post #59
glimshe wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.

> there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free. Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service. But the API access and federation should remain free.

> But the API access and federation should remain free.

...no.

APIs are not free cost-wise: They require server compute to serve requests, at minimum.

IMO: Require API users to put down $2 to obtain access, and offer higher tiers for higher limits. I.E What Twitter's API already does.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#244

Post by rebeccaskinner »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #207
rebeccaskinner wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think Mastodon and the Fediverse is better equipped for this kind of thing. The software itself acts like a "common carrier", and the networks formed by the instance operators align according to their politics. Truth Social itself is built on Mastodon.

I really wanted mastodon to take off but in practice it just hasn’t seemed to, or at least any spaces that are worth using are also not discoverable.

Anecdotally, as someone who mostly used Twitter for math and theoretical CS (plus some news and current events) I feel like I ought to have been able to fairly easily find a community on mastodon but I never did. BlueSky is doing much better as a replacement for tech twitter and math twitter.

I suspect the centralization is necessary to an extent to get critical momentum. You could replicate something like that in mastodon maybe, but nobody seems to have done so in practice and I’m skeptical they will. Truth Social is probably the best example but from what I know, but it never hit the scale of Twitter even with a fairly ravenous core audience.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#245

Post by mattl »

sangnoir wrote: post #188
shwouchk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> How many of those have had trouble sending mail to eg gmail? The whole appeal of email-style decentralization is that even in those cases, Google can only block you from GMail - not email as a whole, which would be far more deleterious, and is the ever-present threat in non-decentralized platforms.

Number of people using Gmail is basically 100%

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#247

Post by Ukv »

iteria wrote: post #223
everybodyknows wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is definitely a perk. If I see someone whose posts are abhorrent and someone is following them, then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either. Some people are block happy, but being able cut off chains of people is a perk. I'm also pretty sure OG Twitter and Mastodon let you see followers. If you could make them private, I never found any user that actually did that.

> then I understand that they share values in some way

Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed? I feel it's relatively common for someone to want to keep an eye on, say, what Trump is posting even if they detest him.

Probably becomes self-reinforcing in that by treating follows as a public endorsement, many people start following only what they want to be seen endorsing instead of what they want on their timeline. Which leaves a void for a timeline of what I want to see instead of what I want to be seen endorsing, probably currently filled (slightly awkwardly) by using an alternate account or visiting the profiles manually.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#248

Post by phoronixrly »

_IIIIIIIIIII_ wrote: post #182
griomnib wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you're describing there is the "actual work" which can either be done by someone else and funded by investor capital (see the beginning of this thread) or you learn to do it yourself and in return you are not beholden to investors who will eventually try to extract a profit from you and your peers. Easy is seldom truly free.

Just a reminder that this was how it always was before. Then people got lazy, people forgot how to RUN a community, and here we are.

Moaning that federation is not decentralisation without even considering running their own instance, and when you suggest that, they turn around and say 'oh it's too hard'...

Oh how I miss the times of interest-based forums with ACTUAL moderation, large IRC channels where assholes got kicked and none of this amorphous mass of people and bots producing unmoderated brainrot that then gets turned into AI slop-based timelines optimised for the sole purpose of stimulating people's dopamine receptors until they burn out...

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#249

Post by Dylan16807 »

_IIIIIIIIIII_ wrote: post #182
griomnib wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you're describing there is the "actual work" which can either be done by someone else and funded by investor capital (see the beginning of this thread) or you learn to do it yourself and in return you are not beholden to investors who will eventually try to extract a profit from you and your peers. Easy is seldom truly free.

Plenty of free software is easy to install. Why should it take "actual work"?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#250

Post by MichaelZuo »

amatecha wrote: post #236
MichaelZuo wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s simply not credible to expect tens of thousands of random people to be scrupulous 100% of the time.

Centralized services try to solve the issue by simply never giving out such authority outside of a small handpicked group. (And even then a reddit admin was caught red handed doing it a while back)

Edit: And so the trust that takes years to build up can be lost in a few seconds of bad decisions…

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