Jack Dorsey is furious that #Bluesky has attracted "very very common" people. He also doesn't like the idea of moderation tools facilitating the banning of racists.
All these tech billionaires are like a version of the movie Big, in which a pre-adolescent boy wakes up in the body of an aging Howard Hughes. Or Colonel Kurtz. Or a sardine. #JackDorsey
Jack Dorsey referred to Twitter, the privately owned company that blocked links to competing social media platforms like Mastodon, as "freedom technology". What a clown.
He also deleted his account on Bluesky announced he's no longer on Bluesky's board of directors. Jack's involvement was one of the reasons I was never excited about #Bluesky, TBH.
Former CEO of Twitter wanted to build a social protocol no-one can control, like SMTP or HTTP for social media. Bluesky’s ATProto was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize, but then Musk happened and Bluesky started taking it to the wrong direction and everything fell apart in Dorsey’s mind.
A very revealing interview. I now see even more future in W3C’s ActivityPub.
I must wonder… if Dorsey truly wants to build something open, non-commercial and decentralized, why doesn’t he even look at the ActivityPub? Why not help it thrive? What’s all that fuss about Bluesky and Nostr?
#JackDorsey is endorsing an anti-vax conspiracy theorist moron RFK Jr and he’s predicting he’ll win 🙄 What an imbecile. Nice to finally know what a dumbfuck Dorsey is along with little boy minded #Musk. Billionaires will pick any candidate that will make sure they don’t pay any taxes. Think twice joining #Bluesky that will eventually become a cesspool.
Worth asking ourselves: why do obscenely rich and powerful men like Twitter founder (and Musk promoter) Jack Dorsey want to give whackadoodle conspiracy theorist RFK a leg up in the presidential race?
It's because chaos, and chaos agents, serve the interests of obscenely rich and powerful men like Dorsey and Musk.
I don't get to to do long reads, but
Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) piece titles "‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything" is an excellent read, specially if you care about privacy, digital rights and digital sovereignty and what to understand what has been eroding them.
Dispatches from the #Twitter war:
• The bots have won
• Elon has lost
• Now is the time to encourage defection
• No, NOT to BlueSky
I can elaborate:
The Bots have Won
Back in early 2022, #ElonMusk promised to purchase Twitter and wage war on bots, presumably the ones that were peddling cryptocurrency #scams, romance scams, and all sorts of other scams.
There is a good chance that Elon only said this to try to weasel his way out of purchasing Twitter; basically, if he could claim that the product he was promised didn't resemble what was available in reality, he could undo his promise to purchase the corporation. By claiming Twitter was rife with bots, this was his attempt to do so. But whether it was dishonest or not, Elon stuck to his pledge to try to rid the platform of #bots, in ways that are alternatingly incompetent, silly, and ineffective.
Long story short, Elon never saw his "eliminate all bots" promise through to completion. The ultimate concession to failure was when he changed the Twitter algorithm to favor paying users over regular ones, meaning the best way to be heard on the platform was to give him $8 and say your piece. But that $8 surcharge came at a steep cost: no longer were tweets being amplified based on the content of their quality, but on whether the user had extra money to waste or not.
Initially, maybe this was good for the paying users too. After all, someone with $8 who follows Elon might consider themselves very smart, and those people think they have some very smart things to say. To the average onlooker, though, their "very smart musings" look like complete and utter crap: unfunny jokes, stale memes, cold takes.
It turns out that having money doesn't equal intelligence, and Twitter was providing us evidence at a rapid pace.
Elon has Lost
Let's get the obvious things out first: Elon overpaid for Twitter. That much we know. And the value of Twitter has tanked since then, because even the free market won't continue to honor foolish business decisions.
But today, Elon has started limiting the posts that various users are even allowed to see, as low as 300 posts per day for new users, 600 for normal users, and 6000 for the fools who pay $8 to him.
As I understand it, 300 to 600 posts is not a lot. For comparison, when you click Show More in Mastodon, you're probably loading 20 posts at a minimum. Click Show More 30 times, and you've already seen 600. Depending on your usage habits (maybe you just like to skim!) you can easily breeze through these limits in a fraction of an hour.
And that's just not good for user retention. If somebody is locked out of a website after spending a certain amount of time there, I don't think they're going to cough up a couple extra dollars to keep browsing. When the Bezos-owned Washington Post begs me to subscribe to their newspaper, I turn 180° and look for a different source. And the Post actually has valuable information, it's not a cesspit riddled with self-important idiots who pay money to get their unfunny jokes stuck to the top of comment threads.
Now is the Time to Encourage Defection
Imagine you love Elon Musk, you think he can do nothing wrong, and you even join Twitter just to see how much better it can become under his new leadership. And you get hit with a 300 post maximum before the site stops working and/or begs you to cough up your hard-earned cash, to the guy you're pretty sure is already a billionaire.
Isn't it just disheartening?
Here's a more reasonable scenario: You're a Twitter addict. We've all been there, after all. The conversations suck you in, and they're almost always negative conversations too. Twitter drives its engagement based on negative interactions, using #addiction forming patterns that resemble the casino slot machine more than a public square.
Then, one day, whatever #argument you are watching or participating in, suddenly gets replaced with a "insert $8 to continue" screen. It's straight out of a #MontyPython sketch. For the displeasure of raising your stress levels and your blood pressure, you must now spend money.
This is horrible. All of it is absolutely, totally horrible. Anyone who was lulled into complacency by Twitter should now have their way of life shaken to the point of reconsidering why they use the platform. I used to be among them, and I cannot stress how much I regret giving Twitter my time. There are good people on Twitter, but there is no good Twitter to be had.
Stay Away from BlueSky
Never choose the lesser of two evils, when there are more than two viable choices. It has been a trend, recently, for large influencers to hope to recreate Twitter, verbatim, somewhere or anywhere else. The November 2022 #TwitterMigration seemed to be equal parts #TwitterRefugee and hapless influencer who was simply looking for the most interaction.
Never mind the complexities of Mastodon, most influencers were disappointed by how it was difficult to reassemble the same audience as they had on Twitter. The network effect was in full swing on Twitter: you joined Twitter because people were there, and people were there because you joined Twitter, so not joining Twitter became simply unfeasible for most people.
Influencers do understand one thing: hero worship. And if you were complacent during earlier Twitter, perhaps the easiest hero to worship is #JackDorsey. He created Twitter, after all. And sure, Twitter itself was always toxic ever since it started encouraging arguments. Maybe a lot of people have succumbed to addiction to Twitter, and have decided that Twitter is now only bad because of Elon Musk, and not because it was always bad.
The people in this mindset are more than happy to follow Jack Dorsey to his next terrible creation, which appears to be BlueSky. Right now, the website is simply a Twitter clone, and it's begging influencers to come to it because soon, it infers, it will be the Twitter for people who aren't quite as extreme as Elon Musk.
I hate to use the term, and I do not use it lightly, but #BlueSky is "virtue signaling" about being #federated. Right now, there is only one BlueSky server, and it is invite only. Something cannot be federated if there's nothing to federate with, especially if it's closed off from the world to begin with.
But do you know why BlueSky is #VirtueSignalling? Quite simply: it has nothing else to offer. Mastodon is, as most foundational level, a federated Twitter clone. BlueSky is, at ITS most foundational level, a Twitter clone with nothing to separate it from Twitter. But being federated is what all the cool kids want, so Jack Dorsey weaseled the word into its description to make people think it might be like Mastodon, if not compatible with it.
Jack Dorsey has always been a fundamentally bad person, a #libertarian#techbro who has no qualms about supporting the far right when it helps him.
Dorsey is friends with #Jan6 promoter, #StopTheSteal believer, and all-around right wing disinfo peddler #AliAlexander, for example. He has always had constant, open dialogues with conservatives who want to accuse him of being too biased against them, and he is often stooped to appease them without questioning whether they were lying to him the entire time.
Dorsey has also become more obsessed with #cryptocurrency in recent years, with a huge donation to the Twitter-like #Nostr social network, a place where almost all conversations are one-sided cryptocurrency plugs, and sending cryptocurrency over it was one of the defining features.
And Nostr wants to be #PayToWin too, the same way Twitter currently is.
Final thoughts
Succinctly: Mastodon is good, actually. It has a lot of flaws, it has a lot of user experience issues to work out, but I am incredibly thankful it is not being driven into the ground by venture capitalists hell-bent on extracting as much time, money, and attention out of the average human being as possible.
Jack Dorsey finally opens Bluesky to everyone. Analytics show that one of his very first invited followers has changed their name. It’s John Mastodon. Jack gazes at the distance in disbelief. His phone rings. It’s John Mastodon, letting him know the federated way is the better way. Jack weeps.
Born in St Louis, had a thirst for knowledge
He tried then dropped out of NYU college
Where supply
Caught his eye
He started Twitter and soon he was loaded
But then Blue Sky became his new tombola
And he was "Fine"
But then in thirty-seconds time he said
Don’t wanna mix with all these common people…
Don’t wanna do the hard work that common people do
Don’t wanna moderate common people
Don’t want common people like you
Jack Dorsey is crawling back to Twitter, licking Elon’s boots, calling the site “freedom technology”. In case anyone wondered about Jack’s political alignment: it’s far right, techno-fascist probably.
Ser att Bluesky vunnit viss popularitet bland Mastodon-användare, det är förbryllande, Mastodon (ActivityPub) är den fria plattformen, de flesta andra är inlåsning.
Il miliardario fondatore di #Twitter e #Bluesky ha abbandonato le sue creature per lanciare un protocollo decentralizzato in cui si può scambiare bitcoin. #JackDorsey donò 14 #Bitcoin a Nostr subito dopo aver venduto twitter a Musk.
#Snowden, che ora è naturalizzato Russo, non è nel fediverso ma ha un account verificato su nostr:
Not a feature, but an interesting post by Jay Graber, the CEO of #Bluesky.
How involved was #JackDorsey before he left the board? Not that much, it turns out.
It has always been misleading to present Bluesky as the “platform of Jack Dorsey”. It’s also sexist, as once again, the work of a talented woman was wrongfully attributed to a very mediocre man. The tech version of the Matilda effect.