I like Jason but he completely missed the boat on this one.
The active migration away from social media networks that are owned, controlled by, and distorted by the richest men and most powerful companies in the world to a decentralized platform that is not owned and controlled by billionaires is one of the more hopeful things to happen in what has largely been a bleak year for the human internet as AI slop infects everything and billionaires put their thumbs on the scale of what we see on social media.
He says this and yet jumps to Bluesky, a platform created by Jack Dorsey and now owned and managed by a crypto bro? You don’t need powers of prophecy to see where Bluesky is headed.
Honestly I don’t know what’s up with the mass delusion about Bluesky being oligarch-free. It’s understandable that most don’t know or haven’t looked into it, but then some folks that should know better are displaying the same ignorance.
People going over don’t care who owns it, they just want to use a platform that regularly censors thoughts they disagree with. That’s it.
They want a platform where THEY can censor. No matter how much I block Leon M. on twitter, I keep seeing his posts
It’s very telling that all across lemmy this is being celebrated. Looks like most people completely missed the point.
I don’t myself like mastodon very much, but if you came to lemmy to stick it to the man it’s a bit silly to cheer on the next man, which is what bluesky is.
Twitter will remain a place for the Right and nut job grifters , probably absorb truth social and the others. bluesky will become the place for liberals and centrists who jerk each other off because they have a degree and gay friends and think they are enlightened.
Sorry , nobody asked for that rant .
People aren’t going to be convinced of social/communism overnight.
I celebrate the move to BlueSky as positive in that they are no longer propping up an apartheid tech bro who’s now running a meme branch of US Government, and also because many of them are doing the thing they were scared to do before: leave. They now know how that feels and what it will be like rebuilding friend groups and such.
It’s not the anti-corpo step many are deluding themselves to believe it is, but getting out of the muck and learning how to take the step to change something are both things I see as positives that can be guided to better things in the future.
For me the bigger value is not in the quality difference between the two platforms. And don’t get me wrong, i agree that BlueSky is a lot better than Elon’s Twitter, but not as good as a decentralised Fediverse Platform.
The real positive is in the act of migration itself, because it shows that is still a possibility. So hopefully it proves sustainable.
musk could just buy it. jack already sold twitter to him, and while musk might have comprehended how shitty a deal it was (i mean he tried to back out of the contract and all); he doesn’t seem like the guy who would be smart enough to avoid cost sunk fallacy and might want to buy bluesky to keep digging that hole. and jack wouldn’t turn him down for a bid on bluesky for the same reason he didn’t turn him down before - money. heck, if the rightwing shittards were ready to really destroy the “liberal web” they’d make sure musk could buy and convert bluesky too. nowhere for “liberals” to run after that, because they already had the option for mastodon and choose fucking bluesky like months to a flame.
musk could just buy it. jack already sold twitter to him,
Yeah, certainly, or some other billionaire. I think it goes without saying that most of us here understand the flaws with centralized services.
I’m not saying it’s the best choice ever, but I’m hopeful that the choice to leave Xitter might do positive things to people’s mentality when BlueSky almost certainly repeats history. It’s not likely to happen right away, as even an offer to buy would take time to approve, so for now, I’m taking it as a net positive.
The Fediverse will continue to grow and change in the meantime, and we’ll all still be here to help them migrate to better things in the future.
Yea, it would seem the embrace from those “who should maybe know better” is based on it being the appropriate compromise to make progress in this field.
BlueSky is not just another centralised platform. It’s open source (or mostly), based on an open protocol and an architecture that’s hybrid-decentralised. The “billionaire” security, AFAICT, is that we can rebuild it with our own data should it go to shit.
This thread from Andre Staltz is indicative I think: https://bsky.app/profile/staltz.com/post/3lawesmv6ik2d
He worked on scuttlebut/manyverse for a long while before moving on a year or so ago. Along with Paul Frazee, a core dev with bsky who’d previously done decentralisation, I think there’s a hunger to just make it work for people and not fail on idealistic grounds.
That’s cool. Well, I wish them well. Hopefully they can make something that’s good for people and not just chase profits.
The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.
So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.
For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.
Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.
we’re on lemmy, yet over the past few days there has been probably 100+ posts and so many more pro-bluesky comments written. so i’d say most of us here apparently do not understand it.
the worst part about all this isn’t that bluesky is getting traction, i really couldn’t care less about it since i’m happy with Mastodon as it is. the worst part is that a critical mass is moving somewhere else than the fediverse which indirectly let’s facebook groups maintain their dominance over the hobby space. it may sound contrived, but i firmly believe that if the fediverse gains critical mass. regardless of service. then the hobby space could actually, finally, move off that shitty platform, but for the third time, Mastodon devs didn’t care to cease the moment, so it’s never going to happen, and probably not even when the flagship (Mastodon) finally launches groups (which was promised a 2020 release, 4 years behind schedule and absolutely no updates, feels like vapor ware at this point and facebook will always be king because of it). but, maybe bluesky will offer a good groups feature, and then the hobby space will happily move from one dumpster fire to another, yay. i guess, the devil you know, and all that, has never been more appropriate.
groups With the gup.pe concept, social groups can be formed on Mastodon today!
afaik there are several of those offers and they are all now defunct. and as they are shabby work-arounds they do not offer anything in terms of technical group management, administration or data indexing, so it’s essentially worse than the already crappy state of facebook groups. not to mention, it’s i.e. not something your average 50+ year old dove fancier will use in place of facebook groups for their club activities. it’s unreasonable to try convince users to go from a bad solution to a worse solution. it would be better to just setup a traditional forum in that case; but everyone left those for facebook for a reason.
Mastodon devs didn’t care to cease the moment
And they never will. That’s not their focus or goal. They don’t care about “gaining momentum” and explosive growth, and I wouldn’t want them to.
That’s up to us. Convincing people to join the Fediverse and showing them better alternatives to their favorite platforms (and teaching them how to use them) is our collective job, not some group of hobbyist devs.
Plus I think explosive growth would change the vibe of the Fediverse in a negative way, since most people expect it to be free (i.e. “I am the product”) and shitty (so always taking offense). I’m fine peeling people away over time.
For groups, I don’t know if Mastodon will ever get that or not. Friendica exists, it’s more analogous to Facebook than Mastodon, and it already has groups and public/private forums. I’m not really sure if that would be a great addition to the microblog format of Mastodon, anyway, so I don’t really care if it never comes.
groups With the gup.pe concept, social groups can be formed on Mastodon today!
And they never will. That’s not their focus or goal. They don’t care about “gaining momentum” and explosive growth, and I wouldn’t want them to. While it’s not their goal, it should be. Social media is all about momentum, without momentum you disappear. There are hundreds of exhibits for how there can “only be one” in the social media space. The reason for that is simple; people want a means to access all their communities at one access point, it’s why facebook groups had killed 99% of the hobby forums out there by 2020, starting in 2015. This is why the fediverse would in theory actually work, but it can’t because of certain limitations in the fediverse space, and the lack of group management. Yes, friendica is sort-of like facebook, but people don’t actually want facebook. likewise, facebook groups is a terrible replacement for traditional forums, it’s like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver, because it’s designed for absorbing algorithm pushed junk information, not for having a healthy discussion, which basically means people just see the same questions asked every single day and there is rarely ever any discussions and when there are, the facebook search index doesn’t work well enough for people to find the information nor is the information possible to index, which is all by design, to maximize engagement at the cost of literally everything else. the problem with people is that they want both a junk information stream, and a means to enjoy rich engagement with their community. in every club i’m in, people are screaming at how they hate facebook because meta takes liberties to update their policies which directly harms the clubs activities and it just makes it impossible to manage information and the same questions are being asked every single day. the lack of active focus engagement is also causing the clubs to bleed paid membership and thus budget for national events etc. it’s really a downward spiral and it will kill a lot of hobbies before long. i’m not saying that friendica couldn’t be a good replacement, because literally ANY federated space with a means to organize club activities would do just fine (mobilizion would probably be the best), if only it had enough critical mass to let the users engage with all their communities at one single platform (spread comes after the fact), and because of the stability, ui, and condensed information stream with high activity already existing on mastodon, it is the hands down best place on the web for an exodus of all the clubs currently locked in on facebook - IF they finish their groups feature.
musk could just buy it. jack already sold twitter to him, and while musk might have comprehended how shitty a deal it was (i mean he tried to back out of the contract and all); he doesn’t seem like the guy who would be smart enough to avoid cost sunk fallacy and might want to buy bluesky to keep digging that hole. and jack wouldn’t turn him down for a bid on bluesky for the same reason he didn’t turn him down before - money.
That’s actually not as easy with Bluesky. It’s decentralized enough that buying it doesn’t help control it that well. The previous owners or someone else could easily go set up another shop and compete using the same network and protocol.
Do I wish Mastodon were coming out on top? Sure. But Bluesky is still a significant improvement.
not really, maybe i’m wrong but as a commercial service meant to generate money for the owners, bluesky will never federate with a third party server. there is no point in federation for bluesky besides being in control of the technology itself. just like how google and facebook killed XMPP, or how microsoft and google are currently trying to kill the email protocol.
Your rant is very much appreciated.
Most people came to Lemmy becaise they felt personally agreived by the Reddit API issue. They don’t give a shit about what’s good for the Internet, or society.
They’re here out of protest, and would happily give their all to the next Billionaire that makes them feel smarter than the average bear.
Small steps
He says this and yet jumps to Bluesky, a platform created by Jack Dorsey and now owned and managed by a crypto bro?
Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it’s headed.
There are already smaller appviews that use the existing hosting/authentication infra, but bypassing the bsky appview aggregation. Nothing with any real scale but for example there is a barebones reddit/hackernews equivalent https://frontpage.fyi/
That’s interesting. This post had suggested it isn’t yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.
That post refers to hosting an appview that does all the same things as the official bsky (the service) one, which involves a ton of storage and bandwidth and processing (for everyone’s recommendations, notifications, and all the other moving parts), and is closed source to boot.
Frontpage.fyi is a lot cheaper simply because its used by like 50 people tops.
At least maybe some more regular people will learn about decentralization (and alternative ways there) from this mass adoption?
Lemmy does not understand that people are leaving X cuz of Nazis, not cuz it’s a centralized corpo platform.
Pretty sure a significant portion of nazis are also moving to bluesky
But on Bluesky you don’t get them shoved in your face and there is culture of just blocking Nazis and moving on.
Ignoring the Nazis in the room, rather than barring them from entey, is enabling Nazis
They aren’t being ignored. Bluesky has real moderation, they are being banned.
If no one gives the Nazi an audience they will go away eventually.
But they don’t. They just formm small communities and slowly work their way back up to power.
Might take 50+ years, but it’ll happen again and again until crushed out.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
- @iamragesparkle
If they get blocked constantly chances are they are also getting reported for their behaviour and eventually banned.
Elon turned it into his own personal Nazi blog where people can’t block him.
To a platform that has been on the record about not kicking ouy Nazis, though.
There were Nazis on X for years before this. They’re leaving because Trump won.
The CEO of Bluesky just posted they hit 17M users today after hitting 16M in the last 24 hours.
The juice is juicin’.
Threads, Blue Sky and Mastodon are at 292.8m mau vs Twitter’s 304m
Sure, but what percentage of users are bots on twitter at this point?
80%, if I’m feeling optmistic!
We are witnessing the rise of a new platform (in terms of relevance) in real time, this will probably be one of the key points in our digital decade, and it’s happening right now! Have you thought about it?
People are leaving Muskrats fascist supporting platform. So what if they aren’t going to Mastedon, they’re leaving Twitter. Isn’t that enough for us?
I don’t need Mastedon to win. I just want Twitter to lose. Once Twitter has been (hopefully) de-platformed we can talk about Mastedon and the Fediverse and the idea of a non-corpo platform.
But it terms of main stream casual appeal, Mastedon still doesn’t have it yet, and that’s okay.
Mastedon needs to get more casual with the introduction to the Fediverse because for everyday non-tech people, it can be a little confusing.
People see Bluesky as the Twitter replacement because of its simplicity.
They’re leaving Musk, but they’re not leaving his financial backers, and they’re entering into the same kind of “possibly sold to a fascist despot at a moment’s notice” situation they just left.
It’s short sighted, perfirmative, and doesn’t actually make the Internet better at all. It just tells us that people prefer a closed Internet owned by billionaires.
Maybe these people need to feel the cycle first hand a few more times and that’s okay. ActivityPub will be even stronger when it comes around again.
Yeah, what’s stopping the richest guy in the world just buying blue-sky as well?
Nothing, and it’s already run by web3 folk
Once Twitter has been (hopefully) de-platformed we can talk about Mastedon and the Fediverse and the idea of a non-corpo platform.
BlueSky is as prone to enshittification as Twitter. If you’re waiting for BlueSky to take off, you’re just setting yourself up for the next rug pull.
I mean, go to BS and enjoy it while it lasts. But don’t think this is the future.
Well said. Maybe there’s more to do in the hardware, software and general computing training such that the layman could safely deploy their own Website like we used to be able to do. Then everyone could have their own servers at home like some of us do. True decentralized communication.
Lemmy would be great for dare I say it…church congregations for example. Schools, mechanic forums, unofficial student associations like alpha Kapa whatever. ETC. it’s a momentous opportunity.
Yes, it’s better to move forward a little than to go backwards. When you move forward you can keep moving forward more later. If you move backwards you have to fight for what you lost before you can get more back.
Bluesky is not great, but it’s at least (for now) a better platform than X and the AT protocol is actually very well written. (For instance having a moderation service separated from the service that provides the posts I think is a hands-down better way to handle it than most ActivityPub servers having their admins handle all incoming and outgoing moderation)
Bluesky federation is just now getting started so it’ll be interesting to see if it goes anywhere/where it goes.
Anything which drives nails into the xitter coffin is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Bluesky may not tick many people’s boxes here on lemmy, but this migration shows that lots of people wanted to leave xitter but didn’t see an option. Threads clearly didn’t attract them, likely due to the owner. I hope it nothing else, Bluesky is a less toxic place and xitter and musk become less relevant. In the long run Bluesky may end up being another head of the hydra , but for now, it’s not, and it may get people used to the idea of federation.
That decentralized and self-hostable platforms like Lemmy are fringe does not give me hope for the future of social networks on the Internet.
They don’t have to have everyone on them to be good. In some ways it’s preferable not to. Reddit was far better before the Digg migration, and we might already be living in the golden years of Lemmy and not even realize it.
I don’t know, Reddit also has more niche communities that just don’t have enough people in platforms like Lemmy.
It’s true, that’s the advantage of a larger user base. But when I compare my homepage of Reddit after 15 years of refinement to that of my lemmy homepage after 1 year, my lemmy one is way better. Most of those niche communities devolve into memes and nonsense like the same questions being asked over and over and over again after a while. Great for searching, but for actually getting content on a regular basis from, mostly a waste of time.
This is true, it’s like other platforms that value content creation rather than value, so people keep repeating the same thing. I haven’t worked as a moderator ever so I don’t know what’s possible or impossible, but I think many of these problems are a result of poor moderation though.
Sometimes moderation needs to be a bit unpopular to have the community work in some way.
If people moving from one corpo owned platform to another corpo owned platform gives you hope for the future of the internet: You haven’t been paying attention to the history of the internet at all.
Once they have critical mass, the enshittification for profit will begin a new.
But it means people are still capable of caring.
At least it theoretically has account portability…but yes, I fear people are setting themselves up to be enshittified again, as Cory Doctorow has brought up
Whhhhhhy?
This is the same thing. This is the exact same type of platform that will eventually go the same way. This is shooting yourself in the foot once, then aiming the shotgun at the other foot and pulling the trigger thinking that the bullet was a fluke the first time.
To be fair Musk buying twitter and turning it into a Nazi propaganda site was kind of flukey.
Twitter was already really bad, Musk just brought back the Nazis and fired all the people that were the guardrails.
Bluesky just got major investment from a crypto bro…
It’s not flukey…
Was it though?
A billionaire buys or funds a privately owned platform and does with it as he pleases, despite the obviously humanitarian route being something different. Have we really never seen that before?
Sure the billionaire buying stuff thing happens, but a Nazi billionaire?
Because most people switching don’t know (or care) about the fediverse and decentralization. They are regular internet users who just want to get away from the cesspool that is twitter, so they go where other people are going.
Idk why people think the average user is going to go to Mastodon. I’m glad anything else other than Twitter or Threads is popping off.
Mastodon could have worked sooner if it was more approachable.
Shame that it’s another Capital-owned platform taking the spotlight. I’m not surprised unfortunately. We’ll be in the same place we are now in 10 years.
I’m preaching to the choir, but mastodon is the better platform if you want more authentic community and conversation.
Chances are that any new large commercial platform will enshittify, sooner or later prompting another exodus, and each exodus will at least have some people choosing a community platform.
I’m really enjoying Bluesky strangely enough, not normally my thing.
How does another social media ruled by a billionaire gives hope?
Because it shows that a sizable amount of people are at least anti-nazi enough to move platform.
Yes, it would be nicer if they moved to mastodon, but nobody even knows what that is, nobody is there (classic chicken and egg problem), and people get confused by the whole “choose an instance/server” thing.
Is it not ok to have a small celebration of people moving to a better, more positive platform, even if it is far from perfect?
Anybody recommend a good mastodon instance?
my personal solo instance is great but the admin is an asshole.
Pick any instance that suits your interests: https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers There is also this picker.
This is really cool, it helped me find an instance that specializes in shitposting, much appreciated!
What’s the name of it?
Jorts.horse
Jeez, man! Just yesterday I’ve read some text about some bad things this instance has done! I don’t know if the situation is better now, though. It was a webpage from 2023.
Damn it
I’m on Fedia.io
Which is both Fediverse and Mastodon.
Which is both Fediverse and Mastodon.
Well… yeah.
Did I say that wrong?
Is it Lemmy and Mastodon?
They are both ‘fediverse’?
Yeah, sorry for being snarky, but the Fediverse refers to all federated software. So, Fedia.io for example, is an MBin instance. Which is different than Lemmy and Mastodon but they can all interact with each other. They’re all part of the overall Fediverse. So your comment was just kind of awkwardly phrased and redundant.
Oh ok. Got it.
Thanks,
It’s venture capital. Eventually it will stop being open source and will enshitify just like every other platform. So nothing is changing long term in my opinion.
