Why I recommend against Bluesky.
Why I recommend against Bluesky.
Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
72 comments
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My $0.02 from extensive cryptocurrency experience:
A centralized project with a user base never becomes decentralized later. It's always a lie to get users quickly. Centralization generally just gets worse.
I think BlueSky will keep half-assing decentralization until their owners decide that narrative is no longer necessary.
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People didn't go to Bluesky because of an informed choice based on features or security. People went to Bluesky because that's where everyone they want to follow went.
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But Bluesky does have a lot better features when it comes to actually effectively using the platform. Getting set up on Bluesky is orders of magnitude easier than Mastodon, and I do think that's a big part of why it's become the preferred destination recently. Mastodon had a real shot early on but didn't make it easy enough for people.
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I know you’ll get blowback for this, eye rolls and such about how it’s not that hard, but I’ve been building social software for ordinary humans for almost 25 years and you are quite correct. Honestly the Mastodon PR itself was too complex. Anytime you heard about it, you heard not about what a hot social destination it is, but how cool its distributed technology model is and that shit just flies over most peoples heads and actually scares them into think it will be complex and hard. Then you prompt them to choose an instance and it’s just game over. Ordinary users have the attention span of a fruit fly.
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I'm probably an idiot, but my experience was exactly the opposite. I don't really feel like following specific users (at least for now), I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn't figure it out on Bluesky.
I never used Twitter, and am not particularly excited about the general format, so I'm probably not the target user, but I check Mastodon occasionally, and gave up on Bluesky after like 2 days.
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Bluesky isn't Twitter. That's all that mattered to most people. A few influential people went there first and the network effect kicked in.
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Yup, the network effect is real.
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Hell I wouldn't even say that... they don't understand it, they don't care to understand it, they don't know or care what federated means. They went there because, it's not currently nazified twitter.
I get that it's "technically" federated... but practically it's for all practical purposes just a proprietary program, run by a group that isn't currently horrific. Unfortunately everything I see in it says, it's every bit as vulnerable, and it can be good for as long as the owners care about not becoming a nazi propoganda machine. Actual recourse from it going evil... is non existant.
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None of the people I follow are active on Mastodon. The selling point to me for Bluesky is that it’s essentially a Twitter clone not owned by a billionaire. It’s friendly to the communities I’m part of specifically and doesn’t have ads. What more should anyone ask for from a social media platform?
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That's how it is today, that is how most of these projects start out. Google too was "do no evil" and look at what it is today, or what it's been for the last decade.
How will bluesky be tomorrow?
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What more you should ask is precisely that it's not owned privately. Otherwise, soon the next Elmo comes along and buys this one too.
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Sure, I get that, it’s just when it eventually becomes corrupt or falls apart, everyone that moved from Twitter to Threads to Bluesky will find another platform. Nobody is going to move to Mastodon until the people they want to follow move there too.
In my three attempts to make Mastodon work for my needs in the last few years, I can’t follow NBA or NFL news, catch up on AEW wrestling or hang out with IRL friends.
The content I want/need simply isn’t there. Until it is, i don’t really care how private it is or how perfectly decentralized it is.
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To not be corporate owned at all? Reddit used to be all those things, too. As was Digg. Until they had a critical mass of users and began trying to turn a profit.
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This is why I can't get into it. The whole twitter format just feels so unappealing to me.
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Yeah, that is me too. I tried Mastodon for a bit and it just didn't work for me. Posting something just drowns you out until you actually have a decent amount of followers, however many that may need to be.
If I post with a new account, 99% of it goes into the void. I had a few people like and boost my posts but they were still gone into oblivion within an hour or less. Not sure how that is appealing? It is like a popularity contest. Like those cliques in schools of the popular kids.
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It surly can't avoid having ads permanently tho?
I assume they're just burning cash rn but will eventually need to have sustainable income. Alternatively Mastodon is an actual non-profit, it doesn't need to have the same type of income
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Come join Mastodon where the skies are bluer and the grass is greener.
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I had a nice little profile on there until about a month ago. I didn't delete when I saw AI spammers join. And I kept my profile even when the mods were starting to become reddit-ish. What sent me over the edge was when they announced a partnership with an AI company who said they were "just there to beef up security". Yeah, no, not for me. Super sad, too, because Bluesky is a good idea, but I'm sticking with the fediverse.
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it's not yet federated properly, or would not be completely, but it's still a good player in the game for now. I'll advocate against it if shareholders start shenanigans.
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I get the mentality, but that’s the problem with enshitification. It always starts good, but once all the twitter traffic moves over, and the world becomes dependent on BlueSky the way it still is for Twitter, what do they become next?
It would be better to push people away from the closed platform and towards the actual open platform.
Edit: maybe BlueSky is open source. In such case, if they start fucking around, maybe it would be simple to fork this source code and form your own community. I think until other instances gain tractions, it is hard to consider BlueSky comparable to mastadon.
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That's exactly what Bluesky was designed for: so that anyone can clone their qubibytes of data and start a new central platform anytime without any account loss (though this mechanism relies on user domain owners staying the same). You can read more at https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ from the 'Bluesky is centralized, but "credible exit" is a worthy pursuit' section on.
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if shareholders start shenanigans.
That happens only when user count and platform lock in are past the point of no return. This sentence is the essence of why platforms have been allowed to do this again and again.
Its already too late for bluesky, because even if they started federating now, any other instance would be in such a minority that it would have zero sway over the wider federation if bluesky HQ went rogue.
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There is a recent community project that focuses on federating Bluesky without the Bluesky devs' involvement:
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It's not a non-profit like Mastodon so, seems inevitable
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I'll advocate against it if shareholders start shenanigans
I mean, they will. It's inevitable. So why bother? BlueSky also ultimately retains the final word on moderation as well.
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That's a great write-up!
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Bluesky didn't have a strong of a hold on me, tried it, wasn't impressed with what was there before deleting the account. Getting too burned out on social media in general to really be invested in these kinds of platforms. The fediverse is more or less my last rodeo.
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Every time i'm amazed at how such authors are talented at avoiding mentioning Nostr 😏
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You mean the Dorsey-endorsed crypto platform that has spam waves conducted against Bluesky and ActivityPub?
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the speed with which you encounter your first nazi on nostr is not indicative of a system worth spending time on
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72 comments