The brutal truth of social networks: people don’t stay for protocols, decentralization, or good intentions. They stay because everyone else is there. Building better infrastructure is impressive. Building a habit people refuse to leave is harder.
Everyone I know who’s tried it tells me that big corporate brands and their slop / astroturfed content is why Bluesky is less enjoyable. Haven’t myself, as I’m perfectly content on Mastodon and Lemmy, so I understand that’s anecdotal.
bsky is just another VC-funded corpo platform. The initial wave of Libs who moved over gave it some gas, but ultimately, it’s just another toxic, bland platform like all the others.
Mastodon is the same, its a cesspit. Its the microblogging format that attracts the worst people and fosters the worst interactions.
I tend to agree. I simply don’t like the short form content. I never did. When twitter launched, I didn’t understand it, and I still don’t. It doesn’t facilitate conversation whatsoever. It’s just shitposting and one-liners and toxicity. We really lost something special when we moved from forums to shorter and shorter content platforms.
I have found Bluesky to be less toxic than Twitter, but that’s not exactly a huge improvement.
I remember that on Twitter, if somebody decided to reply to you and to be a jerk, not only would you get a notification of that reply, you would get a notification if people liked that reply. Bluesky by default allows you to only view the feeds of people you follow or are mutuals with. These are all good things.
But since there is VC funding, and because they are looking for ways to expand, at any moment that rug can basically be pulled out from under people’s feet. It’s technically decentralized, but in practice, it’s probably 90%+ controlled by one company.
I use Bluesky all the time, and I barely ever see corporate brand stuff.
My actual gripe about Bluesky is that somehow they haven’t dropped an iPad app after four years. Or at the very least fixed issues with their iPhone app while using an iPad.
I don’t really use Bluesky I just bridged my Mastodon Account to bluesky and all I can say: There are more users bridging their Mastodon to Bluesky then Bluesky Users bridging to Mastodon.
Europe COULD push the Fediverse and show the Middlefinger to US Datahording Social Networks like Facebook, X/Twitter and Reddit but Some European Countries are not even close to the Digital Age.
There’s something about Bluesky I just don’t quite like. I have an account, sometimes (rarely) I use it. But for example today I wanted to share a short video with a friend. I send him the link - “only logged in users can see this post (OP himself set this option)” ok, weird but let me download the vid and send him - “nope can’t do that”
They literally added some frontend bullshit to not allow you to download a freaking video. When you Inspect it with developer tools it shows a button… If you try saving it with right clicking it will save the thumbnail instead… I know there are probably easy-ish workarounds but this sort of instagram closedness pisses me off.
Meanwhile in Mastodon I right click and save video as…
I also don’t like the underlying complexity of how decentralization is supposed to work there. That being said, if the choice is between twitter, threads or bluesky, please use bluesky.
I prefer Mastodon, though.
because bluesky wants to be a walled garden. they still operate under the same metrics as every other social media platform because their value comes from keeping you on the platform as much and as long as possible and tracking everything you do on it. they can’t do that if you aren’t logged in and views from external users aren’t as valuable as logged in users.
mastodon doesn’t care about any of that. it works off the principles of the open internet.
Here’s the thing.
looks around
Hmmmm, yeah. That’s what I thought. Everyone here is the wrong audience to really comment on this.
The reason peoples opinion here doesn’t matter much is because like it or not, Lemmy is a hive mindset.
Don’t like linux? Booooooo
Don’t care about open source? Boooooo
Don’t engage in antisocial behavior? Boooooo
And thats the audience here. It’s impossible for you to comment on the mental state of the general broad population when this site seemingly collects an audience that goes out of their way to stay away from the broad general population. How could you possibly relate to someone like my brother in law, who uses Windows 11, without issue? I asked him how he can stsnd all the AI, and the spying. I was expecting an actual answer, and maybe some insight as to how to not make Windows 11 the dumpster fire that it is. Instead, he defends Windows 11 with blind faith ignorance. Insisting that there is no spying in Windows 11, and the AI is actually a good thing.
And I watched as an entire room nodded along in understanding. All agreeing with these points. I realized in that moment that there is zero conversation to be had with these people. I know for fact that Windows 11 spies on you. I know for fact that there is AI in Windows 11. It’s easy to see that if left at its current rate, that AI and data centers that support AI will inevitably lead to mass water shortages.
And I’m confident that these words would land harder here on Lemmy, where I think 99% of you understand the gravity and real nature of what I’m saying.
The problem is, 99% of Lemmy’s typical userbase accounts for 0.01% of the general population. This website is a bubble. Which is a shame, because I fully believe the model for Lemmys infrastructure is the cure for the problems that the general population complain about.
But it’ll never be tested at scale. Most people do not give a fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck about privacy, or open source, or decentralization. Facebook knows my phone number, and has photos of me. Against my consent. And my mom who’s in her 80s, who uses facebook to keep in touch with her sewing community, sees nothing wrong here.
Thats why the people here, who only support mastodon, will never understand why that stratagy won’t work for the masses. And honestly, even if it did, then it wouldn’t work for you.
Because twitter has something like 375 million users. When taylor swift wants to promote something, she does it on twitter. Because it’s where the people are. It’s also a right wing agenda platform, owned by a literal seig hailing nazi, but yet its still the default service regardless if you’re left or right. It’s just where the people are.
Here is what you have done. You saw an ocean. You took note of all the problems fish have in the ocean. You then designed a new concept where fish can swim in a tiny little manufactured pond. But if it gets too small, it can be scaled bigger. You removed the threats of being eaten. You’ve removed the fishing boats. You managed the algae. You planted seaweed so they have food. You installed everything a fish needs to have a happier healthier life from your perspective.
Except there’s no water in this pond. The fediverse concentrates so hard on the advanced features that would make for a great experience…and then forgets the basics that are needed to support life here. Social media only survives when it has an audience, just as fish only survive when they have water.
All the advanced stuff that goes unused in the fediverse means nothing without an audience. Basically if bluesky dies, the users go back to twitter.
You complain that mastodon is better. But bluesky only got popular because the general population didn’t want twitter with nazis. They wanted old twitter. Bluesky is old twitter without the nazis. Thats all they wanted. But it’s only got a tiny fraction of the audience twitter has. So again, taylor swift says her things on twitter. Not bluesky. Not enough people on bluesky to be considered the default. Just like the fediverse can’t keep fish surviving without water, the same is true on bluesky.
The order it goes is that celebrities need to say things to hold an audience. Before the internet, that platform was tv/radio. There were also a lot less celebrities. Because tv/radio just didn’t have a need to create more celebrities. But now, a celebrity can either get their message across to 375 million, or 14 million.
Celebrities go where there is an infrastructure that can handle their fame, and the audience goes where the celebrities go. Below that are us. We’re not the 14 million. Lemmy has 60k and shrinking. But for us the order goes “infrastructure THEN audience”. Which is never going to pull in a huge audience. It can support a large audience. Argueably better. But it’ll never be tested.
You make some good points, but you’re making the same mistake you’re accusing your audience of making: you don’t understand why people are on the platform they are on.
I can’t speak for everyone, so I’ll just speak for myself: I’m not on Lemmy and Mastodon because I want them to become the next Facebook–even if it were some kind of libre utopia free of commercial interests.
I’m here because these weirdos are my weirdos and they like the same weird things I like. It’s a small enough sandbox that I can still recognize people here and there. These people have similar interests to me, and they post long, insightful rants about stuff that my family and other friends would not care about. The network effect is working in my favor.
The fediverse community feels more like home to me than the big social platforms. This feels more like it’s my community. If Lemmy gets as big as Reddit, I’ll probably go somewhere else.
I don’t use Linux because I want it to dominate the world. I don’t care if others use Linux or not. I use Linux because my computer finally feels like it’s mine again. I do what I want with it and I don’t have to worry about AI running or spying happening on it without my knowledge. As a bonus, it runs smoother.
The tradeoff is there are a few rough edges, and I have to learn some new things. But I enjoy learning. Lots of people don’t enjoy having to learn new things to just veg out with IG or YouTube. I get that. So, then don’t. Veg out with Windows, if that’s your thing. We can all do our own thing at the same time.
Choice is a good thing. Small communites are good. Decentralized is good because then big bullies can’t come in and take your community away. Small size and fragmentation are features, not bugs.
If Taylor Swift wants to set up her own Mastodon instance, she can. If she wants to cross-post between that and X, she can. I won’t be seeking out her content and it will be trivial for me to stay in my bubble without Taylor algorithmically popping up inside of it like she is on IG, FB, and X.
Every last god damn word of this. Well said.
Choice is a good thing. Small communites are good. Decentralized is good because then big bullies can’t come in and take your community away. Small size and fragmentation are features, not bugs.
Would be nice if the Fediverse had more of that.
There are three or four different “Technology” communities. But there might as well just be one, it’s the same bubble in each of them.
I wish I could upvote this more than once.
I tried bluesky. It feels too curated and for lack of a better term, politically correct. I don’t engage with the morons on Twitter, but I find that even today the interactions are far more real and less “polished”.
I’m also on mastodon but I’ve had a real tough time finding my crowd there which is odd, but I think it’s because it’s too fragmented. My lemmy instance is awesome and I really enjoy using it, but it too suffers not having the same crowd as Reddit. Reddit won’t have that problem for too much longer though, judging how intent they are at burning down their empire for a little bump in stock price.
I think it comes down to choice; on Twitter I can simply ignore/block the morons. On bluesky it feels so much more “behave or we’ll ban you” and I’m not cool with that. That’s exactly how Twitter was feeling right before Musk took it over. He screwed a lot of it up but it’s come back in some surprising ways, which is why I think most people have stayed. It’s just not that bad, and you have (mostly enough) control over what you see.
I’m also on mastodon but I’ve had a real tough time finding my crowd there which is odd, but I think it’s because it’s too fragmented.
What have you tried so far to find your crowd on Mastodon?
The whole non curated hashtags flat structure instead of curated forums are rough. Lots of garbage with the good stuff.
That’s true. It’s like (old?) Twitter. Anyone could pollute and spam hashtags. Some hashtags are worse than others.
Honestly I personally, selfishly, hope Lemmy never gets anywhere near Facebook or Twitter huge.
Most people are fucking boring idiot assholes, full of actually boring and stupid ideas and opinions they only think are clever or notable because them and their social circle are broadly ignorant and hypnotized by marketing.
I prefer a smaller community where people at least tend toward not being idiots, and not being boring.
I don’t want to hear from a celebrity, as their celebrity self.
I don’t want advertising to be viable.
You are right; most people do not care about things that they should, if they actually believed half the things they say they do. Most people are enormously massive hypocrites about most things, whether theyre aware of that or not.
I am under no illusion that people, broadly, when freely handed the solution to a large chunk of their problems, will use it, if it means they suffer any kind of inconvenience whatsoever.
I am under no illusion that most people want what they claim they want; they just want to be popular, or be where the most other people are.
If Bluesky dies and the users go back to Twitter, they never believed in anything more than ‘I want to be part of the herd.’
What you identify as a lack of water, I see as a functioning primary filtration system that prevents microplastic infected water from coming in to the system.
Keep Lemmy Weird.
I also find it odd that you would likely describe all that as anti-social.
… having preferences for the kind of people you enjoy socializing with… is not anti social. You seem to be functionally saying that not starting a massive marketing drive, that in itself is anti social.
This to me is either completely insane, or you don’t understand what ‘anti-social’ means.
The corporate paradigm for social media… that is anti-social. ‘Demonstrates a chronic pattern of disregarding the rights and well-bring of others.’ They literally act as fine-tuned personalized, digital drugs to manipulate your thoughts and emotions, by exploiting your weaknesses.
If Bluesky dies and the users go back to Twitter, they never believed in anything more than ‘I want to be part of the herd.’
- If ATproto (I migrated to Blacksky last year when Bsky made an unpopular ToS change) dies, I also have a Mastodon account I’ve been active on lately although my Mastodon account predates my ATproto account by a couple years, that I’ll happily move to full time, I killed my Twitter months ago because I wasn’t even active on there anymore anyways plus the baggage associated with that platform now, and I don’t plan on setting another one back up.
but we can pump water over here! Hans! bring the industrial pumps!
Hell yeah, new copypasta just dropped!
Really though, you speak some truth, but it seems like you make the case for breaking up monopolies. Of course the current political environment in the US wouldn’t allow that, but you’ve identified winner take all. I disagree about whether it’s inevitable or does it take continual coersive action to stomp out that competition?
It should have never been allowed for Facebook to take over WhatsApp and Instagram or Google taking over YouTube… It’s the opposite of what capitalism should be according to people who defend it: allowing such mega monopolies destroys the few benefits the free market has to offer. It stunts innovation and encourages enshittification and anti consumer vendor lock-in behaviour
I recently discovered wafrn, which is fediverse software that lets you directly interact with both the Fediverse and Bluesky.
Also it has lots of fun easter eggs like this button in the settings
What’s that referencing? Unless there’s something specific about the phrase, that would bug me because dice are plural, haha. By the way, does the button actually do anything?
Dice, die, both actually work as singular and/or plural because english is a mess.
Mastodon.
I’m just don’t really find the Twitter experience to be all that much use. I was never a big Twitter user anyway.
They keep banning japanese artists, let that app rot.
First ive heard that, any idea why?
Underaged looking gooner characters. Not a big loss if you ask me.
Lol can’t they just stay on the CSAM social media, Twitter?
It’s not CSAM no matter how much you try to push it.
Yea, good luck with that argument bud. Enjoy your lolis. Disgusting.
I’m just correcting your disinfo campaign.
I’ve been banned on bluesky because I choose to follow a curated group people’s accounts (I don’t remember what it was called that someone shares a bunch of people where you can choose to follow all with one click) about books which had over 100 people in it. Never went back…
That seems unlikely. More probably some random user put you on his own personal block list no one uses.
Is that why bluesky closed my account? How ignorant of me that I couldn’t realize someone personally blocked me but not the bluesky.
I was talking to some other people about books in general. Someone shared lost of accounts which you can follow I checked the accounts and saw that most are from sci-fi writers and publishers. So, I clicked follow all kind of a thing which let you follow everyone on the shared list. And afterwards my account was banned by bluesky. I told them what happened but they didn’t respond and I didn’t try again.
Yea, that didn’t happen
Things that never happened #1
I doubt that was the reason lol
You have no reason to doubt that
Oh buddy
Yes buddy
I tried Bluesky. I noticed two overwhelming trends that led to my hasty departure:
Wishful thinking left-wing politics. Encouraging people to pretend like how things ought to be is how things are, and to act accordingly. This is lazy and disastrous thinking, both because it overlooks the real systemic change that needs to happen to get to where you want to be. Though, in fairness, there is quite a bit of this on Lemmy too.
Extremely popular poster who spent their entire careers making the Trump presidency a certainly trying to back pedal on Trump specifically. No mention of their awful ideas they still keep and spread that lead to such an outcome. Lots of thumbs up and people saying “see, they get it” while also not connecting the dots, as if Project 2025 fell from the sky and wasn’t the product of decades of effort.
It’s an idiot convention.
Amen.
liberal/left can’t seen to understand why they keep losing… but then makes no legit effort to like have a actionable plan for any of their political goals.
And if you suggest such actions/plan/pragmatic thinking, you’re basically voted off the liberal ‘happy think only’ island.
I’ve been left-wing I feel like for 25 years, but the entire time I left the politics was moving away from me. As much as the right parodies the left as being elitist and out of touch and delusional… it’s like the left now actively embraces that vision of themselves and actively pursues it.
You don’t need a plan, you just need to fucking vote. Not that hard.
This is 100% the wrongminded mentality we are talking about. We need systemic change to how we vote. We need politicians with actionable plans worth voting for. We need people who understand how voting ACTUALLY works in this country. But nah, man, just fucking vote! That’s the solution!!1!
Well yeah, and none of that will be possible until the fascists are turfed out, which can only be done with voting for now.
We need politicians with actionable plans worth voting for
Reading is hard, yo
Oh I read that ya dick, I just have more than one braincell so I can see that that’s a slightly different point.
What are you voting for if there’s no plan? Gut feeling? I like that guy?
How is that acceptable, a person who’s not even able to make up a plan is definitely not fit for government.
You turf the fascists out, then you work out a plan.
When your house is on fire, you gtfo. Worry about how you’ll rebuild it afterwards.
without a plan there is nothing to vote for. why would anyone vote for the status quo that the left/liberals so viciously defend?
The current status quo isn’t a boring democrat, it’s literally trump…
I find it rather strange you say this. Bluesky was on the receiving end of a major artist exodus from Twatter. With them came all the progressive ideals that they’re known for. A lot of gay, trans, and otherwise queer individuals who are either artists themselves or follow artists they feel safe with. Certainly not the kind of people who are satisfied with the status quo.
I didn’t say people there were satisfied with the status quo. I said they had fantasy-based thinking instead of actionable plans and, for some reason, are letting the GOP sane-wash itself so long as they blame what they did on Trump. Both of those actions are quite anti-status quo. They’re also really, really stupid.
That’s the same everywhere. Like here, like on Reddit, like in real life, people have ideas and then say “won’t somebody do something about it!”
Everyone likes to imagine doing something but nobody actually wants to do anything.
Anecdotal example; the beginning of this year proved that Discord is in bed with supplying profiling training model data to ICE in the United States. That made me want to nope the fuck out. Why stick around where every word you write will contribute to the ability for fascist agents to shoot their next victim? Tear apart the next family?
So me and a friend set ourselves to build an as-close-as-possible drop-in replacement Matrix server for all our Discord friends.
Nobody came.
Fucking nobody came.
Everyone recognises the problem, but when it comes to taking a simple action, a dead easy simple action like make an account on a server owned by a friend they’ve known for a very long time, all we got were excuses. “But nobody else is moving”, “maybe I’ll consider moving when it gets even worse”, “I just wish somebody would do something…”
So it’s not Bluesky. It’s humanity.
by the time they scrolled by, the issue popped out of existence
Beyond that, the fact that Bsky came up out of nowhere and ate Mastodon’s lunch around that time just reeks of hostility to me.
If something can come out of nowhere and dominate a already established platform… That platform probably already sucked to begin with.
Completely, vastly different scenarios, so not a good comparison. Bluesky was VC-funded with $billions, headed by the same guy as Twitter originally. Mastodon was started by one guy in his spare(?) time, has never accepted VC money, and was and is specifically designed to avoid the toxic trends from Twitter.
Isn’t Bluesky where all the left wing and Woke people moved to from Twitter when Elon Musk bought the thing?
Bluesky is pretty weird in its own way. It’s full of really irritating leftist politics plus a lot of unsolicited porn.
Nothing happens in Mastodon.
Twitter seems to be the only place that has anything going on in that style of social media.
There is a considerable number of users that stopped using Bluesky because of the Age Verification. I think that is playing a significant issue, along with corporate accounts being few and far between compared to Twitter. I really liked how it was set up vs my Mastodon and Twitter account I keep for contests and giveaways. It is a shame they had to go fascist like that.
Did those users not hear they can dodge Age Verification by using a different Bluesky compatible app?..
Bluesky are transphobic and Islamophobic “centrist” twats, but the protocol they’ve developed is kinda decentralized and so can be used against their wishes… there’s even one app where you can keep posting even if bsky.social or whatever your home instance is marked you as “banned”… lol.
Oh, I can post anywhere. I’m in my 50’s, and I know that alt clients can get around it, but that doesn’t change the fact that the service itself chose to “Papers Please” RLID its users when there wasn’t even political pressure to do it at the time in most of the places it operates. If it had changed to be trans and islamiaphobes then I am glad to be off there.
If it had changed to be trans and islamiaphobes
It hasn’t. Or the block lists I’m using are fucking amazing.
From what I gather, the admins could be stepping in more like they do on Lemmy for hateful behaviors/users. If BlueSky were more federated like Lemmy, I think they would have been defederated by now for not taking direct action.
The block lists themselves work great imo and should be used universally on the Fediverse, but people do have understandable gripes with admins there for not stepping in more and are instead differing moderation to the user level tools in place.
