What’s Bluesky?
It’s the hot new non-billionaire controlled social media app for the 2020s: https://bsky.app/
I’ve started removing trash sites. I blocked twatter and reddit at my router.
Ha ha ha, yeah, sure. Bluesky won’t defeat xitter, at best it’ll just be the “next thing” once xitter finally finishes getting rid of most of its users, which I guess will take more than 4 years from now.
The great thing about BlueSky is how under-the-radar its flown for the last few years. Virtually no advertising. No legions of bot accounts spamming with invites and generic attention baiting posts. No |>u33y N |3io blowing up my mentions. No enshittification, because its just a primitive clone of the original Bird Site.
The more popular it gets, the less likely that’ll last. BlueSky won’t defeat Twitter until it becomes Twitter.
It will almost certainly become Twitter as it was created by the Twitter founder. The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over. Which is a massive difference.
The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over.
Dorsey is just as emotionally stunted and socially reactionary as Musk. He simply isn’t as wealthy.
BlueSky has thrived not because Dorsey crafted it into a purer vision, but because he’s neglected it and allowed the user base to have their way.
I never liked Twitter to begin with so I’m not one to defend him. My preferred one is Mastodon, but generally I don’t like the format to begin with. At any rate, I’ll still take pre-musk Twitter over Xitter any day.
I don’t understand how those two things are distinct.
I guess they don’t consider it bluesky defeating twitter if twitter is commiting suicide. Sounds like pedantry to me.
He on that “reddit didn’t kill Digg, Digg killed Digg” mindset.
For reference: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/
The key factor in Digg’s demise was a flawed design that was too easily abused by users. Digg had no controls over user verification, so individuals could game the system by creating multiple accounts to artificially inflate the number of votes for their own content. Because Digg displayed content in order of popularity, most visitors saw and voted only on content that was already popular. This system created a vicious cycle in which a small number of dedicated users could push their own content to the front page and thereby gain more followers, allowing them to more easily repeat the process. As Digg grew, so too did its problems related to power-hungry users cheating and gaining undue influence over content.
Sounds like the same problem that every centralized social media ecosystem suffers from. The big difference between Digg and Reddit was that Reddit successfully monetized the “push me to the front of the queue” algorithm rather than engineering around it.
The Digg bar is why I stopped using Digg
🎼It’s gonna be Blue~~~ Ski~~e~s for you~ and I~ 🎶
Or… or… hear me out… everyone comes to lemmy?
Not even remotely the same kind of platform
You mean Mastodon?
Hopefully not. This place is worse than Reddit.
Oh no, fascists won the election! Oh no, Musk is a fascist! We need to leave X! Where should we go? Mastodon? Too complicated! BS, which is financed by fascists? Count me in! 😭
im out of the loop. who are the faccists that financed bluesky?
Why people cannot see that the core problem of twitter is not that it got bought by the asshole billionaire. It’s that the asshole billionaire was able to buy it.
Wasn’t he forced to do so after trying to back out, or am I either imagining that or thinking of someone else?
If I recall correctly he could have backed out but he would have had to pay I think 1billion as a penalty and worse admit things didnt go his way
300 Billion dollar portfolio, 34 Billion dollar loss (~22 Billion after he writes it off in “taxes”) and he has his own right-wing media company chocked full of nutters.
I don’t think he cares much about the individual Billions much these days. Half his Tesla stock is securing his debt.
He also bought 9% of it and didn’t disclose it, IIRC that had something to do with it as well.
It should be Mastodon. This is the same shit with a different name
Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can’t run your own server yet. We’ll see if they keep their promise.
Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you’re not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.
Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.
Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).
ActivityPub is the protocol though. Mastodon is an implementation of the protocol.
That’s an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I’m from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy… this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.
Do you think the same about lemmy?
I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…
I’m reasonably tech savvy and even I’d struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.
There’s a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can’t. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that’s hosted on .sh.itjust.works.
There’s also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.
We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem.
People complain that the mainstream sites are relatively closed ecosystems, but they also complain when those sites try to be more open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People don’t like the monolith when it’s over there and they don’t like it when it comes over here, either
There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.
What’s the difference, really? Aren’t they both decentralized microblogging social networks?
One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.
Bluesky is mit licensed, if it goes bad what’s to stop a fork? Once there’s interop between the protocols will it matter at all?
Not 100% sure but I don’t think anything would stop either a fork or a new app that uses the same protocol.
I really don’t see how it could matter tbh
I think lemmy should get atproto support too.
I wonder if the next president could do something to stop that… seems like the head of DOGE might like it (or not, if that means contrarians disappear and stop “community noting” his posts, and allow for a more echoey chamber)
Let’s replace one proprietary service with another. It looks so good with its API wide open, like it’s never getting enshittified.
Bluesky is not proprietary, it’s mit licensed and open source
It’s obvious to me that we need to have laws to enforce portability of data and interoperability for large platforms.
I’m sure the Republican govt will get right on that
I mean, this is one of the central pitches behind Web3.0/Crypto. Everything has a digital tag and its all going to be portable between platforms.
Did it come to fruition? No, of course not. Its all a pile of scams. But then so was Web2.0 and Web1.0 during their heydays.
Web 1 and 2 were a pile of scams? Wthdym
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
This goes all the way back to '98, when the original slew of start-ups gobbled up investments only to flop a few years later. Web2.0 had its own bubble burst starting in 2008, taking down a host of the early social media ecosystems (MySpace, Yahoo, and Geocities, most famously). Huge upfront investments with the promise of explosive ROI that took far longer to materialize (or simply never did).
A great deal of the valuation in these firms was built on lies and bullshit - misreported user activity, overly optimistic monetization estimates, and outright accounting fraud.
2020 gave us what looked like was going to be a third Crypto bust wave (FTX being the big industry leader leading the charge). But the pivot to AI appears to have bailed a lot of the bigger investors out. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Yeah…the new Dumbass Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will be right on that. Top priority…I’m sure…
Twitter facilitated exactly what Elon set out to do with it.
It costs a lot to become vice president, especially if you weren’t born in America
Even if it did, Musk would just buy it.
it isn’t necessarily for sale at the moment
Even if it were for sale, it’s designed to be decentralized so you couldn’t buy the whole network, just like you can’t buy all of Lemmy or Mastodon. That’s the theory anyways - I don’t think they’ve really executed on it yet.
Put enough zeros on the end of a check and it will be.
Good. Fuck Elon Musk and Twitter.
It needs A) same functionality B) ban all forms of racism, especially Zionism and C) refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China
refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China
:-/
That’s not going to happen here. Am I the only one who watched Trumps speech claiming to be about 1A? He is coming for social media day 1, to reinforce Elon Musk, not only on Twitter, but all other large social media platforms (he doesn’t name FB and Reddit, but he’s talking about FB and Reddit, maybe as far down as Lemmy, BlueSky & Mastadon too, idk).
He says he’s going to mobilize “my Department of Justice” to do it.
He specifically says: making account removal/banning only possible via court order, removing moderation, and removing any labels of misinformation or disinformation.
He’s already threatening YouTube with removal of section 230, if they moderate content.
Why is no one talking about this?
Or USA 🤭 they just killed their democracy hard
What’s with the consistent amount of “American Democracy is dead” rhetoric I’ve been seeing lately? It’s not like Trump is president yet. And sure, Biden isn’t going to make too much impact as a lame duck, but even after Trump takes office again, there’s a lot he can do, and a whole lot more he won’t be able to. The power is still in the hands of the people, especially at the local level. America’s democracy isn’t dead, and saying anything of the sort is obeying in advance.
Oh you sweet summer child.
A key component of 2016-2020 was Trump was surrounded by people who wouldn’t, including generals who wouldn’t entertain his talk of maybe using nukes. It’s not that he couldn’t in 2016-2020, it’s that he was surrounded by people who wouldn’t and he didn’t know how himself.
That’s no longer the case. And the people around him have studied up on how.
One of his first big speeches post win this week, claiming to be about defending 1A, he states he’s going to use/mobilize “my Department of Justice” to prosecute anyone trying to enforce the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is the thing that keeps polling locations safe and neutral. The Hatch Act prevents the threatening of voters in or within 100yds of polling locations, as well as making the buying of votes illegal. That latter part keeps voting free.
Think about the possibilities. Think hard. In fact, if you’re a creative type, sit down and write a short story about what that could look like on the present political climate.
He’s reading a script, the entire speech lacks his usual meandering bullshit. It’s cagey. He totally didn’t write it. The only piece that smells like trump is the piece about no longer being able to ban social media accounts without a court order, probably because that’s personal for him.
And remember. SCOTUS basically said he can do anything while President without fear of prosecution. It’s simply that Biden is unwilling to go there that we haven’t seen what that looks like yet.
I don’t read hard left media for this info. I listen to direct talk, from Trump, from his people, and listen to/read interviews with individuals in or very close to the 2016-2020 term. I then find a historian or lawyer who can add nuance. I then read the hive mind of We The People and other countries for more perspective.
Have you seen Project 2025, Trump’s unofficial but kind of official election plan? Republicans have all three branches of government now. They would have to willingly choose to not follow their own proposed plan, and there’s no reason to do that. So, logically, they will execute it - and that’s it. The end of US democracy.
Go read it or summaries of it if you think it’s hyperbole.
It’s not a bullet list or headline so they’re going to continue to ignore all 996 pages of it.
Yea, have you heard about project 2025?
With choosing trump, the American people have chosen that they approve that project.
At least, so do I see it.
If you tell people now that Democracy is dead, they don’t bother fighting the real fight, if and when push comes to shove.
Dems said this election is the end of Democracy, but still put an uninspiring right candidate. They said Trump is the fascist danger to all the US stands for. But having him and his crownies dismantled by getting criminal charges on them seemed to go too far. When grassroots movements came up and demanded change instead of embracing them, taking them seriously and talking with them properly, they were shunned and pushed down.
Now the greatest danger to corporate America are people to start organizing and taking to the streets. So hammer down the defeatist message, so the people suck up to their corporate overlords. The corporate overlords who won yet another election as both candidates represented their class interests.
I just don’t see how that broken down old man who says they’re eating the cats and dogs is inspiring to anyone. But then I don’t vote on inertia.
All you are describing really only suggests that American democracy has been dead for even longer, not that it isn’t dead yet.
yeah I don’t think a usa based platform is really “long gaming” the fee speech problem. Bluesky now shifting to monetization plans. Its a matter of time until some rich dildo buys it up. If were lucky it will be mark cuban or somebody buts its still grim prospects.
Cuban has deleted much of his anti trump talk, high odds the man is hunkering down.
Remember, trumps been promising vengeance to “enemies” for well over a year now, and now he has immunity from prosecution.
“Fee speech” is a serendipitous typo. Or maybe you meant it. First I’ve heard it, anyway.
Agreed. It needs to be in a country like Switzerland or some such.
Countdown until it turns out that everybody associated with any competition to Musk’s companies just so happens to be a criminal Trump siccs his DOJ after: 5… 4…
I wouldn’t discount the possibility that bsky is backed by the same dark money pool that bought twitter. putin found that it’s way too easy to buy elections worldwide just using social media. They’ll never give it up.
