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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

#261

Post by mattl »

sangnoir wrote: post #259
mattl wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s clients.

People add their Gmail account to their iPhone and get Apple Mail.

Virtually all email goes to Gmail between personal accounts and GSuite stuff.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#262

Post by haswell »

Spivak wrote: post #256
Ukv wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fu…

> Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values

I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO.

What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#263

Post by whimsicalism »

haswell wrote: post #262
Spivak wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

> Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO. What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.

absolutely agreed

+ most of my inclusion in these blocklists is due to actions taken by someone i follow after i followed them (some AI person I followed who posted bluesky posts on huggingface). it really is ridiculous to read a follow as an endorsement

i think this is more of a cultural issue with bluesky than a technical issue/flaw

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#264

Post by dingnuts »

brightball wrote: post #34
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…

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.

can't someone just stand up another atproto AppView with different default feeds to solve this problem?

BlueSky's moderation team has traditional Twitter-like biases but my understanding of the AT protocol, from reading the spec, is that they do not have a monopoly on moderation in the AT network.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#265

Post by dingnuts »

simonw wrote: post #120
grumbel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon isn't true decentralization to begin with, it's just federation like email, where every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none. I find that approach a waste of time, as it's just replicating past mistakes verbatim. On top of that, the whole Fediverse is extremely political. Email providers don't care much what you write or with whom you communicate…

"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.

harder in practice because many large instances block single user instances because abuse was an afterthought to the activitypub designers.

Also, if you want to operate a home server, you also have to be willing to have a public file upload endpoint capable of receiving and storing arbitrary data on your server (because that's how ActivityPub works), and people send your server a lot of data, and a lot of that data will be extremely unsavory, and it will be your responsibility to make sure you remove anything illegal that someone on another server uploads to yours.

I wasn't willing to take that risk, myself.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#266

Post by wrycoder »

sangnoir wrote: post #259
mattl wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When I look at the email addresses in the various communities I belong to, it’s at least 80% gmail, and the rest are mostly defunct services are just barely hanging on. Yes, I run my own email server, have for years.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#267

Post by dingnuts »

amatecha wrote: post #222
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.

You didn't really set up a completely separate server that can exist without Bluesky's central servers (because that's not possible), so it's not a fair comparison. No, Mastodon was not designed to keep out anybody non-technical. In any given social circle, there is almost undoubtedly at least ONE person who can fire up a server and administrate it. You only need one sysadmin for your whole community - the rest can b…

> because that's not possible

it isn't? I'm not aware of any relay servers being run but the AT protocol makes affordances for this functionality. Are those features a lie? I read the protocol specification only a few weeks ago, perhaps this is new?

You're correct that the grandparent's PDS isn't the same as a Mastodon homeserver but that's probably a good thing; the network functions much differently than the ActivityPub federation

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#268

Post by sumeno »

haswell wrote: post #262
Spivak wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

> Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO. What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.

Nobody cares about your public discourse. Your opinion is not that important to 99.9999% of the people on this planet. I use social media to follow people I like and see funny jokes and if a few people undeservedly catch a block oh well, that's the price of a curated feed.

Call it an echo chamber, but nobody has a right to have their posts be seen

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#269

Post by fastball »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #55
fastball wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that doesn't apply to the powers that be at other social networks (or management at Twitter pre-Elon)?

Pre-Elon moderation was (somewhat) sensible. Every online space needs a janitorial crew to keep it from turning into a wasteland (look at 4chan /b/, and even b isn't completely unmoderated). But it didn't take actions at the emotional whims of a megalomaniac ruler.

It took actions based on the emotional / political whims of various random people though, right? Maybe not from a single megalomaniacal ruler, but that seems like a distinction without a difference.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#270

Post by haswell »

sumeno wrote: post #268
haswell wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO. What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.

Nobody cares about your public discourse. Your opinion is not that important to 99.9999% of the people on this planet. I use social media to follow people I like and see funny jokes and if a few people undeservedly catch a block oh well, that's the price of a curated feed. Call it an echo chamber, but nobody has a right to have their posts be seen

I was reacting to the very direct and unqualified statement that who a person follows strongly indicates their values.

If you’re just using social media for entertainment, I don’t care who you block or how. But perpetuating the idea that “follow equals endorsement” is a problem regardless.

This has less to do with people having a right to be seen and more to do with the perpetuation of ideas that make society more polarized in spaces where such things matter.

To put this another way, I’d react less strongly to “blocking people based on who they follow weeds out almost everyone I don’t want to see and I accept the false positives”. I’d still express concerns about the resulting echo chamber but that’s a far more reasonable position.

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