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.
He says this and yet jumps to Bluesky, a platform created by Jack Dorsey and now owned and managed by a crypto bro?
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
At least maybe some more regular people will learn about decentralization (and alternative ways there) from this mass adoption?
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.
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, 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.
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.
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!
True! I forgot about that. Other accounts have used similar functionality.
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.
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.
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.
Your rant is very much appreciated.
Small steps
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.
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.
