I like Jason but he completely missed the boat on this one.
The active migration away from social media networks that are owned, controlled by, and distorted by the richest men and most powerful companies in the world to a decentralized platform that is not owned and controlled by billionaires is one of the more hopeful things to happen in what has largely been a bleak year for the human internet as AI slop infects everything and billionaires put their thumbs on the scale of what we see on social media.
He says this and yet jumps to Bluesky, a platform created by Jack Dorsey and now owned and managed by a crypto bro? You don’t need powers of prophecy to see where Bluesky is headed.
Honestly I don’t know what’s up with the mass delusion about Bluesky being oligarch-free. It’s understandable that most don’t know or haven’t looked into it, but then some folks that should know better are displaying the same ignorance.
People going over don’t care who owns it, they just want to use a platform that regularly censors thoughts they disagree with. That’s it.
They want a platform where THEY can censor. No matter how much I block Leon M. on twitter, I keep seeing his posts
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Your rant is very much appreciated.
Most people came to Lemmy becaise they felt personally agreived by the Reddit API issue. They don’t give a shit about what’s good for the Internet, or society.
They’re here out of protest, and would happily give their all to the next Billionaire that makes them feel smarter than the average bear.
Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it’s headed.
There are already smaller appviews that use the existing hosting/authentication infra, but bypassing the bsky appview aggregation. Nothing with any real scale but for example there is a barebones reddit/hackernews equivalent https://frontpage.fyi/
That’s interesting. This post had suggested it isn’t yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.
That post refers to hosting an appview that does all the same things as the official bsky (the service) one, which involves a ton of storage and bandwidth and processing (for everyone’s recommendations, notifications, and all the other moving parts), and is closed source to boot.
Frontpage.fyi is a lot cheaper simply because its used by like 50 people tops.
At least maybe some more regular people will learn about decentralization (and alternative ways there) from this mass adoption?
Lemmy does not understand that people are leaving X cuz of Nazis, not cuz it’s a centralized corpo platform.
Pretty sure a significant portion of nazis are also moving to bluesky
But on Bluesky you don’t get them shoved in your face and there is culture of just blocking Nazis and moving on.
Ignoring the Nazis in the room, rather than barring them from entey, is enabling Nazis
They aren’t being ignored. Bluesky has real moderation, they are being banned.
If no one gives the Nazi an audience they will go away eventually.
To a platform that has been on the record about not kicking ouy Nazis, though.
There were Nazis on X for years before this. They’re leaving because Trump won.
The CEO of Bluesky just posted they hit 17M users today after hitting 16M in the last 24 hours.
The juice is juicin’.
Threads, Blue Sky and Mastodon are at 292.8m mau vs Twitter’s 304m
Sure, but what percentage of users are bots on twitter at this point?
80%, if I’m feeling optmistic!
We are witnessing the rise of a new platform (in terms of relevance) in real time, this will probably be one of the key points in our digital decade, and it’s happening right now! Have you thought about it?
People are leaving Muskrats fascist supporting platform. So what if they aren’t going to Mastedon, they’re leaving Twitter. Isn’t that enough for us?
I don’t need Mastedon to win. I just want Twitter to lose. Once Twitter has been (hopefully) de-platformed we can talk about Mastedon and the Fediverse and the idea of a non-corpo platform.
But it terms of main stream casual appeal, Mastedon still doesn’t have it yet, and that’s okay.
Mastedon needs to get more casual with the introduction to the Fediverse because for everyday non-tech people, it can be a little confusing.
People see Bluesky as the Twitter replacement because of its simplicity.
Once Twitter has been (hopefully) de-platformed we can talk about Mastedon and the Fediverse and the idea of a non-corpo platform.
BlueSky is as prone to enshittification as Twitter. If you’re waiting for BlueSky to take off, you’re just setting yourself up for the next rug pull.
I mean, go to BS and enjoy it while it lasts. But don’t think this is the future.
They’re leaving Musk, but they’re not leaving his financial backers, and they’re entering into the same kind of “possibly sold to a fascist despot at a moment’s notice” situation they just left.
It’s short sighted, perfirmative, and doesn’t actually make the Internet better at all. It just tells us that people prefer a closed Internet owned by billionaires.
Maybe these people need to feel the cycle first hand a few more times and that’s okay. ActivityPub will be even stronger when it comes around again.
Well said. Maybe there’s more to do in the hardware, software and general computing training such that the layman could safely deploy their own Website like we used to be able to do. Then everyone could have their own servers at home like some of us do. True decentralized communication.
Lemmy would be great for dare I say it…church congregations for example. Schools, mechanic forums, unofficial student associations like alpha Kapa whatever. ETC. it’s a momentous opportunity.
Yes, it’s better to move forward a little than to go backwards. When you move forward you can keep moving forward more later. If you move backwards you have to fight for what you lost before you can get more back.
Bluesky is not great, but it’s at least (for now) a better platform than X and the AT protocol is actually very well written. (For instance having a moderation service separated from the service that provides the posts I think is a hands-down better way to handle it than most ActivityPub servers having their admins handle all incoming and outgoing moderation)
Bluesky federation is just now getting started so it’ll be interesting to see if it goes anywhere/where it goes.
That decentralized and self-hostable platforms like Lemmy are fringe does not give me hope for the future of social networks on the Internet.
They don’t have to have everyone on them to be good. In some ways it’s preferable not to. Reddit was far better before the Digg migration, and we might already be living in the golden years of Lemmy and not even realize it.
I don’t know, Reddit also has more niche communities that just don’t have enough people in platforms like Lemmy.
It’s true, that’s the advantage of a larger user base. But when I compare my homepage of Reddit after 15 years of refinement to that of my lemmy homepage after 1 year, my lemmy one is way better. Most of those niche communities devolve into memes and nonsense like the same questions being asked over and over and over again after a while. Great for searching, but for actually getting content on a regular basis from, mostly a waste of time.
This is true, it’s like other platforms that value content creation rather than value, so people keep repeating the same thing. I haven’t worked as a moderator ever so I don’t know what’s possible or impossible, but I think many of these problems are a result of poor moderation though.
Sometimes moderation needs to be a bit unpopular to have the community work in some way.
Anything which drives nails into the xitter coffin is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Bluesky may not tick many people’s boxes here on lemmy, but this migration shows that lots of people wanted to leave xitter but didn’t see an option. Threads clearly didn’t attract them, likely due to the owner. I hope it nothing else, Bluesky is a less toxic place and xitter and musk become less relevant. In the long run Bluesky may end up being another head of the hydra , but for now, it’s not, and it may get people used to the idea of federation.
Whhhhhhy?
This is the same thing. This is the exact same type of platform that will eventually go the same way. This is shooting yourself in the foot once, then aiming the shotgun at the other foot and pulling the trigger thinking that the bullet was a fluke the first time.
To be fair Musk buying twitter and turning it into a Nazi propaganda site was kind of flukey.
Was it though?
A billionaire buys or funds a privately owned platform and does with it as he pleases, despite the obviously humanitarian route being something different. Have we really never seen that before?
Sure the billionaire buying stuff thing happens, but a Nazi billionaire?
Because most people switching don’t know (or care) about the fediverse and decentralization. They are regular internet users who just want to get away from the cesspool that is twitter, so they go where other people are going.
Anybody recommend a good mastodon instance?
my personal solo instance is great but the admin is an asshole.
Pick any instance that suits your interests: https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers There is also this picker.
This is really cool, it helped me find an instance that specializes in shitposting, much appreciated!
What’s the name of it?
Jorts.horse
Jeez, man! Just yesterday I’ve read some text about some bad things this instance has done! I don’t know if the situation is better now, though. It was a webpage from 2023.
Damn it
I’m really enjoying Bluesky strangely enough, not normally my thing.
Shame that it’s another Capital-owned platform taking the spotlight. I’m not surprised unfortunately. We’ll be in the same place we are now in 10 years.
I’m preaching to the choir, but mastodon is the better platform if you want more authentic community and conversation.
Chances are that any new large commercial platform will enshittify, sooner or later prompting another exodus, and each exodus will at least have some people choosing a community platform.
I hope some of them come to the Fediverse. It’s nice that only the curious ones will come.
I think the smartest ones will. Really I don’t mind an intelligent community like this one.
quite the opposite for me. bluesky is a centralized platform owned by capital exactly like twitter, thus prone to the same issues.
migrating to bluesky instead of mastodon will just delay the problem.
Bluesky actually has content though. Unless all you want is linux and news.
chicken and egg kinda problem. mastodon would have benefitted from the influx of users.
Its open source isn’t it? It still has the same problems but on a privacy level, having it be open source is much better.
reddit was open source as well.
was
The main thing I would like to know is why so many people nowadays want a microblog platform, whether it is X or Bluesky or Mastodon, and why community-based platforms like Lemmy are getting relatively little attention in comparison.
Is it just that these people weren’t seriously online before the rise of microblogs? They didn’t start out with phpBB-style forums, so don’t miss their existence and think that individuals having followers is the normal state of the Internet? I’m genuinely not super sure what’s going on.
People have different tastes, which can vary.
Microblogging is something more casual, and has more focus on the people sharing content. Community foruns are revolved around the content shared, so you don’t really get to know people, so it has a difference on what they actually want.
I found that on old forums I did get to know the people regularly posting on them quite well over time (and they got to know me). On reddit and lemmy not so much, or do you have any idea about anything I’ve posted before (because I don’t know anything about you).
Community-based platforms aren’t receiving as much attention because while Reddit is getting worse and worse, it has not reached the level of enshittification Twitter is at. Most people are still going to keep using it. Twitter on the other hand is reaching the point where huge amount of people are leaving, making alternative microblog platforms very relevant.
If it was owned by the community that moderated it, then yes. But no it’s owned by another rich asshole.
