I just want an invite. I don't know why they are being so snobbish about it
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331–340 of 356 posts
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you accept that premise Personally, I don't. I think the flaw in this reasoning is to think that people join social networks with the sole purpose of exchanging information effectively, but I could probably make a list of 50 reasons that make people participate more than that. There is also the aspect that SNR is frankly a bad metric . We are quite able to filter things ourselves, which means that in the end we…
I think you might be interpreting my point about SNR narrowly and literally, when I meant it in the broadest sense. Obviously social networks are not solely about exchanging information (which I never said...), they serve all sorts of other purposes, connecting and forming bonds being a major one. I think you're also not being particularly charitable in your interpretations of what I'm saying, or opening yourself up…
> if you can imagine a world where it takes users less effort in setting up their twitter account to get the same quality output
What I am failing to understand is idea that "quality output" is a measurable metric in any meaningful way. The dimensionality of this metric would be almost as big as the number of people you have in your network, so in the end you are just trying to solve an infinite customization problem.
> can cause some unnecessary strife and result in the rather silly situation of being in violent agreement.
Or perhaps it is a good way to illustrate that the strife is actually necessary and should be embraced and seen as a natural consequence of any group of people who are trying to make sense of their internal worldview and how it fits with the real world?
There is no place in the real world where people "connect and form bonds" by following a strict protocol and have all their interaction methods designed. Every attempt at crating those end up with a system that feels forced and boring, like speed dating, town hall meetings or those ridiculous college assemblies where they need to have a mediator to constantly remind everyone what they should and should not do.
Conflict and strife is not a problem to be removed away. If you succeed at doing that, you'll end up removing an important part of what makes us human. What we need is to have better mechanisms to deal with conflict and strife, and I really don't believe that the way to go is by throwing tech designs around.
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know how censorship and Balkanization work on Bluesky? On Mastodon this was quite extreme, as entire servers can block each other, without any involvement from the individual user.
FWIW, many Fediverse instances will be / are blocking Bluesky. Some instances and individuals will block Fediverse instances which federate with Bluesky.
This is so stupid. Individuals should decide whether they block something.
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you might be interpreting my point about SNR narrowly and literally, when I meant it in the broadest sense. Obviously social networks are not solely about exchanging information (which I never said...), they serve all sorts of other purposes, connecting and forming bonds being a major one. I think you're also not being particularly charitable in your interpretations of what I'm saying, or opening yourself up…
> if you can imagine a world where it takes users less effort in setting up their twitter account to get the same quality output What I am failing to understand is idea that "quality output" is a measurable metric in any meaningful way. The dimensionality of this metric would be almost as big as the number of people you have in your network, so in the end you are just trying to solve an infinite customization problem…
> Or perhaps it is a good way to illustrate that the strife is actually necessary and should be embraced and seen as a natural consequence of any group of people who are trying to make sense of their internal worldview and how it fits with the real world? ... Conflict and strife is not a problem to be removed away.
I specifically said 'unnecessary conflict' to mean the part of conflict that is induced by the limitations of the medium, the topic of this thread. I too believe that some conflict is absolutely necessary and our communication mediums must be able to hold space for that conflict. We agree!
Again, I encourage you to interpret more charitably and to make fewer assumptions. This is the second time you've put words in my mouth and defended a position I'm not attacking and I'm trying to be polite but it's kinda tedious (can you see this?).
The time could have been better spent in exploration; I still don't know if you see any room for improvement anywhere, you don't seem to be engaging on that. A good design discussion doesn't consist of 'no no no'.
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#335It's lost the initial momentum but it's not dead yet. I'm still holding my breath that the critical mass makes the leap eventually; "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. A few never came back to twitter, but most did mostly for social reasons. But twitter as a pla…
Most of my people seemed to have landed on bsky. Discussions there get shares and likes, unlike mastodon where for me it's just a few void-shouts per day. Threads appears to be 100% mid celebrities who I am sure Facebook is paying to hang around.
After a year or so my mastodon feed is getting better and its more of the same people who were on twitter, less void-shouty than it was.
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you can imagine a world where it takes users less effort in setting up their twitter account to get the same quality output What I am failing to understand is idea that "quality output" is a measurable metric in any meaningful way. The dimensionality of this metric would be almost as big as the number of people you have in your network, so in the end you are just trying to solve an infinite customization problem…
> Or perhaps it is a good way to illustrate that the strife is actually necessary and should be embraced and seen as a natural consequence of any group of people who are trying to make sense of their internal worldview and how it fits with the real world? ... Conflict and strife is not a problem to be removed away. I specifically said 'unnecessary conflict' to mean the part of conflict that is induced by the limitati…
> 'unnecessary conflict' to mean the part of conflict that is induced by the limitations of the medium.
How would you expect to do this without changing the medium itself?
> I still don't know if you see any room for improvement anywhere
I don't see it, no. At least not by adding "features" or by tweaking on the software implementation of the system.
In regards of "social media", I am more and more convinced that the only winning move is not to play, but unfortunately we will never do it. The only option that I see left is to work on "damage reduction", which is why I've spent so much time, energy and money to see if we can get "corporate-free social media" as a viable alternative for the masses.
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Choice is only good if the options are differentiated and easy to understand. A bunch of algo and client options sound good for someone who is already a committed user, but for a new user it just complicated the onboarding experience. Not to mention, it’s unclear what the incentive to put real resources behind any of these clients is.
It doesn't complicate the onboarding process though, because there's an official client and a default algo. That's Bluesky's whole thing: sensible defaults and easy onboarding, so it can be "just twitter" if you want it to be. But the open protocol and ecosystem that give you more options if/when you want them, and put pressure on the official ones to stay good
The thread is discussing Blue Sky getting critical mass (ie casual users), my claim is that for this the algo and client choices are neutral to mildly negative value.
Take that away you’re really back to “just Twitter” with fewer features and less content.
I agree that algo and client choice would be a positive for a mature site like Twitter, but it’s unclear how a site with this strategy will get enough traction for the choices to be useful
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way to truly have a "good" social media experience is to have a small site (a few hundred active people, maybe less who join slowly over a somewhat long period of time) where everyone has at least slightly overlapping interests. I'm lucky enough to have found a site like this and it's epic. Better than any social media I've ever experienced. People actually care about each other. We have a community.
You managed to describe the many forums of ye olde days. I miss those days. Has it really been at least 20 years? I'm getting too old for this...
There's still places left where you can find it.
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way to truly have a "good" social media experience is to have a small site (a few hundred active people, maybe less who join slowly over a somewhat long period of time) where everyone has at least slightly overlapping interests. I'm lucky enough to have found a site like this and it's epic. Better than any social media I've ever experienced. People actually care about each other. We have a community.
Welcome to twenty years ago, when we could still hope the internet would actually enrich our social lives.
Yeah, but you can still find that experience in a few back corners of the web. Like I said, I've been lucky enough to find it.
Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is still a waitlist but we're working hard to open things up ASAP. Some people will never believe it, but the waitlist was never intended as a growth hack. It was purely an attempt to keep the network healthy and the servers from catching on fire as we iterated on the app itself. For devs that want to experiment, we've had a special waitlist for a while: https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers
Amateurs. you guys blew a once in a life time. Invites/waitlist... For a social media app. Seen it before with that other app who's name I forgot about.
Livejournal?