Why Not Bluesky
tbray.org
tbray.org
We've seen it though, Mastodon's model is garbage, and they lost from the start. No one wants horrible Reddit style mods ego tripping over their own echo chamber. There is no future for Mastodon.
To the point of the article, the real question is if we'll see more atmosphere hosts (aka using a PDS other than Bluesky's) and more applications built on the protcol. And I think the real test will be if anyone ever builds their own relay that gets popular.
Bluesky's model is still better (more open, unbiased, harder to censor) than Mastodon/Threads/X by default, and yes it has a long way to go, but we've known that from the start.
I think this has to be the sentiment that saves discourse on the internet. We spend too much time focusing on the size of the network graph and not nearly enough time considering how to elevate the best conversations.
There are similar cases for mastodon instances and it really did repel many users. But there are still open and interesting ones. Not ones where you see celebrities posting, but that isn't the focus of everyone. They will remain niche because exposure of communities is minimal on other places. Maybe that isn't a bad thing.
In contrast to media propaganda, that it is hate that drives users away, in my case it is the paternalistic and childish content moderation. If everything is safe, everything is boring.
I hope Bluesky is more tolerant here, but I fear its discovery just forms information silos as well. Time will tell. Until then it probably is an improvement that we get more distinct platforms.
Some use these sites for networking. For me it is purely entertainment.
What? About half the people I care to follow post exclusively on Mastodon.
Hosting you own data/integrating in your own CMS is of course possible with both, in Atproto that would be PDS.
But getting other peoples reactions in you own website is hard.
In ActivityPub there is a push model: If someone likes your post, they send a message to you AP inbox and you can use that message to bump an integer in your database.
Atproto in a way has a pull model: You need to read other users PDS. Of course you can do that, but only of PDS you already know. Unknown PDS of other unknown users stay unknown. ATProto solves this with Relays, which index PDS, transforming the data into a firehose. So if you want to get reactions, you'll need to run you own Relay or subscribe to someones elses Relays's firehose and do a lot of filtering.
In a way the Relay part of ATProto seem tailormade that only one or a few multi-million companies can run this expensive part of the network.
publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
A normal human being can use it as if it was a normal website and I really think this might just be what is needed for this to stay alive.
The discourse is also at least today much healthier than on mastodon for the communities I’m a part of.
I think the most likely outcome however is that Twitter will just continue to be the platform to be on.
Every major social platform has turned into a shithole. Orkut, Facebook, Twitter...
Musk is such a child that he could easily decide to buy out enough investors to get a majority holding and...then what? You're right back to square one.
In what other communication medium or protocol would you tolerate one company controlling everything about it?
And Mastodon seems remarkably single leader. And the community seems expressly hostile to letting people make cool experiences that span the network -nthey want a level of insularness & isolation, where the only things happening are defined by their server. And right now there's not much variance across servers; they all do mostly the same things, with only moderation & community differing.
It's going to be an enormous challenge to see competing Relays and AppViews spring up for At Protocol. That really is the challenge, seeing if other people can chew the network. One interesting idea I heard floated was that cloud providers might be able to host their own, that see less platforms or what not might hook into. Not perfect, not as distributed as totally desired, but it sure could be cost effective to have them maintain network copies.
Where-as you will be burned alive if you try that on Mastadon.
The other “network effect” in play here is that there’s only one viable place for masto accounts and that’s .social - and if everyone is flocking towards a single place with a single owner then the tech being federated still fails in the face of enshittification when the instance or instance owner goes bad.
TB and CD’s points are spot on - but Masto / federation needs some serious work on the usability side before anyone approaching a “normal” (non-geek) user is going to find this a serious contender to X or any of the others.
I had the r/ontario mod publicly admit they ban ALL canadian conservatives because they are ALL homophobic. Mastodon has a public blog post where they admit the same problem. as long as you ban opposing viewpoints you can never win.
Why is it each time the cognitive dissonance peaks in an echo chamber they simply seek a new social media safe space?
Toronto Maple Leafs are on a 10 game winning streak after they banned their opponents from the building.
Reddit has fallen out of the top 15 social media platforms, now ranking around 20th and soon to fall behind LinkedIn. Most of reddit are bots creating the illusion of activity.
Banning conservatives goes well beyond politics. All community sizes shrink. With fewer opposing viewpoints, left-leaning users dominate discussions, reinforcing a one-sided narrative.
But you might say, no how could that be?Ive been banned from a dozen subreddits for violating rules that dont even show up in the rule list. You just so happen to hit a subject which is secretly against the rules.
I asked the mods how I would know not to break that rule, talking about what they claim is a conspiracy theory. But they dont even list in the rules because they dont want to give it any additional coverage. But i dont even get a warning?
Digg died because of their move against free speech. Every rolled over to reddit because they claim to be free speech but really never was, it was just micro censorship. outsourced antifree speech.
Reddit and digg will be hosted on the same servers in thefuture.
What was the thing that "the mods" claimed was a conspiracy theory?
It is not the panacea they expect it to be. Most of these people don't even know what they're running from. Case in point, the histrionics in the very first sentence.
It's reminiscent of the Jonestown cult exiling themselves to Guyana.
A quick trip to the Bluesky homepage showed its feed promoting some of the very same political 'influencer' accounts that spew some of the most toxic and divisive content on X.
Folks packing up and running from X because their 'friends' are, unknowingly are bringing the cockroaches with them in their luggage.
That way you'll never see any content from them, even if someone you follow shares it.
On Twitter Elon decides what you see and you can't block.
These new accounts are not all organic users hopping over there for chill conversations and good vibes.
My personal theory - and I have no hard evidence - is these bot farms are operated by foreign threat actors trying to sow discord among the English-speaking populace. The venue where this happens is irrelevant.
A more similar comparison would be the flight from MySpace or Digg. One day those places just weren't it, and everyone was talking about how much better the new place is. Some folks stayed behind, most of us moved, and some folks used it as a chance to get off the ride.
There's nothing conspiratorial here, everyone can see musk is a divisive figure. And I think everyone can see Twitter has changed. People look at blue sky and see something of the old Twitter and go, "I like it here, I should tell the people I know it's nice here."
But like Digg and MySpace, some people will stay behind, many will move, and some will use it to exit the game entirely.
I think it's pretty obvious - Musk and Trump. (or rather Musk and pro-Musk/pro-Trump users and/or bots).
It takes too much effort and time to actually have reliable email server. One mistake in config or wrong thing good luck convincing MS and Google. Even smaller players like fastmail and proton (many others) will have problems with Gmail or Outlook (Hotmail or whatever the hosted version of MA offering is called now) from time to time.
The language of anti-spam tools for any practical reason in this space is defacto unknown to you. So you don't know what is actually this language.
I'm actually on most of these networks. I'm not on Threads yet. Just not especially in a hurry to join that crowd. But with four networks largely not sharing any content between them for mostly petty (non technical) reasons, it's a definite downgrade from when everyone was using Twitter.
It seems a lot of energy is being wasted on raising walls against federating or arguing why such a thing would be a bad thing. I agree with Tim Bray that the tech largely doesn't matter. What matters is the users and the content. And that is fragmented all over the place right now.
Twitter messed up by becoming a toxic waste dump and then losing a lot of its user base. What remains just isn't very interesting to me.
BTW. Twitter had changed for the worse long before Elon Musk got involved. I see that more as a symptom than the root cause. The real problem was infighting inside Twitter and many years of stagnation of the platform because of a complete and utter lack of leadership. And good old corporate greed and VC induced stupidity/madness.
They gradually rolled back features that made the platform interesting. They shut down the fire hose, they killed third party clients, and then AI was imposed. And then you got all the clowns gaming the AI trying to "win" at everybody else's expense. they threw out the baby with the bathwater. Enshittication is a great word for that. Everything that made Twitter great was killed/removed. And then they got Elon Musk. Not the other way around.
The shock therapy applied by Elon Musk was pretty brutal and ugly but also highlights what a bloated, dysfunctional platform it had become. There wasn't much left by the time he took over. Just a bunch of clowns pretending to be a mature company and clearly failing hard at that. I don't think Musk will save it but it's interesting that you can just remove layers of dysfunctional crap from an org chart with a flame thrower (in human form) and not have the whole thing collapse into a pile of rubble. The platform continues to function with a fraction of the people involved. If somebody adds federation to the platform, unexpected good things might actually happen.
This isn't rocket science from a technical point of view. Mastodon runs on a shoestring budget. Flicking short text messages around at scale is kind of a solved problem technically.