Comment by dang
Comment by dang 5 months ago
[stub for offtopicness]
Comment by dang 5 months ago
[stub for offtopicness]
Not everything good becomes bad. That premise is wrong.
Bluesky accepted VC money. For a social platform that means its death certificate has already been signed.
What you're ignoring with that framing is that we can use social media that operates outside the VC startup pipeline and doesn't have enshittification baked in from the start.
The fact that you have to be on “the” relay to meaningfully participate on the network.
If you instead claim that users can always choose to use other 3P relays, then you immediately lose all the nice things that Bluesky is able to do well today (search, discoverability, a “discover” algorithm). Indeed, you fall back to the same old problems that every other decentralized social network has.
Bluesky is just a shittier version of Nostr, except that the people over at Nostr don’t pretend.
People seem to lark on and on about how it has better "default moderation" than Mastodon.
It's not that it is "better" but that the choice is individual, not up to the mastodon server. In Mastodon, you trade Elon for some other group of individuals, so what happens if they make decision on moderation or content you do not agree with?
ATProto is designed around accounts that are independent of data host, application, and moderation, all in the name of giving users individual control over these things. It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server, but without the overhead
You have the opportunity to demonstrate this. I am banned from Bluesky. (They didn't tell me why - just a generic "you violated community guidelines")
Tell me, concretely, how people can choose to continue following me, even though I am banned.
Profile: immibis.bsky.social
Are you suggesting the "big few" can't largely censor a given account?
I don't see how ATProto is doing noticeably better than the scenario where a large ActivityPub instance blocks your external account.
>It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server
No, it's like every Mastodon user used the same server, and all the coordination is done by one server that nobody can replicate.
Every user in ATProto gets their own database that amounts to a tar file (technically sqlite with car export format)
This is nothing like having a single server for every user. Perhaps you are confusing Bluesky (one app) with ATProtocol the shared network? There are already independent servers and apps operating separate from Bluesky
Twitter was always... not great (there's a reason it was affectionately known as the Hellsite), but it had 16 years of being _tolerable_ for most people (the real exodus only really started with Musk's changes, though there had been a couple of smaller ones previously, mostly over Twitter messing with the API).
Frankly, if I get 16 years out of Bluesky before having to move onto the next one, I can live with that. Social networks _die_; it has always been so. USENET, livejournal, Tumblr, twitter... nothing lasts forever.
Bluesky's 'Discover' feed (the default algo feed that you get when you create your account) is based on _likes_, not follows, so if you never like anything you'll get random nonsense.
You can try using other algo feeds from here: https://bsky.app/feeds and remove the discover feed, or of course you could just use the chronological one.
This is such a lazy, uninformed take that people just love to repeat. 1) the left on Bluesky is full of in-fighting because neolib left are convinced that Harris lost because of racism/sexism and the progressive left spend a lot of their time trying to educate (and dunk on) them for their braindead takes, and 2) any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your sentiments. As long as Bluesky isn't actively censoring and suspending journalists and other public figures, there is no equivalence to Truthsocial or X and only a clown/shill/psyop would suggest as much.
It's really not that hard to find enriching content from all walks of life on Bluesky -- if somebody can't find it, they just suck at the internet.
To be clear, I do have grievances with Bluesky, and I do not have high hopes for its future -- but that's because I personally believe that social media in general is both fatally flawed from the start and detrimental to society, and will never not devolve into ad-riddled or otherwise enshittified services. I am not a Bluesky shill, I'm just here to call out the silly false equivalence with Truthsocial, etc.
> the left on Bluesky is full of in-fighting
yes, the right is full of infighting too as shown by the recent H1B debate, that doesn't contradict my point.
> any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your sentiments
bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing. There is literally no one else to follow, at least for now. X still has non-political content, I mainly follow AI, technology and cryptocurrency, and I couldn't find similar content on bluesky.
> bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing. There is literally no one else to follow, at least for now. X still has non-political content, I mainly follow AI, technology and cryptocurrency, and I couldn't find similar content on bluesky.
Not op, but chiming in. There's a lot of content regarding aquatics and home automation (separate topics). I avoid the politics stuff entirely, and much of the crypto stuff on X tends to be promoting scams and rug-pulls.
> bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing.
A big contributor to this feeling is their default "Discover" feed being very mediocre. "Less of this" and "more of this" do not seem to impact what it gives you, neither do what you like, respond to, follow, or who you block. Some days it's entirely cat pictures, other days it's entirely politics (my suggested accounts to follow are 100% of the time in this category). Finding the good content is very difficult, and the handful of accounts I follow are largely accounts I had to manually search for or was given a direct link to somewhere else, which would never have come up naturally. And to try to fix it, I took the advice to use the block feature, er, liberally, and I think it made the problem worse.
I even wouldn't mind the politics being in the feed if it didn't show me the exact same things repeated again and again. I get that determining if two posts are too similar is difficult, but it could at least not show me the same image again and again and again...
I've found https://bsky.app/profile/skyfeed.xyz/feed/discover to be a slightly better version of the Discover feed, but it's a lot less dynamic.
Can I move my followers/following graph as well? Moving the actual content is barely a consolation prize if you lose your entire audience in the process.
I don’t understand the infatuation with blue sky. The minute they need money it’ll go the way of the Reddit and twitter.