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.
It’s very telling that all across lemmy this is being celebrated. Looks like most people completely missed the point.
I don’t myself like mastodon very much, but if you came to lemmy to stick it to the man it’s a bit silly to cheer on the next man, which is what bluesky is.
Twitter will remain a place for the Right and nut job grifters , probably absorb truth social and the others. bluesky will become the place for liberals and centrists who jerk each other off because they have a degree and gay friends and think they are enlightened.
Sorry , nobody asked for that rant .
People aren’t going to be convinced of social/communism overnight.
I celebrate the move to BlueSky as positive in that they are no longer propping up an apartheid tech bro who’s now running a meme branch of US Government, and also because many of them are doing the thing they were scared to do before: leave. They now know how that feels and what it will be like rebuilding friend groups and such.
It’s not the anti-corpo step many are deluding themselves to believe it is, but getting out of the muck and learning how to take the step to change something are both things I see as positives that can be guided to better things in the future.
For me the bigger value is not in the quality difference between the two platforms. And don’t get me wrong, i agree that BlueSky is a lot better than Elon’s Twitter, but not as good as a decentralised Fediverse Platform.
The real positive is in the act of migration itself, because it shows that is still a possibility. So hopefully it proves sustainable.
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.
Small steps
He says this and yet jumps to Bluesky, a platform created by Jack Dorsey and now owned and managed by a crypto bro?
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.
Elon turned it into his own personal Nazi blog where people can’t block him.
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.
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.
Yeah, what’s stopping the richest guy in the world just buying blue-sky as well?
Nothing, and it’s already run by web3 folk
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.
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.
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.
If people moving from one corpo owned platform to another corpo owned platform gives you hope for the future of the internet: You haven’t been paying attention to the history of the internet at all.
Once they have critical mass, the enshittification for profit will begin a new.
But it means people are still capable of caring.
At least it theoretically has account portability…but yes, I fear people are setting themselves up to be enshittified again, as Cory Doctorow has brought up
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.
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.
Twitter was already really bad, Musk just brought back the Nazis and fired all the people that were the guardrails.
Bluesky just got major investment from a crypto bro…
It’s not 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.
Idk why people think the average user is going to go to Mastodon. I’m glad anything else other than Twitter or Threads is popping off.
Mastodon could have worked sooner if it was more approachable.
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.
How does another social media ruled by a billionaire gives hope?
Because it shows that a sizable amount of people are at least anti-nazi enough to move platform.
Yes, it would be nicer if they moved to mastodon, but nobody even knows what that is, nobody is there (classic chicken and egg problem), and people get confused by the whole “choose an instance/server” thing.
Is it not ok to have a small celebration of people moving to a better, more positive platform, even if it is far from perfect?
It’s venture capital. Eventually it will stop being open source and will enshitify just like every other platform. So nothing is changing long term in my opinion.
Anybody recommend a good mastodon instance?
I’m on Fedia.io
Which is both Fediverse and Mastodon.
Which is both Fediverse and Mastodon.
Well… yeah.
Did I say that wrong?
Is it Lemmy and Mastodon?
They are both ‘fediverse’?
Yeah, sorry for being snarky, but the Fediverse refers to all federated software. So, Fedia.io for example, is an MBin instance. Which is different than Lemmy and Mastodon but they can all interact with each other. They’re all part of the overall Fediverse. So your comment was just kind of awkwardly phrased and redundant.
Oh ok. Got it.
Thanks,
If it was owned by the community that moderated it, then yes. But no it’s owned by another rich asshole.
