The way certain men in the tech press reflexively scoff at mastodon while giving bluesky just ridiculous amounts of leeway is incredibly bizarre to me.
@fraying@lisamelton “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani, as quoted in the Talmudic tractate Berakhot (55b.)
@fraying I think the US press is completely bought into the US evangelical prosperity gospel, whether they realize it or not .. Jack Dorsey has $billions, so he must be great. John Mastodon, not so much.
I'm not a bluesky hater! I have an account there. It's interesting. But its provenance should absolutely give you pause (Dorsey is still on the board), it's WAY behind mastodon in terms of federation and toolset (post editing ALONE is worth the trip), and any vibe advantage it had is about to evaporate now that the doors are open.
Worse, since it's not federating yet, it will have the exact same abuse and harassment problems as Twitter because there are no instance mods to do the work.
@soypunk I guess, but their much ballyhooed "rules based" stuff is just content moderation with some tools, which, yeah all content moderation has tools. And so long as all users are on the same server (as they are now) they'll inevitably get to the point where Twitter was/is - too much content and not enough moderators. And when the VC money runs out, I don't see a business model to pay anyone to moderate anything.
@fraying For sure! Their approach does not address the centralized server problems at all. Dorsey’s involvement throws up a huge red flag for me given his very clear views on moderation... but I am trying to cut them some slack and the blog posts suggest a change of tone internally at least. They were aggressively opposed to moderation at the beginning. Like Substack “Nazis are fine" opposed.
@soypunk@fraying and a lot of this had to come after people had to run campaigns to remind them of the last two decades of socal networking (nee Black women on Twitter and the new form done by BlackSky).
They have too much money and access to be given any passes unless operating with "negligible harm" is an acceptable practice for community building.
One interesting thing about bluesky is the way people can make algorithms and share them. Thats cool! I'd love to see mastodon do that, too. I'll always prefer chronological, but it's fun to shuffle the posts to discover something new.
Oh and quote posting, which, come on. Just add that already. It works.
But otherwise, mastodon is far more alive, dynamic, and interesting to me. Bluesky seems the most like a Twitter clone, and they've solved none of the core problems Twitter had.
I also don't think it's bad that there are multiple Twitter replacements! That's how the web was supposed to work. We should have WAY MORE, all trying different things, focusing on different communities, different content, different identities.
Trying to stuff everyone into the same box was always a fool's errand.
And if that means you have to go to more than one site to catch up with your communities, YOU'LL LIVE.
@fraying Regarding "algorithms", I have been greatly enjoying whatever it is that the Explore / Posts tab in the web UI does. Having my primary feed be chronological but having this zeitgeisty thing off to the side is basically exactly what I wanted all along. No notes, ship it.
@fraying from a bit I've seen, some authors, artists and scientists are able to have better conversations and better reach their audiences on bluesky than on fediverse.
@fraying there's going to be more noise, but for example multiple feeds/channels are curated and you need to at least somewhat prove to be reliable to be added to it, and there's active conversations and yelling at people who try to spew bullshit. Hell, Dorsey got bullied off of there XD
And, being single platform, there isn't such an issue with discoverability and being able to reach people, which isn't going to change just because of more people.
@fraying tbh I think it's doomed forever on the federation/moderation front. their federation offering is so late and over-complicated that in the best realistic scenario we'll still have 95% of AT users on Bluesky — so whatever moderation policies Bluesky has (if any) become the de facto standards for the whole network. no federated instance can really do anything about that
@fraying I would love to know more about Dorsey's role there before and now. It's hella weird that no one on BlueSky talks about it.
"Here's this billionaire endorsing and committed to Bitcoin, whose main company he has directed to hold 10% of its cash in Bitcoin, who financially supported Tulsi Gabbard - who later pivoted hard to the GOP, freeing Ed Snowden and Julian Assange -post-election - then in 2023 supported vote split candidate RFK Jr.
@fraying quite a lot of technology that keeps this shitshow of the internet running doesn't come from billionaire assholes, and precious few recognize its value, so ... nothing new here. ;)
@fraying The other thing that bothers me is this idea you have to bet on a "winner”, invest your time, effort and interest in the one that's going to "come out on top" instead of, you know, the one you like the best. I'd say most people who use BlueSky just like it more, but some tech people use and laud it because they think it’ll "win”.
@Moltz TOTALLY. It shows how warped our expectations of community online have become. There shouldn't be a "winner!" We all win when we all have supportive community experiences. They don't have to all be in the same place! Hell, they SHOULDN'T be.
@fraying even as a tech person I really really think this little "picking the server" is an obstacle much bigger than standard nerds recognize. Or maybe it's just the lack of "onboarding help" average people are missing. Just some little "how does this work for dummies" explainer that curating your own timeline is actually very valuable.
On the other hand the current state is a filter against people with "full service" mentality
@fraying I had this conversation, and unfortunately picking a server is not just a name, but also who yells at you for not conforming to which CW customs, which other servers you don't get to communicate with due to blocks, who and how many people will see your posts on local timeline, and how many people will be able to discover your tagged posts.
@fraying
I skimmed that article because a misreading of the headline let me think they were beginning federation, but nope. They just removed the invite requirement.
Add comment