I’m not very active on Mastodon, but saw this post - browsing the bluesky hashtag for a bit afterwards did not really give me much info. I can definitely imagine enshittification happening there, but what is causing the current drama in particular?
blusky users concerned with the state of twitter, mastodon users concerned with the state of blusky, lemmy concerned with the state of mastodon. you guys are so boring and shallow.
IRC users are in pure bliss. Last community to worry about them died of old age and the bubonic plague.
“I’m not dead yet!”
I atent dead
Who are Mbin and PieFed concerned with?
One of those is not like the others… Did you know Lemmy and Mastodon servers can federate with each other so users can see each others posts and comment, etc?
There’s bridges for Mastodon and Nostr to bsky too
Yeah, there are even bridges for IRC and email. But those are just bridges, and since the underlying services don’t use the same protocols it’ll never have the same level of integration as true federation.
None of these comments are correct. This is referring to an economist and semafor article. In the article, a democratic strategist said that his “moderate” candidate was bullied off bluesky.
(No doubt because he is super zionist and isn’t doing anything to protect people from trump).
Then some people quoted the article saying bluesky is dying and it got out of hand everyone started repeating it without knowing the context.
All that happened is some center right pro elite politician got criticised so much they left the platform. And now the mainstream media is trying to paint bluesky as “not inclusive” or “too radical”.
https://bsky.app/profile/vulgareconomics.bsky.social/post/3lq3bdtdgks2r
some center right pro elite politician got criticised so much they left the platform.
Sounds like the exact right amount of inclusion and radicalism to me.
LOL, the bsky users (blueys? skyes? bskits?) sure know how to bully people, if nothing else. I loved how they treated Adobe some weeks ago.
Biscuits.
Real?
Receipts? Screenshots?
Egyptian style https://programming.dev/post/28330337
Beargun also posted a montage scrolling through some of the replies here - https://programming.dev/post/28330337/16236154
So a bebo situation
That name sounds vaguely familiar.
Social media site from the 2000’s. Quite popular here in the UK/Ireland. Best way to describe it would be like MySpace.
A rumour spread that it was shutting down so everyone moved. Rumour was untrue, and Bebo never recovered. And eventually would be shut down.
Whether it’s happening now or later, it’s a corporate media site, so it’s inevitably going to become enshittified and populated with AI and bots.
Way to not answer the question…
I felt it was a great answer. We can listen to all the news we want about that site, but because it has these massive flaws built into it, the news is just kind of boring. We know where it’s going, we know it’s going to get there, and the only question is who how long, but nobody cares.
As an aside, was anyone else hoping the guys who got $40billion for Twitter were going to turn around and start a competitor and blow Elon out of the water?
The pro move would have been to spin up a mastodon instance and then star an electric car company.
Some people are expecting the imminent apocalypse because there’s verification now. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to verify that somebody is who they’re claiming to be but what do I know.
oof. is that what this is about? that’s a big thing for some people - especially now.
i know what you’re saying with your last sentence, but it also allows people to be tracked down and held accountable for criticizing trumps favourite things.
Not like you have to be verified.
i just still don’t get it. like, twitter was a 2012 thing, back when text messages were a thing with limitations. now, the only limitation you have is texting between an apple and an android. why the fuck is twitter even still a thing - if not for the fact that most people can’t take a thought longer than 140 fucking characters?
Wha? Because this is not “texting”? I don’t know what you’re asking.
twitter was founded as an app that allowed you to basically broadcast a text message. back then, sms messaging only allowed for 140 characters max per message. that’s why twitter became so big - it was basically a great way to shout headlines out to everyone who wanted to hear you. this was back in the days where the internet was still becoming a viable commercial thing and people were still mostly using tvs/cds/landlines.
now, texting is pretty much indistinguishable from emailing, and everybody’s phones are fully on the web. the only thing imo that’s still keeping tweets around is that people don’t want to consider options that provide for a reason they might have to read more.
The broadcast part is what matters, not the character limit. A normal SMS message has just one recipient, maybe a few more for a group MMS, but a Tweet goes out to the world wide web. Although Twitter was designed such that it could be used via SMS, that never defined the purpose of the platform, and changes to the SMS protocol do not obsolete Twitter’s use case.
I am still having serious trouble following. Is your problem the fact that there’s a character limit?
twitter is an outdated phone app that was built for SMS back when text messages had a limit. it should have had a predictable lifespan, but now it’s become a fake-ai-assisted culture war battleground that’s run by the world’s biggest idiot and oligarch.
i’m having trouble following what the fuck you’re having “serious” trouble following. and i’m starting to think you aren’t asking this question in good faith.
Twitter was not founded as a mobile app. Twitter was (officially) desktop-only for the 1st 4 years of its existence. Calling it a SMS-replacement app is ludicrous, since it mainly existed on PC for the first few years. I personally think the concept is dumb, but it became famous because it forced people to keep their messages short and interesting (aka clickbait?), not because it replaced SMSes.
Early on you could tweet by sending Twitter an SMS. (Not that this contradicts what you’ve said. I still don’t know what they’re getting at)
holy shit, really? that’s even dumber than what my idiot-mind-retcon just did.
With a 140 characters limit, silly and meaningless rants like yours cannot exist. That’s a win!
Twitter was a thing because celebrities won’t text at you directly.
Not that texting can’t be toxic and social, though. Whatsapp groups are a major vector of far right radicalization, among other super shady stuff. All social media was a mistake.
All social media was a mistake.
They weren’t a mistake. They were deliberate and calculated. They came to us with lies and fake gifts, but ultimately offered only serfdom.
One criticism I saw was that if you want to verify, you have to use a Google Form and log in with a Google account, which goes against lots of people’s efforts to get off Google.
yeah, i’m a bit pissed that proton blocks verification emails unless you provide a phone number
I’ve thought it would be cool to run a $1 monthly paid mastodon server where your username has to match the credit card used to pay. + maybe other stuff like verifying degrees, medical licenses, etc so that people with such things can have a verified presence with which to interact with the rest of mastodon.
That’s an interesting idea. Could be useful for doctors, lawyers and dentists (folks who tend to have a company presence but no IT staff.)
For others, technologists with a website can self-verify on Mastodon with a specially formatted reference link.
Uuuuuh, I would not like my actual real name associated with an account like that. If I’d use that for work purposes solely, like LinkedIn, OK… But this, no.
Obviously. You’d only use it if you specifically wanted to back up what you were posting with a medical license or status as a public figure or whatever. This isn’t a service targeted at the average shitposter.
I hope you’re planning to delegate the verification to a KYC service…
Tbh this is as far as I’ve ever gotten with this idea but I appreciate the tip if I ever did actually try to implement it! Edit: had to look it up but probably actually. My fuzzy original thought was one of the many services my various employers have used to verify my license, but these seem more consumer focused which is probably better suited to this use-case.
So you would make about 10$ a month and would have to use your time to verify people’s identity and credentials?
I feel like the specific price is something you figure out after you figure out how much it costs to run the thing and no, I had not gotten that far yet. How much do your accounting services cost?
The only thing I’ve personally noticed is we seem to have received another burp of magas recently.
It takes very little effort to keep that shit out of your feed on Bluesky if you don’t want to see it, so I usually only see the magas when they crop up in comments on George Takei posts and similar.
I’m a big proponent of the “block early and block often” mindset in the fediverse and bluesky, so I do tend to notice how much time I spend blocking magas, and I hadn’t needed to do so for weeks until recently. I figured it was from 4chan imploding.
you can subscribe to block lists. heres an example of one that looks for MAGA stuff https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue/lists/3l53cjwlt4o2s
Careful with those lists though, it’s not unknown for bad actors to add innocent accounts to them.
I’m on several MAGA lists because the dumber sect of Democrats can’t understand that people exist to the left of them.
Dare not criticize the liberal lest ye be called a conservative.
Wait, why does George takei attract magas?
Or is he just a well known & largely followed person on bluesky?Wait, why does George takei attract magas?
Its because he’s their most prominent gay, non-white opponent. They don’t like it when he reminds them he actually experienced American concentration camps before they were moved to El Salvador.
Oh, you mean a decent real human? Yeh, that makes sense they would target him
Well known, largely followed, and often roasts the Trump admin. Same with Mark Hamill. (and yes, GT being gay and open about it does not help!)
4chan imploding
What happened @ 4chan?
They got badly hacked a while ago
goodly hacked i’d say
The hackers were alt right loons who were pissed that /qa/ (a “sfw” /b/ that was basically just a Nazi propaganda board) was taken down.
Was 4Chan ever good? I remember not being too bothered by it way back, but I was probably just immersed in the Xbox lobby culture of 00s internet and didn’t notice how toxic it was.
it had good bits among the bad, but it was lots of bad and the bad was REAL bad
Bluesky is owned by VCs that want money back on their investment. Bluesky are saying they’ll do ads.
I always figured ads were inevitable, but as long as there’s no algorithm for me feed and no shadowbanning, I’m happy
Welp, hope someone makes a better client when they enshitify the official one then.
I never used Twitter, I don’t see a reason to use bluesky.
The other comments are roughly correct in general, but the current drama is because a couple people said “Bluesky is dying” because the number of unique users that liked a post over the past 3 months has gone down (that’s the Number that went down), and then a bunch of people got mad at those people because that’s a single very specific measure and Bluesky is objectively doing very well and anyway they’d still use it if it wasn’t popular etc etc.
Regular internet drama, basically.
It’s not just “hey, look,.traffic is down”, but rather a few.folks saying "see, traffic is down because you keep commenting negatively to politicians and journalists "
The stats are trending down, but not precipitously so and still at a level that (AFAIK) eclipses the whole fediverse. And there are plenty of journalists and politicians who engage or endure the negative feedback.
Fair enough. I only got what people were originally complaining about from context; I woke up too late to see those complaints, just a billion replies.
If it’s “objectively” doing well, I assume you can support that with some data?
Based on the chart that they are referencing, while the monthly uniques is lower than the spike, it’s still higher than the previous plateau.
Spikes are moments in time and less important than a sustained use which still shows growth.
That could just as easily be an increase in bot accounts. Not super convincing.
The lull after the spike could just as likely show a drop off in bot accounts active during the US election. But that’s immaterial because growth is not the same as success.
As long as it’s got an active returning user base that gets value from the product and is able to curate their own experience, it’s able to sustain itself based on the money it has/gains, people are building new tools to make it more engaging, and it’s not being taken over by undesirable actors so that active user base starts to look at another solution, and sites increasingly see Bluesky as a driver of traffic to their websites, it think that would qualify it as a objective success.
If you have a different metric, please feel free to share it.
I feel like you’re coming at this pretty aggressively. I don’t feel like getting into a fight, but I’ll reply once:
I don’t like Bluesky. I find its culture very US centric, depressing, and frustrating. However, I also find it is technically better than any activitypub software I’ve used, and protocol-wise, much better specified.
It also has >30 million users, and is much more prominent culturally.
Lemmy and the microblogging activitypub software are more pleasant to use, but definitely rougher around the edges.
Feeling like I’m being aggressive for asking you to show what you’re basing the claim on, and then deflecting to technical strengths of the platform, really isn’t painting a picture of objectivity.
Could be referring to Bluesky’s silencing of Palestinian voices.
I’ve seen the open letter linked in that article shared a few times on Mastodon. I’m not sure how big a deal 3000 boosts makes it on Bluesky. But browsing the thread quick and seeing it full of posts shared by the publisher of the letter being deleted is a bit worrying.
Is it real Palestinians? Or is it the scammers taking advatage of their situation to wring money out of people? Cause theres a LOT of those on bluesky.
I don’t knoe just personally none of my pro palestinian comments was removed
Yeah, I honestly have no idea. Probably a mix of both.
If people are silenced from sharing their stories because they also ask for aid this seems potentially bad. It’s also unfortunate that it’s hard to say what has really gone down since the record is deleted, though it’s probably available somewhere online.
In either case I think it illustrates quite clearly the advantages of true decentralization for censorship resistance. What is allowed or not on Bluesky is decided by a tiny board of Americans, with no meaningful way of bypassing their moderation decisions.
Same for me. I don’t know about the recent drama, but I remember that bluesky censored stuff and now they can’t pretend to be an alternative to twitter.
Enshittification seems inevitable what with it being based in the US and operated by someone who could just sell it or whatever. But I expect it’ll take at least a while longer before I’ll feel the need to bail on it like I did Twitter in 2022.
ANSWER: some people value the ability to act online without having their activities traced back to them. there are many different reasons that people may want to do this - and some are bad. this initiative seeks to fight the bad ones without any consideration to any of the other ones. a lot of people online do not want to be tracked in any way that could identify them. this change oversteps some peoples’ boundaries.
Which initiative?
sorry, was probably an odd-sounding word to use here. synonymous with “decision” here.
I don’t want my activities traced back to me, but given how fucky the world has become since Internet went mainstream I’d be willing to give that up.
That’s why I particularly hate active bigots. Like dude shut up I love free speech, keep this shit up and you’ll ruin it for the rest of us.
yeah, yikes, uh, and no.
- yeah: i don’t want my activities traced back to me
- yikes: i’d be willing to give that up
- uh: shut up i hate free speech
- no: you’ll ruin it for the rest of us
regarding the “no” part: who are you to say?
Its already started. Remember the “you get arrested just for posting on Facebook now” business?
“you get arrested just for posting on Facebook now” is a funny way of saying “you got arrested for attempting to incite a riot”
it’s very telling how there’s a variety of correct answers here
Mastodon: “is it my turn now?”
more like: mastodon sits patiently while the other services implode
doesn’t look like it: https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/dailystats
I’d be disappointed if I had any hope to begin with.
Not an ounce of sympathy. If you ignore every single warning sign and get willingly fucked by billionaires to get away from billionaires whilst saying federated social media is inherently worse then you deserve to stay on the sinking ship. Hopefully you know how to swim in corpo-infested waters.
there’s that smug condescending mastodon user i don’t miss
