- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Summary
Journalists are increasingly abandoning X (formerly Twitter) for Bluesky, citing higher engagement and less toxicity. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of X, changes like deprioritizing external links and rising hate speech have alienated many, especially marginalized groups.
Bluesky, founded by Jack Dorsey, offers a more welcoming environment, especially for journalists and activists, with 20x the engagement in some cases.
Reporters note better traffic, reduced harassment, and a focus on diverse stories.
Organizations like The Guardian and fundraising groups also report greater success on Bluesky compared to X.
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“There’s no chance this leopard will eat my face.”
–Migrating Journalists, probably
Well, it’s not like it’s the exact same dude who sold the old platform to fascists last time, right?
Bluesky is a registered public benefit company and Dorsey is no longer with the company and no longer on the board.
Phew … then we can trust the open software that is locked to one company and one instance essentially leaving control to a handful of people.
What could go wrong?
I’m not saying open software isn’t awesome. I’m simply correcting a common misconception.
I agree, there is nothing wrong with Open Software … the problem is the way Bluesky is being arranged and developed. They are essentially cornering the development to create a situation where only one company and one group maintains dominate control over everything and everyone.
The track record so far since the popular world wide internet started is that if a popular social media platform is controlled by one group, one company or even one person, it will eventually turn into a tool of monetization and control and it will eventually degrade and dissolve.
The only difference this time is Bluesky is supposedly built on open source software, which is true … but the whole platform and system is corned, controlled and managed by only one company and one group.
They’re actively working on making it easier to fork the entire platform.
There’s already 3rd party account hosts, moderation labelers, feed generators, and alternative implementations like whitewind (blogging system on top of the same account repo & lexicon architecture) were you can use the exact same account. All of these works together independently of which hosts / providers you use.
Relays and microblogging appviews (a fully functional bluesky mirror) are technically possible but more expensive to duplicate but there’s work on making that practical too.
You can already bypass PLC by using DID:Web for account identity.
The single most important thing if you want to be able to recover from bluesky going bad is to just back up your account recover signing key, and to keep a recent backup of the repo to preserve your post history and social network (follows, etc).
All the rest can be rebuilt if you have your account hey and backup. The content addressing will make it seamless!
That’s the thing about how this is all working though. I’m semi technically literate and I barely can understand most of what you just wrote. So chances are, I might be able to attempt some of the things you said and might be able to do something but realistically, I probably won’t.
The reason why Bluesky is not a good thing is that it is too complex for the average user to understand. All a new non-technical user understands is ‘it works, it works fast, I get to connect to lots of people’ and most importantly ‘I don’t need to figure anything out and I can just get to use it’.
You’re average user which is about 90% of the user base will never go through all the trouble of understanding what you just wrote or in even attempting to go through any of those steps. They are a captive audience and the developers and corporate wolves in the sidelines all understand this. They just need to herd the sheep into a large enough pen, lock them up, shut out any dissenters and start monetizing the new audience that will stay captive for a few years until it all degrades and falls apart like previous platforms.
Open AI changed to a for profit company in a heartbeat and these folks can too.
More worrying is who owns them and their funding sources.
These people are why I’m barely here anymore and more on…Bluesky. And I like the format here way.more.
“He’s said he’s sorry, and he’s not going to do it again. You’ll see. He’s changed.”
This time he bailed early though. He’s got no control of the site
No the site just owes a bunch of money to the crypto bros at Blockchain Capital.
Doesn’t matter if Dorsey isn’t there and if it’s a PBC, if the investors want a return on their investment (and they do) enshittification is coming.
Correct.
Here’s a thread about who owns and funds Bluesky.
Nice, thanks for the link. I knew almost all of this stuff but never had a place where it was all tied together and organized neatly. Now I do. Cheers.
It’s open source and designed to literally not be reliant on the company running it. Start a community appview and plc and you can bring your entire account history with you
These are aspirational goals and not at all actively true now. They are technically possible, but not actually viable as a social media network.
Its design was based on a drop in for twitter, and will always require a megacorp sized entity for it to operate, due to a “god’s eye view of all data” model requiring huge, faste data lifts to exist at all.
Best case is some opensource org like internet archive/wikipedia willing to spend 6-7 figures/month(raw costs +engineering talent) on running the service, but so far none have.
There’s already others running other relays. The appview is the most difficult, but in theory indexes on top of the data could be shared too which would reduce the need for each appview to have everything saved in advance
It’s not actually decentralized or federated, but keep telling yourself that.
Tell that to the people running their own PDS servers and the people running whitewind and all the other services built on the protocol
More like
everyone else is, and I need to keep my job as a… you know, journalist
I think Mastodon needs to adopt a flying animal as its logo and make its theme blue and white
They could use Dumbo
Best not to prod the mouse.
Introducing “Masto! The flying elephant! A legally distinctive flying elephant than Dumbo!”
Dumbodon
Pegasus?
Omg blue sky is a yeast infection LMAO 🤣
Im kinda pissed about this ngl. The enshitification of twitter was supposed to drive mastodon not another corporatised shithole.
Wont happen until mastodon makes on boarding easy enough for the tech illiterate.
And the name doesn’t help.
Yeah that generally seems to be an issue with a lot of foss projects.
It’s not that surprising. Developing software requires a certain skillset, heavily based in logic. Understanding people requires a completely different skillset, and people tend to be more emotional than logical. Our brains just draw connections between different concepts that are, at their core, fundamentally illogical. A big business has the benefit of a marketing department, staffed by specialists who earn their paycheck by studying and manipulating people. Your average FOSS project doesn’t have that advantage.
If you wanted some of that same advantage, you’d want to onboard some talented humanities or marketing specialist and give them the branding responsibilities.
Ist that ths kind of place for a non profit organisation. They monetise and pay devs and marketers and as long as u keep it foss thwn that helps the community as a whole.
We need a nonprofit that provides reccommendations to all the Activpub services and helps to steer them in the right direction.
Developing software requires a certain skillset, heavily based in logic. Understanding people requires a completely different skillset
Before Zuck dropped out of college to do Facebook instead, he was double majoring in computer science and psychology.
Fuck the Zuck, but that’s the kind of person who can make a successful social media website. Someone who knows how both computers and people think.
Using the term “Open Social Web” instead of fediverse or mastodon seems to help a lot. TechCrunch and other news orgs use the term more nowadays and Meta mentions it as well as the about us on Bluesky.
Mastodon needs a lot of work before it becomes a mainstream option. They missed a big opportunity when twitter became toxic, and now they can’t compete against bluesky. Hope i’m wrong but i think they are doomed.
At this point I’m just hoping BlueSky gets it right and provides a federation protocol.
That is a major issue the fediverse needs to fix.
We need a single federated account that works across all platforms that iant tied to a single server even if said server goes down that preferably allows for your private key to be held by u. Ideally get this to work with the new passkey standard supported by google, apple, microsoft etc.
Then. We need to make a website that is like 3 simple steps.
Step 0: Option a) sign up with email Option b) sign up with username
Step 1: Select or search for 3 categories ur interested in
Step 2: Show me nsfw yes/no default no Show me extreme opinions yes/no default no (need to rework what word to use instead of “extreme”) Show me bot accounts yes/no default yes
Step 2.5: automaticly send said user off to an instance that is the following:
- Respects their email/username sign up choice
- Related to their interests
- Respects their nsfw choice
- Is defederated from extreme instances for dont show me extreme opinions hexbear lemmy.ml etc 4.Respects the load any individual instance can handle that the instance admin can configure.
Step 3: user signs up to the instance they have been directed to
Step 4: reccommend people/communities etc fir them to follow/subscribe to. Reccommend blockliats for specific subjects, racist, tankie, asshole, nazi, etc.
Done!
Their already exists a standard for accounts just that its not yet been implemented into most services yet. Mastodon already has blocklists (although poorly managed and implemented). It wouldnt be too hard to make this website i could probably do it myself ngl.
Should probably also drop this vid into the proccess somewhere as a quick explainer.
It seems like Bluesky kind of did all of this with ATProto but they’re just met with constant criticisms
It’s like everyone agrees mastodon isn’t the “right” special concoction but any attempt ever made to do something different or better and people shoot it down because it’s “not open like mastodon”
Met with constant criticisms…here. Because people seem to care about feelings more than facts or results.
I think it comes down to people not liking that Bluesky is controlled by a board. But that’s what’s needed for mass adoption: a group of people to be accountable.
That’s what bluesky’s DID based account identity does. Unless you make that key the sole authority (no key rotation, like nostr) then you need a registry as authority (like bluesky’s PLC registry)
Bluesky specifically lets the account hosting server handle your auth, the directory points to where your account server is as in when you enter your handle, every 3rd party service and federated peer can do OAuth seamlessly to your account host. Then you can log into every compatible site with your handle, instead of having to get redirected “home” before you can interact. Your account server’s repository keeps records of all your posts and your social network, and you can even migrate seamlessly across hosts.
Yeah if they used Activpub then id be onboard 100%. Its just that there architecture is fundamentally incompatible with Activpub. Federation was supposed to destroy the fragmentation not join it.
Atproto is better at global views thanks to stuff like content addressing than activitypub is. That’s better to reduce fragmentation.
This is the most common reply to any mention of onboarding newcomers, but it’s not helpful. It’d be much more productive to hear specific criticisms so we can address them.
- Is clicking the big “Join” (the default server) on joinmastodon.org really that big of a hurdle?
- Is a firehouse home feed required to engage users from the start?
Ask someone you personally know in real life that is not tech literate to sign up for each service and try to get an account going.
It is night and day
There are other issues. Missing features (cited by people who bailed from Mastodon):
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a lack of “trending” list - that means journalists and other people who want to know what’s happening right now didn’t have a way to find events.
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no suggestions for follows. As a new user, how do people know what to follow?
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no suggested posts. Once I scroll through all the posts from the people I follow, the system doesn’t provide me with new posts.
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no quote tweets.
It isn’t just that Mastodon has a weird onboarding experience, it’s that it doesn’t behave the way Twitter users have come to expect/need. I realize that is usually by design.
Edit: added 4
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Yeah I don’t get it, it really doesn’t seem hard. Honestly I feel like its more of a marketing issue. Bluesky probably has a large budget to buy influencers and create a larger network effect
Never going to happen. You’re in the company of the people who have been saying “year of the Linux desktop!” for three decades or more.
We used to be <1% we are now up to about 4%. We are on the slow lead in to the exponential curve.
Lots of that is the steamdeck, so it’s a bit hard to say if even that lackluster improvement means actual Linux OS usage past “platform for an app that users dont leave.”
Is it? Most of those numbers come from web browser share sites, and Steam Deck is barely used for web browsing.
Sure, but instances / servers confuse most average users. We see this every single time there is a new big migration wave. People don’t get it, then bail.
It’s wild that no one ever had a problem with this with email and yet this is apparently so confusing they abandon it.
It’s wild that no one ever had a problem with this with email
Do you work in IT? I couldn’t imagine sitting there trying to guide people through IMAP and SMTP settings. Like email has been made a lot easier on that end because most people use an app on their phone that allows them to select from one of the three major providers, they click it, poof all done.
But imagine someone calls you up and is like “hey how do I setup mutt for gmail?” “How do I set up Canary for Microsoft?”
Then imagine someone who has 1/10 of your knowledge trying to set it up. We have to remember that a lot of people are unaware of the file/folder metaphor in computers because a lot of people just “put it in a cloud” and call it done. The tablet/phone era has really eroded a lot of knowledge about systems. I know that seems hard to believe on the Fediverse when we’re all surrounded by incredibly knowledgeable people.
People at work think I’m a wizard because I can do formulas in Excel and know how to navigate through directories in the file explorer. Even standard keyboard shortcuts (Like Ctrl+C) are strange magical things to many of my coworkers.
I see your point but do you really have that level of complexity on the fediverse?
You pick an instance, create an account and then browse; much like you would pick an email provider, create an account, and email your friends.
Sure if you’re setting up your own domain for email, or configuring a mail client to work with your email provider, then you have to deal with these things but in my opinion the analogy works reasonably well. Maybe I am being dense.
Agreed, imo lemmy is more of lacking critical mass. Ime, more people seem to complain about the small size of communities.
I would just never get accustomed to mastodon, though. Finding out people is difficult there.
This analogy gets used a lot here, but it ignores the fact you literally see users struggling, asking for help, then giving up.
Also, email had a lot of things helping it out. Many ISPs would (and still) give people an email address and set it up for them. Moreover, mail web clients like Hotmail and Gmail didn’t pester people with domain selection. Average users didn’t pick a Hotmail or Gmail domain because they were thinking about the domain, they got it because they were thinking about the features that the web client and host offered.
Hotmail and Gmail are domains. People had already chosen a domain before they went to the website.
My point is email isn’t just a domain. It’s a client and a hosting service. You were forced to use their domains if you wanted access to their web clients, free storage, etc.
No one chose Gmail early on because they wanted the “Gmail” domain. They chose it because of the web client and massive free storage.
So you’re arguing that Mastodon instances don’t do enough to set themselves apart on features?
You don’t have to deal with being sent links to other people’s mail servers’ public mail lists, and then figuring out how to get your own mail server to figure out how to join that conversation. Mailto links open in your mail client which already knows what your server is.
Mastodon don’t have a mailto: equivalent, pages can’t identify themselves in a way your browser recognize as a Mastodon host, your browser won’t remember your Mastodon account(s) specifically. And federation sync issues aren’t even dealt with here…
Email is not the same, if it was, then mastodon would just be another email client.
One of the biggest issues with federated social media is discovery, a specific problem that email doesn’t deal with, sense communication with email is primarily done between individuals with known addresses.
It’s also easy for people to comprehend email because it has an easy analog to regular addresses and traditional communication (I’m writing a letter on my computer and it’s getting sent to someone else’s computer)
Finally, it took email decades to get to the place it is today, and 99.99999 percent of people using it don’t understand how it works in the slightest, like at all.
One of the biggest issues with federated social media is discovery
Exactly this. IIRC the Mastodon devs don’t want to add recommendation algorithms, since those can be gamed. The problem is that many users rely on them to bootstrap their account and find ongoing events.
This sort of thing will keep happening unless the FOSS world learns to treat designers as equals. Mastodon is significantly harder to get going. Simple things like on-boarding and starter packs make BlueSky a better experience.
100% agree
Dont fret Mastadonians. The great Bsky to Fediverse migration is inevitable. Only the timing is debatable.
All we gotta do is wait for Bluesky to get bought by Musk.
Full circle!
So you are saying go to the thing that has been shit for years over the thing that isn’t shit yet because that second thing may become shit in the future?
No. Im a self serving bastard who wants to see Activpub as the dominant form of content sharing and discussion. Because i think Activpub is an objectivly better standard that gives more power and liberty to the individual.
We have had many waves of people in the past. It does not look like Mastodon will become mainstream for some time if ever.
Twitter was always toxic.
Yes, but it’s 1000x worse now.
News orgs would have set up their own Mastodon instances ages ago and moved there if they were even 10% as “liberal” as the wingers claim they are…
Good, but Mastodon has been a great option for a long time…
yoo not call mii toxic, i hav big brian.
Reguards Elon Mush.
You ----------------> Horse
Cue drowning child meme
Better summary: Biased journalists bitter their ideas don’t get traction where everyone isn’t holed up in an echo chamber so they blame racism and homophobia while migrating to a platform run by the same corrupt garbage, but its BLUE garbage.
If you’re still federated you’re doing it wrong.
