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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

#521

Post by _djo_ »

Amezarak wrote: post #517
_djo_ wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post said Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." and It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity. . That is clearly false. The blue check was an accurate signal of authenticity through verification by Twitter. What it was not was a universal verification mechanism that scaled to being able to verify everyone who used the platform. Those are two different things, and the lack of u…

And yet somehow, impersonation is no more a problem on X than it was on Twitter. The fact is nobody paid attention to the blue check except the people who had one. The outcry was because a set of people felt elite because of their blue checks and were upset that anyone could get one. Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump or Kanye West impersonators are not an issue on the platform.

There have already been high profile impersonations, one of which caused a company’s stock to dive. Another was the infamous situation where Musk freaked out over people impersonating him.

The only reason it’s not worse is because of inertia and the fact that most public figures are still using the accounts they had when verification was in place. That won’t last. It’s also why public figures who are leaving for other platforms usually opt to keep their X accounts in place but dormant.

Kanye was in fact impersonated on Twitter in the past, it was one of the key reasons behind the introduction of Verified Accounts.[0]

I have also seen impersonators for all three of those you mentioned, especially in terms of crypto bots for Trump. However those are also three of the most heavily policed and watched profiles by the company’s understaffed moderating team, who proactively monitor for impersonations. That’s not true for lesser public figures: I just searched for a hand full of well-known journalists and found several impersonation profiles for them all.

What’s worse, their impersonation reporting function does not let you report the impersonation of someone who is not an active user. I know another public figure who doesn’t have an account there, doesn’t want one, but now hasn’t been able to get them to do anything about an impersonator who is using his name to scam others.

The current model is badly broken and decidedly worse than the verification system that existed before.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-compla...

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#522

Post by wordsinaline »

hypertexthero wrote: post #472
mozarella wrote: post #340

Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02... Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...

Tim Bray doesn’t trust it, either: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/11/15/Not-Blues...

[flagged]

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#523

Post by BeetleB »

Zambyte wrote: post #429
BeetleB wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the weakest point of the whole article, particularly because Mastodon and Bluesky are identical in this respect. The reason he doesn't realize it is that almost everyone is on the same instance. So yes, you will have: @stephenking.bsky.social and @stephenking.bsky.otherinstance Unless Bluesky remains a single server, in which case it's not at all decentralized.

Small nitpick, the domain name used for a ATProto identity is decoupled from the server that hosts that users data. A username is established on ATProto by creating a TXT record of the users DID (essentially a public key). This is not identical to ActivityPub, because the users data is hosted / managed by the server that the A/AAAA record points to. ATProto users can migrate their data from server to server while mai…

This solves only half of the problem (migration). It doesn't solve the problem of different people signing up on different servers using the same handle. Is there anything stopping me from making a stephenking account on another server?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#524

Post by int_19h »

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.

But when they are faced with two options, one of which is confusing and requires figuring out, and another one that does not, with the first having no clear advantages over the second, why would they bother spending time figuring it out?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#525

Post by int_19h »

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.

A for-profit business might be run by people who do care about ethics at any particular point, but one thing that we've learned over time is that there's absolutely no guarantee that those people will still be around tomorrow.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#526

Post by int_19h »

exodust wrote: post #356
rswail wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What X gets mocked for is that the feature of being "verified" by Twitter was worth paying for. But X turned the "blue tick" into "this person has paid" which totally removed any value for the blue tick. It was yet another self-own, along with things like getting promoted on the feed. X could have made money by selling features (eg tweetdeck) and other useful things, but they didnt. Of course, then politcally it beca…

> "...other useful things, but they didnt" But they did. Nobody pays for X premium just to get a blue tick. Being verified I guess is part of it, but they're paying to get other things including less ads, Grok access, longer posts & videos, communities, media studio, monetization, and other things.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are playing for the blue tick solely because it makes their posts rank higher in the feed.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#527

Post by minitech »

josteink wrote: post #506
minitech wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing concrete in any of those links, but they all smack of bad faith (and the middle one didn’t even depict a ban). That said, if people whose entire personality is being anti-trans perceive Bluesky as ban-happy and aren’t interested in it, I see that as a win.

> they all smack of bad faith > That said, if people whose entire personality is being anti-trans Are you talking about protecting women’s rights? That’s pro something, not anti something, right? So speaking of bad faith… The only one I see acting in bad faith here is you?

No, I’m not talking about protecting women’s rights. I hope if you were to imagine (in good faith!) a person “whose entire personality is protecting women’s rights” and a person “whose entire personality is being anti-trans” you’d come up with different images.

Btw, you’re firmly doing the bad faith thing now, and were from the very start when you danced around the truth with language like “commonly held views and scientific facts”.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#528

Post by kazinator »

jeroenhd wrote: post #518
pavel_lishin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my own domain, and have email set up so that any email to that domain goes to me. You'd be surprised (well, nobody here on HN would be) to know how many times I tell a business that my email is "their-business@my-domain.com", and they ask me how I got that email address, whether I work for their company, etc.

I do the same, and some companies flat-out refuse to accept email adresses with their own name in them. Samsung, notably, won't allow samsung@domain.tld for some obscure reason. Every time I have to hand out my email over the phone, I brace for having to explain my catch-all to people. Depending on how tired/tech-illiterate the person on the other end sounds, I've started using plausible-sounding alternatives (contac…

> won't allow samsung@domain.tld for some obscure reason.

It's not obscure. Some code monkey at Samsung was told to filter out certain addresses, Samsung ones among them, and just used a regex or substring search on the entire address.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#529

Post by rors »

LittleTimothy wrote: post #469
rors wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of content creators on YouTube will follow a power law distribution. There will be a very small number of hugely profitable creators and a vast sea of people who do ok. This power law distribution makes YouTube very different to setting up a physical retail store in London. Even if I do well with my shop, I won't outperform my neighbour 1000x. If anything Mr Beast is an argument for not using YouTube. Alpha…

Again you've gone straight back to zero sum thinking. There's no reason Alphabet keeping Mr Beast happy has to be bad for you! It might be good for you! It might be - in fact it almost certainly is true - that the changes that Mr Beast gets youtube to make might be good for everyone. The network effects of the platform are massive. 90% of that surplus can go to Alphabet and it still be a good deal for average creator…

My statement did not imply zero sum thinking. The pie can get bigger and the bigger slices can get disproportionately bigger.

As an analogy, economies can increase their GDP and inequality can also increase. Just because something is getting bigger doesn't mean it's getting fairer.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#530

Post by dredmorbius »

iteratethis wrote: post #514
mozarella wrote: post #340

Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02... Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...

"If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server" He's completely wrong about how easy it is to move a Mastodon account to another server. First, your instance admins can completely wipe your account before you even have a chance to move. Second, you c…

Any platform can wipe your account without notice, and so far as I'm aware, without meaningful legal recourse. Your only assurance against this is regular backups. There are tools you can use to automatically mirror your Mastodon / Fediverse accounts locally, as well as in-app content extraction tools.

Content migration isn't implemented yet, and as someone who's migrated a few times more than I can remember (three or four, possibly more), that's a bit of a PITA. But it is on the roadmap, and account migration in general has become far cleaner over the years, see note at bottom of:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...>

I've been on the Fediverse since 2016, and in the several times I've migrated things have become far smoother.

At present you can migrate your followers, following, and blocked accounts:

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>

Note that there are few if any proprietary / commercial services which afford anything remotely close to what Mastodon does, though blogging platforms probably permit import/export of content to a greater degree.

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