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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

#481

Post by nunobrito »

Heliodex wrote: post #379
nunobrito wrote: post #344

Would be interesting to ask the author for a review of NOSTR afterwards. At NOSTR the account functions without servers, you get private keys that certify your messages as yours no matter where or when you post them. From that perspective there isn't a private castle since you can send your messages to any of the several hundred relays existing today. It isn't VC funded but doesn't really cater to woke people and the…

I love Nostr and run my own personal relay, as it's much simpler to set up than a Bluesky or Mastodon instance. The idea of nonexistent moderation is untrue. The big relays get big because they only commit to the minimum necessary moderation, though there are plenty of smaller or topic-centric relays based on user allowlists, payments (regularly or per note), or admins enforcing pretty standard moderation systems. Th…

That's the thing. I can troll you across all your relays and others.

You can't really stop a targeted attacker. Sure you can always add a few "IF's" as disclaimer and nitpick all you want, reality is that moderation is defacto non-existent for the overwhelming majority of relays.

As a challenge, try to see for yourself what is posted to them without any filters or WoT algorithms, then you see the unfettered amount of material getting published. Of course that is small relays you can enable whitelisting and so forth, but those are corner cases. They are not the norm.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#482

Post by ikesau »

kalleboo wrote: post #352

Going more to the topic of the article rather than platform wars: In moving to Mastodon from X a few years ago, I didn't want my content to be owned by a platform, but I also just don't have it in my to write blog posts, posting threads bit by bit works better for my brain. So my solution was to write a script that took that any thread I start with a certain hashtag in it, and threadreader-style mirror it to a basic…

this is really cool! thanks for sharing :)

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#483

Post by javier_e06 »

dsr_ wrote: post #81
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, people are confused by it. I think this is at least partly because there's even less to differentiate the different mastodon domains than there was to differentiate gmail and yahoo. And, of course, there are a lot of people growing up now who don't really use email, so the analogy can't be taken for granted.

Stages of enlightenment: 1. That didn't work as I expected. 2. I am confused! 3. Oh, that's how it works! I learned something. Humans go through this every day, in domains technological and not.

Stores won't let you have cash-back from your purchase when using your debit card if you flash the card. You have to insert the card. Some cashiers don't even know that. I don't feel enlightened by that fact. Newer cars won't disengage the hand-break if parked on a slope and you don't have the seat locked in. I don't feel enlightened by that fact. The list of "rules" goes on and on and technology feels oppressive, not empowering. Maybe is artificial enlightenment?

Sorry for the rant.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#484

Post by rchaud »

epolanski wrote: post #378

Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much? Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.

Because there is money to be made on whichever platform manages to trap the largest number of active users.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#485

Post by nunobrito »

dom96 wrote: post #409
nunobrito wrote: post #344

Would be interesting to ask the author for a review of NOSTR afterwards. At NOSTR the account functions without servers, you get private keys that certify your messages as yours no matter where or when you post them. From that perspective there isn't a private castle since you can send your messages to any of the several hundred relays existing today. It isn't VC funded but doesn't really cater to woke people and the…

> there isn't moderation of any kind How can this possibly work? What if someone posts illegal content?

Well, tough luck.

Of course that app providers want to keep their customers returning, so they will try to show you the most interesting posts while keeping other stuff away.

But the thing is to try yourself. One of the fastest app provider is Primal, you can find it here and register an account for posting any kind of stuff you want under 5 seconds: https://primal.net/

Will someone read your stuff? That is a different topic. Because new accounts tend to be ignored no matter what you post, usually you have to first interact with existing users and build up your credit score if you want to get noticed.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#486

Post by diggan »

exodust wrote: post #362
diggan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who does the author think controls Discord? I think you misunderstand what sort of control they speak about. I think what they're getting at is "Who is doing the moderation?" rather than "Who is maintaining the servers?", so the community aspect instead of the technical details. I think Discord let people do the moderation part pretty much however they want, compared to say Twitter where there is one moderation tea…

The author lists a set of rules, one of which is: " always move people back to your kingdom, never to another kingdom ". So he's motivated by "moving people to kingdoms", which sounds like the exact thing he's calling out the big social platforms on, but adopting himself on a smaller scale. In the end, respecting users isn't the guiding force. "Kingdom building" is. Brand building. Users herded like cattle from castl…

I dunno, reading and trying to understand what the author is trying to mean, I still think they're referring to moderation and not servers/infra when they talk about "kingdoms".

But I could be wrong, it has happened before so bound to happen sometime again.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#487

Post by rchaud »

aSanchezStern wrote: post #144
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.

You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century, and is not true of every business today. Just because people are sometimes selfish doesn't mean they never have any principles.

Facebook and IG allowed 3rd party apps, until they went public. Twitter and Reddit did as well up to a couple of years ago, now they don't. I'll look to the real history of 21st century Silicon Valley companies over the theories of a dead academic from the Great Depression.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#488

Post by ghaff »

DecoySalamander wrote: post #412
glzone1 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like twitter / x being called dead has happened a lot since Elon's purchase (they fired folks which lead to claims to was going to be going down etc etc). Is this really the case now that it's dead (for real)? Are folks going back to NBC/MSNBC etc for news?

It isn't dead in any meaningful way. Every time there's an issue with a service (Musk writes something obnoxious, 2 day outage, rules change) people create accounts on competing services, but are back within a week because those places don't have content or engagement. Some people do migrate, and it's possible to get the impression that Twitter is dead if this happens to your social circle, but to me it seems as acti…

Dead is probably an overstatement and I agree that the alternative services don't seem to have a lot of traction, at least among people I've followed. However, in my tech circles, it seems like a lot of people (and organizations) just checked out of or way dialed down their usage of Twitter/X and relations. YMMV of course but Musk seems to have been a forcing function for a lot of people to reevaluate their use of such services in general. To the degree that there's a commercial winner, it's probably LinkedIn.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#489

Post by rchaud »

rsynnott wrote: post #370
piyuv wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess then Bluesky will ban alternative clients and start charging for API, a-la Musk?

Twitter managed without banning alternative clients for 16 years, right up until the advent of Naughty Old Mr Car. (They did vaguely try once, but there was such a backlash that they backed off.)

They did not manage, they made losses every single quarter but one.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#490

Post by Ukv »

rsynnott wrote: post #373
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 can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low. I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes. It can also be pretty effective for stopping brigading. Back in the day, when he was stil…

> It can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low. I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes.

I feel you're calling something a good heuristic based solely on how predictive it is, and not considering the impacts of using that heuristic. A property tax based on the number of windows in a house[0] may have acceptably low false positives, but encourages people to brick up their windows.

Here it makes follows performative rather than just about what I'm interested in seeing on my timeline, since I'd now be hesitant to follow content that doesn't align with my views. In addition, everyone on the site being discouraged from receiving content from outside their bubble seems likely to exacerbate echo chambers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

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