141–150 of 561 posts
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Yes, but hopefully it is more free speech than om twitter where Elon wants to decide what you can and can't see. It is well known that he is obsessed that things that align with his own views get more visibility while things he doesn't like is suppressed https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
“These sites are all as bad as each other” remains a very workable hypothesis.
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.
Threads sucks because it's empty. Bluesky appears to be an extremely online leftist enclave (which might be valuable to extemely online lefists, but is less appealing to the rest of us). Twitter... remains the king? It has its issues but lack of poasters and a broad spectrum of opinions aren't among them. These services aren't bad because they're commercial enterprises.
Some diversity they got there.
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curiosity-joined a month ago, 90% of discover feed is politics
Hm, maybe for a fresh account today. I just checked and my discover feed is pretty much just art and photography.
Personally I'd prefer if there was no default algorithmic feed but I know that just doesn't work. People will create an account, see nothing in their feed, and leave because the site seems dead or because they can't even fathom how to get started finding people to follow or custom feeds to add.
This is true but still, Bluesky enables things that X just cannot. I've spend hours building a website (1) that counts which members of the French parliament still actively tweet on X, and which actively use Bluesky. The "analyse.ts" script for X did have to go through scraping, in a real browser connected to a real account. It got blocked every 30 or so profile views... The Bluesky script was a delight, using the op…
"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.
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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.
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.
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> 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…
This seems like a category error. Topics that have political aspects, e.g. environmentalism, also have non-political aspects. Also, it just seems like an excuse for mob mentality. It's "if you're not for us you're against us" with extra steps.
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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…
Mastodon is worse if you pick servers that insist on being activist, and bother to care about the drama, sure. You don't need to do either.
A bad user experience is just that: bad.
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.
Threads sucks because it's empty. Bluesky appears to be an extremely online leftist enclave (which might be valuable to extemely online lefists, but is less appealing to the rest of us). Twitter... remains the king? It has its issues but lack of poasters and a broad spectrum of opinions aren't among them. These services aren't bad because they're commercial enterprises.
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 dream of a “classic web” as well. Principles: (a) non minification and no binary code – this is so that the platform is user and dev centred and not corpo and advertiser centred (b) static only mode as default, as in a site will be considered broken if it needs dynamic scripts to work, or at least it won't be considered a "classic" site – this is for (1) accessability and (2) command line (non-GUI) browser access a…
I believe you want human comprehensibility, but going with "no minification, no binary" may throw out a baby with the bathwater. Everything about computers is binary code underneath, even this message (and even UTF-8 is not exactly a trivial spec - it's just that we have tools that make it super accessible). I suspect you rather want lack of deliberate obfuscation for the sake of obscurity.
I think binary formats are fine, as long as there are tools to work with them. Same with minified code if the source maps are right there - we already spend a ton of computing resources for our convenience, no reason to send more bytes over the wire if they're not needed, just make sure they're fully accessible to whoever wants to look under the hood.
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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.