Maybe Bluesky has "won"
anderegg.ca
anderegg.ca
Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.
A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"
It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.
To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.
I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That
(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also
(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and
(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play
My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".
I think the kind of person that's energized to comment online generally feels more strongly about the issue than most lurkers. This means that online conversations are dominated by the most passionate, most invested, and often least interested in impartiality. This post [1] comes to mind.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
EDIT: I realize you specifically called out politics here and that makes me even more inclined to agree.
I'd agree MBP are poor media for nuanced debate but can work well for info broadcasting.
Pre-echochamber Twitter was an excellent venue for disseminating important news - news that actual news orgs were too distracted or deferential to publish.
I’d also add that no one (again, relatively) reads anything, anymore. A couple of paragraphs and you’ll see your engagement drop off a cliff. But a quick, “witty” slap? A stupid pun thread on Reddit? Easy money.
I think your point is generally right - not trying to disagree, but I think these platforms are simply effective tools to mirror back their users and what their users want, rather than the inherent, specific problem themselves. That is, it’s not Twitter that’s the problem - it’s that Twitter users really like the behaviors Twitter rewards.
That being said, BlueSky is simpler and easier because there's no real federation yet, and even if they have a "Discovery" algorithm, you get many options to control what you want to see. It's feels great, like Twitter before their 2012(ish?) IPO.
I was very disappointed to find out that whatever instance you choose can essentially hold your identity and content hostage.
I'd been hoping for something where my identity comes from a private key that I could take elsewhere.
No one there wants to hold your information hostage, you can always export it, and while it doesn't support importing, you can repost it through their API if you really want to.
> You can redirect your old profile to the new one
Is that true even when the reason for the change is because the instance operator wants to silence you? If you can't put up a metaphorical "Go Here Instead" sign, could they also stop you from "proving" that your new home is legitimate and that you're the same author as before?
But you lose all the posts and interactions. Most importantly, you are not keeping your identity, but merely creating a new account with a copy of your follower/following collections.
> No one there wants to hold your information hostage,
Tell that to a friend of mine who got banned from their instance for committing the crime of being an Ethereum developer. The admin suspended his account and didn't let him go back or initiate the migration process.
Most notably people can only follow hashtags from accounts that are on their server so if you insist on joining some micro server please save yourself the hassle of putting hashtags on things.
Instead I join specific interest-related communities that offer what I can't find in real life: the one person in the world that's had and overcome the same problem with their table saw.
Consider using a self-hosting service, like https://togethr.party/ , to have your own instance on your own domain. Much like email, you should never be beholden to another party for your identity; your hosting service should be an invisible detail that can change without anyone interacting with you needing to notice.
I've watched several instances shut down over the years, and have never once regretted the decision to have an instance on my own domain. My social network handle is now the same as my email address, with an extra @ in front.
I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me.
You're right about federation issues, though that's more a limitation of the fediverse protocols and fediverse software that really needs fixing. Fediverse instances don't automatically fetch and show all replies to posts you see, even if it knows they exist, unless your server is already fetching other things from the server hosting those posts. So it's a little harder to see other people's replies, which contributes to the problem of 20 people replying with the same answers because they can't see that other people have already replied.
Large instances work around that because everyone's already talking to at least one account on that server.
I hope those limitations get fixed someday, but for now they're fundamental to the fediverse.
Personally, I think Bluesky is a mix of NIH with a dash of wanting to be a central point of control, that is doomed in the long run - anything that works well for Bluesky can be copied, but the real benefit for the Fediverse in the long run is that Mastodon is just one of many services, or types of services. Every new service gets to hook into an existing network instead of starting from scratch.
I very much agree with you in owning your identity on this sort of thing, but I wouldn't pay $7/mo in order to participate in any social network.
I have my own email domain, and I can host it myself, or have someone else host it for me, on shared infrastructure. Fastmail charges me ~$4/mo, and that's for email, something anyone on the internet requires in order to interact with online services. I think $4/mo for a communications necessity is reasonable, and there are cheaper (even free) providers if I wanted to go that route. $7/mo for a social network is nuts.
I'm not sure how services like togethr.party work, but is it safe to assume that they have to spin up a completely new copy of the server software for each domain? That seems like a big problem, and is probably why this is so expensive.
I recently set up my own Matrix instance (using Synapse) and found it to be pretty wasteful, resource-wise. This is a solved problem with email servers, where one server can host as many domains as you have storage and processing power for; not sure why the chat/social platforms haven't caught up architecture-wise.
I don't believe ATProto has the same issues, and I believe it would take quite a rearchitecture of ActivityPub to solve.
> such that you can import it into a different service later
This is the key issue. There is no way to import posts in Mastodon without manually fudging the database (which I also had to do when running my own instance). As another commenter mentioned, it's a tricky issue, in large part because it's not part of the federation protocol.
Bluesky solves this by separating the storage from the other parts of the distributed system, such that you don't need to move your storage to change your identity, hosting, moderation, etc. Keeping them independent is a smart move.
I host my instance on an always free VM, don't put much work toward maintenence, and haven't had a problem with federation. Post migration is not really a thing from a shared instance, I don't think, so yeah, that sucks.
Honestly, the most expensive part for me is the domain, because I shelled out for a spiffy premium domain. But I'm weird.
Spammers sure love you :)
>> to have your own instance on your own domain
Domain is likely linked to your identity. What might look like an innocent *eet today, might end you on a wrong list down the road.
The activation energy of moving ones home is very different from moving a social profile. I also find in some old, dead communities I was a part of, the most toxic people can't pull themselves away and stick around
I think what you're saying here is not that politics are terrible on microblogging platforms, but that microblogging platforms are terrible, which is a pretty valid sentiment.
His reasoning was complex but a lot of it revolved around the simple fact that as you get more people publishing, the intellectual quality of the average published work goes down.
I'm not ready to roll back the printing press, but in retrospect the digital era has proven him right about this. For instance his position kind of predicts Eternal September - the easier it gets to post online, the more numbskulls you have doing it. Microblogging is the ultimate expression of this and frequently the content you find on microblogging platforms is the absolute worst hot takes and generally the most vile stuff the moderation rules will permit because shock value generates impressions. It's every idiot on earth competing to be as flagrant and base as possible.
We usually hold up free speech as a virtue in Western societies and there are a lot of good reasons for that, but I'm increasingly inclined to treat microblogging less like publishing, and more like alcohol/tobacco/gambling, like it's something people do but they know it's not good for them, they do it anyway because it's addictive and easy.
He argues for a society where people are both free and equal, but he recognized that some forms of inequality could coexist with freedom, provided they were rooted in merit or necessity, rather than arbitrary privilege. Also, when he talked about the Rights of Man, it wasn’t a rhetorical flourishes, he did mean man.
It’s a mischaracterization too to say he hated the democratization of publishing. His own ideas gained traction precisely because publishing allowed them to reach broader audiences. His critiques of printing and arts weren’t aimed at access itself but at the unintended consequences that came with it.
From the viewpoint of a library patron, for instance, feminism is a literary movement because it has left behind a large literature frozen in amber.
The earliest authors of the second wave, say Friedan, Steinem, or de Beauvoir were good reads but in 10 years the movement becomes a lot more “vulgar” (in the Latin sense of “common”) and at its worst you find large format books, cheaply bound and typeset with illustrations that probably got mimeographed before they saw the lithography camera full of radical and sometimes hateful rants.
Traditional online communities -- BBSes, IRC channels, Usenet groups, even standard blogs -- are all self-contained spaces that have their own norms and expectations, and so preserve the ability to have communities with high standards and high-quality discourse amidst others that fall victim to the kind of regression to the mean you're talking about. HN is a great example of this (as compared to other sites), as is Reddit, where the differences between various subreddits are very apparent.
But social media lumps everything together into a single space, where each participant is looking at a slightly different subset of the whole, and this causes the rot to overwhelm everything pretty rapidly.
For Mastodon, it's not just political, it's cultural
It's too out there for most people (as in, any random popular public instance you go to)
I don't know exactly how they populate that with no following, but I can prove it's filtered by showing you this completely unfiltered view: https://firesky.tv
Have Ctrl+F4 ready to go. Good luck.
It's certainly a better name, if nothing else. Names like Mastodon, Diaspora, are just terrible. One sounds lika a dinosaur, the other like an unpleasant condition of the large intestine (yes I know what diaspora means).
Turns out HN is my Colorado.
I guess you'd be a year early but I mean, the outwardly fascist candidate just won the US presidency so I'm not sure what your point is?
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/how-dumb-ideas-capture-smart...
It is true that the academic clerisy is a problem and a few leftists actually argue that this social class is a block on social progress. However, sometimes their ideas are right, ranging from the sciences to social justice issues, such as racism and sexism and so on.
There is no need to be defensive when how perverse the incentive structure for academia is, is pointed out. You can be a diehard leftist and also hate the present day institutions of academia.
This specific, comparative argument is used by industry and conservatives to undermine academics and progressives, it is very prevalent on Hacker News when they shit on academics. It has zero to do with the replication crisis which you mentioned, or "publish-or-perish", or the neoliberalization of academia - which as an ex-academic leftist I am very well aware of and have been materially harmed by it.
There is a nuanced distinction between the two forms of argument. The former is a prevalent bad take on Hacker News by folks who unilaterally shit on academia, saying things like "industry is actually more innovative" and other half-baked nonsense like that.
The result isn't perfect, but I do notice it's much more in line with what I want in a timeline.
[0] I should save more links! The devs talk openly about what they're working on and the changes that end up in the app and protocol, so I have the knowledge that something changed, but not always a link to the source of that knowledge since it was just another post in the timeline.
On the other hand Twitter still feels like where things are actually happening but more and more feels like they are about to start terminating anyone with eyeglasses.
I was there when the Digg exodus happened, it doesn't feel like that. It's something else. It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.
Bluesky seems a bit more like a 140 Characters mashed with Reddit with subtopics/submods of feeds as the focus. Also it seems to highlight the custom feeds feature which you can manage yourself. Twitter/X has such features but for the most part you are nudged away from these to improve "engagement" metrics. That said its highly possible that could change over time based on the long term vision.
My belief is that there's some very real reasons for that!
First, incendiary posts seem to get boosted by the algorithm. It's good for engagement, which keeps people online and hooked, which feeds more ads, and is good for the business. Elon and his CEO of the company know this.
Second, the more you look at the replies, the more you find people who are weirdly into Elon Musk. They'll bring him up even in a thread where he's not mentioned and the topic isn't about him. "Thank god Elon saved free speech!" or something rather. Just profoundly weird stuff that I can't help but feel is designed to stroke his ego. Again, I believe the algorithm is intentionally boosting these things. It also serves to create a cult of personality. He's not just the site owner, but he's its "savior".
Lastly, the company is clearly in trouble financially. Revenue is down substantially by all accounts, and there's a very high valuation to live up to. They want to get people to pay money, look at ads, and keep them coming back again and again for more. Being community-first and focused on people having the kind of good time they want in their communities just doesn't align with those very difficult business constraints.
Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."
I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.
The issue with Twitter and a lot of social media is that you don't often encounter opposing views that are nuanced, thoughtful and constructive, but rather hot takes, rants and memes. Even when those share your same worldview they can be tiring, but when they don't, they can drain your mental energy quickly.
Perhaps people do want to live in their own bubble, but I wouldn't say we can judge that based on Twitter just because of how toxic it can be.
I just want to post and interact with people without getting bombarded with wishes about my death for posting that I biked to work. There is no discourse there anymore, only loads of hate.
Painting people that leave as people that enjoy echo chambers is just dishonest.
I guess we just follow different people.
It's not about who I follow. It's about the replies I get when I participate in discussions around my interests.
It's a bit of an overreaction which, ironically enough, is the kind of engagement Twitter thrives on.
How would you feel about, multiple times a day, being required to defend your core beliefs that you find trivially true? Or even being constantly exposed to folks who you tangentially know presenting a constant barrage of ideas that you find stupid and mean in ways that explicitly target you and yours?
After many years of being around that (I'm a queer/non-binary, an atheist, and politically far left) I stopped enjoying it and just started blocking folks.
I still seek out contrary opinions- that is why I regularly look at HN.
However, in my daily feed of stuff like "pictures of my nieces" and "birth/death announcements from my larger community" I don't really feel like I need to be confronted by folks who consider me to be literally demonic.
And, for the record, I don't expect those same people to be constantly subjected to my own opinions.
So it doesn't feel sad for me: if you consider places like "churches" or "chambers of commerce meetings" to be "safe spaces" for particular kinds of folks, then it just seems "normal".
Do you have to defend, or can you just ignore. I assume those statements are still being made, even if you don’t read them. So why not just ignore and move on?
FWIW, Twitter (not saying Twitter is the best or only site) allows you to have a feed of only people you follow. That probably approximates going to another site of only people who share your core beliefs.
It doesn't matter if you interact only with people you follow, given that anyone with a bit of an audience gets plenty of hateful replies.
There's a concept of "background radiation" expressed in social spaces. Dealing with a constant barrage of people who hate you or your existence[1] is tiring.
[1] Or perhaps they claim they don't hate you in particular, just, you know, anyone like you who they don't know in particular.
No ads?
On Twitter, I have a make an active effort to not click on the "For you" tab because I'll be bombarded with posts about Trump or "woke" games, which I simply don't want to see. On Bluesky, I can actually discover new content without having to think about my mental health when using the "Discover" feed.
Secondly, I find it so interesting that you come to HN for "contrary opinions" from your self-described "politically far left" viewpoint.
I hold a politically right viewpoint, and I come to HN for the same reason - it feels far left of my own world view.
I think it's pretty cool that HN can serve as a more neutral safe meeting place of minds.
I’m left, but I can listen to people that identify as right on HN and not roll my eyes, because they have good points as well.
If you pick a random person off the street (left/right), your chances aren’t nearly so good.
I suspect that because a huge portion of the HN crowd are educated IT workers / would-be founders, overall there's both a strong support for capitalism mixed with progressive social views. That doesn't really connect well with the political landscape in most of the western world and typically gets you labeled a centrist, regardless of how important those particular issues are to you.
So? I have never seen instances where YC's organizational viewpoint controlled the overall discussion, and I think dang is probably the best moderator on the planet.
Sure, HN has a focus around the "tech startup ecosystem", and that may attract a certain type of viewpoint, but I've never seen that viewpoint pushed from an institutional perspective.
A lot of folks I know find all kinds of things "left wing". A lot of my liberal friends think they are leftists, though most of my leftist friends would disagree. My conservative friends don't really draw that distinction between liberals and leftists, and at the same time my liberal friends often think my anarchist friends to be about on par with literal Nazis, horeshoe-theory wise.
I suspect a lot of the Dem establishment neo-liberals (who are rapidly becoming neocons ala Rumsfield/Cheney) who make up a lot of this site see themselves as slightly left. Rationally left, but not part of the "revolutionary" left.
Which, from my position, puts them fairly close to the Reagan conservatives, if you overlook some issues about gay folks and are took the 80s conservatives at their word rather than their deeds when it comes to race issues. However, I don't find this place to be a meeting of the minds.
I find that HN is a place where I can observe what the sociopaths who have real capital and thus material political power think about the world, or at least what the their sycophantic mandarins work for those folks might think.
I listen to what folks say here because I am genuinely curious about what their alien-to-me understandings of technology and political ethics will do in the larger world.
I listen to folks here for the same reason I listen to left-wing folks digest nazi propaganda, read a lot of history, and try to hear what conversations are happening at the red neck bars and at gun shops I hang around.
Cause that's who has no problem fucking with my world, and fuck with my world they have indeed.
HN is not a place where I think any of my actual politics will find an audience.
Though I am (likely unwisely) communicating now, I mostly just shut up when I am here, unless someone has something worthwhile to say about music.
I honestly had no idea that anyone "left of center" felt they couldn't openly share here, as I have always mentally categorized HN as a leftist echo chamber (hopefully that's not too blunt - it's just my honest perception).
I naively assumed that it was only those more right-of-center that felt their worldviews and opinions were unwelcome here, judging from the instantly dead posts I see of anything remotely right-aligned.
From your short share, I see that the echo-chamber is unwelcoming to a much broader sphere of humans than I realized. I find that super helpful to understand - so thank you for sharing.
It's a problem amplified by Murdoch type media outlets who have weaponised the us-vs-them worldview for clickbait outrage and spread that dumbing down as far across the world as they are able.
For those of us not within that mindset such views seem very childlike and unsophisticated, there's a slew of nuance to the world that doesn't easily reduce to L v. R, "woke agenda" and all that et. al. jazz.
FWiW IMNotACommunist .. but I have an endearing love of this short interaction twixt Piers Morgan ( UK outrage talking head ) and Ash Sarkar for higlighting the pitfalls of not paying attention to what people actually think and believe in.
If I understand you correctly, you feel it's the right-leaning outlets like Fox News that have weaponized us-vs-them mindset?
The origin feels flipped to me, but regardless who started it, I see little to no actual respectful and thoughtful discourse these days - mature discourse where each side is willing to listen and acknowledge the elements of truth and assume positive intent in the other side's positions.
As you say, the media on both sides, including social media, feels extremely childlike and unsophisticated.
This, with Murdoch, harks back in a lesser way to his father, then to his expansion into the UK Fleet Street and eventual transition in US media, in Canada with Conrad Black, in the US pre Murdoch with Hearst, Pulitzer, Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, in the UK pre Murdoch with Alfred Harmsworth and the like.
These are people who have all had large significant media outlets that have engaged in extremely partisan positions with respect to wars, the economy, favoured political candidates and dumbing down discourse.
> I see little to no actual respectful and thoughtful discourse these days
In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism, which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors.
Murdoch is more than Fox News. Just ask any Australian or Brit .
It's from the late 80s, but it is still relevant (and it also helps it feel a little above the current political hot-topics of today.
It is certainly the case that many well-meaning, Dem-voting Americans don't seem to know what leftist politics is (having never been exposed to it), and don't seem to realize that they are right-wing. It's an interesting phenomenon, but quite alarming when the consequences for the rest of the world are Not Good.
Strange, because I've noticed over the past few years that HN has been sliding further to the right. Or at the very least it's susceptible to brigading. To be clear, it's not "right winger equals brigade[0]", it's "oh gee someone posted a story about EU external immigration and now the comments are full of people angry about asylum seekers who think the correct solution[1] is to shut down international law and start retroactively deporting citizens".
For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.
[0] I live with right-wingers, so I kinda have to be tolerant of them
[1] If this had been anticipated and dealt with ahead of time, the correct solution would have been to invest in integration and have generous family visas. That's why the US doesn't have a migrant integration crisis like the EU does - we know how to welcome and inculturate people. The EU doesn't really do integration, it assumes everyone is a self-motivated tech worker who will do all the integration work themselves.
Of course, the ones that cannot tolerate any dissenting opinion will either whine or leave.
The truth is that this sentence is believed by every audience ever convened.
Other side promote engagement. This site still rewards discourse.
> The audience here skews towards those the truth.
The truth is that this sentence is believed by every audience ever convened.
This site definitely skews towards objectivity.
Suppose you have a fairly open border policy. Lots of folks get to contribute to the economy, there’s some cultural exchange, it’s pretty okay.
What if there isn’t a good plan in place for making people integrate with the local culture and you end up with large groups of people whose beliefs and behaviour are incompatible with those of the local population, e.g. calls for religious rule in an otherwise democratic country and increased violence? Not the blown out of proportion election claims in the US, but rather the real question of what happens to people after they cross the border? If that detail is unaddressed then people might grow to desire more closed borders, even if the issues lie elsewhere.
It’s a bit similar to the self-described “pro-life” movement, except when you look past those strongly held beliefs, things get more complex. For example, if children are born in families that can’t really afford them, will there be enough government assistance to school and feed them? What about daycare? What about neither of the people being mature enough to be good parents? That’s setting the personal freedom argument aside for just a second, it’s like they care about the births but don’t have the rest figured out, similarly to the discourse about borders.
I think you’re correct that the right solution would involve focusing on integration.
Integration is primarily a numbers game. Most people don't integrate into the local culture unless they are cut off from their own. If you have so many immigrants that you either need to build immigrant housing or fill up entire towns with them then you don't get immigrans assimilating into the local culture but rather them bringing their own culture no matter what other measueres are implemented. So yes, a good implementation of immigration needs closed borders at least for foreign cultures - these things are not independent.
The EU consists of welfare states. Thus the incentive structure for an immigrant is totally different than in the US. Further more MENA immigration which is what Europe has most of is not the same kind of immigration that the US enjoys. The amount of state expenditure on facilitating and integrating immigrants in western Europe is insane.
Western Europe has bendt over backwards the last 50 years to accommodate people of cultures that have pretty much nothing in common with European culture, values and historically has been the enemy both culturally and religiously - the world did not start in 1945 as many on the left in Europe thinks.
That's a stretch... those welfare states aren't that universal and realistically most people in such situations would be barely above subsistence level.
But yeah, Europe generally gets people who can't get into US with all the outcomes of that.
Also even the illegal immigrants that come to the US is easier to integrate than the immigrants from MENA in Europe. Culturally they are much closer, even though there has been a influx of illegal immigrants from other places than Americas last couple of years.
This is a very deep difference in immigration in EU vs US that is quite foreign to many Americans.
1. A lazy attempt at seeming impartial while holding a subtle, elitist anti-republican opinion.
2. A not-so-subtly marxist or socialist outburst.
Under each comment the top 3 direct replies are an agreeing sentiment that pretends to add some nuance to the discussion. The fourth might be a contrarian (either right wing or conservative) opinion that gets barraged by downvotes and angry responses.
I believe you got this other way around. The US doesn't have a migrant immigration crisis like the EU does, because it's a big isolated island with relatively strict immigration policy. The people who immigrate to the US are exactly the kind of self-motivated workers who do the integration work themselves.
Many here believed that investing in integration will magically make open borders policies work, and the countries did. Less people in Europe believe it now.
Another thing is, how much immigration does US get? In Europe, many countries can have a significant fraction (a few percent) of their population immigrate over a few years (for example check how big UA immigration was). That makes integration much harder.
To be clear, I'm not against immigration, but it's a complex topic and I believe you're a bit too optimistic and extreme about it.
>For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.
I don't get dividing people into two neat categories (left and right). And you're welcome in Europe, it would be great to have you and I'm sure you would do well here!
It’s just a lot. Twitter will be awful. Bluesky will be a little over the top. I don’t know what’s happening in threads these days…
People want to yell into the void and don’t want to think about more than 140 characters… and there really isn’t a place for just easy going goofy fun
Life is political. Believing that it’s not only means that someone who is also pretending that life is not political will make the rules.
Out of 245 million eligible voters, only 65% voted.
For many people politics is an abstract concept in a faraway place.
The problem to me is more that whenever you have a centralized platform that's associated with a single owner, it inherits all the issues of that owner, good and bad. It's inevitable. I'm not sure it's an issue with people not wanting to hear other viewpoints, it's more so people have decided they have had enough of, say, Musk, and don't want to support him. With Facebook stuff came up about that. The other stuff, about feeling like they're drowning in abusive right-wing stuff is also part of it but I think if it were just, say, like the web, they'd say "well this is the web" like people say "this is the news". Once you can point to, say, Musk, and say "he made it this way" or "I don't want to support a person like this", regardless of whether or not it's true or whatever, if enough people feel that way, they're going to want an alternative.
This won't really go away until there's a decentralized open system that's easy to use, and not associated with any given "owner". Mastodon/AP is close but things there are so closely associated with hosts that the host starts to become a dominant issue (see Threads), as does figuring out where to go, and transferability of accounts across servers.
As for "why Bluesky"? Probably because it looks like Twitter and a lot of journalists and politics people were complaining about Threads rules prohibiting things they wanted to post. Not because it's left or right wing, but because of links and political content period. I don't know enough about Threads policies but independently lots of journalists on Bluesky were saying they just couldn't post content on Threads even if it was fairly neutral, or that it wouldn't get any visibility?
Bluesky is easy to sign up for and fairly open. Once you get the journalists and news organizations on there, and a critical mass it grows.
Personally from a technical standpoint I'd like to see Nostr take off but that community currently is very heavily crypto-focused. Network effects and feedback loops are a pain.
The momentary Banning of twitter in Brazil, provided the impetus for a large amount of normal people there to look for a close alternative. And BlueSky is a more normie friendly.
Now a simple network analysis will show you that a lot of "tech-normie" people, but heavy user of social networks, in the US have an extended network that touches Brazil, especially for people of color and blacks. their social contact primed them for changing to Bluesky. In a sense it was the dry powder.
Now came the election, where Elon Musk took a central role and where more than 80% of black voted against his prefered candidate. It just gave the sparkle inside an implicit network that was already playing with BlueSky.
I really don't. I know you mean this as an insult, but like, it gives this weird reverence to social media that I don't get. I am all sorts of interested in long form media that explores striking/dangerous/novel ideas that really expand my mind and help me to see the world in a whole new way, or interviews with people who have a set of beliefs that are different from mine.
I am not interested in 140 character hot takes that just pounce at my amygdala, just like I wouldn't want my Thursday night football game to cut away to a five minute diatribe on the pros and cons of abortion access, or my video games to lecture me on free market economics.
Engaging in as social network that isn't an echo chamber of my beliefs is like being interrupted every five minutes during dinner time to be yelled at by a different evangelist. Church is on Sunday, thanks.
"B-but they believe these morally reprehensible things!" So what? Have we not all hurt people and been the villain in someone else's life? People get lost along the way. Show them grace. We can't force people into different ways of living, but we can show them.
Maybe somebody being patient with them will change their mind, but that’s not what I want to spend my time online doing.
Most people don't think of themselves as [insert negative trait].
The internet for a while was a big melting pot, probably because there was an inherent IQ filter to using the early/medium web.
But once the stupids came on, then came the stupid-manipulation companies chasing them, and everything went to hell.
Usenet was kind of like this too, until tools made usenet more accessible.
I've been too busy to look at Mastodon/Bluesky out of laziness. I never did Twitter. Mastodon may require some technical work to make use of, which may be a wonderful long term thing.
This is partly true. But also - life is too short. There isn’t enough time in the day to engage socially with people you don’t have a connection with.
If that pure noise, a litany of uninteresting ad hominem attacks at best, which drown out relevant conversation, is "diversity" that's required, what is gained? If not wanting to be subjected to uninteresting insults is an "echo chamber" is that so bad?
Twitter was interesting because you could have on-topic conversations with world experts and random people. By protecting the uncivil, and even elevating it with for-purchase blue checks, people find better uses of their time.
The destruction of value in the transition of Twitter to X is something to behold. The person who bought it had no clue about the value of what he bought and what drove the value. Social networks are about the people; Twitter in particular was about the specialists, the journalists, the exchange of ideas, far more than any other social network. And that was all destroyed so that more bots can spam people and so that personal attacks can be left up.
Fortunately I do have a few other smaller hubs for a more "diverse" (in the original sense of the word) conversation, while not allowing bigotry.
The sad thing is you could be referencing the left with Covid vaccines or the right with abortion.
When people don't vaccinate themselves they become a walking vector that affects society as a whole. Yes, personally, they might be healthy. But there's people out there who can't take the vaccines and should they get sick of COVID they could die. There's people out there who, even after being vaccinated, are still at higher risk should they get the disease (the vaccine doesn't prevent you getting sick, rather it makes it more difficult for the virus to transmit and lowes it's effectiveness and how dangerous it is for you). So people not vaccinating puts the whole of society at risk.
On the other hand, abortion is very much a familial issue. It affects the woman that is pregnant the most. The rest of the people around her are affected only tangentially, yes, the parents might want to become grandparents or the person that got her pregnant might also want to have a child. And those are inputs that are necessary when coming to the decision of performing an abortion or not.
Now, where does "your body, my choice" come into play? Do abortions cause the societal harm that vaccines cause? I don't think there's any evidence to this, it's all moral standings. But we legislate for everyone, we don't legislate for a group of people that happen to have a particular religious view of the world. Now, these people have a lot of power and influence and that's why their view is imposed on most of society.
Ultimately though, these issues are different and shouldn't be treated as mirrors of each others. I think that's a mistake.
If you're comparing walking into a store or concert (both private establishments) to your state telling your doctor thru cannot operate on you, you clearly don't understand or won't understand how freedom works.
Private businesses can place whatever bans on whomever they want, for all I care.
Where? I've yet to hear of a court case where the plantiff is arguing that they were forced to take a vaccine by a government. Bodily automomy has plenty of case studies and it'd be an easy slam dunk if any federal entity tried doing that.
There was an executive order:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/wenstrup-opens-investiga...
>the Biden Administration implemented Executive Order (E.O.) 14043. This E.O. required federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by November 8, 2021, or risk removal or termination from their federal employment.
But I believe the precedent for political discrimination in the workplace is thin, at best. I don't think the Hatch Act would have much ground here. You're not owed a job for your political nor religious beliefs if it puts others in danger (there's a lot of case law on the latter with regard to rituals).
----
EDIT: Oh yea, there was the overreaching argument of the president. That one was swiftly shot down:
https://www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/feds-for-medica...
>Finally, our brief argued that Supreme Court precedent supports the president’s broad authority to regulate federal employees, including their out-of-office conduct, when such regulation is justified by the government’s interest in the safety, effectiveness, and security of government facilities. In one case, for example, the Supreme Court sanctioned Reagan Administration regulations requiring drug testing of government employees and prohibiting drug use outside of the workplace
Although now that you’re making my argument for me, it’s not cool that tax payer funded jobs would be terminated over that.
They would be replaced, not terminated. We lost a few million people in COVID, cso firing a few people is better than the government basically having a class action launched at the United States.
I didn't mean to fear monger or construct a straw man. I didn't directly address anyone's argument, I stated my own opinion on this subject confidently on this message board that's meant for just that.
Welcome to the free market. If you would prefer a larger government to enforce this lack of ostracization, perhaps a change to the first amendment as well, feel free to advocate for that.
Companies are risk averse. They don't want to deal with people getting sick and the PR nightmare of their employees not wearing masks. So that's that, and from a business perspective it's by far the best choice. You're always free to quit your job and go work somewhere that aligns with you more ideologically.
Wherre is this story on a person forced to take a vaccine?
The premium account system where comments are not sorted chronologically but where paid accounts post first (on top of a poorly moderated platform) leads to drive-by toxicity, not intelligent discourse.
Sounds great to me, if its true. Prior to social media, "echo chamber" was the status quo, and I think everyone can agree things were a lot more peaceful during that time.
> I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.
It's not that I don't want to engage. I just don't want to be submerged there all the time. I want to spend most of my time surrounded by 'my people' and only once in a while peek outside.
Let me recommend an article by Noah Smith where he argues (IMO convincingly) why he thinks that the internet works better as a fragmented thing https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...
If the political alignment of those posts resonates with you, it isn't as annoying.
It's noteworthy that with AI, so far we will just get more / louder / more awful posts, rather than a potential for superior moderation and appreciation for nuance.
After all, the busted metrics that AI will be aligned to are the same old flawed ones that reward sociopathy.
Anyway, I don’t want an echo chamber for my beliefs. I just want to be able to discover and discuss scientific articles and watch sports highlight clips without being bombarded by a bunch of bullshit.
If people think I deserve AIDS what the hell am I supposed to do with that? That's not useful information, and I don't understand why you're demanding people have to put up with it. They can leave, and evidently, they are.
BlueSky was also not a practical Twitter replacement for a lot of people until a few weeks (!) ago when they finally added video support.
Also, have you not seen the latest user growth stats on BlueSky? Apparently it took the total destruction of the United States postwar consensus to achieve people finally abandoning Twitter en masse, but hey, it's happening in the past week or so.
That's an unusual way of viewing it.
When you're waitlisted for an app that has limited capacity, you take it as not being "wanted"?
Of course they want you! They're just building capacity so that you can have a good experience once they're ready to send you the invite. Don't worry -- you are wanted!
Every shard speaks Common Tongue, the inoffensive moderate conversation that is acceptable everywhere.
Each shard also has its own local flavor, with local axioms and heresies.
The difference is that this version of Twitter isn't censoring and banning people for wrongthink. The people leaving are self selecting out of the idea gene pool, as opposed to being forced out.
Naval wrote it well, "Rigid ideologues move but the persuadable center does not. So they just move into irrelevance."
And the ads. Sooooo many scammy ads.
How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 - Nov 2024 (42 comments)
1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 - Nov 2024 (109 comments)
Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 - Nov 2024 (44 comments)
Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 - Nov 2024 (13 comments)
Visualizing 13M Bluesky users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 - Nov 2024 (236 comments)
Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 - Nov 2024 (168 comments)
How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 - Nov 2024 (79 comments)
Bluesky Is Not Decentralized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 - Oct 2024 (194 comments)
There are lots more...
Also, this is a seemingly great underdog story. First open source app to top the App Store, a tiny scrappy team of protocol nerds takes on the most powerful people in the world...
What leads you to believe that people posting about this is not organic?
Anecdotally, I have submitted a few stories about Bluesky, and I am paid nothing.
The same reasons I see manipulation, I also see legitimate moves. It's loaded as can be. The iron is extremely hot given Elmo and everything with the election.
Some posts are genuine, some are fake. Some of the grass is real, some is astroturf. This isn't the first campaign, it's stupid to debate.
To close on a more positive note, we are the most-effective moderators
This isn't quite accurate. You only need the MST blocks in the merkle path(s) back to the root, for the subset of records that you care about. For a single record, that's O(logn) blocks on average, where n is the total number of records in the repo. For a full checkout, the MST block count is ~33% of the number records in the repo, on average.
(MST = Merkle Search Tree, which is a special type of merkle tree, distinct from the one used by git - https://inria.hal.science/hal-02303490/document )
> Also, it would be great to edit posts! I believe this is tricky because of the Merkle tree structure mentioned above
It's not so tricky at the MST level, and it already happens there when you edit your bio for example. What is tricky (relatively) is figuring out how to represent post edits at the UI/UX level.
For context, I'm working on my own PDS implementation in Python, with corresponding library for working with the MST (both fairly WIP):
*unless the repo had been "rebased"
But, this:
> Radically open
> I think some might be surprised to learn how open Bluesky is. It’s trivially easy to grab an export of any user’s data. It’s also a core assumption of the service that all the data (aside from out-of-protocol stuff like DMs) is completely open.
I'm still skeptical of Bluesky having "won" until the average user is completely aware of things like this. I fully expect that there will be some drama about this openness at some point in the future.
When this happens, we'll see if people go back to Twitter again (how many times has it been already?); or if they embrace this new social network where your art and posts can be scraped waaaaaay more easily than in Twitter, so they're probably more likely to be used for AI training anyway.
Until conversations about these topics happen between non-tech users, I'm mostly just watching how the situation evolves.
As you imply, this is a bit meaningless for people who don't want their posts used for AI, because anyone can grab all data pretty easily (at least for now).
But, AI aside, this is so much better for a lively ecosystem - 3rd party apps, bots (the fun and useful kind), research, etc. A lots of things simply died when Musk decided effectively end the API program [1].
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3layuzbti6s2x
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near... == https://archive.ph/ikPOk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550625
At least, that's also why we got Mastodon...
Yea, like how WhatsApp promised they wouldn't share data with Facebook;
A promise obviously has 0 value...
The average user doesn’t care.
The average user still gets surprised when a website "steals" (knows) their IP address and make some drama around this "leak", not realizing that any network communication makes this possible.
So that's what makes me think it's plausible that they might care that their whole account data can be exported by any internet rando.
(EDIT: All this is of course in the context of my bubble, where the non-techy users are mostly artists and streamers, because those are the ones I've noticed migrating to Bluesky. I realize you might have had a different subset of people in mind when responding to my comment.)
HOWEVER: there’s a big difference between posting your work publicly and having someone come along and use it to train their models against your wishes, and a platform changing its terms to say “And you’re giving us permission to use this to train our models”. They’re saying “no, you don’t have my permission to use my work and you’ll have to go against my wishes to use it this way”. It’s not a big difference in terms of outcome, but I think the principle of the thing is important to a lot of artists.
Since then I've seen plenty of Bluesky embeds in articles where there wouild have been Twitter/X embeds.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-bluesky-moraes-thre...
Bsky have some pretty good frontend devs ;) https://podhunt.app/episodes/2755/dan-abramov-on-working-at-...
Network effects are so powerful at keeping people in, but they have the ability to turn a trickle into a flood when it comes to depopulating a service. The big social networks were so big we thought they were unstoppable, so I'm interested to see if we can still see a shift like that in this day and age.
That is definitely a quantum jump beyond a bunch of geeks posting about rust or whatever.
Search Reddit for "bluesky" and you will find a ton from the last month. Reddit does OCR on screenshots, so that is included.
Also, one of my highest upvoted comments on this site happens to be one. [0]
And finally, quite a few Bluesky content links have been submitted here recently [1]
Bluesky feels like Twitter used to and it’s shockingly refreshing to hear about industry news and friendly updates rather than some “pick-up artist” explaining how women are too privileged these days.
>The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying “unqualified DEI hires” are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.
This is the opposite of what I want in any app I open. It's time we stop chasing engagement for sites and start filtering for content. I want sites that don't promise to be the place to do everything for everyone but one's which I can judge on their censorship to know if I want to join.
I refreshed once after posting that and it looked amazing enough to come back and post here that it does look great now. Refreshed again and got this at the top: https://bsky.app/profile/rexchapman.bsky.social/post/3lazzns... here's hoping they stop amplifying the people who made twitter so toxic and make a network that's actually pleasant to be in.
[1]: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-ou...
It is a program. What has become political is society. Bluesky and Twitter are just the two sides of the fracture manifesting as online discussion spaces. Bluesky users are just as polarized as Twitter users, but perhaps more in line with what you’re comfortable with reading.
There's two feeds: for you (the algo) and following. following is the traditional only people you know feed.
If you're having trouble with the people on X you might need to reconsider yourself. Why are you not open to many viewpoints? Diversity of thought and people should be welcome and if you hope to change minds, you do need to be able to interact with those people to do so.
I did theater when I was younger, and I think a lot of my 'open' friends weren't open per-say they were just weird and like being in the weird group more than being truly open.
But for the current situation you are just misrepresenting the problem.
Aggressively maintaining a decent follow list no longer helps.
And "other viewpoints" are not the problem. Every somewhat popular tweet has automated replies full of porn bots and clearly automated answers that say basically nothing or just try to provoke or advertise.
"Following" has become infuriatingly useless too because it algorithmically sorts in nonsensical ways.
The result: many tweets I would have liked to see get completely buried while others get shown to me over and over as I visit the site.
I'm so incredibly tired of algorithmic timelines.
It used to be a good tool on interesting updates on hobbies I enjoy. Now it just wants to waste my time, and I'm just not interested in screaming matches about daily politics.
That includes echo chambers too so it is not about differing opinions even, I don't need people from "my side" telling me again and again what the "enemy" is doing wrong and how I am supposed get angry at that.
i will probably work through my physical book backlog in the meantime.
other things: i use the web app exclusively. the bots have been pushed to the bottom of all replies or hidden. the following feed is unaltered and chrono (annoyingly so, some posters post A LOT). and i know even hovering on things i dislike for too long will show me more of that. i get good good content from non american friends so i have a hunch this is a unique american thing rn
> I'm so incredibly tired of algorithmic timelines.
Then why not just use your following lists? I have a main list of people I follow, mostly people I know, then a bunch of topical lists for various topics, from silly stuff to NLP.
I think a small, somewhat homogeneous community is very attractive. You get a high ratio of interesting posts and very little toxic behavior.
The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. Technology won't solve this problem (because it is not a technology problem). Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.
Maybe the balkanization of social media is the best we can hope for.
Online services do scale, which is the root of the problem. It's more profitable to focus on a large number users who get a little value from the platform than on those who find it particularly valuable. No matter whether your revenue comes from ads or subscription fees, you want more users, more impressions, and more activity. Which turns your focus away from whatever the early adopters did when there was only a little activity.
Influencers are a convenient red flag. Once they find a platform attractive, it's probably no longer good for activities not centered around them.
But taking venture capital means you can never restrict growth, even if in the end it kills your service.
I'd love to see a Reddit that caps its communities to a thousands or even hundreds. Once that cap is hit, either form a new community or join a waiting list. But it's clear that a hundred passionate users often produces a much better discussion than millions.
Every problem you mentioned is solved by Mastodon. Independent instances can and should stay relatively small to allow good and independent moderation, while the whole network can grow a lot without being homogeneous.
How big do you think a Mastodon instance can get before it's too big? Right now the largest instance is maybe 1 million users. Let's say that's a good size. To get 3 billion people on it (Facebook's scale) we'd need 3,000 different instances, right?
Except, people won't evenly distribute. Instead, we'll have a power law distribution. The largest instance will be maybe 500 million users, the next largest will be 200 million, and so on. That means that most Mastodon users will be in Twitter-sized instances, and you'll either have to spend a ton of money on moderation (except, I don't know who pays) or you'll end up with the usual toxic anarchy.
Yes, this is likely indeed. Those instances will probably be unsustainable and/or user-hostile, but users are always free to leave to another instance without much to loose.
Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?)
Mastodon monthly active usage has dropped below 1 million.
Threads is not trying to be a Twitter replacement and is another brand in the Zuck conglomerate
What makes Bluesky different to me is ATProto and the possibilities for a new social media fabric, that they learned from some difficulties with ActivityPub to build something better
YMMV depending on your region but my Play Store "social" chart is currently showing Bluesky at #1, then TikTok, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Reddit at #7.
It is if they have a Threads account and interact with any Threads content on the Instagram app, which is extremely easy to do even accidentally, because they shove it into the Instagram feed and make it look like Instagram content.
I would not be surprised if a large chunk - maybe even the majority - of "Threads users" interact with it exclusively through the Instagram app, with many of them not even fully aware that it's nominally a separate product.
And also into your notifications now.
Of course Instagram helps, because they keep showing Threads posts on Instagram, notifications, etc, so people download and create an account, but is not automatic.
Facebook monthly active users: >3 billion
Instagram monthly active users: >2 billion
Threads monthly active users: ~275 million
If they're cheating, they're doing a poor job of it.
But that's very different from saying that Threads MAUs aren't specific to that platform.
In all my circles is unreliable argument.
You need to use non-numeric information to tell you if "number of posts" should be more meaningful than a HackerNews stranger saying "these are the vibes I get, anecdotally." Numbers are pretty appealing because we have a lot of simple and consistent tools for working with them, but we also know the number of posts on Threads are artificially gamed, because Instagram and Facebook crosspost to Threads by default for anyone who has an account.
But it's still my guess. English is my only fluent language and I don't know even 1000 people. Threads could be wildly popular and I could be blissfully unaware. Again, I'm not asking you to make any epistemologically unsound leaps.
Edit: Thanks @JumpCrisscross.
And at least here in Australia, X is ranked #69 on the App Store. Threads #2.
Year from now, Threads could well be bigger.
There are many interest verticals on Twitter like politics, sports, celebrity, influencer, porn etc.
That is a very good question. One of the Bluesky developers gave the figure at around 2.25M DAUs [0]
This chart shows that they now have 3.74M DAUs and have 9.3M MAUs [1]
Mastodon does not give their DAUs, but their MAUs are down to less than 1M users. [2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953421
[1] https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
According to Mosseri it is now adding 1m new users a day.
X/Twitter has over 500 million monthly active users.
9.4m active this month (and counting), according to https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
Nobody I know uses it, or has even acknowledged its existence. I see people on other social media talking about their Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and directing people there, but I have never seen anyone do it for Threads. I have never seen anyone share a link to Threads, I don't even remember what its domain name is. I have never seen Threads included in those little sets of social media icon links that all brand websites have.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe Threads has actual users who care about it and aren't just clueless Facebook/Instagram users who were not-so-subtly encouraged to also use Threads by those apps.
A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.
Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.
Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.
both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds
I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.
Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?
Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)
If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.
* A police report is a legal document.
* A tweet can be removed by either its poster or by the platform's operator after it's been posted, while only the police can make a report disappear.
* You can tweet at someone anything you want and they don't have to accept it to receive it, while the police can refuse to accept an unfounded report. An insurance company might require a police report be filed before accepting a claim, but it would not accept a tweet as a substitute.
I have seen plenty of toxic comments on "official" announcements that allow comments that the official entity doesn't actually read. I'm happier with no comment than with toxic comments.
Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.
Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.
Otherwise, there’s absolutely utility to interacting over social media. We’re doing it right now!
We're talking about marketing here. Shouldn't it be conversions or awareness or something?
Also, liking it signal that other people were interested in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes from people you follow are important.
Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you follow. If you follow interesting people, you see interesting discussion.
With social media, it isn't possible to read everything, I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There needs to be some way to filter than just time when you looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering things that want to see.
If you want likes, or views, or reposts, then you will have to "engineer" your post in such a way that it gets more attention. Not sure if that's always beneficial.
The problem is with Twitter and others is that they now have algorithmic feed. That means posts get seen globally and clout metrics are valuable for reach. Comments also get clout so get lots of drive-by ones and less discussion.
If someone has an RSS reader with feeds from some news sources, official channels issuing announcements, etc - that's great, but does anyone consider that "social media"?
(Of course, you can believe that social media is bad and you don't want it, but that's a different question)
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's goal is not to be "the" hub. It is a middleman that takes you to other websites that implement it. Be it twitter (on shakey ground), Your own website, or a game server (in theory). Anything that implements it and sends out messages can be caught by any number of clients made on top of RSS.
Asking for interactivity from an RSS Feed is like asking for interactivity from an email. The goal is to point you towards other content that may or may not be interactable. The RSS is simply there to consolidate all your feeds into one view.
Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. And they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
And I explained why that response is a bit nonsensical. Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.
>they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
1. Thars overly presumptuous. Social media didn't give them a real choice.
2. You don't need an account for every blog. Not even for interacting. I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing. If you really want to like stuff sure. But that's not anything different from today.
>Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed.
Sure, Bluesky shows they don't have to but the service can still be successful. As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.
How's thst different from using something like Feedly? It's juet a different app view.
It does take it away. The current status quo has (1) a feed of content and (2) two-way interaction between poster and commenter in the same place. Switching to just RSS inherently takes away (2)
> Social media didn't give them a real choice.
Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.
> I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing.
People didn't but I doubt most people running blogs want to deal with anonymous comments. You already get so much spam and unhinged content when you require a signup.
> As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.
Part of it sure, but it also involved other layers to compensate for the parts that are lacking in RSS that users have come to expect.
Can we say that people choose to get addicted to addictive stuff?
And using other non RSS parts is fine again, RSS isn't a social media. It's a way to help aggregate content. You keep claiming to know how RSS works but demonstrate that you feel it's some competitor instead of a commodity.
And yes, the powers that be "won" becsuse they were at war with the idea of people not having all their time dedicated to their feed. Users "chose". to be manipulated becsuse their choices were taken down, weakened, or taken hostage. Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.
Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them. Further, it's a known problem for both of those sites that people will not read the article and instead riff of the title. I'd wager the final 50% of every article could be removed and it wouldn't significantly change the comment sections here.
> Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.
Yes they did, they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour. The alternatives just aren't good enough.
Yes. And you can use RSS feed to do the same thing, either liking to a reddit comment section or actually reading the article and not bothering. Same structure except you're not limited to Reddit's servers.
>they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour
They lost choice and decided using the worst choice was better than moving off of Reddit. I guess if enshiftification is "choice", They did indeed choose. I chose to walk away.
And it's why I hate centralizafion. Because it reduces you down to two choices per owner. Their way or the highway. If you instead managed an RSS feed of a dozen websites and Reddit removed its API, your daily feed may be smaller but your browsing habits would not change. I can still interact with the other 11 sites as much as I want and not need extra time trying to figure out what's out there.
My point is that (a) many people have not despite the cess pit Reddit and other sites have become, and (b) RSS is inherently incapable of replacing the experience because it’s a pull only mechanism.
Mastadon based itself on ActivityPub, not RSS.
We’ll see if the long term forces that consolidated and entities Twitter and it’s ilk will do the same to Mastadon instances. Cause I’m still not convinced that the general public is willing to or ready to run their own servers
The users. You can put your news on RSS and approximately nobody will read them. Or you can put them on twitter and it will reach people.
This is true even now when the management of the bird app is seemingly hellbent on destroying the site. It was even more true when the decision was made.
I guess we can hope (or work) on an RSS based future, but the key thing to achieve is users, and then the rest will follow.
Issue is that the bird app doesn't want this middleman between them. They want all the users' attention.
Picking a reader means making one or more choices (for your phone, laptop, tablet whatever), adding a feed is several steps, and it is easy to get overloaded with too many boring items (and too few interesting ones) because curation is left to the end user.
Centralized social networks require no choosing of readers, let you add an info source in one click, and ensure you have neither too few nor too many interesting items -- for some value of "interesting" -- regardless of how many entities you follow.
I love RSS and decentralization but creating a smooth, user friendly experience with such tools is a major unsolved challenge.
But after that, it is at worst pasting a link into your client, or clicking a button if the site gives proper attention to it. Not that much more friction than following someone on any centralized platform.
Already, we talking about some other service that accumulates the history and provides search, history, etc. That and many other things (likes, replies, quotes, etc) are all things users expect (rightfully, IMHO).
While orgs/people simply issuing announcements should ideally provide an RSS feed, that type of content is a tiny part of "social media".
Their website! Now get off my lawn! :p
I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using location services.
Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.
Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.
If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones. Should be easier since protocols are more open.
I would have assumed this one. What's the downside?
RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching done by
which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.
It was created more than a decade ago.
The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering the service for free.
Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.
I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.
These ‘federated’ systems are just recreating feudalism in cyberspace.
Edit: Well even worse in some ways, since it’s not like a majority of the ‘gentry’ and ‘nobles’ could challenge and seize control of e.g. a Mastodon instance from the owner.
Email is far from perfect, but good enough and its federated nature means it's reasonable for institutions to use it as a default mode of communication and authentication.
What exactly is the alternative to federation? Is it possible for everyone to be their own admin?
In any case, under feudalism serfs didn't have the freedom to choose and switch their feudal lord as they saw fit.
I also believe it. I don't want to have to subject myself to the X dumpster fire or sign away my data to Facebook just to receive communications from my local police department or child's school.
Or worker owned, or shared ownership (basically 1/3 capital, 1/3 workers and 1/3 local council, ratios are not usually that, it is often 60% for the capital owners, but you see the point)
Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)
And Bluesky is a publisher and a client?
https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applica...
For consumers that just want to write posts and get comments, there are many platforms out there. http://threads.net is an example of one.
Again as I have already said, it's like requiring a blogger to write an elegant static site generator. Who cares that the Wordpress backend is messy and bloated? Only on HN will you find this fetish about an elegant backend when you are merely a user.
If the blogger just wants to write a blog and doesn't care about anything else, they can just use threads, or keep on using twitter, for that matter. But for some reason, this hypothetical blogger has decided that they don't want to use Twitter. They don't have to write their own static site generator, but in moving off Twitter, they're going to be exposed to some of the details behind the scene. If they're not an anti-intellectual, this hypothetical blogger can do some light reading to get up to speed.
When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.
That I can agree with. Usually what I have seen, at least where i live, is that no public body used it exclusively. They still had a website, they still talked with journalist, talked with radios, used flyers, whatever was appropriate in each situation. (Or at least they tried, not saying everyone was getting it always right.)
These public entities post _exclusively_ on Twitter as if it's the public square. It's not and it shouldn't be. The argument is not about how easy it is to create a Twitter account.
I've been annoyed over the years because (not having an account) sometimes Twitter won't let me look at Tweets. Hopefully none of them contained useful info.
To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple syndication.
It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc
When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further.
When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free.
Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously.
Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.
It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more.
The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter
Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.
Have you tried running a server? Even a single user instance is a resource hogger.
Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.
Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be useful to society.
- PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher
- Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host
- App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after
- PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI.
A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed
1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats.
2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>
3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build
All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders
Having seen this process of creation sustaining & decaying happen again and again, I totally get why you would feel this.
And I forgive you for applying the thinning broadly like this, casting insidious doubt widely like this.
But that's not what Bluesky is doing. Some links; first their o.g. app-lead (is that still right?),
> The network should outlast the company. Imagine if the Web died when Netscape or Yahoo did! It's strange to even think that. The same should apply to social networks.
https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g
(Or see 18 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757)
And ((new) board member) Mike Masnick & (founder) Jay Graber on protocols not platforms, 9 months ago (pre Mike on the board),
https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6...
Steve Klabnik has a post, How Bluesky Works, that talks about what Bluesky is. Yes, right now a variety of the layers of At Protocol are run by BlueSky alone. But the data can retain its integrity even if they fail, the network & data is by design open & transparent to all & transferable, and it's all based on protocols. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work
This hypothesis that everyone else has been rug pulled & so BlueSky will too defies a ton of very hard careful work that Jay began when she very specifically worked to make sure BlueSky could be independent, to make it based on protocols.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 | https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds
My opinion is that their ATProto is better than ActivityPub b/c account migration and global search among other things
Here the human condition can flourish in a more localized way, with more participation (less lurking). No more winner takes all.
Digg to Reddit was a unique case, because Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly, with the V4 update. Reddit was in a great spot to pick up users from Digg because of not only having a similar overarching purpose as a link aggregator, but additional features like subreddits which enabled more smaller and casual link sharing and comment sections. It was a clear upgrade from Digg V4. I do think that Reddit would have eventually overtaken Digg anyway, and V4 only sped up the process.
Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now. If you're on there to look at funny memes, cat pictures, celebrity news and pornography -- which encapsulates about 98% of Twitter use cases -- it still functions much better than the alternatives. The migrations are happening for meta reasons, either political or ToS-related (specifically, X claiming they can use images you post for AI training). This isn't a recipe for long-term success, it's a precursor for people making bunch of noise for a month and then heading back to Twitter.
As someone who doesn't really participate in these large social networks -- even modern HN is way too mainstream for me honestly -- I do think it's a good thing people get off them, though. Smaller communities are a good thing. Shouting your loudest, hottest political takes on Twitter so you can pat yourself on the back for 10k likes is a fast track to mental health issues.
The Bluesky app both performs better and uses much less battery than Twitter does. I think because it uses Google ads now, but not sure.
Twitter also has disk space leaks - I regularly find the app has gone up to 3GB or so. (And it's not from image caching, seems to be an SQLite db of all accounts I've seen posts from.)
The app is a bin-fire.
And Twitter didn't? They use the "nazis at a bar" metaphor for a reason. UX is not the only way to screw up a site. Ashley Madison didn't torpedo because of a bad UI redesign.
Even on a product level, the change to not hide tweets from blocked accounts may as well have been a Digg v4 for high profile people. There was no profit to be had here and no one to gain with this update. Purely ideaologically driven.
> it still functions much better than the alternatives.
in which ways? Genuinely curious. All these social media feeds, by design, all just blended into the Instagram/tiktok mush of infinite scrolling and predictive "you might like this!" sorts of algorithms to meximize engagement. None feel much easier/harder.
What you have in the modern internet is that left-leaning users avoid networks that aren't moderated in their favor (in a conscious attempt to prevent moving the overton window), which leads to right-wing takeover (and eventually death of the social network because there are only right-wingers, see the graveyard of reddit alternatives). This trend would have been reversed a decade ago.
Facebook is MySpace, Tumblr is live journal, reddit are forums and Discord is Skype.
It's all been done. Why create the new when you could recreate the old?
But yes; I to crave something new.
Can you think of anything new?
The "ideal" of Mastodon was the first thing I regarded as new. This idea to properly own your communities and conversations and move them around and connect/remove others as you would an email address was novel.
In reality, it's nowhere near that ideal. But I still want to see if anyone over the years could make it work.
----
Much less realistically (somehow), I'm still waiting for that moment where we run a full on AAA game in the native browser. I think the tech is now at the point where it exists and is possible. Just not the incentives. But IDK if that's the "new" you were talking about.
Funny you mentioned it, but the original Twitter was never cloned. It's a messenger program status aggregator.
People used to have GTalk/MSN status bar set to various short, funny and insightful texts and Twitter was the place to have them collected.
If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.
The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.
Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.
Neocities is a ton easier to try for “non-engineers”- it even has a discovery feed and a WYSIWYG editor…
depends on who you ask.
but in general I think that the goal of gatekeeping should be to filter out bad candidates without filtering out good candidates. You could imagine that for a medical degree, if students were graded on exams based on their handwriting and spelling that many otherwise good candidates would be eliminated, which is bad. So we want to avoid arbitrary gates and uphold meaningful gates.
If we are talking about gatekeeping new technology, we might want almost everyone who uses it to grasp it well, so it does not become a system of organized control. It may be reasonable to allow the technology to filter those who struggle with its inherent problems, but it would be good to avoid filtering out people due to the tech's unnecessary complexity (complexity based on its implementation, for example). So it is good to cull this unnecessary complexity of the system.
For example, a good gate for technology is making sure users understand the modular aspects of it (for example on linux this would be commands and unix pipes) and how to repurpose those modules for their own needs. A bad gate in this case might be bash syntax.
by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account can get purged because:
- they decide to start purging old content
- they comply with a censorship order from the country you live in (or a country you don't live in)
- the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really only a current issue on Twitter)
> Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.
Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large companies.
But yes, we're in a weird spot of "clearly this is altering society" and "it's just an app bro". The latter is shedding away, but the powers that be will try to delay it as much as possible to squeeze out a few billion more dollars.
Why shouldn't hosting a webpage or social media content be as easy and reliable as seeding files on bittorrent? Programs like syncthing are proof that this model works in other domains, for example "cloud" storage.
With bluesky on the other hand, there really isn't much jank, certainly not relative to twitter (except right now when it feels like the servers are struggling to scale fast enough...). The average bluesky user doesn't seem to be ideologically motivated (or if they are, their ideology is "I don't like elon musk"). They mostly use bluesky because it works for them, regardless of implementation details.
It's fascinating to see how well Bluesky has done with RN + Expo though, and makes me wonder what an equivalent Matrix client would feel like. Unfortunately rnmatrix.com looks to have been stalled since Annie joined Beeper/a8c.
Hope you can pull it out of the fire. Good luck.
But just as Bluesky dipped and then returned with critical mass, so can Matrix. The uptake patterns of decentralised platforms seems to be much less linear than the tightly controller centralised apps of the path.
I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it
This is caused by you writing custom software, not by decentralization. If you were running some off-the-shelf software like WordPress it would probably be updated to keep pace with the world so you wouldn't have to do much.
There is a larger group of people who are frequently harassed but don't have sufficient control to prevent harassment on Twitter, for instance the recent change in what the block button does.
With decentralization, one can self-host on their terms, or find one with like-minded people and have more stringent controls on both incoming and outgoing messages, via blocks or defederating unmoderated or otherwise disagreeable instances.
Are you suggesting that journalists and activists should have their own, separate social network?
But people still care about it and that minority can become expensive to fight off. We see this as we speak with games. The (IMO, frivilous) minorities got to a point last week where 2 Californians are trying to sue a 10 year old game for shutting down in 2023 (before this law they are suing under was made).
It'll probably take a few thousand to fight it off, so those two plantiffs are having the effect of maybe 100 gamers in terms of cost. For what I see as a frivilous lawsuit. Imagine one with teeth.
It'll calm down in a month. Maybe. The current atmosphere isn't going away in a month like the API protests.
Putting aside the issues with who owns twitter and some of their recent policy shifts about content, I still have relatively sanitized feeds where I mostly only see friends' content. I'm still making new friends from Japan on it through our shared hobbies. Most of the sports news I follow is still there.
Nothing materially has changed about how I use the platform.
Bluesky is still pretty empty. Maybe some "nodes" of it are getting busier as people trickle out of twitter but I'm not sure it matters much until theres more saturation of many more things.
> I’ll also add that the reason I’m a big fan of a ActivityPub solution like Mastodon is that it’s quite inexpensive to run your own complete stack unless you’re extremely famous. Hosting a Mastodon instance is a one-step process, and you then control everything. To get the same experience with atproto, you’ll need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and even then you still don’t control everything as of today.
When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison. I'm quite interested to find whether there will be niche relays that only index posts from certain pds (or provide a kind of community-chat discord competitor by being one server that hosts the PDSs of the community, and also provides the relay and appview for that community)
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
It's a weird install with a hybrid of Docker and systemd, but basically you run a script on a low-end Ubuntu VM and point your DNS at it and you're done. Far less resource intensive then Mastodon.
I wish they released an official k8s Helm chart or something, but it's not too hard to roll your own deployment.
That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.
microblogging, i.e. twitter, succeeded in the first place because people just want to post, and not worry about taking care of technical things.
in the demographics that often forget the password they once set, expecting "one-time setup" and "complete control" when they do not change default settings for most things is very out of touch with reality.
we are still living in the internet that for the most part wants someone else to take care of these things for them. but besides the ownership, there is nothing that is also setting bluesky aside for a regular folk. we ought to do better before celebrating any level of success.
This is Twitter all over again, including risk of a hostile takeover. I don't think they're stupid enough to just let the allegedly-decentralized protocol to take away their control when billions are at stake. They will keep users captive if they have to.
I like the feeling and style of the app, it's very comfortable coming from Twitter
Still I feel like Facebook/Instagram, and certainly X/Twitter has done a lot of damage, which has cause many of us to be sceptical about ever opening another social media account.
So if you take everybody at their word and assume the money doesn't run out, this is sort of the opposite approach to federation. Build out a solid main instance and get federation working "for real" later.
But has it won? I guess that remains to be seen. It entirely depends on the users who are willing to move there from x.
Bluesky should actively increase the difficulty of onboarding people onto the platform to weed out or reduce the population. Vitriole need a critical mass before it overtakes the entire discussion.
Is it still too early? Time will tell.
"if you want to look up a DID:PLC, you need to query the Bluesky servers. This is important because every user is identified by a DID:PLC, and all interactions need to reference them."
which is not strictly true.
almost every user is identified by a DID:PLC but DID:WEB is also supported. DID:WEB is not mentioned in the article at all
I think this is important because it means that users can opt into being their own source of truth for their "identity" in the ATPROTO system
FWIW I just exited from twitter - no value.
Very odd.
So far I see good sides of both Threads and Blue Sky. Threads has a lot more users, but I see more 'subject matter expert' kinds of people on Blue Sky as well as smaller more intimate communities. But we'll see what happens if that dynamic attracts more people and it stops being quite so cozy.
If they fix that it could indeed be quite good, but it still feels too much like "broadcasting" vs "conversation", and I'm personally not ready to be popular like that.
Bluesky does have a little toxic positivity but it's much better, and it's possible to chat with friends on it. (When I try enabling the algorithm features they still won't stop showing me gay porn though.)
Also, half the people I follow are getting baited by the "random people complaining" posts - so I just see their replies to it!
And now they will be adding ads. That’s it. I’m out.
The only posts I see on there that look like they're made by humans are jilted twitter refugees trying to convince each other they're having fun by sharing articles about how X is dead. Meanwhile on X nobody has thought about Threads since the day it launched.
There's probably a good chunk of people who just drop Twitter without picking up another social media in replacement.
I haven't used Twitter much lately since it got bought, and I haven't missed it.
A lot of the time when I did use it, it was for customer support. I feel bad for my followers who had to see my gripes about whatever behemoth sold me crap.
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know
We can assume that Twitter was a vocal opponent to the repeal at the time and that they have now become somewhat more in favour if it means knocking out their competition whilst they enjoy special protection.
All it would take is some catalytic content to kick things off and a compliant state judiciary to get the ball rolling.
Bluesky's Terms Of Service explicitly state that they are not liable for the impacts of their user's content. They say they reserve the right to delete content or accounts at any time at their discretion. And then there's this:
Indemnity: Summary: If someone brings a legal claim against us based on your actions on Bluesky Social, you are responsible for our defense in, and the consequences of, that claim.
It all looks bulletproof on the surface but I just don't know if it will survive under Trump/Musk.
I get the sense that it's just for trying to be witty. The replies are hard to follow for a reason. They aren't the point. It's really a series of unrelated posts you have to keep reading to follow any kind of "zeitgeist". It's like they thought of a good user interface for conversations and did the opposite of that.
This makes me super happy I was on that train early and got the "iain.bsky.social" handle.
Went to GopherconAU last week and one of the organizers very proudly announced that you should "skeet" with their hashtag like the word didn't have another completely inappropriate connotation. I really can't take this sort of internet circlejerk seriously when I have a mortgage to pay and a family to look after.
How does censorship work?
Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like. You can run your own labeller to get your own moderation. I run my own labeller and my own feeds so I can customize my experience but none of it is in a state that others could really fork the code. It's not too hard to start reading the jetstream (a version of the firehose that's easier to parse/read) though.
Does this mean there is one set of moderation/censorship that you get by default, but you can turn it off and get a fully unfiltered version of the service? Or is it like clicking “reveal” on every hidden post individually? Are the additional “labeller” on top of the default or can you replace it entirely?
The best responses will bubble up and that really the main innovation that makes a forum more practical.
What about hosting a Lemmy instance or and if you have the money, Stack Overflow for Teams ?
The golden age of social is over and it's just a horror show now. Look what it did.
I’ll just put stuff on my personal website.
That being said, the change handle to domain process is quite slick with very smooth DNS record based transfer done in a minute.
I'm fine with people backing the wrong horse (again), and I don't have an ounce of FOMO. It's upsetting in a general sense that people will regularly behave in a manner against their own self-interest. But when Bluesky is fully enshittified in a few years and people are wondering what in the hell just happened, the Fediverse will be here waiting to embrace them with open arms.
I think a general problem with the current political landscape right now is that people literally cannot tolerate reading something they disagree with, because they convinced themselves that the other side is so morally flawed, they can just immediately write them off without further consideration.
But irrespective of that, how are you supposed to understand what is going on if you only read content by people who think the same way you do?
Not everyone uses it solely for political stuff, though. I'd like to just be in a community related to my hobby without death threats and constant abuse. We moved to bsky a year ago, been so nice.
Instead of having "upvotes" or "reactions", this function would be the same as replying a single char or two. If multiple people post the same thing (like "" ":)" "L"), it gets collated and boosted as a single message.
If you want to flex, you can drop $10,000 to post a 10kiB picture of your dog. Or spend $1000 to write an overly long post. But I imagine long posts would be seen as bougie.
For readonly nodes they should be. Otherwise we could see tons of adoptions by bloggers, with some simple Github/Cloudflare Pages setup.
Obviously they don't implement every part of the protocol nor every feature Mastodon has.
Bluesky is a breath of fresh air.
Twitter / X, for political reasons, allowed extremely toxic behavior while at the same time disempowered communities from moderating themselves. If you force each individual user to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person it's a losing battle and low quality speech will overwhelm conversations. X folks know that but did it anyways.
It's also becoming more and more clear that we need a relatively neutral medium for free speech. Musk claimed to be building that on X but then did exactly the opposite. It's very hard to trust the algorithm isn't being manipulated in one way or another.
On BlueSky it's incredible how much value is already being produced by connecting intelligent and creative folks as compared to what Twitter became.
What I consider "toxic" is using slurs, trying to make people angry, bad faith arguments, spamming replies without giving them much thought, etc.
I'm seeing vastly more signal and less noise on topics I care about like game dev, urbanism, art, and tech.
https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes
For better or worse, X / Twitter was never really about communities. It has always been focused on allowing individuals to broadcast their thoughts. If you want a moderated community discussion then there are much better platforms for that.
We do have neutral mediums for free speech: HTTP and SMTP.
But on X too much value was / is being lost due to policy and algorithmic choices that discourage signal and encourage noise.
I used to go there for critical discussion of various tech issues or smart people talking about innovations at the cutting edge. As an example I used to use X to learn about modern graphics programming by searching certain terms to see what the smartest people in the field were saying while talking to each other.
It used to be that if a big account Tweeted something often you'd see true experts responding as the first replies. Now you'll see dozens of Bluechecks spamming memes or gross statements before you get to any substance, which inevitably has lower engagement.
Too many smart people have been turned away from the platform and it just doesn't generate the quality of discussion it used to. Already in the communities I care about I'm finding vastly more substance on BlueSky.
You can either rely on Bluesky's standard labeler only or subscribe to ones that handle certain niches or the higher standards of moderation that you may want.
There's also lists made by other users that you can use to just block all the trolls/bots/etc on them at once (and as more are added).
X was locked down in a way that seemed to be giving the bots and trolls a significant advantage.
Landing page: https://keri.one/
Whitepaper: https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/whitepape...
Sure, but most of that seems to be to engagement farmers who provide little to no value to actual humans.
> And it seems their advertisers are coming back.
Anything to back up this claim?
Comcast, Disney, and IBM Are Among Advertisers Returning to X After Ad Freeze
A few screens grabs for proof: https://imgur.com/a/ra8P81G
Please for the love of god someone make a social network that has okay discovery features without political content.
I follow 3 people who post about ML papers. Not sure why blue sky shows me posts from Don Lemon and someone called @CallToActivism
Man, really? Domains tend to be around that much for a year.
I guess it's cheap if you're doing this for marketing purposes, but given that this was marketed towards "developers", I thought there'd be more homespun method to get this up.
But aside from that, I don't quite understand the counterargument of Bluesky not being federated/decentralized for custom domains outside of "Bluesky handles DM 's" (to paraphrase). I'm sure most users will more or less choose the centralized approach of Bluesky handling everything, but the fact that you can decentralize off is very valuable (even if it's a different service than ActivityPub)
>The whole Twitter mess has taught me not to attach myself too closely with these things anymore. I hung on far too long to Twitter while it made me feel terrible. My goal going forward is to post more to my own site and aggregate to any social channel I currently care about.
indeed. Don't put your eggs all in someone else's basket. If you're selling, always try to get people on an email list (the only popular standard of federation as of now) so when that basket is taken that your devout followers can keep in touch. Ideally this decentralization of Bluesky (if you take the time/money to set it up) should let you take most of your ball home, but it may not be as easy to just "move it somewhere else". Mastodon's ideals vs. reality certainly show this.
Particularly if you are using it as a tool to advertise your company, channel, stream, etc.
I would love for this to not be true this time. But I am not holding my breath.
Maybe instead of having yet another echo chamber of short form content, we should embrace long form, well written content with wide range of opinions.
Atleast Bluesky has a chronological feed without shenanigans.
I think the problem is that short form content simply should not exit. I don’t care what people eat for breakfast, or reading the same motivation quote over and over again.
I want to have discussions, with different opinions. And current microblogging platforms do not provide that. Hence it doesn’t matter who “wins”. IMHO they are all net negative for humanity
>If Bluesky comes out as a “winner” and more posting happens there, I think I’m generally fine with that. At least for now.
If that's what the match between microblogging services is about, I wager Bluesky has no chance whatsoever to come out the winner. It sounds like wishful thinking to me. Mere delusion.
If i read some interesting article that turns out to just be a reblogging of an interesting post on a service, the original embedded article is inevitably from xitter, which if i want to read more generally i can't. Either technical or personal issues usually prevent me from being able to read the original source and additional related tweets.
Now lets say for the sake of argument that a person's speech is just trolling hateful shit. Contributing literally nothing. I argue that quite often you even want to allow this kind of speech because when almost always when you have 'content moderation' it becomes over-moderation. It's a 'slippery slope' where people are unable to keep their own biases out of moderation. Which brings me back to Bluesky. A deranged, leftist hellscape, designed to enforce the largest possible book of unwritten woke social regulations across the site. Literally stacking the deck against Wrong Think. Or an orwellian nightmare. This is what happens to the internet when you let fucktards moderate it.
Edit: ty for the downvote soyboy. On downvote sites like this if someone doesn't like your post they downvote it and it becomes a popularity competition even if you're right (which is what you're signalling is a good idea btw.) Bluesky is exactly the same. As is reddit. As is every top 100 website at the moment.
So you would be able to build communities around specific topics.
People act like Elon is the devil while using Gmail and googling things. Lol.
So, how does moving to a platform with the explicit aim of being decentralised solve this? Even Elon Twitter has more oversight than a decentralised platform with zero control.
Saying that HN is social media is like saying that a taco is a sandwich.
- Barrier to entry is higher and participation is tiered by karma
- Moderation and community participation guidelines are heavier-handed and more defined
- You can't embed media or have a profile picture
- There's virtually no advertising anywhere
- You can't delete posts after a few hours which means no way to nuke your presence after the fact
- No hashtags
- Far less algorithmic manipulation of user attention (infinite scrolling, per-user algorithmic feed, etc)
- Encouragement of longer-form discussion because of a lack of (at this point historical, from what I understand) character limits on posts
- Likes/upvote counts aren't visible to other users
- No official app with telemetry and push notifications; in fact, no notifications _period_ for things like replies
- No friend or follow mechanism
My taco comment stands. Both a sandwich and a taco comprise flat, oblong starches with ingredients in the middle. One or two people have called them the same. In practice virtually nobody would confuse the two or substitute one for the other. People are migrating from Xitter to Bluesky but almost none are migrating to HN.
I think there are two central criteria for some interaction-based online system to be called 'social media': follows, and DMs.
Hacker News has neither of these things, so it isn't social media. YMMV.
You follow people because they will show you a cool rock, not because its a slot machine that pays out massive amounts of dopamine.
It would be great if Bluesky could generalize to that. My understanding is that it’s focused on primarily following accounts, and that you don’t independently have communities focused around topics and interests.
Essentially you’re switching one filter bubble for another filter bubble that makes it harder for any contrary opinion to pierce it.
Like it or hate it, spending money is about the only semi-reliable defense against boting.
I believe it's a mistake for the owner be so busy with his own platform but I don't follow him or any famous people. That helps too.
But Bluesky is already censoring viewpoints that the collective don't want to see promoted, so its really not much better than X.
The issue is, whether or not a collective, reactive crowd, is really the ultimate form of human discourse. I happen to think not, but its sure interesting to see the dynamics of humans flowing from one echo chamber to another ..
Every community will have its own strengths and weaknesses.
- Which accounts get the most followers
- Which posts get to the top of their front page
- What is the predominant sentiment in the comments
also advertisers like Disney,IBM, comcast, warner bros, discovery, lions gate etc are all coming back to advertising on X now
If you are a normal person and made the right conclusion that Trump / Elon are byproducts of forcefed radical leftist policies you'd be better to steer clear from this platform. X is lightweight compared to what Bluesky is about to become.
Many people are comparing X and Bluesky, but I think this is a mistake. The two platforms shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. These are two drastically different platforms. X is a real-time news app, currently holding the #1 spot in the News category on the App Store (e.g., The New York Times is #8). Bluesky, on the other hand, is a social network and the #1 app in the Social Networking category. These are fundamentally different categories, so let’s stop treating them as rivals - they’re solving different problems for different audiences.
Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category?
If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)
> Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category?
No. Each application is in their own category.
> If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?
I did not assume anything. I use X as a news app, the CEO of X has stated it's a news app, and its category in the iOS App Store is News. There are no assumptions here.
That said, I do agree that Twitter is a horrible social networking platform. Not even in a snarky way.
- I could never follow conversations on whatever the hell response system it sets up.
- It's focused on short form comments but tons of people use it as a blogging platform (including its new owner).
- The algorithms and filtering are just horrid. It is so bizarre how I can be logged off and not even see user feeds in any meaningful order (ignoring that it filters out NSFW stuff).
- They recently made worse with blocking changes. a social networking tool with bad user filering is failing its most basic task. meanwhile they also recently decided to privatized what people liked, so it's all sorts of backwards in its design.
But despite all that, Bluesky as a "social network" platform solves #3. For now. Wonderful,I can see tweets in reverse chronological order without being logged in (and for now, the curation is... fine). But people still want imageboards with small character limits so I'll just continue to yell at a (literal, not digital) cloud.
But others do and that's the sad part. I felt the same about Google+ dying to facebook; the inferior technology wins and it works against all the ways I want to communicate with others. So I gave up; I'm using Bluesky as a fresh start to be able to connect to future people I couldn't years ago that I met at conferences. But had nothing else to share other than a Twitter.
While I think it's horribly inefficient, it's even less respectful of me to ask them to take the time to make a social media account they don't have. That's all this is about for me. Meeting people at their level instead of trying to be this hipster trying to shill for this "cool misunderstood platform that's way better". I'll still use my hipster spaces, of course. But I can manage multiple feeds just fine.
I'm not on Twitter and used to be on Mastodon so the idea of Bluesky per se sounds interesting. But so far it looks like a forced, desperate attempt by a very political group of people. And that's the opposite of what people like me would like to spend time on.
It's telling that people who are leaving X are doing so not because they are being censored, but because their political opponents are no longer being censored.
I avoided politics, but I got tired of the bots, the spam, the idiots who paid $x getting promoted to the top of discussion with uninteresting replies rather than more informative replies.
Musk literally censored a key technical term, "cis," because it's used in culture wars in addition to all sorts of other uses in biology.
Calling this dilution of value and signal to be "uncensoring of opponents" is merely insulting reasonable people. That's not what happened at all. And the only "uncensoring" that actually happened was letting nazis and antisemites and racists be as offensive as they wanted. And that's pure uninteresting noise to all communities except the nazi, antisemite, and racist communities.
It would be good for all tech people to learn what happens when you insert too much politics into your platform: you go broke.
I only ever followed a handful of accounts and those had stopped posting many years ago, so when Musk made it so the algorithmic feed worthless there was no reason to keep my account.
Also, X does provide community based fact checking too, which works best when there are representatives from all sides participating.
One of the appealing aspects of Bluesky / ATProto is that there can be multiple fact checkers that users can subscribe to, which can have differing governance models, policies, and operations. Within the app, you can decide which ones (more than one even) at an individual level. This means we can have competition, but also echo chambers. It will be interesting to see how it works out
In the real world you congregate with like-minded people. The same applies to my social media timeline. And I use Mastodon by the way, which doesn't have an algorithm driven timeline.
This is why Bluesky, with ATProto, appeals to me. They have made the four core components (data hosting, app view, algo feed, moderation) a pluggable system with user level choices, for what they use for each component and which they combine
and you think any current mainstream social media will ever let us get full control of that?
And why is it fine for me to leave to another "echo chamber", but it's fine to filter myself with site features in your proposed "commons" to the point where I made an echo chamber?
Online communities have existed for over four decades now and we still haven't solved these problems.
The beautiful thing about digital graffiti is that you can remove it instantly, and return to an unmarred environment. As long as such tools are provided to each person, those who enjoy graffiti can leave it in place too. Win-Win.
We do need a new vision, with people embracing and promoting digital maturity. Both in a reduction of trolling, and in a stronger resilience against it. Because not everything that is objectionable, is graffiti. You should not hate your neighbor because he has a different political sign on his front yard during election season. We have to stop equating everything that is objectionable, as a catastrophic, intolerable insult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
I think at this point you may need to review your history. There's sadly only so much I can do as a handle on a social media platform to convince someone this unaware of the powers that be.
We should each follow our own moral compass, and oppose viewpoints that we find horrific. But trying to systematically stamp out disagreeable ideas, rather than to influence people with better ideas, is a road to hell.
Shutting down twitter, rumble, and substack would be a massacre for independent media right now. Elon could make an offer that couldn't be refused on the other two, and turn on the censorship harder than Facebook.
The right-wing free speech heel turn is always the same: when you censor, you're trying to prevent the free expression of ideas, when we censor, we're trying to prevent the "support" of terrorism. Lèse-majesté is always around the corner.
But yeah, if there is a truly distributed system, that had facilities and incentives which support and even promote diverse interactions, that'd be even better.
I firmly believe his posture with twitter has been because 1) it's a fun place for him and it was obviously a money losing purchase* so he might as well have that fun, and 2) his level of censorship is something that he can use to negotiate with government over contracts or regulation.
He might even really believe in free speech, but a conceptual belief in free speech doesn't mean he'll feel obligated to personally provide it if he can make a dollar denying it. His speech will remain free no matter what happens, he's a rich guy.
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* (not unlike say the Guardian, the New Republic, Mother Jones, the Intercept, or the Atlantic, or the WaPo, aparently, and probably CNN and MSNBC at this point. They're not for making money.)
But I'm with you on the potential problems and would rather have a system that was immune to such issues. What i'm really arguing against is people who saw the previous regime as correct and just, and are looking to recreate their echo-chamber somewhere else.
Part of what it will take to create a healthy town-center, that is much better than X, is for more people to speak up for ideals of diversity and tolerance. And to fight against the very loud and angry segment of people who see censorship and authoritarian control as good things, as long as they're working in their own favor.
The problem is that Musk came in and lifted the bans on a lot of people who were removed for roughly the correct thing, community standards. And then he let those very people help him find the voices you do want in the community and shut them down. Its gone beyond just echo chamber, and now the management has a clique. That clique doesnt just hate free speech, they loathe the people that largely use such rights like journalists.
Then of course theres all the shit about compliance with foreign governments etc. Twitters going to be an amazing case study one day in the future that will likely conclude against "free speech" as Musk poorly interprets it.
My impression is that the goal isn't to uphold free speech, its never done that, its to create a safe space to be an asshole. And that if you can hold your own against the assholes, then they will find a way to abuse their position in the clique to get you banned.
Back in the day you had these coffee shops, that may or may not be partially responsible for the success of so called western civilization. People would travel across europe to visit and exchange ideas with likeminded people. Thats not what social media is. People arent having robust, intentional, intellectual discussions, they are forming tribes and attacking each other with whatever weapons are available. People wake up in the morning and check their notifications like people in the blitz looking out the window to see if their neighbors survived the night. Aiding one side or the other of the conflict should never be conflated with "promoting diverse interactions".
All the abuses you're describing, were going on previously, it was just accepted by the majority as a good-thing, because it was only hurting "Nazi's". I'm not supporting anything the current ownership does on that basis, i'm saying we should all be fighting for a new paradigm, not just recreating the old one on a new platform.
And currently, there are very few voices standing up for a healthier interaction between people with opposing views. This will take a lot more than any technological fix, it will require an attitude shift. That isn't possible if we take our respective corners, and only come out when the fight-bell rings.
Here’s how I see it: imagine you like going to a restaurant for dinner fairly often. Recently, a group of rowdy patrons has started coming in, getting drunk, and making all kinds of noise. Strangely, the restaurant seems to encourage their behavior. You don’t love this—you’re just trying to enjoy a nice dinner and some casual conversation. So, you leave and don’t come back.
You can’t force the restaurant to calm down or kick out the rowdy patrons. They should be allowed to serve whomever they want. Luckily, you’re also not forced to endure their actions.
I disagree. I think the definition of hate and extremism has been warped to encompass things that aren't either of those things. And that's part of the problem. The rhetoric has become so hyperbolic that we're having a hard time coexisting.
The answer is for us to walk that back, and encourage actual dialogue, not run into our own safe bunkers.
You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant, and it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.
The definitions of hate and extremism are inherently tied to personal values. Many people perceive much of the speech on X as hateful and extremist because it directly contradicts their core values, not because they're arbitrarily expanding those definitions.
> You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant, and it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.
This analogy only works if everyone abides by a social contract. that’s often not the case on X. It’s like if the people at the next table overheard you, didn’t like what you said, and decided to come over and spit in your food. That’s the experience many people have on X.
People disagreeing with you is not "hate and extremism".
There is most definitely original content that is hateful, racist, and/or extreme on X that goes beyond the difference of policy or ethical opinions
It's not even arguments. They are saying the quiet parts out loud.
95M likes. This isn't some niche extremist circle to push under the rug.
How about we just go dictionary definition:
>denoting hostile actions motivated by intense dislike or prejudice.
can you really argue this past week, month, year. That you have not seen any dictionary-definition hate spread, promoted, and cheered for on the platform? Some by the owner himself?
Twitter isn't a commons. it's an amusement park and Musk is the manager. You don't bother trying to change a manger's mind unless you have millions to start the talk. Abandon Disneyland and try to see if Knott's or Six Flags or Funland fit your vibe more.
> it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.
Not when they are slinging their food at me. Experiences and atmosphere are well known to alter your sense of taste. Not just smell (which is obvious, since your nose and tongue are basically connected).
Also, maybe I'm from a different generation, but the trolls can be very easily ignored. What do I care is some no name account is posting some stupid content somewhere on X? I already know which people I want to follow. The rest I don't care about.
They censored cisgender as a slur.[1] They are not avoiding moderation to avoid bias.
> Also, maybe I'm from a different generation, but the trolls can be very easily ignored. What do I care is some no name account is posting some stupid content somewhere on X? I already know which people I want to follow. The rest I don't care about.
Signal to noise ratio is not a generational issue. Muted users and phrases not being muted is a common complaint. Less signal and more noise after the changes favoring paid accounts is a common complaint. And finding new accounts to follow was part of Twitter's value to others even if not you.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats...
if you're a no name user who barely comments, sure. Trolls have evolved beyond mean words in the last 20 years, though. They are NOT easily ignored anymore, and it only takes one doxxer to ruin your entire online presense. Or even physical.
Create a new account on X and then come back and talk about this.
You will notice that it is entirely right-wing political content that is being pushed.
Anything that X does which favors right-wing opinions, and censors or diminishes left-wing opinions, I oppose. I'm for free speech, and all of us being in the same proximity to hash out our differences, and accept that there will be some which always remain.
Hiding in our own echo-chambers does not solve any real problems, and it creates new ones.
No, I had centuries of ancestors fight so that question has a nigh-objective answer. I'm not going to entertain the argument to "expand my worldview". Why would I? That kind of talk is basically saying you don't respect me as a human being, so why talk with someone like that?
Diversity of viewpoints is nonsense.
Diversity of viewpoints doesn't mean every viewpoint is equally valid. It means that we endure the crazies on both sides, and don't let their stupid theories prevent rational conversation and good-natured and loving people from coexisting. That is, we become more mature, and find ways to cool down the hyperbolic rhetoric -- not abandon each other.
We aren't talking about our favorite flavor of Pringles here; coexisting means the right has to abandon their principals wholesale, not just say please and thank you while politely discussing how vaccines cause 5G or whatever.
- I'd love to hear more points about fiscal and foreign policy.
- I want to hear what people see in country music.
- I want to know about weird bizarre facts that can only be remembered and regurgitated by an obsessed madman. Likewise, I enjoy the occasional, IMO overanalyzed dives into arts from people who are considered auteurs that goes beyond my eye and ear
- I want to attempt to understand the experiences of those in very different socioeconomical environments. immigrants, LGBT, Some dude traveling the country on train cars,
- I want to understand more about the people who represent my country. The mundane dry stuff on the day to day, not just once every 4 years in the big showdown
- I want to hear people's technical approaches to software, hardware, and anything in between
I am open to a lot of viewpoints, I will not agree with all of them. I will find some of them obnoxious and other snooty.
Why is it that when I don't want to hear stuff like "My body your choice" I'm suddenly a coddled prude who is seeking an echo chamber? I did my time shitposting on 4chan when maybe half of it was ironic. I don't want nor need to do that anymore. That well has clearly fallen fully to Poe's law and my one and only real hard line is "don't spread hate".
This line of thought is very simple: you don't get diverse viewpoints when people are scared of being doxxed, harrased, or even murdered. You're making a place less diverse by literally trying to say they are less of a person than you. Stop it.