I don't see a long term future for Twitter. It will either file for bankruptcy or get crushed by its tech debt. Bluesky doesn't look like it has a solid foundation either (I wrote several threads on that). More like a "Twitter is failing, lets jump start something and take a chance" thing. And quite hopefully, it will fail, too. Everyone involved there is incompfortably close to cryptocurrency and the whole AT protocol looks like shoehorning a case for blockchain tech.
Oh, I was not implying that it will fail due to blockchain, but rather hope that it will fail because it is close to this tech. The whole AT design just smells as if they wanted to sell accounts as NFT tokens.
If social media was inherently tied to blockchain, the planet looses.
I agree. But Elon Musk is a wild card here. He is moody enough to close down Twitter on a whim. Ultimately, I think, Twitter is going to die from something that crawls out of the server room and money can't fix. Mudge's whistleblower statement paints a dire situation and that was even before Musk
(and potentially gives one reason for Dorsey to start Bluesky)
Google already tried to get everyone with a Gmail address on Google Plus.
The thing with Google is that they start project after project and if they can't figure out how to tie it into their advertisement infrastructure, they sunset it brutally.
Mastodon is an open protocol, so no one would use a Google client that has ads in the UI and if they send ads as posts, everyone would defederate.
Good point. But remember: ads is a game of large numbers, so even a low number of instance blocks can make it unprofitable (especially if its foreseable that instance admins might conspire against Google). And you don't even have to block instances, just the spam accounts.
Also: Google ads are highly dependent on Javascript for clicktracking. Mastodon does not support that. Any Javascript you might put into your posts gets filtered away before it reaches the user.
Nostr is a social network (protocol) with the core feature of being censorship resistant. Of course, content moderation and spam protection are the "benign" side of the same coin. So, it's probably not something, you can or want to use to bring large numbers of people together.
Thanks for the promising #Fedimeister app. It has come a long way since 1.0.
I'd like your help with the following:
Is it possible to set message visibility, or are posts always public? FYI I'm creating this post from the app and like it to be visible just to you but I don't find a way to do that.
Thread mode is automatically triggered if the text is longer than your instances character limit. The "Force..." setting will always trigger thread mode.
Yes. Short messages (<500 chars) are sent as-is, unless "Force..." is toggled. The use case here is that you might want to do an image thread, where each image only gets like one sentence of text.
I composed a post in #fedimeister (ironically with some questions about the app) but hitting "Publish" caused this error message. What am I doing wrong? 🙏
If someone (👋🏻 @OutOnTheMoors ) wants to do a "follow-the-money" thing on #Bluesky, I'd contribute the following puzzle pieces (sorry, my expertise is in #tech, not #journalism, #law or accounting).
The difference between a PBLLC and a conventional LLC is that the PBLLC can state a Public Benefit it wants to further and is allowed to spend money on that. A LLC may only spend money in the interest of its shareholders (every penny spend must have the intent of producing a Return Of Investment). In order to prevent squandering and embezzlement, a PBLLC has certain reporting duties to it's members that money spend on the Public Benefit really went into furthering that goal.
Bluesky doesn't publish any contact information on their website [1] and all of their domains are registered by proxy, so the WHOIS database is a dead end for getting an address as well. By law, a physical mail address is required for every company to receive legal proceedings. Deliberately hiding it, raises questions.
The website does provide some pointers, though, that can be used to track the company down:
The registration date (4th OCT 2021) is consistent with Bluesky's blogpost [2] . If this is really them, they used an agent to register and this [5] is the address of "their offices".
For me, the trail ends there. I'm not a US citizen and I'm not going to gamble $20 on obtaining legal documents, I'm not qualified to evaluate. If someone wants to, I'd be interested to hear the results.
Hm, I'm probably a bit biased, when it comes to this. Here in Germany that kind of thing is frowned upon. But if you tell me, that it makes sense under US law, I'll take your word for it.
I am aware (and probably a bit biased). I'm not too familiar with US business customs, but here in Germany, hiding your company behind a front like this is frowned upon. It's not illegal, but generally seen as shady.