I'm really enjoying Mastodon. It's a bit like Usenet back in 1994 - only us geeks there.
To be honest, I'm kinda glad that the Twitterati aren't there; I did not enjoy Twitter when it was in its prime.
Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
251–260 of 561 posts
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#252Earlier 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.
Thank god for that... I love Mastodon, but the moment it experiences an Eternal September, I will be done once and for all with social media.
At this point I consider the technical/usability hurdles of it a feature that filters out people that are not my kind of people...
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Plenty of email servers will throw you off for using the domain to email things they disagree with. It's just that most people have migrated to general purpose providers for their personal addresses.
> throw you off for using the domain to email things they disagree with
Right, you can get kicked off for your emails.
But nobody is going to ban you based on which domains you do or do not put on your block list.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I guess then Bluesky will ban alternative clients and start charging for API, a-la Musk?
Ah, the circle of life for VC-funded social media... Let third party devs write cool apps, copy the features that stick, then pull their rug. Then proceed to squeeze ad revenue in a death spiral as the MAU gently falls off.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
That sounds like a recipe for a social media platform that never has enough people on it to be even remotely interesting.
From my understanding of messing with Mastodon a bit, users can "subscribe" to other servers in the 'fediverse'. The proposed personal instance can act as a "Home" server and is a part of your handle in a way. It almost functions like a sub identifier. You can browse and interact all throughout the fediverse on a number of topics, while linking people back to the server you came from during engagement.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
It depends on what your personal philosophy of blocklists is. If you believe that on a supermassive social network that no single person's content is worth anything and can safely discarded then what you're interested in is signal and a low false negative rate.
Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values. Is it always accurate, no, you stand as an example of such a person but their feed is still full and the kind of people they have in mind they don't want to see are gone.
Reddit has a similar culture with extensions that let you hide users that subscribe to or have ever posted in certain subreddits. It works better than it has any right to.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#257Earlier 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.
> 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
yeah, a lot of bluesky members seem to hold this attitude - but it is not correct & moreso incentivizes epistemic bad practices
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
“Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed?”
It is for those that need safe spaces. I love hearing the nonsense on both sides so I’m sure I would be blocked by people not ready to listen to such views due to fragility issues.
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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%
Your implausible estimate got me curious; so I checked[1,2] the first couple of result from Google on email marketshare. GMail is 27.7%. Apple has double the share, at 54%, you should be worried about Apple instead.
1. https://www.litmus.com/email-client-market-share
2. https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients
Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
> Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed?
Emphatically no, and it’s one of the things that I dislike about what blocklists have become on Bluesky.
The fact that many people now view follows as some kind of endorsement speaks to how much social media has deteriorated and arguably makes the polarization problem worse - not just because people are making themselves ignorant of what public figures are saying, but they’re isolating themselves from the people they actually do align with who choose to keep themselves informed, further reinforcing the echo chamber.
Depending on your primary reason for using social media, I realize how attractive it is to quickly lock down your feeds. But it comes with a dark side, and blocking someone for no reason other than following an account is part of that dark side IMO.