Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?

  • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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    4 hours ago

    My $0.02 from extensive cryptocurrency experience:

    A centralized project with a user base never becomes decentralized later. It’s always a lie to get users quickly. Centralization generally just gets worse.

    I think BlueSky will keep half-assing decentralization until their owners decide that narrative is no longer necessary.

  • Hafty@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    None of the people I follow are active on Mastodon. The selling point to me for Bluesky is that it’s essentially a Twitter clone not owned by a billionaire. It’s friendly to the communities I’m part of specifically and doesn’t have ads. What more should anyone ask for from a social media platform?

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      That’s how it is today, that is how most of these projects start out. Google too was “do no evil” and look at what it is today, or what it’s been for the last decade.

      How will bluesky be tomorrow?

    • ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml
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      13 hours ago

      What more you should ask is precisely that it’s not owned privately. Otherwise, soon the next Elmo comes along and buys this one too.

      • Hafty@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Sure, I get that, it’s just when it eventually becomes corrupt or falls apart, everyone that moved from Twitter to Threads to Bluesky will find another platform. Nobody is going to move to Mastodon until the people they want to follow move there too.

        In my three attempts to make Mastodon work for my needs in the last few years, I can’t follow NBA or NFL news, catch up on AEW wrestling or hang out with IRL friends.

        The content I want/need simply isn’t there. Until it is, i don’t really care how private it is or how perfectly decentralized it is.

    • Eddy@lemm.ee
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      18 hours ago

      This is why I can’t get into it. The whole twitter format just feels so unappealing to me.

      • ddash@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        14 hours ago

        Yeah, that is me too. I tried Mastodon for a bit and it just didn’t work for me. Posting something just drowns you out until you actually have a decent amount of followers, however many that may need to be.

        If I post with a new account, 99% of it goes into the void. I had a few people like and boost my posts but they were still gone into oblivion within an hour or less. Not sure how that is appealing? It is like a popularity contest. Like those cliques in schools of the popular kids.

    • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
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      20 hours ago

      It surly can’t avoid having ads permanently tho?

      I assume they’re just burning cash rn but will eventually need to have sustainable income. Alternatively Mastodon is an actual non-profit, it doesn’t need to have the same type of income

  • CitricBase@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    People didn’t go to Bluesky because of an informed choice based on features or security. People went to Bluesky because that’s where everyone they want to follow went.

    • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Bluesky isn’t Twitter. That’s all that mattered to most people. A few influential people went there first and the network effect kicked in.

    • realitista@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      But Bluesky does have a lot better features when it comes to actually effectively using the platform. Getting set up on Bluesky is orders of magnitude easier than Mastodon, and I do think that’s a big part of why it’s become the preferred destination recently. Mastodon had a real shot early on but didn’t make it easy enough for people.

      • QualifiedKitten@discuss.online
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        13 hours ago

        I’m probably an idiot, but my experience was exactly the opposite. I don’t really feel like following specific users (at least for now), I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn’t figure it out on Bluesky.

        I never used Twitter, and am not particularly excited about the general format, so I’m probably not the target user, but I check Mastodon occasionally, and gave up on Bluesky after like 2 days.

        • Ulrich@feddit.org
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          3 hours ago

          I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn’t figure it out on Bluesky.

          BSky is just a little different, and I would argue superior, in the way discovery works. Instead of searching for hashtags for a subject (which can easily be abused) you search for feeds of the subject, which are far more useful. Then if you want, you can combine multiple feeds.

          • QualifiedKitten@discuss.online
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            2 hours ago

            Another commenter shared a link with a guide to create a custom feed, and I definitely see how that can be better. As a new user, I was having too much trouble finding an easy way to create my own custom feed, and wasn’t happy with any of the existing feeds that I looked at… they all seemed to include more “junk” than the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon. I agree that simply following hashtags has downsides, but the logic as to why a specific post shows up in my feed is much more obvious in that case, allowing me to more easily troubleshoot and adjust my follow/block settings.

        • realitista@lemm.ee
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          13 hours ago

          On Bluesky you follow starter packs which are collections of users which go to your main feed. https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all

          Or you follow feeds which are set up by users to track certain topics. These can be very highly customized follows of people, hashtags, keywords, crowd tagged topics, including blocks of certain stuff. These are like subreddits or Lemmy communities. https://blueskydirectory.com/feeds/all

          • QualifiedKitten@discuss.online
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            4 hours ago

            Yeah, I saw those and appreciate the idea, but I didn’t like them, at least not yet. I just want to follow a few cat related tags, maybe some FOSS stuff, and some tags relevant to my local area. I just clicked through a few feeds related to each of those, but didn’t like any of the ones that came up. Each feed contains posts that seem totally irrelevant and I don’t understand why they’re included or how to tweak my feed to remove them.

              • QualifiedKitten@discuss.online
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                2 hours ago

                Thanks! I was looking for a way to build my own feed, but this is the first guide I’ve seen that seems relatively simple to follow. I agree that there’s downsides to simply following hashtags, but I’m familiar with ways to curate my feed based on hashtags, and just wanted to start with something familiar. The curated feeds are probably great for a lot of people, but just really frustrated me, as the feeds I happened to browse seemed to somehow include more “junk” than what I’ve encountered with the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon.

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        Getting set up on Bluesky is orders of magnitude easier than Mastodon,

        I’m so tired of hearing this. Just click the mastodon.social button in the app and it’s not any different.

        • realitista@lemm.ee
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          14 hours ago

          Not setting up an account, that’s roughly the same. Adding contacts by topic, blocking topics and people with bad agendas en masse, etc. I started my Mastodon account almost a year before Bluesky. In Bluesky I had something useful in a week. In Mastodon I still don’t (and it’s not for lack of effort).

        • MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca
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          20 hours ago

          I’ve been on Mastodon for two years now. I’m active and all.

          And yet, to this date, I still can’t find a single person in my working field, who are located within the province of Quebec.

          Bluesky? Found and added over a hundred, in mere days.

          • Ulrich@feddit.org
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            19 hours ago

            Yeah I mean you’re making my point here. More marketshare = more leverage over users.

            • MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca
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              19 hours ago

              I don’t think I do… what I explained was, Mastodon is too difficult not because of the interface, it’s because it’s too decentralized, to the point of everyone getting lost in the forest, and no one can find each other within the networks.

              As for Bluesky, while it’s not the best or safest alternative, is way more convenient for networking—the raison d’être of a social network.

              • Ulrich@feddit.org
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                18 hours ago

                No one is arguing about that. None of that matters when BlueSky turns into the next Xitter. Your social network is irrelevant when you can’t even find those people in a feed full of ads for weight loss supplements and unchecked disinformation.

                • MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca
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                  18 hours ago

                  I know that. And I do believe Mastodon is superior tech-wise, safer and better.

                  But, at this moment, the people I look to reach are on Bluesky, none are on Mastodon.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          22 hours ago

          Wouldn’t that mean everyone is centralized on the same instance? I don’t use Mastodon so I don’t know if it’s the same as here…

          • Ulrich@feddit.org
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            22 hours ago

            Not everyone. Just those users who don’t care enough to be picky. I wish they would rotate the instances but this is better than nothing.

            • Comtief@lemm.ee
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              21 hours ago

              Sorry what do you mean? I see users posting from other instances in my mastodon app (I haven’t used it much).

              • Ulrich@feddit.org
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                21 hours ago

                Sorry, what do you mean?

                I see users posting from other instances in my mastodon app

                Which would indicate that

                everyone is centralized on the same instance?

                is incorrect.

                • Comtief@lemm.ee
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                  20 hours ago

                  Idk this whole thread confuses me. I’m on est.social instance, I’m gonna assume I see everyone who hasnt excluded my instance and vice versa…

      • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        You can convenience or security, never both. Unfortunately bluesky’s compromises towards convenience hurt it’s security measures against enshittification

        • realitista@lemm.ee
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          14 hours ago

          For me it’s the difference between something that’s usable for its purpose and something that’s not. As much as I wanted to use Mastodon and tried, it just never got off the ground. If Mastodon introduced starter packs, subscribable block lists, topic tagging and blocks, etc. I would use it in the same way I do Bluesky. But it hasn’t done that so I don’t.

        • Ulrich@feddit.org
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          21 hours ago

          You can convenience or security, never both.

          Generally, yes. Strictly, no.

    • TheFogan@programming.dev
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      1 day ago

      Hell I wouldn’t even say that… they don’t understand it, they don’t care to understand it, they don’t know or care what federated means. They went there because, it’s not currently nazified twitter.

      I get that it’s “technically” federated… but practically it’s for all practical purposes just a proprietary program, run by a group that isn’t currently horrific. Unfortunately everything I see in it says, it’s every bit as vulnerable, and it can be good for as long as the owners care about not becoming a nazi propoganda machine. Actual recourse from it going evil… is non existant.

  • ryan213@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Come join Mastodon where the skies are bluer and the grass is greener.

  • Mist101@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I had a nice little profile on there until about a month ago. I didn’t delete when I saw AI spammers join. And I kept my profile even when the mods were starting to become reddit-ish. What sent me over the edge was when they announced a partnership with an AI company who said they were “just there to beef up security”. Yeah, no, not for me. Super sad, too, because Bluesky is a good idea, but I’m sticking with the fediverse.

  • Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    it’s not yet federated properly, or would not be completely, but it’s still a good player in the game for now. I’ll advocate against it if shareholders start shenanigans.

    • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
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      20 hours ago

      It’s not a non-profit like Mastodon so, seems inevitable

    • danc4498@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I get the mentality, but that’s the problem with enshitification. It always starts good, but once all the twitter traffic moves over, and the world becomes dependent on BlueSky the way it still is for Twitter, what do they become next?

      It would be better to push people away from the closed platform and towards the actual open platform.

      Edit: maybe BlueSky is open source. In such case, if they start fucking around, maybe it would be simple to fork this source code and form your own community. I think until other instances gain tractions, it is hard to consider BlueSky comparable to mastadon.

      https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app

      • Die4Ever@programming.dev
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        24 hours ago

        maybe it would be simple to fork this source code and form your own community

        The network effect makes this extremely difficult, even with the source code, it’s basically starting from scratch again.

          • Die4Ever@programming.dev
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            14 hours ago

            In theory I guess. But you’d need a ton of funding just to get the server power for that, and there’s no guarantee that users will switch over to your service. And if Bluesky starts turning bad then they could start blocking your instance. Also the users are much more valuable than the data. There’s lots of ways this could fail to pan out. The Fediverse is much more flexible to new instances joining.

            • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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              20 hours ago

              True. There’s reassurance in Bluesky plus many open-source endeavors getting that funding, though. One might look at organizations like SDF. There’s millions of insane people out there like me and at least one of them has a big-enough nest egg.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 day ago

        if shareholders start shenanigans.

        That happens only when user count and platform lock in are past the point of no return. This sentence is the essence of why platforms have been allowed to do this again and again.

        Its already too late for bluesky, because even if they started federating now, any other instance would be in such a minority that it would have zero sway over the wider federation if bluesky HQ went rogue.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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        1 day ago

        That’s exactly what Bluesky was designed for: so that anyone can clone their qubibytes of data and start a new central platform anytime without any account loss (though this mechanism relies on user domain owners staying the same). You can read more at https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ from the ‘Bluesky is centralized, but “credible exit” is a worthy pursuit’ section on.

        • danc4498@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Is this possible to do now? If BlueSky was bought out by somebody like Trump, could he disable this feature?

          BlueSky is not open source, is it? The entire premise of things like mastodon and Lemmy is that they are open source and federated at their core. Nobody can change that.

          BlueSky is not federated at its core or there would be other BlueSky instances.

            • danc4498@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              Sure, but the federated aspect is not at the core of its functionality the way it is for Mastadon/Lemmy. If Elon Musk ever bought BlueSky, would he be able to shut down 3rd party instances? Or stop supporting them with security updates? Would the instances be forced to abide by whatever rules Elon says in order to stay active?

              This is a hypothetical scenario, but if the answer is “yes” to any of those questions, then it is not worth the risk of moving to BlueSky. You’re just kicking the can down the road.

              There is no way for Elon to come in and take over mastadon. He could buy the organization, but the software is open source he cannot ever stop that. Meaning he could never force his values onto the fediverse the way he did with Twitter.

              • Flic@mstdn.social
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                1 day ago

                @danc4498 agree! Just interesting to note that someone is trying a new instance. Unclear, as you say, what control they will have.

                • danc4498@lemmy.world
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                  1 day ago

                  I did some digging, and it seems like BlueSky is open source. I’m not sure the process of creating an instance, or how easy it is for an instance to interact with the main instance. So maybe I take back much of what I’ve said.

        • danc4498@lemmy.world
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          24 hours ago

          This would be good. I just hope it can do so while still being a part of BlueSky (as it is today).

      • Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        The devs also made it clear that if ever bsky became crap, the system is made so that you could just jump over to another instance and go from there.

        So far so good, but yeah I get it, the more they talk about investors, the more I’m reluctant to jump in fully.

        • MysticKetchup@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Except they haven’t actually backed that up with a way for you to jump servers. If the central Bsky server goes down, it takes the network with it. Until they actually let other people host, it’s just meaningless posturing. Without a way for people to leave their network you are as captive there as you are on Twitter

          • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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            1 day ago

            They do let other people host; it’s just that they’re not going to be federated and one has to clone quite a lot of data. And there’s people mirroring Bluesky’s servers.

    • Ulrich@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      I’ll advocate against it if shareholders start shenanigans

      I mean, they will. It’s inevitable. So why bother? BlueSky also ultimately retains the final word on moderation as well.

  • venotic@kbin.melroy.org
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    22 hours ago

    Bluesky didn’t have a strong of a hold on me, tried it, wasn’t impressed with what was there before deleting the account. Getting too burned out on social media in general to really be invested in these kinds of platforms. The fediverse is more or less my last rodeo.

  • postall@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Every time i’m amazed at how such authors are talented at avoiding mentioning Nostr 😏

    • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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      1 day ago

      You mean the Dorsey-endorsed crypto platform that has spam waves conducted against Bluesky and ActivityPub?

    • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      the speed with which you encounter your first nazi on nostr is not indicative of a system worth spending time on