I just.. I could never comprehend twitter (or Mastadon, or bluesky for that matter).
The whole structure of the conversation feel like people shouting into an open auditorium. And everyone is shouting at once.
I just do not see the appeal.
I’m with you 100%. The Twitter product has always been a clunky pile of bullshit for me. But somehow it became the default public space and choice of celebrities, etc and I think that has been 98% of its appeal.
Yeah. I think that's the appeal. You could just shout things and hope others would follow until a part of the auditorium would turn their heads to you. So, if someone shouted "it's an Earthquake!", and people nearby felt it and tweeted, implying it was true, everyone in the auditorium would know about it. Of course, other types of messages were send in Twitter, but most importantly, actors and robots started to use Twitter to plainly shout lies and noise.
Small notes to be answered rarely.
I've looked at the early Usenet archives, and typical posts there resembled this format quite a lot. It's later that Usenet became a place where you write long considerate posts, and also expect rather quick answers.
It's actually interesting to communicate in a rare terse format.
The reason I don't use Twitter, BlueSky, anything like that is - I don't have a scenario of it being useful for me.
About 15 years ago, I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. I joined Twitter because I like to try new apps as early as possible. It turned out to be a great place to talk about live music in my city, amongst other things. I met all my friends on Twitter.
At that time in my city, it was very much the town square that Elon wants it to be now. It was a place to discuss events in realtime; especially sporting events.
I suspect the advantage for Twitter was that you could communicate with people you didn’t know directly like celebrities, authors, politicians, etc. Not just write to them, but they write back because sending off a short message is much easier than making a call or writing a letter. Sometimes that is an unhealthy parasocial relationship but, it doesn’t have to be.
Kevin Smith basically started writing the movie Tusk in a collaborative way with Twitter.
Me too but here's one useful function:
Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these "scream into the void" social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what's really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.
I thought it was a great idea for official statements. Kind of like a new type of RSS feed.
Local transport companies can advertise delays, meteorology organisations can advertise natural disasters, police can post active missing person alerts, etc.
But it seems like it is just vapid narcissists thinking other people give a shit about their random thoughts.
Anyone try the bridge? Seems a bit convoluted.
Anything that gets people off Twitter is a good thing. And it means more potential mastodon users later on ;)
Yeah it works fine. My mastodon account has gained 40 followers from bluesky even though I have a bluesky account too!
I'm trying Bridgy Fed, but it's too janky. My Bluesky friends and I are able to follow each other and see each others' posts. But, I tried to respond to a Bluesky post and Bluesky never saw my reply.
Is there anything in Bluesky's design that prevents the company from attracting a critical mass of users and then restricting federation, or cutting it off entirely?
No.
I don't think there are any other Instances aside from the default bsky.social right now. It's only federated in theory and essentially a closed platform until that changes. Pretty sad that it gets all the attention instead of Mastodon.
I'm not even sure what the word is to describe that mentality. The closest I think of is "willfully ignorant", but that's not quite it.
Basically people like you are blind to the reason as to why bluesky and not mastodon is getting all the twitter runaways.
And you're blind to it, not because you're incapable of seeing the reasons. You're just unwilling to accept that those reasons ARE the reasons it's happening this way.
Basically the 95% of society don't give a shit about federation. It's not a selling point, it's a scary confusing distraction. Many of them probably went to sign up for mastodon, as they had heard of it......but then they found out:
"There are thousands of mastodons, and if you sign up on one, you can't sign up on the other, and you can only talk to the people on your mastodon......oh, bluesky is just one service. You sign up, and you're done. Oh, it's even asking me if I want to connect with mastodon. So that means I never needed to connect to mastodon! And this one is just like twitter. I know this. The other one is scary. This one is what I like."
And then you come in, correcting every wrong aspect of what they just said. You start using terms like fediverse, and instances, and federate, and they just give you blank stares.
They don't give a shit about that. At all. At allllll. At allllllllllll.
I'm going to include a picture here. I took a picture of my wall while I was watching a hockey game. You'll notice their twitter handles. But those handles are also accessable all across the net. That's how the fediverse should work.
TonyBrownpxp. You'll notice they don't put the X logo in that graphic. They just put the handle, and assume the audience knows what to do. Now, Tony Brown isn't a celebrity. He's a hockey announcer for a Cleveland based AHL hockey team, the Cleveland Monsters. AHL is the farm system for NHL. So this is minor league hockey.
Hardley someone who anyone would instantly know the name Tony Brown. However, if you're watching hockey, and you see the handle @TonyBrownPXP with no other context, as shown in this photo, you know how to contact them.
But, if he were to say, have a mastodon, it would have to be @TonyBrownPXP@mastodon.social
And furthermore, if @TonyBrownPXP@mastodon.world exists, that means you can't just throw @TonyBrownPXP on the screen with a mastodon logo, because which @TonyBrownPXP IS it???
And so now your screenis just FILLED with text, all because handles aren't handled universally on the fediverse. I'm personally signed up for 3 diffeeent fediverse services, all using Lost_My_Mind, but on 3 different instances. What if a 2nd person signs up Lost_My_Mind on a 4th instance? I have no way to prove that's not me. And I don't think anyone gives a shit enough about me to investigate if it WAS me. So anything they say, would in the minds of humans, be assosiated with me.
And while I won't call TonyBrown a celebrity, it's the same for celebrities, and guys like him. He encourages fan interaction during hockey games, and he refuses to call it X. He always says "Send your thoughts or questions to me on twitter, or I guess they call it X now, which is a stupid name, but send your questions to @TonyBrownPXP and we'll address the best ones during game breaks and intermission!"
Says almost the same exact thing, almost word for word, always with the snide diss of twitter, every game.
Now I've never signed up for loops, or pixelfed, or peertube, or a lot of services. But when I signed up for the fediverse, it should have had me pick a username. Lost_My_Mind. Ok, now when I sign up to any service, Lemmy, or Pixelfed, or peertube, or anything else, Lost_My_Mind should be my handle.
And if someone ELSE tries signing up for Pixelfed, on a different instance, they can't use Lost_My_Mind. Even though I don't have a registered pixelfed account. Even though I don't have an account on that other instance.
I'M Lost_My_Mind. Not you on another instance. But that's not how the fediverse works. And because people don't understand, or give a shit about any of that, they just go with what they know.
Right now, we're in the early days of the fediverse. The experience should be centralized, while the underlaying services and protocols should be decentralized. Because right now, the whole thing isn't decentralized. It's fractured.
Basically people like you are blind to the reason as to why bluesky and not mastodon is getting all the twitter runaways.
Bluesky absolutely provides a better, more cohesive and centralised experience than most of the fediverse microblog alternatives.
That's why it's getting more people
But the reason it can do that is because it's centralised, with federation tacked on. And that centralisation means it's most likely going to go through the same cycle of enshittification as twitter, facebook, reddit etc. Twitter was great to use back in the day. Reddit was great to use back in the day. Then they got large captive audiences that couldn't leave because of the network effect, and instead of trying to make the platforms attractive to new people, they started to bleed their existing customers for value at the expense of their user experience, because those people had nowhere else they could easily go.
Bluesky will go down that same path if they get a critical mass of users and stop being the "alternative" to twitter.
Mastodon and the fediverse will always be an alternative at best, because they can't compete with the experience of using a centralised network. But the Fediverse platforms don't suffer from the vulnerability of centralised networks and their path to enshittification. And for me, that's going to keep me here.
The only way I'll move to Bluesky is if they truly embrace decentralisation to the point where the platform/network could exist without them.
I'm with you.
I think GP has one or two good points about shortcomings of the existing distributed platforms, but I also think these things can be addressed. For example, a centralized system's single namespace for usernames brings advantages for both identity and usability. This would be harder for a distributed system to implement, of course, but it's not impossible.
Look, I appreciate you pushing on the UX aspects of the fediverse here. But let me ask yout something. What's your email address? Is it Lost_My_Mind? No? Oh, because it's got an @whatever.com on the end? Why is that? Why don't we have one global, centralized namespace for email usernames such that there's only a single Lost_My_Mind in the whole world?
Mastodon is fine, but I burned out on it pretty quick. There's not an intuitive way to find new content on there. I'm sure the content is fine, but Bluesky can get you up and running really quickly.
I've found tons of new "content" on Mastodon by following hashtags related to the things I like.
Personally I like the fact that I'm not being fed some corporate algorithm.
I like the fact that I’m not being fed some corporate algorithm.
Bluesky's entire appeal for me is that you can choose (or even create) your recommendation algorithm. Not only it's an amazing idea, it also works really well
Sure, that's definitely nice in theory.
In practice, however, because the client is closed source and there's no way to self-host and instance, BlueSky users will eventually find themselves at the whims of the people/person who controls the software. What's to stop some Elon Musk type from buying BlueSky next and then adding things to your algorithm without your consent?
That's why I'm very skeptical of BlueSky's pseudo-federation, as it feels like people are just making the same mistakes (with regard to corporate social media) over and over again. Unlike Mastodon (which I understand is less popular right now and thus the network/peer effect is weaker for people), the users have very little control over BlueSky as a platform, and that feels like a mistake.
With all that said, priority numero uno should simply be to get people off of shit like X.com and TikTok, which aren't just at risk of becoming toxic playgrounds of oligarchs, but already are. If people choose BlueSky as the next corporate platform to go to, it's a small step in the right direction, but it's worth proceeding with caution.
for now. feels like lots of potential for enshittification though.
Mastedon and the Fediverse need to get their shit together and make it easy for hyper casual basic people to use and understand.
Bluesky doesn't have any of that.
Despite being "open source", if you want to run your own Personal Data Sever, to join the network you'll need to join Bluesky's AT Protocol PDS Admins Discord server:
Using discord for this is such a bonehead move.
That would effectively lock participation behind Discord's terms and conditions. No thanks.
(But thanks for sharing that info. :)
I don't know how old this document is, but I created my own PDS this weekend and it's not have to join their Discord server to do so.
Don't give the VCs any ideas!
Bluesky is centralised and funded by VCs. It plays at being decentralised because people can bring their own hardware to the party and plugin to the Bluesky network, but if Bluesky (the company) turns it off, then Bluesky the platform/network ceases to be usable. They also started without allowing federation with their core network, so they can easily disable it again at any time.
Bluesky is not decentralised in any meaningful way, which means its at risk of the same bullshit that has driven most of us away from reddit, twitter, facebook etc
Two different questions.
They are a gateway to federated material as any other (like Lemmy), and those controls are at the platform. They can gatekeep federated content very simply.
There is nothing stopping them from leaving it all open aside from costs though. Hosting is very expensive, and I'm not sure how they plan to support their platform aside from advertising, at which point you may be stuck in a spot where you shut down certain intersections to appease advertisers.
Oh my god! That's terrible! 20 million people!?
What have they ever done to Bluesky!? Why would Bluesky go out of its way to hit so many people!?
Have you met people?! I'm surprised it's only 20 million. It shows a near saint like self-control on Bluesky's part.
The urge to act like an asshole on another platform is just too much.....
Twitter was a cesspool long before trump, and it was made such by the same people trying to distance themselves from it now.
"Ohh.. I wasn't a cunt on Twitter, I'm one of the people moving away from it".
Twitter, where the response to “I like Hot Dogs” is “Why do you hate Cheeseburgers????”
All that matters is the cesspool that isn't going to make Musk any money
I won't be joining in until I can actually run a real instance on my own.
I don't plan on doing that, but the important part is knowing that I could.
Instances are run through a central "relay" which is controlled by Bluesky HQ, so it isn't decentralized like, say, Mastodon is.
Right-wing crypto funded.
I don't know about that. The big issue, for me, is that it isn't actually decentralized.
It is, however, de-elonized
Damn I sure hope they're gonna pay compensation for all the users they hit
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