surely that corporation won’t be evil
Aah, rather choosing the next company which can turn into corporate bs than using federated Mastodon. I don’t get people.
because mastodon had an opportunity for a migration from twitter and they spent it attacking journalists who started posting on there
It’s not the users, it’s the developers / investors. I’ve tried so many times to get into Mastodon, but it sucks compared to Bluesky. It lacks content and polish, so it’s no wonder everyday people choose Bluesky over it.
The real conundrum is why isn’t there a for profit company with big money behind it, investing in ActivityPub. I guess you could point to Threads? But insert your “not like that” meme of choice.
Fwiw, apparently Bluesky did initially look at activity pub, but found the protocol lacking, which is why they invented ATProto. I don’t know the details though.
What do devs/investors have to do with content? The users are creating the content. And then, there’s not really an algorithm rooting you in. You are free to follow the people you’re actually interested in, how it is supposed to be.
I also don’t have any polishing problems myself. It all just works, there are nice apps, etc.
Why would you want to have a for profit company with Mastodon? That’s what would probably ruin it in the long run, as they would go for their interests, instead of interests of users and the platform itself. Of course it’s hard surviving by donations and so on, but I think that’s the way it should go.
Because you need network effect. Which means you need big money for marketing, content moderation and development costs. That includes algorithms, which maybe you don’t want, but most people do.
It’s not that I want a for profit company, I just don’t think Mastodon will every achieve critical mass without one.
Even as a Lemmy user, I still don’t know how the Fediverse works completely. You’re just lying to yourself if you think understanding Mastodon is easier then just making a blue sky account.
Do you understand how email works? You dont have 1 centralised email server. You pick one and thats your email address name@emailserver. It then talks to other email servers unless its blocked emails from that server.
In principal, Mastodon and Lemmy are exactly the same.
I keep seeing this analogy and unfortunately that’s not how email servers work so it never really helps honestly. The servers are the To: fields, not the From: fields. And there’s also no real analogy about privacy. With most email providers the intent isn’t that everyone reads everyone else’s email. So frankly I really don’t know what insight this is supposed to provide if it doesn’t behave like email.
And there’s a big safety difference. With something like Bluesky you have to trust the server admins to behave. With ActivityPub you have to trust each and every user of the service. Which is why server admins get shirty about whether they will forward messages to or from other servers. That whole situation doesn’t really exist with email. It’s not like you have create a Hotmail account because Gmail has decided to defederate with Google or whatever.
In the office that I work in, I’d be surprised if I’d need more than one hand to count how many people would understand this.
*in principle, not in principal.
I didn’t say that. But it’s still not that complicated, as someone else also replied with the email example
Apparently you don’t know how it works either, read the reply to that reply.
Much less people on mastodon, while most accounts I used to follow on Twitter have migrated to Bluesky or at least use both it and Twitter now.
But that’s not a problem of Mastodon. It’s the problem of people not switching here
Centralisation makes things easy.
If it takes more than 1 minute to onboard to a new service, and especially if you have to overcome any learning barrier (such as what ‘instances’ are and how to choose one) then the vast majority of people will immediately throw that option out and won’t even consider it.
People like bluesky specifically because it gives them something almost identical to what they had before.
It’s great that Bluesky is gaining traction, but how sure are we that it won’t turn to shit before other relays come online and make it actually decentralised?
It 100% will, it has already started
I’m sure it will.
Well, Mastodon is still up and running. And people can always migrate.
We aren’t sure. It’s still a billionaire owned social media. For some reason people are too afraid of the freedom actual decentralized social media gives them and they want a billionaire behind the scenes running everything and coralling them to the correct opinions.
It’s not fear of the freedom, it’s choice paralysis. People want to go to one website, sign up for one account and then be part of a network with absolutely zero research beforehand. I like the fediverse, but the barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.
Internet services getting shitty and then dying is nothing new. Look at MySpace, Digg, or any BBS. people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They’ll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing
barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.
I just don’t buy that argument. Email is prolific and virtually no one knows how it works. IMO it comes down to marketing budgets.
I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.
Instead, for-profit ventures are motivated by money to come up with new ideas and push them into the mainstream with their marketing budgets. Then later, the fediverse copies those ideas, often with half-baked approximations that are hard to scale (usually due to bandwidth and/or moderation costs).
people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They’ll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing
I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.
I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.
Strong agree. Email is prolific because it is the proto social network infrastructure, and it has interoperability at its core. You have someones email, you can write them. Theoretically it doesn’t matter what email you send it from, you can send an email to any address in the world. There are limits to this these days, because of things like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, which have been introduced because of shortcomings in the open protocols, but in its purest form, there are no barriers.
If ActivityPub had been around at the same time as email, it would be considered infrastructure the same way email is today. The online world would look different, but don’t neglect that industries are still finding ways to make money from email. There might not have been platforms like the social media silos we have today, but there might be an industry trying to milk ActivityPub for money.
I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.
I too subscribe to this hope. I always end up writing emails to people I haven’t been in touch with for a long time, and aren’t sure about which phone number, social network, or physial address they are currently reachable on. Which reminded me of this post:
https://my-notes.dragas.net/2023/09/25/25-years-later/
Email just (still) works. Can’t ask for more than that.
Yes. This is the best explanation of why people choose the platforms they use.
I think it’s also a lack of tech understanding. I know how easy it is to fork a repo so I get how great the fediverse is with all the services being FOSS and anyone can create an instance. This major benefit makes no sense to someone who doesn’t even know what a git repo is or the difference between free (but you are the product being sold) and FOSS.
Even if you understand the tech, the fediverse has a content discovery problem. The content you want to see may actually exist. However, your instance needs knowledge of the content that best fits you. That’s what bluesky’s model does better.
Yep this is the real problem. I can’t find the stuff I want to see on Mastodon. But on Bluesky it’s super easy.
This. The average user doesn’t want to know about the workings and ‘All that technical stuff’, and why should they?
They want to click an icon and have everything and everyone there. They shouldn’t have to swap instances or what have you.
I put Mastodon on a back burner as it’s just too clunky (for me at least) and am currently interacting with people from all over on BlueSky. Half the time on Mastodon (various apps/instances, web, or browser) I couldn’t even log on.
BlueSky will probably go the way of others. Yes, there is a troll problem, and you need to be wary. But I had the same to a lesser extent on Mastodon.
In the end, I’ve had to accept my relatives, work, and old Army colleagues will never be on there, I’ve become resigned to that and keep a WhatsApp account for that reason.
Didn’t you hear? Digg is coming back, now with AI!
And one of the muppets behind Reddit, kn0thing.
I don’t believe it has anything to do with people’s fear. More money means more marketing power. It’s that simple.
Most aren’t even aware that a decentralized option exists.
Even so, if celebrities started using something, their users would follow them - as happened with Bluesky, and to a much smaller extent the Rexodus from Reddit to Lemmy over the 3rd party app debacle.
But there seem to be just too many problems to make it worth most people’s efforts. Like lack of content. And speaking of Lemmy, r/RedditAlternatives is full of people that came over here, but then went back - citing lack of content and presence of toxicity as their top reasons.
I almost left due to the toxicity of the tankie triad but luckily I learned the block features work well.
Me too. I found a post via browsing by All, and responded with something innocuous (I thought) to the effect that “Biden may not be perfect, but he did at least lower gasoline prices and that’s not entirely nothing”… and the responses kept coming for WEEKS and WEEKS. And then I did it again - once was on Lemmygrad.ml and the other on hexbear.net.
Even taking it as a given that I’m a dumb stupid idiot (am I though?), it was obvious to me how “consent” matters not at all to them. I was being “dunked on”, which tbf is literally written in the side-bar text of ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net!.. EXCEPT that I found it by browsing All, so had never seen that!?
So to clarify, it’s not that I think such places shouldn’t exist entirely, just that they are not a match to everyone else across the Fediverse, particularly the more mainstream normie, mostly centrists in the USA that were coming over from Reddit (including myself).
Mind you, PieFed provides full solutions to all of these issues: the side-bar text is shown down below EVERY post from a community (okay so someone could still find something via All and respond via comment without ever seeing it but… it’s something?), and more importantly it provides the ability to place messages attached to like URLs or more relevant here, Lemmy instances. Hexbear is fully defederated from PieFed.social but if it were not, then for one I wouldn’t be here, but moreover I would push heavily for such a message to be added that warns people who do not know the lore already. Also you can do personal defederations without needing admin support, by truly blocking all users from a given instance (I do it for lemmy.ml), unlike Lemmy’s horribly misnamed feature that would be better termed a community muting (that still allows those users to spam your inbox with notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS). Also, PieFed allows you to trigger notifications for anything at all - a user, a particular post, a singular comment (whether yours or by someone else), and thus CRUCIALLY allows you to STOP receiving notifications for something when you don’t want that anymore.
And those aren’t even the top features of PieFed:-). However, back then PieFed didn’t exist, so I can well understand all the people complaining in places such as r/RedditAlternatives (as I mentioned but I’ll bring it up again:-) why they tried out Lemmy and decided to abandon it. You and I almost did the same - and we are by no means alone in that, as, still yet again, many did do so.
Unfortunately Lemmy’s feature set in this regard have actively gone backwards lately - e.g. instance blocking used to not allow notifications, but now it does. And Lemmy.ml seems integrated heavily into the Lemmy processes, so much so that most instances don’t dare to defederate from it. This seems relevant since the OP was talking about “centralization”, and while in theory the Lemmy sourcecode doesn’t absolutely 100% mandate that a new instance be federated with lemmy.ml, in practice it is true that every single major instance has done so. i.e. we talk a lot about decentralization, even while we have this major centralization feature present in the Lemmyverse.
Thus forcing new users to be exposed to the anti-Western propaganda (e.g. “bOtH sIdEs SaMe”), before they learn how to block those communities and users (but are prevented from doing so for the entire instance) one by one…
I might have to try PieFed. I think this might inspire me to.
Omg it’s amazing! Treat yourself enough to make an account. Once you see the sign-up wizard, asking you what your interests are and pre-signing you up to communities based on your responses, and it asking you how much content you would like to see containing the keywords “Musk” or “Trump” (importantly, not just All vs. None, but an intermediate Some as well), you’ll see what the Threadiverse has been missing!
After that, it does take quite some getting used to, coming from Lemmy and Reddit, but that’s a good thing bc it has so many more CHOICES that you can make, like not just All vs. Subscribed (vs. Local), but categories of communities. Like e.g. you could choose not to subscribe to any political communities so that you won’t be deluged with such every single time you log on, and yet all the News and Politics are available in the appropriately named News and Politics - which (it just keeps getting better and better) are also user customizable and shareable as well!
It’s not perfected yet - notifications are sometimes buggy and the search function sucks compared to Lemmy - but it serves my needs 99.9% of the time and for the rest there’s my Lemmy alt to fall back to anyway:-).
So yes indeed, try it and you’ll fall in love instantly, finding yourself using it more often until it’s your main. You’ll see.:-)
Oh and the developer team adds features practically weekly, plus is super friendly and responsive, so there’s that too.:-)
“But none of my friends are on there.”
Make new friends then.
Right, so we just trade in our relatives for some new ones.
That’s the attitude that puts people off.
At some point you have to jump ship and follow what fits you and your needs/wants in terms of security, morality (in the context of Meta and its complete lack of ethics), etc. You can try and get folks to try other platforms but most of them will inevitably fall back to what they know and never leave. I’m not going to keep Facebook around on the off chance that one relative needs to reach out. The relatives willing to actually make an effort can already text or call me and vice versa.
This whole billionaire social media prison is not something I’m willing to keep destroying my mental health on over some “blood is thicker than water” bs.
Yeah I get that, it’s why I don’t use FB anymore. I keep WhatsApp for close family though. They’re is no other option. And dont tell me to use text. Doesn’t cut it.
Oh, no I get it. I went to Chile a few years ago and it made me realize how truly big the WhatsApp community was in South America. It was on billboards, buildings; it’s become a necessity.
Tech people tend to make horrible salespeople, especially to non-technical normies.
The thing is, some people value different things… and that’s okay.
I’d say that we’re sure it will. It has begun making the same shady practices like redirecting all out going links through go.bsky*app 🙄
it’s it really shady when they stated up front they’re doing it so posters and journalists can see where their traffic is coming from?
Well, if they tell the truth then it’s fine. But no way to know what they do with this redirect (to my knowledge at least).
Ah yes, to prove they drive traffic to places, they funnel all outgoing links through themselves for tracking.
Can you please explain? Is that like the amp prefix or more sinister?
go.bsky.com does not even exist. Do you mean go.bsky*.com?
And they reported that it was to gather the referral when going to websites, which constitutes their income. But it’s closed source so we don’t know. It could be tracking and selling the data.
Sorry, it is go.bsky*app. I corrected my comment!
My tenuous understanding from an article I read about the AT protocol but barely remember is that it can’t be fully decentralized. I think you have to use bluesky for user authentication. And I think it said the hosting hardware requirements would be significant to the point where it’s not very feisable. I welcome corrections/clarifications.
Point is, assuming that’s reasonably correct, true decentralization isn’t possible. And by it’s nature as a big corporate owned site, enshittification is inevitable.
The authentication parts uses a standard w3c developed format called DID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier it’s basically a more general form of a url that must point to a specially formatted file. There are several did methods. atproto supports did:web which stores the doc at a user-set http URL path, and also did:PLC which stores the doc in a special database controlled by bsky. They plan (hopefully) add more methods in the future.
the currently supported did:web authentication method is fully independent of bsky inc
Yes, apparently their protocol sends everything to every node, so it would overwhelm anything but a very powerful and expensive server. The Fediverse’s ActivityPub protocol is more efficient and only sends traffic where it is needed.
This was true for a while but they’re updating the sync protocol to support sharding etc. people are running full network relays off a raspberry pi
It’s federated in name only.
I blame ActivityPub. W3C didn’t get their shit together when they invented the standard and now we are paying the price.
Or just users being too stupid. I do not see any real problems with AP
it requires a very large investment to run a node, but the fact that it’s possible means it’s open by necessity, which means we can bridge to mastodon etc
this means that it will be a lot easier for people to migrate, since they don’t have to give up their entire social network
imo it’s a good jumping off point: people clearly have problems with the mastodon “on ramp” and are having no issues with bsky, so imo it’s a step in the right direction and we can’t let perfect be the enemy of better
What else is there though? Mastodon by design is counter-culture, so why then are people surprised when “culture” in turn does not like it?
As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person’s followers could get confused. Throwing out right or wrong, famous people worry about stuff like this, which would require a level of coordination and communication across the Fediverse - i.e. a type of “centralization” (even if accomplished via possibly decentralized means?). I’m not sure if I am remembering correctly or not, but I thought there was even a fix submitted to the codebase, which has sat for YEARS without being reviewed or approved. If not this feature though, other features have definitely followed this pattern.
TLDR 1: you snooze, you lose.
TLDR 2: ideological purity
testsbeatings will continue, until moral improves.TLDR 3: FAAFO means, it turns out, that if you entirely ignore everything / most things that the users that you hope will use your platform ask for, they might just go elsewhere, where they feel welcomed.
Is Mastodon behaving similarly to an incel culture, demanding that people like what a “nice”
manplatform it is, rather than do the work required to make people actually happy with what it offers? And if not (due to other reasons, perhaps funding), then what is the functional difference really, between that vs. whatever it is doing?So yeah, Bluesky it is then. If we want something better, we had best get to actually building it.
As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person’s followers could get confused.
Tbf, you can basically do this now - throwback to the start of paying for Twitter verification…
On Mastodon, the simple answer is you use the verification to prove it’s you by using rel=me links.
It’s not perfect, as you’d expect, but in an age where everything is suspect anyway…
On bluesky/atproto, your handle is a hostname and is only recognized valid if you control that hostname. Basically the same as rel=me except it’s a .well-known file instead of a html tag
You can be anything. Any company. Any person. Any organization. On any platform. Anything.
Thank you for explaining about the relationship=me links.
Email ofc is the same - e.g. BillGates@google.123 just maybe might perhaps not be the same person as BillGates@microsoft.com. Nevertheless, Bluesky makes this stuff trivially easy, as too does Reddit, by virtue of centralization.
So the task would come down to convincing people to prefer more effort on their part vs. less effort somewhere else - while also at the same time doing this on top of all the other criticisms as well (none of my friends are there, there’s barely any content, trying to find stuff is so very hard, why do the developers fight amongst themselves leading to an abysmally slow rate of improvements, and basically why should I care about this anymore then, if others likewise can’t be bothered to care either?). And the vast majority of people are going to choose the latter over the former.
It’s not even necessarily a bad thing, so much as it simply is, and we must make peace with it, or expend effort to overcome it ourselves, bc that’s just how the law of entropy works.
How does reddit implement this? Afaik famous peoples accounts were known only by reputation and if they posted some form of image verification publicly, but there wasnt any identity verification going on on reddits end. Thats how it used to be everywhere, and how it probably should still be. If you saw an account claiming to be someone, you didn’t believe it was actually them unless you could check it out and verify their identity in some way.
Should or shouldn’t doesn’t matter. The majority wants an account that doesn’t require external verification.
Ignore the fact that that’s not truly possible. People will go to whatever platform makes them feel it’s true the best.
Being capable of effectively convincing people your platform will provide this is a baseline requirement to even start having this discussion. The anonymous Internet isn’t something most people want
People want “anonymous for me, not for thee” mixed with “I don’t trust you, trust me bro”.
Starting from a basis that people want a contradiction, people will go to whichever platform “cons” them better.
Facebook had a real name policy, then it didn’t. Twitter had an anonymous policy, then it added verified accounts, now anyone can buy the blue, so they added a gold.
Meanwhile, people don’t want to understand that others can behave in different ways or capacities at different times, but if course want full understanding for themselves.
Goggle’s Circles had the right idea, but it failed explosively by showing their hand to people who want to pretend it doesn’t exist.
I thought the title was hyperbole at first, but I just checked the Google Play charts, and it’s not even in the top 200 under the Social category anymore. Less than a month ago it was in the top 5. Talk about a rapid decline…Edit: See below
I went on Twitter to download my data pre-deletion (still nothing) and Billy Bragg was on there. What the hell?! That’s practically on a par with guesting on Joe Rogan by now.
