Surely nothing will go wrong with THIS corporate owned walled garden.
How any times do they have to learn the same lesson?
Technically it’s an open protocol. Whether or not any other implementations will surface remains to be seen.
I know a much better place. It is called mastodon.
Just pointing out the author mentions they used mastodon for a time too, their argument is that bluesky interface, content and moderation are better for them.
That mindset is the problem. A slightly better UX at the cost of freedom is a bad deal.
They keep building up these companies with shiti core principles then pika face when corpos do them dirty 🤡
UX matters.
If open source software genuinely wants to be an option for normal people, they need to fix their shit.
That’s fair! Although I fear big money will always come up with some way to make a “better” UX, either simply because they can afford more/better devs, and often by compromising privacy, accessibility, etc.
embrace extend extinguish has worked in the past and it can work again
It’s a little more than a slightly better UX. Dismissing the entire concept of the instance removes a fair amount of complexity and fragmentation from the equation. There are so many cheerful guides out there about how to select an instance and every single one of them loses 95% of normal people in the first paragraph.
Having a signup model that people understand helps. Concentrating everything in one schema creates a noticeable increase in density of relevant content. Having corporate money for real hosting and security counts. When you fediverse instance goes down to DDOS or implements crippling safeguards because they can’t keep up with the spam, you really feel how the whole thing is run on a shoestring.
I will give bluesky credit for their focus on moderation. Hopefully some of that design is cloned by the Mastodon folks sooner than later
I will give bluesky credit for their focus on moderation.
Watch that focus disappear once the enshittification phase starts.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of the microblog format, but I’m pretty sure everyone here is going to agree that Mastodon is the superior Twitter replacement.
Nope. Not at all. I very much prefer BlueSky as far as Twitter replacement goes.
yep, people that loved walled gardens like twitter will absolutely love bluesky
I don’t think I get what you mean when you say “Walled Garden” in this context. Can you elaborate?
just another corporate managed behemoth. their interfaces are slick, but the federation lacking
walled garden
(Edit, For example…) Facebook control all aspects: you can only do what they want. Mastodon can be hosted and modified by anyone, it’s freedom.
A closed platform, walled garden, (…) is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and/or media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content. - wikipedia
What are you talking about? BlueSky has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook. It’s a different company using the open AT Protocol.
My mistake.
I’m going to say that to the absolute gross majority of people federation means absolutely nothing.
I’d go even as far as to say that the Venn diagram of what you can and cannot post between Mastodon and blue sky is almost the perfect circle
Nothing wrong with that.
Interesting. Ugh, I feel the need to go peek at it now, but I also expect to really not like it. Oh well, here goes.
Unfortunately not. For me the main problem is discoverability. There’s no recommendation algorithm except for boosts. I’m not suggesting Mastodon integrate some kind of machine learning or other advanced stuff, but number of likes from followed accounts and a threshold would be nice for a start. As it is, Mastodon is just bad for entertainment purposes. Maybe it works for other purposes, but for entertainment I’d rather have the algorithm-fuelled quote-tweet dunking on Twitter.
There’s the explore tab in the mastodon app that shows you trending hashtags, and recommends people to follow based off who you already follow. There’s trending accounts that just post about trending items too. Use them as your algorithm.
There’s definitely an opportunity for someone to run their own curation service for personalized feeds based on a user’s activity on other social networks.
I tend to just check All periodically for the first couple of months and follow tags and people that suit my own interests and build my own feed from zero. But that takes effort and time, and for folks who want an option further toward the convenience end of the privacy/convenience spectrum I suspect it would be a fairly popular option.
Leaving one privately run garden for another sure seems like a choice 🤔
It’s built to be decentralized though, from what I read.
Mastodon: Am I a joke to you?
I wasn’t a fan of the format. (and apparently I’m not allowed to have an opinion on format)
Isn’t the format literally just Twitter?
it’s quite different in the sense that you don’t see any recommended content, just your follows and their boosts.
That’s because its not harvesting your data in order to pull more engagement for ad revenue.
The ad revenue part is true but what do you mean by not harvesting data? Mastodon definitely stores your boosts and likes, it just doesn’t use that data to recommend more content. And the big difference is of course that it is stored on your instance’s server, not a centralized location.
I’m not OP, but yes, that’s why I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter/X. I really don’t like the format.
I tried to give Twitter a fair shake several years ago, and I found it to be a complete waste of my time. So I don’t use it, or anything like it. That’s also around when I found Reddit, which I found to not be a complete waste of time, and that’s why I’m on Lemmy instead of Mastodon. I like following communities, not topics or people.
Yes, and that was the issue for me. Some thoughts are indeed meant to be short, but I’d prefer elaboration in a lot of cases.
Ok, but the comment thread is about people preferring Bluesky to Mastodon, hence my confusion.
I value your opinion. What do you mean by format? Couldn’t you just use a different UI?
It’s kind of you, but not a huge deal. When I tried it (when there was an initial migration to Mastodon), it was so decentralized that you couldn’t really have much of a feed and it was tough to find much of anything.
The secret to Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people. (It took a while for that feature to mature, which made that difficult earlier on.)
You can follow people too, but with the population there being lower, it generally makes more sense to follow a topic and hide accounts you don’t want to see.
Caveat: I don’t spend a lot of time on microblogging platforms, Mastodon or otherwise. The above knowledge might be stale, but used present tense to not give the impression the platform is dead.
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I mean, Mastodon is a joke if that’s what you’re asking
It’s centralized. They allow federation using their own protocol.
But all you need to know is that it’s a capitalist, for-profit undertaking.
When it’s built around lage aggregators, running which privately is rather hard, there’s a bias in favour of centralised, large operators thereof, which mitigates some of the advantages.
Now ditch that for mastodon
Mastodon is much better for that
There is another alternative to twitter
Its pretty unknown, especially on lemmy, so i dont think many people heard of it, its on something called “the fediverse” and is called “mastodon”
Uhmmm… Mastodon works on the ActivityPub protocol, just like Lemmy. So why not use that?
You can even find your Lemmy account on there, and Mastodon accounts on here.
Bluesky is just a lot better. I have no particular commitment to the ActivityPub protocol.
The one drawback to Bluesky’s block feature is that a user’s block lists aren’t private. Through third party apps, you can find lists of everyone anyone’s blocked. That probably won’t bother most people, but it’s a potential issue for those who worry that public block lists could be used perniciously by persistent stalkers or harassers.
The only missing function is the ability to lock your account or go private as you can on Twitter, which would let you hide your account from non-followers while still posting to folks who already follow you.
But Bluesky has gotten considerable criticism at key points over the last year and a half for failures in handling anti-Black racism in particular. Rudy Fraser wrote extensively about some of these issues along with a deep dive into his goals and challenges as the creator of the now legendary Blacksky feed in a great post a year ago.
Every time someone recommends me Bluesky, I learn something else about it that makes me never want to make an account. Any one of these three quotes should be a dealbreaker on their own
His profile is sign-in blocked.
“Public square” indeed.
My experience with BlueSky has been that it is better than Twitter because it is smaller and doesn’t cater to the far-right.
BUT…
It can become extremely toxic very fast because they implemented the same poorly executed features Twitter did that fucked things up. In fact, it’s way worse than that…
The two features they copied from Twitter that hurt them the most are site-wide search and quote posts. Site-wide search enables people to “namesearch” or to monitor keywords for issues they want to fight about. Quote posts are a well understood “dunk mechanism”, that largely encourages dogpiling.
As for being free of a central algorithm, that seems good, until you see that there are tons of community algorithms you can subscribe to instead. Now there are algorithms for things like “anti-Zionist posts” and “pro-Israel posts”, which not only let people find their preferred echo-chamber, but also provide trolls access to exactly the groups of people they want to argue with or harass.
These algorithms can be built to detect certain hashtags and phrases, or they can just be big lists of accounts like a Twitter group. There’s no telling when you might show up in one of these algorithms or why.
As a result, if you say anything less than agreeable about any issue, there’s a chance you’re going to hear from a bunch of accounts you’ve never met before, regardless of what side of an issue you are on, or how extreme your view actually is.
I don’t recommend it. It’s a pro-profit company that seeks to be a wholesale replacement for Twitter. AT Proto federation is a complete joke, it’ll never expand if it doesn’t have a flagship open source server. They’ll give up on it just like Twitter did and just be another centralized, toxic, microblogging community.
The fucking lack of site wide search is why I hate these federated services. Such a glaringly missing feature.
I’d rather have a smaller but somewhat predictable group of peers I grow to somewhat respect and trust than being confronted by thousands of random strangers that are there for mere “engagemen” but not for helping each other out or saying nice things.
Idk man if you’re talking about Lemmy there’s not much respect going on in here, alot of comments get disappeared. It’s like the mods are on cocaine constantly sometimes.
I got accused of being transphobic and banned from an instance because I said that hate towards trans people is a dead cat argument. I forgot that America literally wants to kill trans people my bad.
If you think that by “toxicity” I am referring to moderators protecting their communities, you are sorely mistaken. That’s a feature, not a bug.
I got accused of being transphobic and banned from an instance because I said that hate towards trans people is a dead cat argument.
Good, you showed up in a trans-inclusive space and used right-wing jargon (coined by Boris fucking Johnson) that dismisses their testimony on their own lived experiences as being “shocking” and a “distraction”, when they know full well that their rights and their lives are on the line. Sorry you didn’t get a chance to correct the record on the fact that you were ignorant on the severity of the issue, but if you’re still publicly complaining about being banned on other uninvolved instances, I’d say that they made the right move.
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I prefer allowing hashtags over site-wide search. People can use hashtags specifically when they want their post to be associated with a specific search, rather than letting people search for specific words and phrases.
Site-wide search works way better for communities structured the way Reddit or Lemmy are structured, since people can easily run afoul of different moderation policies, and get themselves banned from communities for bad faith interactions. You have no such protections on a microblogging service.
I want to be able to search for a URL and see what others have said about it. This is important for assessing credibility.
Its absolutely necessary in an age of disinformation
Obviously I shouldn’t be able to read posts that are marked as “private” (eg only visible to people I follow), but the default “public” toots should be searchable. And not just site-wide, but fediverse-wide.
Yeah it really makes Mastodon unusable as the “one big forum” that twitter was and bluesky is trying to be.
Thanks, this was helpful! Sounds like I’ll pass on Bluesky!
I tried Threads and it was horrible. Honestly not using Mastodon that much. But maybe that format is just not my thing.
See the thing is…you have to microblog like a crazed hobo yelling things into the void. It doesn’t need to make sense. It’s better if it DOESN’T make sense.
Yup, I’ve tried Twitter and hated it. I remember when Mastodon launched, and it was described as “federated Facebook” IIRC, and now people are claiming that it’s more like “federated Twitter.” I hate both Facebook and Twitter, so I use neither.
So honestly, I don’t really care about Twitter/X vs BlueSky vs Mastodon, because I don’t want to use any of them. Reddit/Lemmy is a much more interesting format to me TBH.
I really need local interest groups. For example a local skating community or local hardware selling group - that’s only Facebook today unfortunately.
Dang. Does meetup work? I know it’s pretty decent for tech meetups, not so sure about the others.
Sort of. It’s definitely worse since Covid with the majority of “local” events being online either way. And where I live now it’s much quieter than where I used to live.
Dang. Covid really messed stuff up, I used to love Meetup before, but I haven’t had as much time since (had a kid right after Covid started, so I’ve been spending more time at home).
Mbin is attempt at having both. Microblog is a bit weak tho
Bluesky is also about as dead as tumblr
I barely see anyone interacting with anything, or anyone for that matter
How about, no
Another idea: ditch Twitter and learn to play the ukulele instead
