Seriously i have zero idea what is going on with bluesky. I never used it. Why are people saying it’s centralised? I also heard that a lot of people are joining it.
https://lemmy.ca/comment/12906744
I talked about it in this comment, which should hopefully still be recent enough to be accurate
It’s still too soon to tell what they will do. It’s totally possible that they will take the necessary steps to be properly decentralized by transferring control of the registry + protocol to an independent non profit.
Right now I feel that they don’t have much of an incentive to do that, since the vast majority of their users won’t care.
I would love to be proven wrong
As a follow-up, if you have people on Bluesky you want to follow, go for it :) Community is important
There is also a mastodon bluesky bridge that some people use to access both
JWZ » “I prefer to meet people where they are” says reasonable-sounding white dude holding court at a table in the back of a Nazi Bar.
It’s Bluesky. The Nazi Bar is Bluesky.
“Now that Dorsey has bailed as a board member and principal funder, Bluesky’s DNA is basically [TESCREAL / Effective Altruist] people. It gets worse. Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.”
Nothing is “wrong” with it. Its just a different platform.
The “problem” is that its just a different platform. Nothing is really different. It’s like choosing Pepsi over Coke. Its a choice and maybe one is flavored more to your liking, but they are both full of the same ingredients and unhealthy with continual ingestion.
I haven’t used it either, because I didn’t like Twitter or X. Today I suspect Bsky is fine, because it hasn’t been around long enough to become toxic or to censor discussions etc… Just give it time, it will get there.
The issue most people are bringing up is that there are “better” platforms (i.e. fediverse) that aren’t getting any traffic instead.
I can understand this, but the flip side is that the voices promoting the fediverse usually arent very compelling either in voice or ease. Think of it like somebody wanting to buy a PC. One person says to get Linux (and arch of course) because it’s the best and you’re a fool to get anything else. Here, take it and figure it out. Another person says to get a Mac, because it can do everything you need it to do, easily and without work, plus has added features you didn’t even think about that seem useful to your life. And if you get stuck they have a genius bar to assist. So people choose Mac. Similarly people are choosing Bsky because it’s easy and straightforward.
I disagree with saying there’s nothing wrong with it, just as I would disagree that there was nothing wrong with the original Twitter. It is creating conditions which lead it towards for-profit behaviour which will end up hurting users, unlike some other platforms which are not run for-profit.
This is a far-reaching difference with real societal impacts if the platform becomes dominant, not just some difference in taste that can be hand-waved away as nothing.
When it converts to the profit extraction phase the cutting edge folks will move on. Then the content will slowly become dominated by corporate auto created content. And then eventually the average person will look for the next place to go.
This is just the new cool local bar hangout at scale. This is how human socialization works. It has worked like this for hundreds of years.
You say this as if it’s some inevitable law of society, but I disagree. The profit extraction phase isn’t an inevitability, especially online where digital hosting is relatively cheap and services can be run with 0 income, and many larger sites have run off unconditional donations only (and therefore without having to compromise for investors). The domination of content by exploitative actors can be combatted, especially when you aren’t desperate for income from corporations.
It’s obviously an uphill battle, but it’s been done at smaller scales for social media sites and had been done at large scale for other sites like archive.org and Wikipedia.
I think the big difference here is that to the average user they see archive.org or Wikipedia as being a onesided transaction. An Archive where folks store information for you, an encyclopedia where information is stored by folks for you. There is no expectation of engagement of the average user. It is rare for someone to wake up and think “Man I gotta put something up on Wikipedia today or people are going to think I’m not the person I act like I am”.
People go to social events to keep up appearances. People participate on social media to keep up appearances. Maintaining these types of things require you to effectively help people balance their ability to participate in society with their ability to communicate. A Wikipedia contributor is a scholar. A community moderator is a bartender and a bouncer rolled into one. It doesn’t have the stability because the work required to keep things going is high stress for the majority of the people doing the work.
Lemmy’s solution is nice because the smaller instances can just ban whole cloth the larger ones and everyone gets to move forward. It means you never are burdened by having a ton of users, but that then also defies the goal of some of the larger social media platforms.
I get that, and I’m sort of saying that. The only difference is that I’m not calling for profit businesses wrong. In agree that its a non sustainable model for social media from the users perspective, but it’s a very sustainable model from the company perspective.
But that’s why I choose differently now. And others might choose differently when the platform gets to be in a poor state.
The key here is I can’t make that decision for others. Now or later. If you want people to go to another platform, then build a better platform and market it better.
It’s slightly more than a green(blue?)washed Twatter.
The fact it’s getting such a stellar rise over Mastodon is imho a bit sus - people behind it have coin & reach (political), I’m sure monies are being pumped into the bluesky sensationalization, like influences & media articles.
Twatter has/had a lot of monetization potential & now is even more of a (really incredibly direct) political-tool, there are bound to be interest groups that would benefit from cutting it a bit. But all of them want more monies, so they ofc won’t help fossy things.
Having used both, here my view on why BlueSky is outstripping Mastadon:
- It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).
- There’s no messing around with instances to negotiate - you go to bsky.app
BlueSky.comand it just works. Hard to overstate how important that is in retaining people who take a look at a new platform. - There are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t feel empty like I have often found Mastadon.
- There are a lot of relatively influential people on it, media people, authors and actors and comedians, who have largely shifted as a single mass (probably due to the three above reasons) - so for non-famous people there’s a sense of being in touch with what’s happening.
- It’s riding a wave of positivity about itself, which Mastadon never had - this touches on your point about media coverage of it, but whether that’s really due to money being paid to news orgs or just due to journalists seeing what they are doing as being important for others to know about is open to question.
I think the various high profile organisational defections to BS have been a big part of it too. I only looked at BS for the first time when I saw the story about the Guardian newspaper quitting Twitter.
I took a look, created an account and was posting and following people within seconds, it was just really, really smooth. Again, that was not the case (for me) with Mastadon, where it took a while to figure some of it out, and it all just felt a bit fiddly and complicated.
Much like Lemmy in fact, after leaving Reddit - but again there was enough of a swell of new people shifting as a mass that it felt like it was worth the hassle.
- There are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t feel empty like I have often found Mastadon.
Mastodon isn’t empty. People just have to follow folks to actually get any content. Now, Bluesky definitely does the onboarding better in that regard, but this almost certainly comes down to people not knowing that they have to follow accounts to get content.
Well possibly - I do follow people Mastadon though, and it still feels quiet to me. I probably need to spend more time finding people to follow.
In order to get a similar experience to Twitter, you need to follow a lot more people on Mastodon than you did on Twitter, because you never get that algorithmic backfill (and, in fairness, because there are fewer people using it).
It’s funny. People tell me they like that Bluesky has “no algorithm.”
Its funny bluesky.com is not the bluesky website that most people are thinking of.
Hah, neither it is, my bad! I just assumed and didn’t bother to check. Will fix that.
- It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).
Yup, pretty much. I tried Mastodon and found it very unintuitive, but BlueSky was immediately understandable as a former Twitter user. I don’t really use either that much, but I’ve spent way more time with BlueSky.
Honestly, it’s the same with Lemmy. I tried a lot of Reddit alternatives, both federated and centralized, and I landed on Lemmy because A) It has the only decently-sized user base and B) my preferred Reddit app, Sync, moved to Lemmy. Lemmy is similar enough to Reddit on it’s own that transitioning over wouldn’t have been difficult, but having Sync just made it that much easier.
This is the only take based in reality. Nobody (except us) cares about openness, federation or business models. What matters are ease of use and adoption.
Of course that doesn’t mean that the other takes are missing the mark in terms of history possibly repeating itself in the future. But if it does, that just means that (as is to be expected) the people don’t make momentary decisions with a bigger (collective) picture in mind. Design needs to address individual needs first and foremost especially when it comes to social media.
Nobody joins a platform to beat corporate ownership of people’s digital lives. BlueSky manufactured adoption by starting out as an invite-only cool kids club. Having to pick a fediverse instance is an entry barrier. There will always be a lot less money to throw around when you’re trying to create something under the umbrella of freedom and openness. I don’t see how these movements could ever win, even if they provide an arguably better product.
Yes, so the ease of the whole onboarding process & communities/groups that migrated there.
No arguments on the first one (tho stupid on both sides).
What my brainhole is telling me is that the second argument feels a tad too big seeing how Mastodon basically didn’t grew in the same timeframe. What they call “content” and “community” creation feels driven, the “wave” as you put it.
(But again, this is just imho & ‘a feeling’, I have no sauce, not even that much personal experience)
Bluesky is a platform by and for the most racist liberals.
Unlike Lemmy, which is a platform for the most racist tankies?
Where is the tankie racism?
Tankie has no definition to liberals so they can’t answer this, it is whatever they feel at the time.
I’m not a liberal — I’m a leftist — and I consider a Tankie to be someone who gets so wrapped up in hating the U.S. or West in general that they start defending the likes of Stalin and others who used a facade of Marx/Lenin to consolidate power and do horrible things. Like, you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Stalin.
Incidentally, here’s Thomas the Tankie Engine:
I made that for a shitpost in 5 minutes using Midjourney so don’t judge all the obvious A.I. flaws or that I used machine learning. I’d pay a real artist if it wasn’t a throwaway bit.
I’m not a liberal — I’m a leftist
That is what embarrassed liberals call themselves.
and I consider a Tankie to be someone who gets so wrapped up in hating the U.S. or West in general that they start defending the likes of Stalin and others who used a facade of Marx/Lenin to consolidate power and do horrible things. Like, you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Stalin.
Not under any circumstances? What about ending The Holocaust and The Third Reich? There’s a reason Western anticommunism is inextricable from fascism.
By usage, a “tankie” is just anyone that defends an entity that a liberal wants to attack, generally in line with the Western imperialist consensus. Hell, it was defined originally by Trots to attack a decision by Kruschev, someone whose (largely fabricated) anti-Stalin statements defined much of the Western propaganda against him, likely including much of what you’re thinking of. It is very funny to see it used against Stalin. To honor the Trot tradition you should call such people (and maybe everything you don’t like) Stalinists!
[AI things]
Okay bud
Let me see the first ten posts in my feed. (I haven’t opened today so let’s see…)
God saying why is radical left an insult?
Space view with a good picture of Pluto.
God talking about centrists and leftists
More space pictures
Someone talking about a free game on stream
Someone talking about how rpg fans love to insist pokemon isn’t rpg
Horror video game protagonist coming across ammo, yeah that isn’t ominous.
Some new video games called Anton
We asked A.I. to generate a peak Seahawks game, these were the results.
And
A picture of the helix nebula.
Yup lots of racism and traits.
Are you familiar with what liberal racism looks like?
Anonymously browsing the feed I rapidly came upon these posts:
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https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3lcbh7org5c2c - Russophobia and some other brainworms I don’t even want to get into.
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Multiple posts by this guy, one of the many lanyard wearing faces of liberal fascism. In this case, an actual functionary for terrorist groups, including Daesh.
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https://bsky.app/profile/euromaidanpress.bsky.social/post/3lc7vfobvqz2e - more liberals celebrating fascists, this time Azov members.
Bluesky is known in left circles for censoring Palestinian accounts and allowing liberal Zionism.
Racism is when criticism of Russian imperialism.
That post is not a criticism of Russian imperialism.
You’re I guess looking at a feed of everything there is with no anchor to the correct side of politics? Try that with ActivityPub and just ingest the entire ecosystem with no home instance or blocklist and you’ll get lots of this.
But I think you are right that the Bluesky PDS will not refuse to host you for saying things along the lines of “The US should continue to sell all kinds of weapons to Israel”, whereas a lot of Mastodon instances might be expected to kick you off for expressing this stubbornly common opinion.
But I’m not sure it’s quite fair to expect a public service to share exactly the correct Overton window that one has oneself. That sort of enforcement on Bluesky is meant to be at the level of the custom moderation service/labeler, not at the data storage layer, since users more or less are meant to control that themselves.
And if you pick a good labeler it will enforce that only the correct people are allowed in your view.
You’re I guess looking at a feed of everything there is with no anchor to the correct side of politics? Try that with ActivityPub and just ingest the entire ecosystem with no home instance or blocklist and you’ll get lots of this.
I mean, it is trending/rising stuff that popped up organically. And it is all very much liberal. Run of the mill liberal racism we have all seen before, though it is often not recognized as such becauae it is not presented or reacted to as if it is.
Combine this with the censorship of Palestinians and the people who run and fund the platform and you arrive at my conclusion. If Bluesky gets critical mass it will be even worse than Twitter was before Musk bought it.
But I think you are right that the Bluesky PDS will not refuse to host you for saying things along the lines of “The US should continue to sell all kinds of weapons to Israel”, whereas a lot of Mastodon instances might be expected to kick you off for expressing this stubbornly common opinion.
Well yes but my examples are a more naked form of racism beyond the ubiquitous support for imperialism - including their supported settler colonial projects - inherent to liberalism.
But I’m not sure it’s quite fair to expect a public service to share exactly the correct Overton window that one has oneself.
I don’t have an Overton Window. I have simply described the site as what it is.
That sort of enforcement on Bluesky is meant to be at the level of the custom moderation service/labeler, not at the data storage layer, since users more or less are meant to control that themselves.
I mean they ban accounts so regardless of what they say they are in the business of moderation and censorship.
-
Somewhat off topic what you’re discussing but I’ve been checking the bsky feed anonymously every day or two and a lot of those recent space pictures are AI. Didn’t see those a week ago, seems to be something new.
You’ve clearly not been on the platform for any appreciable length of time, if at all.
Try criticizing liberal forms of racism and see how well it goes for you.
Try watching sometime merely being Palestinian and see how it goes for them.
Try looking into who funds and runs the platform.
Seriously all the posters I see and follow are far left and extremely pro-palestinian and are quite quick to criticize liberals, on multiple topics. Maybe you just followed a bunch of the wrong people and decided that was everybody.
Pro-Palestinian or by people who are in Palestine? Because Bluesky has beeen censoring the latter.
I viewed the public trending section and listed some of the racism there in another comment.
I’ve seen plenty of posts by people asserting to be Palestinians.
And what do they say about the people getting banned for fundraising?
Most of the Palestinian posts I see are fundraising posts. Seriously it seems like you’re just out there looking for what you want to complain about. There’s plenty of racism and bigotry on the fediverse if you go looking for it.
A large portion of my TL on Bluesky is people fundraising for specific Palestinian families. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You see what you follow
That’s good because last month they were banning people for doing that
Precisely
its centralized because only a single board controls it, and it doesnt federate with literally anything but itself.
Someone could create an instance if they wanted right? The code is on GitHub
Maybe there’s more to it though, I dunno.
Caveat: Neither do most web pages.
right but most ‘websites’ dont go around calling themselves federating or decentralized.
It’s simply not a part of the fediverse and it’s centralized to a single instance. It’s not any different than Twitter, except no one interesting uses it.
People dislike it because it’s not federated, but hot take: federation doesn’t solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms. It doesn’t do anything to prevent the inherent problems that arise as a result of having everyone freeball a random moderation structure, where they can outsource their agency to some guy they don’t know, with the illusion that there’s some clear set of rules or useful tools that exist somewhere off in the distance, being used by the “correct” actors and moderators. Which in turn means that everything becomes vulnerable to any abuse of the static, singular, broad rules, inside of these walled gardens that people are basically locked into.
You get bait, you get ragebait, people taking advantage of the singular “algorithms” in order to game the system for maximum attention, and you incentivize that behavior because you make it way too easy to engage in. You get people paying to get on the front page of reddit, and you get eglin air force base being the most reddit addicted town. People think that AI abuse is some recent phenomenon, but it’s not, bots have been on the internet forever, and people have been incentivized to engage in bot-like behaviors forever. Eventually you get a huge, hollow system, where everything has the guise of legitimate human interaction at the surface level, but is really just subject to this huge system of incentives and planned interactions which people are made subconscious of.
You’d really need the ability to have account migration for a better decentralized network, and you’d probably actually just need self-hosting for everyone. You’d probably want blocklists to easily propagate around (+2 for bluesky), and you’d probably actually want those to have easily copied and pasted rules that could be shared between users to prevent spam and make it so abuse is less common and easily prevented before it happens.
Which is what the usenet already had/has. It’s just that the common consensus (which I believe to be false), is that the usenet is too hard to use, and requires demands too much intellectually from its users. If you decide to take this philosophy to the extreme, you end up with something like tiktok, where the idea is that people use their premade google account, scroll downwards forever, and that’s it.
I wouldn’t mistake this as being some sort of like, natural occurrence, though, that’s an intentional decision, made by businessmen, that want to maximize sales through an in-app store and control a massive cultural space. That’s a specific decision that they’ve made, and they’ve tuned their platforms to take advantage of people’s worst instincts in order to perpetuate that. Often with the assistance and explicit consent of governments which want these platforms to be used to track everything.
They pour money into that system, it’s an explicit decision they’re making to push that onto people as a result of current economic and political structures, and it’s due to those structures that they have that power to be able to do that, and due to those structures that these shit systems succeed, keep being cycled out in boom and bust cycles, over the better systems that people create.
but hot take: federation doesn’t solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms.
Enshittification, by definition, is a result of profit seeking, especially from venture-capital funded projects.
Shitty internet fiefdoms are shitty, but it’s got nothing to do with enshittification.
Yeah, the broader point I’m making is that the federation doesn’t solve the entire encompassing system in which this all exists.
Federated projects both have their own problems in those shitty little fiefdoms, as said, and are probably never going to succeed in this broader economic context where huge, profit seeking, venture capital funded market actors are able to spin up a new twitter ripoff in no time at all. This is while similar market actors in the form of spam farms, bot farms, adversarial influencers looking to make a quick buck, and moderators themselves, have incentives to game whatever systems are in place on any platform, not just the large ones. This then increases the strain on smaller projects, and decreases their ability to actually be sustainable long-term, especially in comparison to these huge market actors and their platforms.
The systems that are gamed, in the modern internet, are cordoned off and channeled by a bunch of moderators that we all trust to kind of do the work for the rest of us, apply the rules, use the tools to their discretion. Federation just makes it so you can jump from one moderated section to the other, one administrated section to the other, while on the same “platform”. But it doesn’t solve the inherent problems at play here, where moderators and higher level administrators are incentivized to make their platforms shittier with the invitation of advertisers, the invitation of more bad faith posters which can increase engagement, the adoption of shorter form, less substantive content, things like that. Those drive up traffic, and make more money, money they can use to then make their platforms “better”, or basically, to eat up more of the market share. Eventually you play the short term gains game long enough, and then your platform’s growth sputters out, and then venture capital dries up, and then you end up making the moderation more lax as a last resort, and then nazis come flooding in. Then the platform either dies, or mutates into a horrible shambling corpse.
Even if you were to cut out all of that as a possibility, say, by trying to make your stuff copyleft, then you just cut out the route towards short term growth for anyone using your particular platform, and then you’ll just get outdone by all of the other market actors which lean into that short term growth, while still filling your platform’s niche, while using none of the specific parts of your platform.
It’s basically not going to succeed as an approach because it, as we keep learning on the internet over and over and over and over, it exists in a broader material context, the context of the market.
the one thing that most federated platforms have over centralised structures is the possibility to migrate out of your current shitty fiefdom and the fact that the actual code is open source, so a community can make the choices about the possibilities the technology provides (which is mostly usually better than whatever a for profit company is “forced” into), whereas a centralised platform like bluesky can just ruin the codebase and keep it’s users hostage… which after all is one of the key factors to enshitification
edit: i do agree on your other points though, social networks are bound to turn into bubbles and we’ve already seen defederation based on petty squabbles :shrugs:
It’s full of pedos
Less so than nostr and twitter, though. I mean, everywhere on the internet is full of pedos… Even the fediverse.
Is there ANY major platform that isn’t?
There’s nothing from a user experience currently that makes bluesky bad, it’s just that since it doesn’t seem to actually support decentralization, there’s nothing to stop it from eventually getting just as bad as twitter over time due to profit incentive. Misskey/mastodin are the only microblogging platforms that are truly immune from corporate manipulation and enshittification, which would mean it’s a long term solution (that while imperfect, can only get better).
it’s microblogging
I never used Twitter personally, only exposed thru osmosis, so a reboot is very underwhelming. Seems perfect for somebody.
Complians about microblogging
Comment doesn’t actually answer the thread question
Try it out, it seems like you might like it!
It’s another oligarch owned platform?
Basically.
Nothing is wrong with it. It is just much earlier in the timeline of becoming twitter/xitter eventually. Maybe it’ll take longer this time, maybe the change will be more subtle.
Or maybe it won’t happen at all.
I don’t have strong opinions about BlueSky (I have an account, I prefer activitypub but it’s whatever), but to me I will view it as centralized until someone who is not BlueSky runs a second relay server that is federated with the BlueSky run one.
And based on the writings of one of the creators of activitypub, Christine Lemmer-Webber, there are some hurdles to that happening: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
