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
Just in general, people on the internet are haters. I don’t really have a strong opinion either way, but Bluesky could cure world hunger and make all dogs live 100 years and people on the internet would hate it.
World hunger can’t be cured for profit. The hunger of the many is directly caused by the greed of the few.
But I’d love to see them try of course. The billions Musk has evaporated with his purchase could’ve also been spent less egotistically.
Perhaps but I’m not sure what that has to do with my comment about internet haters.
It was a hyperbole, dont take it literally.
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.”
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.
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.
Are you familiar with what liberal racism looks like?
Anonymously browsing the feed I rapidly came upon these posts:
-
https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3lcbh7org5c2c - Russophobia and some other brainworms I don’t even want to get into.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s another oligarch owned platform?
Basically.
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).
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.
deleted by creator
Maybe it’s ads. Maybe it’s subscription fees.
It’s subscription fees. They’ve already announced it. It’s literally on their blog, and they’ve talked about it in their Twitch (they didn’t do a VoD so here’s a link to a YouTube video) and Reddit Q&As.
“In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames. Bluesky will always be free to use — we believe that information and conversation should be easily accessible, not locked down. We won’t uprank accounts simply because they’re subscribing to a paid tier.”
Maybe they just end up selling all your data off to their 1,000+ data broker partners.
I don’t really see how they could, seeing as pretty much everything (including Likes) is already public.
Is twitter again. Algorithms, adds, pay subscriptions
None of these are the case except it being Twitter again.
Yet
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)
The problem I see with BlueSky is, what’s the difference between Bluesky and Twitter?
Did any learning take place? “Okay, clean sheet design, let’s do it again but better this time” what did they do to keep Bluesky from going the exact same direction Twitter did?
I’ve been using it a couple of weeks and loving it. It’s just the way Twitter used to be - fun, quality content, from the people you choose to follow.
No algorithm trying to feed you recommendations. No paid-for blue ticks. No hate-filled bile being ignored or endorsed by those in charge. If someone’s trolling you block/report them and they’re gone, just like that.
At the moment it’s more or less everything Twitter should be. It may or may not last, but for the moment it’s great.
twitter’s recommendation algorithm keeps serving me absolute bangers and i actually kinda like it :/
Ha, fair enough - if it works for you, then ok :-)
It doesn’t promote and endorse literal Nazis. Why y’all pretending like this isn’t a big difference?
Yet.
It’s a commercial platform, it’s going to enshittify because that’s what commercial platforms do.
Yeah let’s not confuse that for openly promoting and endorsing Nazis okay?
“Less nazi than Twitter for the next few months” isn’t good enough for me to adopt it. I’m not going to board a doomed ship.
Let me be perfectly clear here: Fuck Elon Musk right in the aorta. I am NOT endorsing Twitter here. What I’m mostly doing is endorsing abandoning both microblogging and commercial for-profit social media as concepts.
Bluesky is gonna get worse. They’re in attract mode right now just like any tech startup; they’re burning venture capital money operating at a loss in too good to be true mode to gather users and when they hit a certain adoption rate or simultaneous active user base all the shit Twitter and Threads do is gonna get turned on.
“It’s got moderation.” It’s got thought police in potentia. Either they’re going to start using their moderation systems as a political cudgel or they’re going to start letting scammers and shit through because they profit from the traffic whatever that traffic is. You won’t be able to say the word “poop” but commercials for anorexia pills will make it through to teenagers. Can you name a commercial platform that didn’t eventually do one or both of those? The only one I can think of that didn’t just die young was MySpace, which continued to exist into its irrelevancy.
I foresee a cycle of instability that goes something like “New platform just dropped, it’s like Facebook but it isn’t Facebook. It’s like Facebook used to be before algorithms fucked it up.” Early adopters join it, there’s a period where you still have to have Facebook because three of your friends whose ability to understand things doesn’t work won’t make the switch, eventually people leave those friends, everyone is standardized on the new thing, new thing does exactly what Facebook did, it fucks the world up again, “New platform just dropped, it’s like Screechbox but isn’t Screechbox, it’s like Screechbox before algorithms fucked it up.”
I’m kicking that in the head right now.
The problem is mostly that people see that as a natural progression of the free market, so they’re okay with it. That, and/or they’re totally blind to the fact that people like musk are symptomatic of a deeper problem with the system at work here. Myspace, early internet forums, any form of less explicitly centralized internet, those get blamed for not being “good enough” as a platform, compared to these other, more “successful” ventures, which inevitably use spam to make money or attract nazis to bolster their userbase in a short term bargain. It doesn’t matter to your average user that those platforms fell apart explicitly because larger market actors all swam around them like pirahnas and blasted them with spam and bots and all that shit in order to explicitly tear them apart and try to make a quick buck off of their shit.
In the market, that’s seen as a you problem, as a personal failing, if you can’t avoid that, or if you’re not willing to play along with that. That’s the average person’s view of any previous platform. These platforms rise and fall like, almost every decade or so at this point, more at the onset, obviously. People don’t have enough of a long term memory to remember why the last platform died and how it followed the exact same trajectory as the current thing.
You people are fucking insane. You act like what the Muskrat is doing is normal and inevitable. No, a billionaire owner of a website losing his mind acting like an infant and going online publicly promoting and endorsing Nazis it’s not the norm. It’s not the inevitable Next Step.
How many ethnic cleansings has Facebook been instrumental in? I can think of at least one in Myanmar.
Large commercial platforms being absolutely evil is NOT unique to Twitter. Again I challenge you to name me a large social media platform that didn’t either rot into a wasteland of scam bots or start committing atrocities.
Very bad people own almost everything and their solution to any rising star is to buy and ruin it.
Hell, I don’t want to adopt a platform that’s doomed to get as bad as Youtube let alone Facebook or Twitter. You’ve got to show me some low level structure that says “Here is why it can’t fall the way the last ones did.”
I don’t give a shit about the Bluesky stock you bought. Bluesky is doomed, don’t adopt it.
Ooh clever moving of the goal post there. Show me one example of Mark Zuckerberg posting to Facebook about how awesome a literal Nazi is. Personally unblocking said Nazi , and endorsing their message . That’s the discussion buddy.
The moderation and blocking on BlueSky set it apart from Twitter.
