X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky. : technology

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 10 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I'd say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you're not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I'm sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They're not doing it for your benefit.

That said, I've come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I'm expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

It's all cyclical anyway. No social media company will reign forever. We've already seen a number of them rise and fall. It's kinda like how different civilizations gained and lost dominance throughout history.

[–] MooseTheDog@lemmy.world 11 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Go to your favorite content creators and ask them to create a profile on Bluesky. If you don't ask them, how are they supposed to know?

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

I'm still on the fence about that...I think it'd make more sense for many to drop social media and opt for their own site with RSS feeds. A lot of social media for some is little more than a noisier RSS reader. Sometimes even literally with those with auto-playing videos. 😬

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

But how would the bots reply? That's what generates foot traffic, which is what brings ads, which is what is not enough to pay for the bills!

Perfect business model, I had a VC review it and got high marks

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

RSS is kinda a pain to set up though, not everyone wants to go through that.

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

It can be, yeah. However, similar may be said of responsible social media setup.

[–] MooseTheDog@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

They should know they have options at least. Then they can make the decision for themselves.

[–] Yes_Man@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

I run a few bots on Bluesky and absently check it occasionally on a personal account. Anecdotally I can say that I'm seeing a lot more engagement even just over the last week.

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 20 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

I'm on Bluesky. I have seen a drama increase in followers in the last few days since Twitter let blocked people see content that were blocked from.

It's a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.

I had to decide if I was going to Mastodon or Bluesky. I picked Bluesky because after reading Mastodon's integration problems with itself I wanted nothing to do with it. It couldn't scale unless each instance played nice and in the years since it went live they had refused to do that and showed no signs of even moving in that direction.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Mastodon is scaling fine though? I've been using it for years, and it's great, and still growing. User base is a bit tech focused, could be more general, but I think it'll get there eventually.

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Are instances federated or rag-tag islands?

[–] AwakenedAce@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 hour ago

Well I'd say most of them are federated together, or at least those with a good amount of users. In practice you don't really get islands other than I guess troll instances that everyone has blocked.

And AFAIK as long as an instance isn't blocked by yours (and vice versa to be useful), you can follow a person on that unfederated instance and it should just work and get federated.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

I have seen a drama increase in followers

If there's one thing a social media site loves, its a drama increase.

It’s a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.

Honestly, more than anything, it feels like an indictment of Threads. That was supposed to be the big party spot for creatives, journalists, and D-list celebrities following the burn out of Twitter. But modern Threads just feels like the worst kind of Hype-House crossbred with LinkedIn.

BlueSky feels a lot more like a vintage '00s social media site, which is all people really wanted. Hope it survives its own popularity better than Twitter did. But for now, life is good.

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

I'm leaving the drama typo. You made it too good to take away

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

What are the Mastadon Integration problems?

[–] pixelscript@lemm.ee 13 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

I'm pretty sure they're referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.

Bluesky is ""federated"" in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there's basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.

To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it's an irritation.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

You could just stay on the biggest mastadon instance and not care about anything. Wouldn't be too different than just using bluesky.

Preferring handcuffs because it's more seemless sounds like a terrible mindset

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world -1 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

Preferring handcuffs because it’s more seemless

They're not handcuffs. You can always log off.

But the big appeal of BlueSky is the initialization of the interface. It defaults you to "Following" rather than "Discover" and isn't jamming a ton of ads in your feed. There's basically no algorithm. Its a very basic service, rather than an engineered mess. More akin to Facebook or Twitter from back in the '00s, before monetization ruined them.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 51 minutes ago)

the big appeal of BlueSky is the initialization of the interface. It defaults you to "Following" rather than "Discover" and isn't jamming a ton of ads in your feed. There's basically no algorithm. Its a very basic service, rather than an engineered mess. More akin to Facebook or Twitter from back in the '00s, before monetization ruined them.

The big appeal of bluesky is that it is in the early stages of monetization that hinges on effectively enclosing a commons so that everybody chooses the product and everything else effectively dies off. The next stage will come, which is when the enshittification happens.

Do we honestly believe there won't be enshittification because the priorities of the current development in the near future is focused on benefiting users?

...or to put it another way, do you set a mouse trap with food a mouse finds miserable to eat? Do you think that first bite of cheese accurately depicts the reality about to unfold?

Here is some more food for thought, given the fact that large western social media corporations and the investors behind them have the equivalent power and cash of small nation states... why all of a sudden the interest now? If Bluesky is a genuine vision of the future why did all these prestigious, highly paid people with more power and R&D resources at their disposal than any of us could hope to ever have...show up AFTER the fediverse already did the R&D, created the vision and took the impossibly hard step of breaking ground and fighting up hill against the network effect and a generally dismissive tech press?

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Everything you just said is also true of mastodon.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 1 points 2 hours ago

Yeah I didn't know Mastadon monetizes

[–] Lennny@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

an irritation

I get it, hearing about federation is the worst part of this site . Y'all sound like coinbros "here's the most inefficient storage method, lets call it something easy to remember and sell it as a feature!"

[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Partly. Except the time different Mastodon instances were not federated much or at all. If you wanted to go follow someone on Mastodon you had to know the exact server they were on. In an environment like Reddit and Lemmy where you're there for the communities instead of the people that isn't an issue. But if you want to go follow some specific podcaster you need to know the instance because there's no guarantee that whatever instance you happen upon is going to be joined up with the one there on.

Everyone was busy running their own servers and not trying to tie everything together. It was a thing that could be done but a thing not enough were doing.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

That's nonsense. I'm on one of the main servers, and like 90% of my feed is from other servers, and it includes lots of small servers. And that's been true for years.

It's try the search function was bad prior to earlier this year, but it's improved a bit. And if you are looking for someone specific, then presumably their account would be listed somewhere on their website?

[–] pixelscript@lemm.ee 3 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there's only some high-profile defed exceptions.

A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn't remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.

That's...Not how Lemmy works either. In fact, and someone may correct me if I'm mistaken here, your hell is sort of how it works as I understand it. Instances don't have any built-in crawlers to seek out others running on ActivityPub with the same software, e.g. Lemmy or Mastodon or the like. That's genuinely been one of the biggest stumbling blocks with the whole protocol, as discovery is largely a manual affair. The only crawlers we have are the people using the service and following remote people or communities or channels from other instances to let the one we're on see them.

One of the basic reasons for this that I've read is that it's related to handling scaling, as each instance trying to handle all of the data of all the people on each other instance right away would bog down the servers and probably crash them. It also arguably works out, to a degree, that there's a good chance not everyone on each instance is of interest to each other anyway, so you may not want or need each server to know about every other server's people/channels/communities/etc.

But I'm going to stop before I get too much further into the weeds of all this. The irony is that the simplest solution to discovery issues with all of this presently is to invite those you want to have a similar experience to you, or want to connect to with the fewest jumps, to the same instance as you to mitigate any of those issues. Does that tend to undermine many of the benefits of it all? In a lot of ways, yeah, but that's where many ActivityPub platforms are at currently, at least the more popular ones as I understand them.

[–] pixelscript@lemm.ee 1 points 56 minutes ago

My true hell would be instances only federating explicitly through whitelist. If what the other reply I received about Mastodon is correct, and if Lemmy behaves similary, then they operate on an implicit auto-federation with every other instance. Actual transaction of data needs to be triggered by some user on that instance reaching out to the other instance, but there's no need for the instances involved to whitelist one another first. They just do it. To stop the transfer, they have to explicitly defed, which effectively makes it an opt-out system.

The root comment I initially replied to made it sound, to me, like Mastodon instances choose not to federate with one another. Obviously they aren't preemptively banning one another, so, I interpreted that to mean Mastodon instances must whitelist one another to connect. But apparently what they actually meant was, "users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward"? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the "crawlers" (the users) aren't leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

The fact we have to have this discussion at all is more proof to my original point regardless. Federation is pure faffery to people who just want a platform that has everything in one place.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Mastodon federation is not opt-in. As soon as anyone on one server is following one person on the other server, the servers are fully federated. From there, it's opt-out, via blocking.

[–] angrystego@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

It sounds like an asocial network - something for me finally, perhaps :)

[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Is Bluesky federated?

[–] Microw@lemm.ee 16 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Theoretically, yes. Practically, the way their model is set up, it costs a lot to host a federated server so no one is doing it.

[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Wait really? I thought cost were relatively low since a lot of people do it themselves

[–] Microw@lemm.ee 5 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

What you see on Bluesky is a lot of people using their own domains for their handles. They are not hosting their own instances though, it's only their identities. Their connection to the AT protocol still goes through the central Bluesky server.

[–] dan@upvote.au 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

lot of people using their own domains for their handles. They are not hosting their own instances

This is something the AT Protocol does well. Your identity is portable and can be separate from the instance you use.

In theory, you can move to a different instance but keep your handle the same. There's no way to do that with ActivityPub. If you move to a new Lemmy or Mastodon server, you have to change your username to one at the instance's domain.

[–] timconspicuous@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago

If we're talking about self-hosting your own personal data storage (PDS), a few hundred people are doing that, here is a list. Apparently a Raspberry Pi is sufficient to host a PDS.

[–] John_CalebBradberton@lemmy.world 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Taking a page out of Valves book.

Doing nothing and let the competition drive customers your way.

[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 36 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Not really what Valve did. Valve kept doing cool things that benefit the customer, while the competition actively drove them away.

I don't follow social media. Is BlueSky feature rich and only getting better?

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 20 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

The biggest thing that valve did that kept them in everyone's good graces is that steam's core functionality hasn't had any major changes in years. Dare I say, more than a decade.

It's a platform where you buy games, download them, and play them.

In the early days you still had to deal with all the bullshit, including third party launcher installs and crap to get things going, and over time, valve simplified all of that, making it easier than ever to take advantage of the core function of steam: buying, downloading, and playing games.

Literally the only improvement I can absolutely, positively credit them for, is making that entire process, easier, simpler, and quicker, than ever.

Sure, you can chat to people, track achievements, comment on your profile, comment on your friends profiles, buy and sell cosmetics on the market thing, even voice chat and I think they have a way you can stream your game to friends.... Not sure on that last one.

It's like Facebook, FB marketplace, FB messenger, discord, Twitter... And a bunch of other services, all huddled together to make a bastard child with the entire PC video game industry.... That's steam.

But the core mechanic that was always the main reason why steam was great, remains the same.

[–] Randomguy@lemm.ee 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I think you might be underselling how important things like the steam workshop and steam's multiplayer support are.

Games like Starbound or Don't Starve benefit a lot from the workshop.

While insert any party game gains a lot out of steam's multiplayer support and friend list.

Also, while I don't use Linux myself, Steam is one of the main reasons why Linux Gaming is a thing.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 hours ago

I don't mean to, I wasn't exactly looking at a comprehensive list of steam features when I wrote that. I'm sure I missed several of steam's very good features from what I listed.

My main point was, and still is, that the core thing that made steam stand out, has more or less stayed the same throughout its existence. You log in, buy, download, and launch games right from one really easy to use program, it manages all the particulars about product keys and saves, etc. So you can focus on playing the game rather than trying to get the game running.

There's a ton of other really good features that steam and valve in general have introduced, and I'm not trying to diminish the impact of those things.

While other games stores are pulling crap like exclusives to their platform, and requiring dumb shit like invasive spyware "anti-cheating" rootkits, steam has kept the basic formula the same, and doesn't restrict any major publisher from deploying something on their platform. Other developers will still delay making their games available on steam for one reason or another, but steam has been fairly neutral in what's published.

I am aware of some exceptions, so I'm not going to say it's entirely universal that anyone can publish anything to steam, but it's fairly rare that steam is preventing a game from being available on the platform.

That core purpose of steam has always been good. All the other stuff is almost always also good, but the core purpose of having steam installed is the same, or better then, when steam was first released.

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