I wouldn’t get too excited. Humans as a whole aren’t particularly smart and it only takes a small percentage of bad actors and super dipshits to spread misinformation like a cancer no matter what platform you’re on.
Our species wasn’t prepared for the internet. We should be adding courses to public education teaching how to separate fact from fiction and how to find and utilize reliable sources, but instead we gleefully elected a party that ran on deconstructing the public education system.
Oops.
I just hope federal services (like applying for a passport) don’t become Twitter-only after Trump appoints Elon as Secretary of Enshittification.
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I’ve made a huge mistake breaking my personal rule to avoid all political content and I’ve regretted that immediately
Thing is, mate…fascists rarely stay inside their boarders. This is going to be the whole world’s problem in about 3 months.
Maybe for the rest of our lives, however long that is…
upside: maybe fashism will kill us all before climate does? yay?
With the fascist in power they’re going to speed up the climate destruction
So maybe the fascist will kill us with the climate
yay?
I’m glad you guys are looking at the bright side of life 😊
🎶 Always look at the bright side of life… 🎶
Tell me about it.
I’d rather eat rats and survive inside a hole in the ground in 45⁰C weather than die in a war, but that’s just me.
Hey, no eating cute rats
Cute rats are more delicious because they are healthier!
NGL dying due to climate is definitely preferable to dying due to fascist hunting people like me
international us policy is very similar between republicans and democrats. you guys are already the whole worlds problem. 🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
im sorry but trump will be your problem. until the empire decides to turn up the violence dial again that is, which is something both parties do sometimes.
Trump wants adulation, not conquest. Push come to shove you can get him out of the oval office by making him figurehead Emperor, as long as it comes with immunity he’ll accept.
On a scale of Mussolini to Hitler, he’s like 250% towards Mussolini.
Cute that you think it’ll only last for 4 years.
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4 years if laws and constitution stay the same and are followed… first term he had people alienated into him who were at least slightly appropriated for their positions, this time people who has nothing to do with their positions are being appointed simply for being loyal to him… Let’s see if any of them won’t let him do anything drastic within 4 YEARS
It’s more than 4 years. We just crawled out of Trump inflation and now are going right back in.
Dismantling and breaking is easy. They can do a lot of that in 4 yrs. Building takes decades.
There’s also a global effect. Would Putin have ever attacked Ukraine without a Trump term? How about Israel’s taking self defense into genocide territory?
America leads by example and the last example was an impulsive 3 yo with a giant military force and a dead diplomacy department in the executive branch. There’s permissiveness in that.
Nah, most people are going to live their lives and see absolutely no effect from anything done. No single administration has the ability to totally fuck up the country in the amount of time they have. That’s why you get the big swings back and forth between the two parties. Also, the news is very good at sensationalizing absolutely everything and making you think that, oh my god, it’s the end of the fucking world. What are we going to do? Run around like chickens screaming with our heads cut off and shit.
We know that Ukraine will be betrayed by the Trump government. A Russian victory will embolden Russia to further threaten Europe. This will also embolden China and other authoritarian states.
We also know a Trump government will stop climate action. Unfortunately, this will also signal to many other governments that they can do the same.
We also know that immense cruelties will be perpetrated such as the family separation policy of the 1st Trump presidency
But yes, if you are white, straight and middle class or rich, you’ll be able to think all is OK until such time as the authoritarian ascendancy led by China and Russia affects your own life, which might be a decade or more away.
How many people do you think would be affected by his deportation policies? I’ve heard a number of around 10 million, and that’s 3% of the population, which, while absolutely terrible, means that the other 97% isn’t going to really care.
Those 3% (going by your math):
Pick crops
Contribute $90 billion or more in tax for the county via sales tax.
Without those people, we have no food, and immediate inflation begins. You know, the thing everyone was bitching about that was literally caused by Trumps inaction on COVID.
This affects EVERYONE in the US.
Not to mention that the construction industry- particularly housing- just stops.
I did just get a roof put on my house. Small, local business. All the office people were white, the work crew was 100% Hispanic with one bilingual guy who front manned communication. Idk how many were work visa, but given the number of serious injuries I’ve seen from work visas falling off roofs while doing construction and such while at work, it’s not just one company.
And before you go down the path of “they’re taking ‘our’ jobs” remember that there is a shortage of skilled labor and trades right now.
Also, if a company can pay at or near minimum wage for rappelling up the side of house, would you accept that wage given the liability/injury threat?
Housing prices go up in reaction to losing cheap labor, I guarantee it.
I know the last time he was in office his immigration policies made it impossible for some people families to come over. I worked with a couple people struggling with that.
“Stimpy, sometimes your wealth of ignorance astounds me.” – Ren Höek
Food prices will go up, not down. I think everyone cares about food prices right now.
I’m not just talking about outdoor crop picking work. A friend was laid off from a food production company this week and Trumps not even sworn in yet. You can’t make this stuff up it’s so ridiculous. So, anticipate job losses for non immigrants as well.
2/3 of the factory line is Hispanic, and the majority of that is rotating work visa people. In this way, you can pay much lower wages.
Part of it was tariff threat, no one would place orders, everyone’s on hold on the production/supply/buyer chain, waiting for January, so the income of the business dropped to zero this week and is projected to stay there through January. Again, this is food production, not bread or flour, or anything basic like that, but it’s still food.
So, with no income and the threat of loss of cheap production labor, all the American citizens were laid off this week. Whether or not the business will eventually declare bankruptcy is undecided, but that talk is definitely on the table.
No single administration has the ability to totally fuck up the country in the amount of time they have.
Women in need of reproductive health services in red states would like a word.
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What is wrong with you?
If you think this is the only reproductive healthcare that people are dying for lack of in the US, you have vastly overestimated your expertise of the subject matter.
Oh, I know. This is but one facet. And I am definitely not an expert.
No single administration has the ability to totally fuck up the country in the amount of time they have.
Trump: “Hold my Diet Coke”.
Rotflmao, you didn’t read project 2025 🤣
Reagan.
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I’ve made a huge mistake breaking my personal rule to avoid all political content and I’ve regretted that immediately
Trump was already elected before and quickly became irrelevant after his 4 years.
And who is going to be the next US President?
And who is nominating a Russian asset to be DNI?
And who is nominating a child sex trafficker to be AG?
And who is likely to nominate an antivax, anti-science lunatic with brain worms to head the dept of Health and Human Services?
And who is planning to eliminate the department of education and NOAA?
Previous administrations have done damage through incompetence and/or malice, but the plan this time is on another level. They’re going in with the goal of breaking everything.
Dobbs and Chevron would disagree with your claim of “irrelevant”. You might not be aware, but that’s not the same thing…
Well, except for the people that are dead from his actions. For example, the ~461,000 people who died from COVID due to him making every wrong decision. For those people, it doesn’t go on. Because they’re dead.
You mean head of DOGE? Because we live in the timeline where a terminally online edgelord with the brain of a 14yo and the body of a 54yo makes meme government agencies.
Anyway, get your passport now. They’re good for ten years, enough to last at least through the tentative end of Trump’s circus.
The new online passport process is unbelievably good
They better not ruin it
oh yah i just renewed using the new process, got my passport back in less than 2 weeks.
Narrator: they ruined it
Ooh, thanks for the reminder! Mine expires next year. Best renew it now before they fuck that up, too.
Just tell all your friends to do a passport. It will be ready if shit hits the fan and they must leave the country.
The fact that this is an actual possibility is absolutely hilarious.
Mastodon
Bsky federates. I follow several people from my Mastodon profile.
Edit: I should add a caveat here. Federation doesn’t work as smoothly as Threads yet. You have to use a bridge service: https://fed.brid.gy/
For now. They’re still in their growth phase. If they ever become dominant and they need to make money, they’ll turn into a walled garden like every other. Everyone seems to forget that Twitter, Reddit and Facebook were also all about openness at the start
Absolutely, I don’t trust them at all. There’s a reason I’m on Mastodon and not either of the corporate platforms. It is nice to at least be able to follow people there though, and interact with them.
The key is how healthy atproto is outside of bluesky by then
The bridge is necessary because BlueSky and Mastodon cannot federate, and they never will be able to. ActivityPub and ATProto are different protocols.
At a fundamental level the intended meaning of “federate” is that disparate communities and softwares can “connect” seamlessly, a bridge by definition is a tool used to connect things that are not connected or seamless.
A federated landscape of interconnected trails is the structural antithesis to a landscape of bridges each laboriously muscled out of the headache inducing process of connecting two disparate systems with a third system specific to that bridge and that bridge only that must be endlessly revised and rebuilt to keep everything from collapsing in a heap.
A bridge, by definition, is a composite of parts that are existentially vital to the sucessful conveyance of what passes over them, it only takes one section failing to break the entire bridge and it only takes one troll to block everything. A bridge, again by its very definition, is the most brittle architecture as every bridge is ultimately only a temporarily open door that must be continously be maintained and eventually rebuilt at the expense of great effort.
“Never” is a strong word. API translation is a technical hurdle, but rarely an insurmountable one. If Blue Sky wanted to add an ActivityPub interface to their platform, they probably could.
This issue isn’t technical per se; it’s a matter of priorities. Blue Sky doesn’t want to federate with Mastodon/Threads, because they want users to switch to their platform.
Oh, well that’s good anyway. Is it true that they only have like one major server? Because I’ve heard that, but I haven’t looked much into them, so I’m not sure if it’s still the case or not. To my understanding, they are meant to be a federated network, but really only have the one server.
Yeah this is still true as far as I know. Honestly this is probably what allowed BS to gain a foothold; I like mastodon too but asking new users to pick a server was always going to be a source of adoption friction.
Of course it is, why would people throw millions at investing in a product and then decentralize it to the point that there weren’t any bottlenecks to apply pressure and extract a profit back out of it? It makes no sense and would be a ridiculous business strategy.
What is a good business strategy is associating your product with visions of decentralization while never truly intending to get there in practice.
Fair point. They will just grow their user base and then go all walled garden just like all the rest of the platforms. Protocols not platforms.
AFAIK that’s still the case, yes. I don’t have a Bluesky (or Threads) account so I can’t confirm.
Not only federates but can also be partially self-hosted and is also open-source - by the way, I don’t mean it’s perfect but a lot better to reach people from there than Twitter, but be wary of this), anyone knowledgeable of US politics will know the names mentioned and how shady it looks. I still think Mastodon isn’t ready for this kins of exodus. People who waited this long to leave either wants convenience or is waiting for some of the people they follow go elsewhere, or both. Mastodon has too many mobile apps options, BlueSky official app is so much closer to how Twitter looks like and people are used to and don’t need to choosee instance as it already comes pre-selected by default (although people can change). Then comes the issue of scability if there was an instance to be the “default” for these people who just want quick and convenient alternative, will it be able to handle this much people at once? I have no idea but I doubt it. Most of us who go find alternative in the Fediverse is aware privacy-focused alternatives usually more than often comes at the price of convenience, not really the mindset those people are in, hopefully some of them get into it by learning what decentralization is from BlueSky?
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Reddit was the same, you know. It didn’t matter
Has an aggressively unpleasant user base and nowhere near the blocking functionality that Bluesky has, which is essentially mandatory now for minorities on the internet. Not to mention an onboarding process that can confuse the tech literate, much less the average person.
This comment is not an invitation to talk about how actually it’s very simple and intuitive if you follow a 20 step process that relies on detailed knowledge of how federation works.
I think it’s easy to understand Mastodon, or any federated service, using a metaphor for a country or large place, where you can say “I want to move to X country” but then you have to actually pick a place IN that country to live, like a specific city or rural district. Once you decide on your instance, it’s really not that hard
As a progressive worldly usa person which instance should I choose?
Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?
Thx
Some recommendations for lefty mastodon instances, all are vaguely tech themed, but that comes with the territory. That being said none of these instances feel like weird places to not be a techy person, the conversations and interactions on these instances occupy as diverse a range as anywhere else.
Your lemmy instance lemmy.world is under the umbrella of https://fedihosting.foundation/ which oversees both lemmy.world and the mastodon instance mastodon.world
Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?
Please do whatever helps you express your identity/identities of your self best! You can always link between accounts in the public account bios.
I will offer you a suggestion though, if you already made the account [email protected] why not make [email protected], link between them and perhaps indicate if you use one or the other account more. You might as well, people will still recognize you immediately on your mastodon account but you might find it nice to be able to interact with the fediverse through the perspective of mastodon/microblogging.
Then make another account on a different mastodon instance that looks cool too, go wild, do whatever fits your fancy, the consequences to making an account and never using it are small enough that except in edge cases (you took up a slot on a server with a limited number of registrations or something) nobody is going to care!
p.s. Notice all of these mastodon instances have thoughtful moderation policies that place an emphasis on protecting and centering vulnerable voices over valuing the “right” of socio-economically advantaged groups to spread hate speech in public. All these instances have links to the mastodon accounts of the humans who moderate those instances so you can get an idea of the human element of the moderation. How cool is that? Each place has its own slight spin on being a healthy community and you can find the place that is perfect for you!
You dont need to explain email so federation does not seem to be the issue here IMO. The problem is money which FLOSS projects usually don’t have. The successful ones have perhaps enough so that the devs can put food on their table, but not much else. Most of the apps are after Dayjob hobby projects. It’s hard to compete with those who have teams of paid staff.
Don’t forget the disproportionate control individual mods have over the network due to the shared defederation lists. I was on a general purpose instance which found itself defederated from a large part of the network because a mastodon.art admin had disagreement with a mod on the one I was on.
Putting aside control and anecdotes, neither of which would be fair to comment on without more context and a lengthier discussion, this breaks the email metaphor a bit, doesn’t it?
The Fediverse is just like email, where we all talk to each other, except Outlook blocked Gmail because MS and Google had a fight during a meeting so you’re gonna have to migrate to Yahoo or learn to self-host.
That’s not necessarily a criticism, I just find it funny.
Those people will either learn one day or they will end up in the same vicious cycle over and over again for the rest of their lives until they do learn the lesson or die. The only reason the blue sky process is better is because, at least currently, they only have the one server. If it ever actually federates, like it’s supposed to, then that point is completely moot. Because then they won’t know how to sign up for blue sky either.
Oh no, not the same thing I’ve been doing since the mid 90s! I might die if I migrate sites again! Or something.
Making a social network only usable by around 5% of the population and then complaining when only 5% of the population shows up is a pretty indicative attitude of why so many FOSS projects struggle to get widespread adoption. You don’t get to choose how tech literate the population is. You either make it more useable or you accept a limited audience.
Clown take. “People should just get smart!”
95% of all American adults cannot use search functions in email.
Bummer that isn’t mastodon but any inconvenience to musk is appreciated
Actually not a bummer in my opinion, let people sort into different platforms based on their interests like we used to do with forums.
A fragmented internet is a better internet
But it’s not fragmented. Mastodon is still the odd “vegan” option while BlueSky is becoming the main Twitterlike platform. Mastodon is still coming out the other end mostly the same.
Yeah, and that’s a good thing specially for the reason I just mentioned
I somewhat agree, but it’s not going to happen. If Bluesky wins this battle, they’re just going to be the dominant platform. It’s not going to spread out. It’s just going to migrate. A federated alternative would at least be spread out by design, though connected still.
that’s not how the modern internet works and unfortunately i am forced to be on facebook because all 4 of my hobbies no longer exists outside of it.
if people moved to the fediverse instead of bluesky or such, then we’d actually be able to have a fragmented internet again - due to how the fediverse interconnects through federation.
which i think is the best selling point the fediverse have - no longer would users need to be on multiple services, they could just be on one, and still interact with the services across the fediverse. but unless there is a mass-migration of one single service to the fediverse, such as people choosing mastodon over bluesky, to be the dominant service - it’s just never going to happen.
A fragmented internet is a better internet
I’m going to quote that at every opportunity.
Actually feel kinda proud of myself for that one haha
So, a Splinternet?
I say this as someone who likes fediverse microblogging (Mastodon, MissKey, etc) it will never be Mastodon. Mastodon and its maintainers are staunchly against all the things that would make it a viable replacement to Twitter.
could you elaborate for people who don’t use it?
They don’t like algorithms. They want you to select which content you see.
That’s all I’ve got. Mastodon is a better, more open tech. And it’s pretty easy to get set up, relatively. It’s insane that companies haven’t jumped on it.
You don’t even have to quit Twitter. You can just post to more than one place and give people the option.
This is what happens when someone can’t put themselves into their user’s shoes and then wonder why a product isn’t doing as well as it is.
They proclaim the product is great, it’s everyone else that’s the problem
Threads (for better or worse) demonstrates that that’s not a fundamental obstacle for fediverse microblogging.
If someone wanted to launch a Mastodon fork with algorithm-driven content discovery, they could do. Just as with Lemmy/kbin/mbin, the beauty of the fediverse is that different servers can take quite different approaches to use experience design whilst still maintaining compatibility with the rest of the community.
Mastodon is, like, fine, but it has one gaping flaw that makes it utterly unusable for me.
Basically, the issue is you cannot be assured that any particular instance contains the entire conversation thread/replies, because they’re not necessarily sent to every server participating in the conversation.
Bluesky fixes that by the ‘firehose’ feeds federating out to the PDSes and providing complete reply chains, which just flat out makes it a better experience since you can actually see what everyone is saying, not just what people on servers you might be following already are saying.
It’s a giant stupid flaw in Mastodon (since other AP based platforms such as, for example, Lemmy don’t have it) and really should be addressed since it makes the platform darn near useless since why am I following people to only get half of what might be a useful thread?
that sounds crazy. that makes the idea of federation pointless imo… thank you for the response
Yeah, it makes federation, especially if you run your own server and don’t have a large user base, largely broken.
You’ll end up getting a shockingly small amount of replies to people you follow’s posts, which (for me) is the whole reason I’m here.
It almost forces you onto a larger server if you want a reasonable experience (or you have to start ingesting huge amounts of data via relays), but I mean, at that point why not just use bluesky instead?
Why people cannot see that the core problem of twitter is not that it got bought by the asshole billionaire. It’s that the asshole billionaire was able to buy it.
Surely that could never happen again though! /s
Wasn’t he forced to do so after trying to back out, or am I either imagining that or thinking of someone else?
If I recall correctly he could have backed out but he would have had to pay I think 1billion as a penalty and worse admit things didnt go his way
300 Billion dollar portfolio, 34 Billion dollar loss (~22 Billion after he writes it off in “taxes”) and he has his own right-wing media company chocked full of nutters.
I don’t think he cares much about the individual Billions much these days. Half his Tesla stock is securing his debt.
It’s a little more complex than that. He, like, was buying shares, blew past the 5% ownership disclosure point, failed to disclose, was forced to disclose his stake. He was then offered a seat on the board, didn’t like the lack of control, and made a meme offer on the remaining stake to take the company private, tried to pull out, and was forced to buy the company he didn’t want to buy by the board of directors who didn’t want him to buy it.
He’s the recent Adam Conover interview with the details: https://youtu.be/sxG2Y3E0uEY?si=r0VMY7s3iZ9uaP39
He also bought 9% of it and didn’t disclose it, IIRC that had something to do with it as well.
That isn’t relevant to the comment though.
Okay.
It should be Mastodon. This is the same shit with a different name
I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.
There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.
Yeah, that’s what I heard from my microblogging colleagues too. They tried Mastodon during the first wave of Twitter exodus, found it too frustrating/difficult, tried Bluesky and stuck with it ever since.
Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.
Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).
Very accurate
ActivityPub is the protocol though. Mastodon is an implementation of the protocol.
That’s an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I’m from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy… this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.
Do you think the same about lemmy?
I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…
I’m reasonably tech savvy and even I’d struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.
There’s a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can’t. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that’s hosted on .sh.itjust.works.
There’s also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.
We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem.
People complain that the mainstream sites are relatively closed ecosystems, but they also complain when those sites try to be more open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People don’t like the monolith when it’s over there and they don’t like it when it comes over here, either
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read about embrace/extend/extinguish to see why
a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.
They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.
It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.
It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance.
Why? Why wouldn’t they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances
You don’t need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That’s what the users are coming for.
just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.
Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.
You need the plurality of site content
I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.
Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can’t run your own server yet. We’ll see if they keep their promise.
Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you’re not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.
They took crypto bros VC money.
Do we really think they’ll allow mass federation without getting returns on their investment?
It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.
Like seriously… that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.
I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.
Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money…to get more money.
They’ve followed through on their promises so far, and you can actually self-host pretty much the whole stack today:
https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
I’d perfer for mastodon to take off personally, but really at this point both are good options and worlds better than twitter.
What’s the difference, really? Aren’t they both decentralized microblogging social networks?
One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.
Bluesky is mit licensed, if it goes bad what’s to stop a fork? Once there’s interop between the protocols will it matter at all?
There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A…
Can you give a specific example of how bluesky could be?
yes, see this thread
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474
“#BlueSky isn’t decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that’s all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find “networking through Relays instead of server-to-server” as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else.”
You can run your own relay, though:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)
I do prefer Activitypub overall, and it’s certainly more mature, but any efforts towards decentralization should be encouraged/celebrated.
Not 100% sure but I don’t think anything would stop either a fork or a new app that uses the same protocol.
I really don’t see how it could matter tbh
I think lemmy should get atproto support too.
BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Let’s replace one proprietary service with another. It looks so good with its API wide open, like it’s never getting enshittified.
It’s obvious to me that we need to have laws to enforce portability of data and interoperability for large platforms.
I’m sure the Republican govt will get right on that
Yeah…the new Dumbass Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will be right on that. Top priority…I’m sure…
I mean, this is one of the central pitches behind Web3.0/Crypto. Everything has a digital tag and its all going to be portable between platforms.
Did it come to fruition? No, of course not. Its all a pile of scams. But then so was Web2.0 and Web1.0 during their heydays.
Web 1 and 2 were a pile of scams? Wthdym
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
This goes all the way back to '98, when the original slew of start-ups gobbled up investments only to flop a few years later. Web2.0 had its own bubble burst starting in 2008, taking down a host of the early social media ecosystems (MySpace, Yahoo, and Geocities, most famously). Huge upfront investments with the promise of explosive ROI that took far longer to materialize (or simply never did).
A great deal of the valuation in these firms was built on lies and bullshit - misreported user activity, overly optimistic monetization estimates, and outright accounting fraud.
2020 gave us what looked like was going to be a third Crypto bust wave (FTX being the big industry leader leading the charge). But the pivot to AI appears to have bailed a lot of the bigger investors out. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Oh, I think I understand your point, but we do have different definitions of what a scam is.
For me, if the guys getting fucked are capitalists or huge investing firms that were trying to leverage their money to make more money just from speculation and not being actually involved, that’s not a scam, that justice. Economic bubbles happen because big money guys are trying to gamble the system to start with, so karma.
In the other hand, crypto scams are more close to a conman selling snake oil to the uneducated masses, that for me is a full fledged scam.
Bluesky is not proprietary, it’s mit licensed and open source
Then please point me to an instance with less shitty privacy policy than this
Private messages are not end to end enceypted and can be read by mods, hahahaha, nice replacement for twitter lmao
Countdown until it turns out that everybody associated with any competition to Musk’s companies just so happens to be a criminal Trump siccs his DOJ after: 5… 4…
I wouldn’t discount the possibility that bsky is backed by the same dark money pool that bought twitter. putin found that it’s way too easy to buy elections worldwide just using social media. They’ll never give it up.
X will likely merge with TruthSocial as the defacto Conservative/Right-wing social media site (named something dumb like “XTruthXSocialX”), while BlueSky will become the defacto Liberal social media site.
I suspect it will only because every single furry on YouTube seems to be trying to get the entire fandom to move from Twitter to BlueSky. You know we run the internet.
You know it!!
You people are the sewer mutants of the internet
Our group includes the Teenage Mutant Turtles, so you’re not entirely wrong.
Cowabunga, dude!
Hey don’t knock on the guys that keep the lights on.
These kind of articles always remind me whenever a new MMORPG launched, and then people claimed it would be the World of Warcraft killer.
On the other hand, the track record of old social networks is not great.
And it’s reasonable to posit Twitter is deep into the enshitifiication cycle.
Depends what “side” you’re on and what content you choose to engage with I guess.
Because features wise it’s better than ever I’d say, I’m not even sure what stuff they added or removed that would’ve made the platform worse.
I’d posit the algorithm has turned it into a monster.
Attention should be dictated more by chronological order and what others retweet, not what some black box thinks will keep you glued to the screen, and it felt like more of the former in the old days. This is a subtle, but also very significant change.
Is WoW still that popular though?..
Most definitely.
It’s seen better days and current expansion is kinda meh, but it’s still leading the amount of active players by a lot over all other MMO games.
It’s really hard to know for sure, because Blizzard don’t release statistics, but according to ActivePlayer.io, Final Fantasy XIV has more active players than World of Warcraft.
But there are other websites which put World of Warcraft in the lead. It’s also worth mentioning that World of Warcraft has much higher twitch statistics than FFXIV.
Hm last I checked it said WoW had a lot more, I think mostly due to the new expansion at the time. But I think different sources are stating different things, they’re pretty unclear where they get the numbers from anyway, there’s little consistency with other statistics online.
It’s hard to get exact numbers from WoW because they’re not publicly available. You might be right that WoW is still the biggest, I found some other numbers that disagree. WoW’s twitch numbers seem to be way higher.
I’ll edit my comment
Yeah I was looking at Twitch numbers too, but honestly it’d still be a wild guess why it’s that much higher. Could also be that they do something with Twitch drops, it essentially doesn’t say much about player count itself.
I know previously it was because of world-first races, but I’m not sure if that’s still the case.
There’s probably quite a bit of content still that is playing “World of Warcraft” but it’s more like a “just chatting” kind of stream, if you know what I mean - WoW is a safe, comfy game to have on in the background while talking about other stuff.
Lol if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard about the next CoD killer
In truth, every subsequent mimic platform is smaller and more diluted.
I mean, plenty of other games have had way more concurrent players.
Maybe, but they’re not MMO games.
99% of my Feed on Bluesky was just people saying they’ve left Twitter for Bluesky. No amount of suggest less of this helped.
happens on every “new” social media platform that is similar to another social media platform. Was all over Lemmy when people were “boycotting” reddit…course most went right back to reddit when the boycotting was over.
Yeah thats how it was here after the reddit fiasco.
Tbf, were you on lemmy last summer?
Haha there is a gigantic wave of people switching over from twitter right now, that’s just what is on people’s minds. The conversation will move on soon enough.
Just like when Threads launched and or when Reddit made the API changes. You get a flood of new users who want to talk about being new users.
Lemmy is just that but Linux and reddit users
Good. Fuck Elon Musk and Twitter.
What’s good exchanging one bad service for another bad service? Elon can just buy it.
Ha ha ha, yeah, sure. Bluesky won’t defeat xitter, at best it’ll just be the “next thing” once xitter finally finishes getting rid of most of its users, which I guess will take more than 4 years from now.
The great thing about BlueSky is how under-the-radar its flown for the last few years. Virtually no advertising. No legions of bot accounts spamming with invites and generic attention baiting posts. No |>u33y N |3io blowing up my mentions. No enshittification, because its just a primitive clone of the original Bird Site.
The more popular it gets, the less likely that’ll last. BlueSky won’t defeat Twitter until it becomes Twitter.
It will almost certainly become Twitter as it was created by the Twitter founder. The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over. Which is a massive difference.
The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over.
Dorsey is just as emotionally stunted and socially reactionary as Musk. He simply isn’t as wealthy.
BlueSky has thrived not because Dorsey crafted it into a purer vision, but because he’s neglected it and allowed the user base to have their way.
I never liked Twitter to begin with so I’m not one to defend him. My preferred one is Mastodon, but generally I don’t like the format to begin with. At any rate, I’ll still take pre-musk Twitter over Xitter any day.
Things were better before they got worse, sure.
But the problem in these systems is the trade off between centralization (consolidated control and monolithic content) and federation (poor navigation/petty administrative feuds/less quality content). Switching from Twitter to BlueSky relieves you from the current admin’s fuckups, but you’re still stuck in a flawed system.
I fully agree. When I feel like using a Twitter like platform (which is exceedingly rare), I use Mastodon
Dorsey is no longer associated to bluesky. He was removed from their board.
It’s worse than that.
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.
https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476797192400901
Dorsey’s already out, the people running the project are from the TESCREAL gang.
My issue with BS is it took VC money from crypto bros.
What do we think will happen when they come looking for their returns on investment?
I don’t understand how those two things are distinct.
I guess they don’t consider it bluesky defeating twitter if twitter is commiting suicide. Sounds like pedantry to me.
He on that “reddit didn’t kill Digg, Digg killed Digg” mindset.
For reference: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/
The key factor in Digg’s demise was a flawed design that was too easily abused by users. Digg had no controls over user verification, so individuals could game the system by creating multiple accounts to artificially inflate the number of votes for their own content. Because Digg displayed content in order of popularity, most visitors saw and voted only on content that was already popular. This system created a vicious cycle in which a small number of dedicated users could push their own content to the front page and thereby gain more followers, allowing them to more easily repeat the process. As Digg grew, so too did its problems related to power-hungry users cheating and gaining undue influence over content.
Sounds like the same problem that every centralized social media ecosystem suffers from. The big difference between Digg and Reddit was that Reddit successfully monetized the “push me to the front of the queue” algorithm rather than engineering around it.
Digg did commit suicide. I was there for it.
The Digg bar is why I stopped using Digg
It’ll only defeat X if corporations and specifically media and sports entities start using it.
Sigh, that was an eye-opening depresing read… thanks for sharing!
What is TPOT
Somehow that avoids everything that actually makes TPOT TPOT to me (except the links to Rationalism and EA, but then you have to be aware of those).
Like the (scientific) racism.
The author explains in the thread and has links to further info.
