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I honestly don’t understand why people waited so I don’t use mastodon but I did cancel my Twitter account literally the first week he bought it. It wasn’t hard to see this coming and I just don’t get the delay.
I still don’t understand why people even use Twitter or mastodon or blue sky. It all just looks like a Facebook feed to me.
I joined bluesky a year ago to check it out. There wasn’t much happening on it at the time, so I got bored of it real quick. It was like the original version of Twitter. The day after the election, I got on X to see what kind of shit show was going on there, but my account was permanently suspended. I was just on there the day before the election with no problem. I rarely posted anything on it, but I have made some left leaning posts in the past. Like, 2 years in the past. Kinda weird to suspend my account right after the election. Whatever, I was never a big X user. So, I opened bluesky to see if it improved at all, and holy shit, it’s bopping. It’s still like old Twitter. It’s open source, no ads at all, and they make it really convenient to find accounts to follow with “starter packs”. I gotta say, I love it. There are almost no fake accounts or bots. They get weeded out pretty quick. That’s become my new Twitter, and Lemmy is my Reddit.
Are… are you me?
Because that is my exact experience.
Really? You got booted off of X during the election too?
I had an old Twitter account I barely used but I sould still hop on here and there to troll some chuds. After the election that account was booted, yeah.
So you follow people you don’t know, instead of people you do know? I don’t really understand what your story has to do with my comment, I’m sorry.
You said you didn’t understand why people use Twitter, mastodon, or bluesky. I explained why I, and a bunch of others, use bluesky and why Twitter sucks. Is that ok?
That’s fine. It skips the entire question of why use any of them in the first place though.
🤦♀️omg
“omg” yeah. You said you use it because it’s like old Twitter. That means nothing when I was asking why would you use Twitter.
Probably to avoid “Facebook” people (angry middle aged Republicans and easy to swindle old folks).
Leaving the musky fields for where the sky is truly bluer.
I might give Bluesky a shot, but it better not end up like f’n Reddit.
It will be.
Bluesky is not as decentralized as you think… Just saying.
Is bluesky not instanced? Cant you just run Bluesky PDS?
It just has to be better than the Nazi bar.
That’s a very low bar.
I’ll show myfself out.
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That is actually an advantage. Centralized platforms are able to achieve larger audiences, increasing the chance that I will be able to find content I actually care about.
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On Bluesky you can choose which algorithm/s you want to see though and even create your own.
That’s giving the algorithms too much credit. They don’t encode user desires they encode user engagement bait. Like everything under our capitalist system the motivation is profit: in this case ad revenue. Sometimes positive things or agreeable things drive engagement, sometimes negative or divisive things. As long as users spend time scrolling on the platform they’ll both be given equal weight.
As with anything profit motive driven it’s just about what makes more money not what makes more sense or what makes better outcomes. The core assumption of capitalism (at least how it’s sold) is that profit causing activity correlates with improvements to human well-being. How anyone still believes that, I’m not sure.
Something something bittorrent.
what?
An example of a non centralized network that has no issues with discoverability.
Only as long as the centralized authority stays aligned with you. Then you have the same problem.
Pretty much how Bluesky took off at all. It’s just the polarization of the platform style reflecting the polarization of society: Twitter/X went right-wing so the (center-)left made their own platform. It’s the same thing the right did when Twitter was politically censoring right-wing content before Musk bought it and Trump made Truth Social, the only difference being that Bluesky got the Big Tech and mainstream media blessing. Musk said he would stop that sort of censorship but just reversed it to censor left-wing content. Nobody actually wants a truly free platform, they just want their echo chamber.
Everything is better than Twitter I guess.
Is this running on a modified version of Mastodon?
No, and it doesnt federate even though they promised that a long time ago. Unless they do, they will inevitably also go to shit, there is no way around the enshittification pipeline. Just stick to mastodon and invest in a long term future.
For a slightly more detailed explanation: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
No elon involved so it has an enormous advantage over Twitter
That’s the same advantage all the other options have, too.
So you are of the opinion that the bluesky devs are currently lying about working to get it federated?
I wasn’t thinking about that at all, but they probably aren’t trying very hard, if I had to guess. What’s their current monetization model?
Not sure. You can run your own instance right now so they have enabled that but you can’t yet federate with the main instance. I believe you can store your own data in your own instance though but I’m not sure.
Thats an advantage so thin it is almost invisible. Its a centralized platform, it could be bought by Elon or shutdown for whatever reason at any second. Being this shortsighted about the future of global communications systems is not a great idea when Trump is about to take office.
Maybe offtopic, but does anyone has a good guide on how to join Mastodon? I’m still trying to find a good instance.
The best guide isn’t written down: don’t be afraid to try a few instances until you find one you like!
Once you’re on Mastodon and following people, you’ll start to notice the servers and gravitate towards the ones you like.
I would advise against mastodon.social since it is the biggest and also has some problems with moderation. But some people like it, so maybe it is good enough also.
To choose a server, check out https://fedi.tips/which-server-should-i-join-how-do-i-find-out-more-about-a-server/
The fedi.tips account also posts a lot of helpful tips and themed lists of accounts to follow/discover so I recommend following them too!
Appreciate the info!
And I still to this day don’t get the appeal of the twitter model
“The number of characters is limited based on old SMS standard! Lulz!”
Yeah, good way to have meaningful conversations where you can bring convincing arguments! /S
The amount of internet spaces with generous character limits and shit discussions makes me think that’s far from the biggest issue.
It becomes a pretty major issue when it’s one of the main sources of information for people though…
That’s a different thing, and I don’t think bigger character limits would help with a culture of not reading past headlines, not verifying and sharing sources, lacking moderation, and so on. Bigger issues.
Me neither, but I guess once you start following enough people, or the platform has a large enough amount of people posting there, it becomes “interesting” by quantity, if not quality.
I think I tried twitter for a week back in 2018, didn’t “get it”, deleted the account. Tried Mastodon last year, enjoyed the much larger character limit, but didn’t feel like staying.
It’s good for when you want to keep up with what people or organizations you’re interested in are up to. Artists, authors, game developers, etc.
It sucks for any kind of in-depth content or conversation, including politics.
But that’s just Facebook, why would I have twitter if that is my only motivation?
I feel like Facebook is much worse for that, but I haven’t touched Facebook in many years so I couldn’t tell you why I feel that way.
Yes, I much prefer following topics over people. Every time I glance at microblogging, there is just so much noise. At least lemmy-style forums have upvotes to surface quality content rather than the jumbled mess that microblogs are. No matter how much I like someone (even IRL friends/family), I won’t be interested in their every passing thought, it’s just exhausting.
“The number of characters is limited based on old SMS standard! Lulz!”
Yeah, good way to have meaningful conversations where you can bring convincing arguments! /S
BlueSky is its own thing with its own federated protocol called ATproto. They have an explanation in their docs on how it works, different features. There’s a bridge between the two as well, a bit janky but effective.
It’s a federated protocol, but the network itself isn’t meaningfully federated, and is basically just Bluesky (the company) infrastructure. Hopefully that changes, because until then, it’s still a centralised social media platform, despite the underlying technology
They have no reason to change that. They will long term want the exact same thing that twitter has, access to all user data and control of the platform.
Rumors are indicating that they want to offer some subscriptions to users(domain registration and hosting of various bluesky components).
The company is currently TINY, under 50 employees. So as long as the infra costs stay low, it won’t take much. If enough users get vanity domains, and they get some govt/enterprise accounts for hosting bsky.cnn.com and such.
So the idea is that they want to get to some ethical monetization strategy before releasing the software to aggregate content is released, and federation is enabled.
I would happily bet money that federation keeps getting kicked down the road. “Oh, we have to do X first. Also Y just came up, and you know it was a waning moon last night so…” They have no reason to enable it as long as things go their way.
So you can see mastodon posts on bluesky and bluesky posts on mastodon?
No, not unless the person who’s posts you want to see opted into bridging their account.
If both parties bridge their accounts they can follow eachother, or if one person bridges their account others can follow them.
I don’t think you can see boosts of stuff not on your platform though, and I don’t know how interacting with a bridged account works if both of you are bridged. If only the person you’re following is bridged they definitely won’t see it, but I don’t know if that changes if you’re both bridged
How do you opt-in to that?
You opt in by following the bridgy fed account for your platform, so for Mastodon that’d be: https://bsky.brid.gy/bsky.brid.gy
There’s one on each platform, and when you follow it it’ll create you a bluesky/mastodon counterpart and send you the link to that bridged account
We’re seeing a substantial increase on the Mastodon instance I help moderate too, but there’s no aggregate marketing department at Mastodon so we don’t get any headlines.
I’m using both platforms through Openvibe when I’m on my phone.
ditto
Thanks for letting me know about this. Just installed it. Now if they supported multiple mastodon accounts, I’d really be cooking.
Thanks for reminding me of this app. Really wish 'open’vibe would be on Foss stores like fdroid though.
Has 3 trackers too. Google Analytics, firebase, and sentry.
Edit: Downloaded it and it is pretty cool but I wish it had more support for bluesky feeds. It supports the ones I already have but I can’t search for more.
Seems like there should be. I bet people would donate to a marketing fund
You have now taken your first steps to the dark side and becoming a corpo overlord. It is a subtle but slippery slope.
I made an account yesterday to see how it is, however, I never used Twitter and so I don’t really understand how BlueSky works (since it suppose to be the same as Twitter?).
I followed 8 people and a couple of “#” but I barely see a thing of the people, I follow.
Same boat my friend. Never ever had a xitter account but I made a Bluesky account last week to check things out. My husband deleted his Twitter account quite a while back and has been sorely missing seeing people he followed. I tried getting him here but he really doesn’t understand the whole set up. So I’m trying to convince him to join Bluesky. I have no idea what I’m doing over there but the folks there are much like we were here in the beginning in that everyone is helping each other learn. I do think that the platform will serve as a good bridge to get people learning about Federated platforms. We all have to start somewhere.
On Web and official app(android) there are two pages Discover and Following, by default you will be on “Discover” page. To see post from people you followed, you need to switch to the following page.
You can also search for “starter packs” of helpful people to follow in whatever you are interested in, e.g., history, cooking, overthrowing the government, etc.
700,001
Soon Twitter will complete its transition to Nazi Bar of Social Media.
If there’s openly Nazis in your bar and they aren’t being kicked out, you’re in a Nazi bar. They completed that transition a while ago.
For a sense of perspective, Twitter has 106 million users in USA. 700 000 is 0.67% of that.
Twitter has 106 million users in USA.
Prove it
This is additional new users not total users. Growing by 0.67% of the user count of the largest microblogging platform in the world in a week is absolutely massive.
If it keeps going for a year, then it’ll truly be a large number (over 36 million to be precise). But if this was just a one-off protest kind of jumping the ship, then it’s not going to mean much.
I think the poster wants to say it means not that many in the US are leaving twitter or looking for alternatives, contrary to what the headline suggests.
Perhaps. Overall Bluesky is massive already tho. Twitter has something like 220 million users with Bluesky being around 14 million. Having 6% of the user count of Twitter is already beyond critical mass for the average user. People will be able to satisfy their microblogging itch on bluesky which means they wont go back. It has all the drama, porn and politics that twitter had.
Didn’t know it was that large yet, that’s pretty good! The point is whether 700k leaving twitter says anything about a trend. Bluesky could be twice the size of twitter without changing the point.
I will probably start using Bluesky and Mastodon shortly.
Also for a sense of perspective, Twitter is owned by a Trump salesman that lies about everything (including user numbers that affect ad revenue). I’ve seen Bluesky users mention that actual engagement with real people is already higher than Twitter. It definitely feels more “alive” to me as well.
Relevant video from PirateSoftware talking about the difference in engagement between them.
Coing from one shitty capitalist business to another shitty capitalist business.
I think this is the crowd that tried Mastodon and then abandoned it when they realized it required a modicum of effort.
bluesky has a couple disability friendly features both mastodon and X don’t have.
I doubt this sort of attitude helps, too. Mastodon developers know at least some of its failings. Migrating to Bluesky is not effortless.
That’s probably fair. There’s an abundance of smug assholery in the world right now. Apologies.
Honestly I can’t figure out how to find people I’m interested in… or maybe there isn’t much academic/buddhism stuff on there? :/
You just search hashtags or set up a column so you have a feed giving you everything under a given hashtag, though it may be those communities are so niche there isn’t much on the Mastodon instance you chose. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a specific instance for Buddhism itself, though, given that it’s such a massive world religion.
Thanks for sharing! :)
Just search #buddhism
Not a lot of interest sadly :/ Guess I will try to make the content
This man ran into the weirdos on Mastodon. I’m over there hanging out with people posting about ass-pennies and no one cries “content warning!” You’re the one who decides who you follow and who follows you. If your hanging out with folks too sensitive for your liking, that’s on you.
I don’t even know what Mastodon looks like and I don’t know who the guy is, but I’m just assuming he’s lying because it sounds like the usual “crazy pronoun libs” dog whistle.
What being too dependent on the algorithm does to a mf
wtf kind of lame criticism of mastodon is this…there are constantly cute pictures of pets being posted on mastodon… and like anywhere else with humans these posts are very popular on mastodon.
I would say these posts are MORE popular on mastodon because without an algorithm cute animal photos are going to be even more popular.
This is all nonsense anyways, Bluesky is considered “cooler” by techy types with a childlike awareness of history, politics and power because the tech is cooler when considered in the abstract.
Coincidently none of these technical details have the capacity to make bluesky a truly open and free place otherwise those investors would sue bluesky for purposefully not pursuing profit for shareholders.
Being complicated will keep the Facebook moms, and my casually racist uncle away.
Unfortunately a lot of our peers are also tech illiterate :(
Whatever will they do without algorithms recommending their low effort posts to other users?
This smug attitude is why the fediverse will stay niche. People get jobs from twitter and Bluesky showing their posts to people. Its why im on the platforms as an artist. But sure lets talk shit at everyone who doesnt want to post to the void on mastodon
Seriously, I’m so tired of this “we on Mastodon are the Eloi and they on Bluesky are the Morlocks” type bs, that kind of hostility to regular users makes me not want to be on the Fediverse at all.
It’s a problem in the open source community as a whole. People ask for it to be a little easier because they’re not super skilled with tech and then the reaction is “if your so dumb you cant use this then maybe you shouldnt use it” or something to that extent
Closely followed by surprisedpikachu.jpg when nobody’s using it
There’s a lot of artists selling stuff on Mastodon but I don’t think you can have a job as a mastodon influencer
People get what they deserve.
I just learned that before their fundraising round Bluesky called themselves a “public benefit LLC” and I thought thats nice of them to benefit the public 😅 , then I found out about US corporate law and what it actually means…
It means that they are getting funds from the public, I’m guessing…
Sounds like a classic “To Serve Man” type of situation to me… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)
I think I will avoid spoilers…
Impressive, since “network effects” are what keeps people on a platform. Why move off Xitter or FB when everyone’s on there, and not on the new place? Keep moving a significant fraction of a million people every week, and pretty soon, it’ll be where everyone is.
My partner, who is very non-technical, signed up for a BlueSky as well this week: “all the teacher blogs have declared that they are moving over”. Looks like everyone has had enough.
FWIW there’s a way to bridge Bluesky accounts to Mastodon
Why don’t people want to use mastodon?
Are they following rasputin again?
Does Mastodon refuse to deal with its issues, like Lemmy?
Because the concept of federation is still impenetrable to a layperson
email. email is federated. literally everyone has an email address and understands they might be on a different service, but its all email, and you just use their account name and the service part with the @ in between.
it’s not a complicated subject at all, and a good chunk of the humans on earth have no experience being alive without a federated service being a part of their daily life. (lets not mention telephones, or national postal services)
the issue isn’t perceived complexity, it’s that the negatives of using a centralized service are outweighed by the benefits. people don’t see it as a personal liberty issue, or a free speech issue, or a propaganda issue, or a billionaire oligarchs ability to control the flow of information between citizens issue. they just want it to be easy to use. and the more people that do it, the less personal responsibility they feel about the choice.
learning from history is for suckers, I guess
Heck: phones. Phones are federated. I pay for my phone service through one company, and you pay for your phone service through another, but I can still call you as long as I dial the right number.
The issue isn’t really that federation makes things hard. The issue is that it’s not how people are used to social media, and very specifically social media, working. And people are strange creatures of habit who hate change.
It’s just not implemented well from a user standpoint imo.
Not enough people on Mastodon are into the things I was using Twitter/use BlueSky for.
Mastodon does refuse to deal with its issues but i wouldnt say that about Lemmy. Lemmy just has a very small dev team working off no funding.
I’ve heard rumours that Lemmy Devs run that Tankie Shit-hole Lemmy.ml
So?
So they dont deserve a single penny, I’d rather watch this platform burn to the ground.
You can feel that way. but I see it as supporting the product not the people. When I think of the people behind the biggest social media companies in the world they’re awful far worse than some tankie larper online and the product is worse.
Eh, I’m not interested in supporting them, but the code is free and open source. I’m using a client written by not-them, to connect to a server run by not-them, and reading federated content from dozens of other servers run by not-them.
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Kbin is dead, Mbin is good but different to Lemmy. Also see PieFed and Sublinks.
The wonderful thing about federated services is that you can have fun with all the users on Lemmy and see all the content but not have to actually use the Lemmy software. You can even follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon and interact with posts from there (just in a Mastodon way).
Sublinks?
Yip, Sublinks.
I’m not sure how far along they are, I don’t think I’ve seen a sublinks instance in the wild. Their demo seems to be running the Lemmy frontend still, if I’m understanding things right. But it’s basically a community project to build lemmy but in java instead of rust and they have a lot more moderation tools. It’s what Beehaw are planning to migrate to, but I think it might not be ready yet.
Out of the loop, what happened to kbin?
I don’t think anyone really knows. It’s the single person issue, that Ernest was the only person to have access to do anything. It seems something is personally wrong for him, maybe unwell, maybe something else, but no one hears from him for months. The flagship kbin instance run by Ernest, https://kbin.social/, has had an error and hasn’t worked for months.
To my knowledge, this is the last anyone has heard from him:
I have been away from home for a long time now and do not have all accesses. I will try to restore access in the coming days. The care of the instance will also be handed over.
That was 5 months ago.
It’s clear something is very wrong, but because Ernest is the only one with access that means no one can help. Mbin forked Kbin and have been actively developing Mbin. Many, if not most of the sites called “kbin” are now running Mbin.
Anecdotally, I joined Mastodon, found it difficult to find people who I personally know that were on different instances, kind of lost interest and thought kbin might be a better solution for both forums and microblogs all in one place, then my Mastodon instance shut down, and then kbin died too. Hence me being on lemmy.world, as default and stable of a server as there is here.
Bluesky felt fun and familiar right off the bat, my only issue was that it was still so small when I joined. Now that there’s an influx of new users, many of whom I followed on the bird site, it just feels like Twitter 2, which I suspect is what most people want.
FWIW I have a highly technical job and consider myself pretty tech literate, so I don’t think any of the issues I had with Mastodon weren’t things I could’ve figured out or worked around, I just didn’t feel incentivized to bother. I suspect they’ve smoothed out a lot of the federating issues I saw before, but at this point I’m happy enough on Bluesky to stay put.
Meanwhile, I’m technologically thick as shit and have no trouble using Mastodon at all. If I know someone is on there I’ll find their profile and follow them. Done.
It ain’t that complicated.
It’s important to note that my experience is from a year ago, and I imagine a lot has changed. Part of my issue at the time was that I couldn’t see things like who people I followed were following because they were on a different server, which made discovery challenging. Also very few people who I followed on the bird site went to Mastodon.
I’m not saying the platform can’t work or that the barriers make it unusable, just that the draw wasn’t there to warrant the investment in learning a more complex platform than the alternatives.
I’ve been on there two years now, so 🤷🏽♀️
There’s an add-on to help find the people you followed on Twitter on Bluesky, FYI.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge/behhbpbpmailcnfbjagknjngnfdojpko?hl=en
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sky-follower-bridge/
Excellent, thanks!
yea in the beginning it can be hard. Just start following people. And get your timeline filling. Try to check out other users posts/comments and follow them as well if you want to. That will you get started.
We need those cracked TikTok algos which keep children glued to their screens for 16 hours a day
Some children are even behind the screens for more than 26 ½ hours per day.
That was actually part of my issue, and I experienced the same problem on Bluesky at first. The difference for me was ease of discovery and the influx of people I followed on other platforms. If they had gone to Mastodon instead, I’d have been more inclined to give it more effort. As it stands, I’m content with Bluesky and don’t feel I’m missing much on Mastodon. Perhaps I’m mistaken, and that’s my loss. Just trying to add some perspective.
If there are these roadblack to you as a profficient computer toucher then I think it’s safe to say this is system is already doomed to cultural irrelevance, at best just another one of our private clubhouse nerdtoys, sad !
Hopefully this defeat in the face of bluesky shocks the dev out of their uncompromising complacency and start fighting FOR the users
It’s entirely possible that my timing was just bad for Mastodon and good for Lemmy. The fact that I could jump on Boost and have an extremely familiar experience was a big plus. Bluesky was more similar in terms of migration experience to Lemmy than Mastodon was.
The other issue is that in a forum site you follow topics, where on a microblog site you follow people. The topics are here on Lemmy (to some extent), even if the people aren’t, but I don’t really care about the individual contributors as much. The people I wanted to follow for microblogging went to Bluesky, and that matters a lot more there.
Your initial post and response here describe my position as well.
Simply put, to follow individuals, you have to be where those individuals are. On Lemmy here in looking for topics and discussion, those are much easier to decentralize.
Yeah, on reflection, I think that’s the crux of it. There were some users from a more tight knit subreddit that I got to know well, but we all moved to discord a few years back. I miss some of the more active niche subreddits, but otherwise Lemmy replaced it very easily.
which mastadon instance to join?
Yes, I never got past that stage. It seems most instances are either nazis, crybullies or flake. I guess first step of joining mastodon is buying a domain name to run a server instance on and then join mastodon as a single user instance. But then I assume most servers also ban single user instance and I just could not be bothered to join was is probably “worse twitter” when I never participated in the twitter mental illness in the first place.
If you can’t decide, then you can just use the flagship instance, mastodon.social.
Why don’t people want to use mastodon?
Because it doesn’t have a proper discover feed.
But there is a discover feed in Mastodon, isn’t it ? That’s what I use to discover new accounts. Am I missing something ? For me Mastodon is way better that twitter and I wish more people used it.
Discover feed in Mastodon sucks a lot for me, the number of posts there are very limited and not tailed to my preferences. On one hand, that makes it less addicting than twitter which is good for me, on the other hand, it doesn’t make me use it much which is also good for me but bad for them ig.
I got like 10 follows in three days from actual accounts. I’ve posted/replied just a few times andy avatar is Richard Simmons. I figured something was up
I really want BlueSky to add the functionality of old Reddit. And ban all Israelis.
And ban all Israelis
You’re in luck because bluesky is literally the only one with that exact feature. Just search for user lists, which you can use to subscribe en-masse, or, conversely, nothing’s preventing you from using them as block lists. There are probably few out there where bots monitor for anyone who ever spoke hebrew, which should fit your purpose
