436
Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly 'toxic'
(www.nbcnews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
436 points (96.8% liked)
News
23659 readers
3035 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Bluesky is a registered public benefit company and Dorsey is no longer with the company and no longer on the board.
Phew .... then we can trust the open software that is locked to one company and one instance essentially leaving control to a handful of people.
What could go wrong?
I’m not saying open software isn’t awesome. I’m simply correcting a common misconception.
I agree, there is nothing wrong with Open Software .... the problem is the way Bluesky is being arranged and developed. They are essentially cornering the development to create a situation where only one company and one group maintains dominate control over everything and everyone.
The track record so far since the popular world wide internet started is that if a popular social media platform is controlled by one group, one company or even one person, it will eventually turn into a tool of monetization and control and it will eventually degrade and dissolve.
The only difference this time is Bluesky is supposedly built on open source software, which is true .... but the whole platform and system is corned, controlled and managed by only one company and one group.
They're actively working on making it easier to fork the entire platform.
There's already 3rd party account hosts, moderation labelers, feed generators, and alternative implementations like whitewind (blogging system on top of the same account repo & lexicon architecture) were you can use the exact same account. All of these works together independently of which hosts / providers you use.
Relays and microblogging appviews (a fully functional bluesky mirror) are technically possible but more expensive to duplicate but there's work on making that practical too.
You can already bypass PLC by using DID:Web for account identity.
The single most important thing if you want to be able to recover from bluesky going bad is to just back up your account recover signing key, and to keep a recent backup of the repo to preserve your post history and social network (follows, etc).
All the rest can be rebuilt if you have your account hey and backup. The content addressing will make it seamless!
That's the thing about how this is all working though. I'm semi technically literate and I barely can understand most of what you just wrote. So chances are, I might be able to attempt some of the things you said and might be able to do something but realistically, I probably won't.
The reason why Bluesky is not a good thing is that it is too complex for the average user to understand. All a new non-technical user understands is 'it works, it works fast, I get to connect to lots of people' and most importantly 'I don't need to figure anything out and I can just get to use it'.
You're average user which is about 90% of the user base will never go through all the trouble of understanding what you just wrote or in even attempting to go through any of those steps. They are a captive audience and the developers and corporate wolves in the sidelines all understand this. They just need to herd the sheep into a large enough pen, lock them up, shut out any dissenters and start monetizing the new audience that will stay captive for a few years until it all degrades and falls apart like previous platforms.
Just because it's open doesn't mean anyone can do it, but if it goes badly then a group of others could fork and rebuild.
Look at what happened to reddit .... it was open source at the start with a promise that it would be controlled by the company but would later be made fully open to everyone. Those promises became less and less prominent as the years and by until no one cared anymore. The whole system had a captive audience and everything was locked up and now it's a corporately owned money making machine that the community will never have a chance to fully control.
That's not a valid argument, your ability or inability to program this on your own, is not a realistic measure. Something being open source doesn't make everybody a programmer, but it does give everybody a chance to look at the code. Which means chances of shenanigans are way smaller.
I understand your skepticism about BlueSky being privately held. And maybe it would be preferable if Mastodon had the success BlueSky enjoys now. But at least if BlueSky fails and becomes as bad as Xitter, Mastodon may get another chance.
Open AI changed to a for profit company in a heartbeat and these folks can too.
More worrying is who owns them and their funding sources.
These people are why I'm barely here anymore and more on...Bluesky. And I like the format here way.more.