Over the last week I’ve seen a good chunk of the people I follow on Twitter head over (or try to head over) to Blue Sky which just makes me wonder what they thought was wrong with Mastodon.
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Sunday morning I was accidentally browsing the local “everyone” feed on my instance (I rarely do, as I have curated myself a very nice feed with a mix of hashtags and follows) and there was a person asking how to follow someone on another instance and I explained it to them. They would have made accounts on multiple servers… federation is not super-intuitive to the non-technical people who normally live in one of the walled gardens of apple, google or meta.
Some people on lemmy are worried because the new apps direct everyone to lemmy.world which might not be able to handle the load. Lemmy has grown from like less than 100k users to over 2 million in a very short timespan.
When I made my account a month ago the top posts across all instances had maybe 100 upvotes. Now it is 20 times as much. (Well this is just a can of beans: https://feddit.de/post/1309220)
Also I really really can’t resist this beauty:
(https://feddit.de/post/1301501)
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As far as I can see Bluesky is basically trying to produce a more centralised twitter-style experience. And a lot of non-technical people seem to be going there as a result. But:
- no stable URLs, walled garden
- founders are libertarian techbros with actual literal Nazis as friends
- lots of bad decisions about moderation, including “outsource it all to AI”
- plus the basic: it’s designed as a profit-making enterprise so sooner or later it’s going to try to make a profit off the users
Thinking about moving Mastodon server to one that’s more immediately pro-Fedipact (i.e. no federation with Facebook) than “wait and see”.
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I’m enjoying bluesky a lot, but as you say the positives are all temporary. The crowd is small and VERY liberal, and when Jack tried to go techbro they basically chased him off his own site.
That won’t last, and eventually it’ll open to the public, but right now it’s like the fun parts of Old Internet. There’s a chaos vibe that’s missing from mastodon.
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Yeh, I think the distributed nature of Mastodon makes it awkward to use for a lot of people and doesn’t make it quite work as a Twitter replacement.
Meanwhile, BS is basically emulating “old Twitter” and that appeals to people trying to leave. But if it gets any really significant uptake, it will just go the same way.
I feel like Twitter is just going to limp along until Musk gets sick of it and sells it off (at a massive loss) to someone who sees the obvious value of “going back to basics” and attracting back all the lost users (while mining their data).
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Twitter wasn’t making great money pre-acquisition. Now that interest rates are finally rising again, all the big tech firms are feeling squeezed to increase profits - and I think this is why we’re also seeing Reddit and YouTube and Discord all behaving offensively to try to increase income all at the same time. (And why they’re all laying people off.)
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And being Meta, it wants all your data. It isn’t launching in the EU at present, although it is in the UK. UK data protection is theoretically based on GDPR, but is seriously under-enforced. The current government seems to regard the population as a resource to be exploited.
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I cannot think of anything I want less than “Twitter, but on Facebook”.
Especially if your Facebook contacts are involved, since they tend to be family etc.
(Bluesky is great)
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Tbh, I dont see the appeal of Twitter nowadays, as a formula, except as a bulletin board for famous ppl. Ppl make big threads when 160 characters isnt enough. And Im thinking: this could have been a blog post instead.
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Back when Twitter was primarily an output canvas for users embracing the “up-and-coming mobility” of SMS and 2G user data, I suppose it made sense. Doesn’t seem to now, even for people whose thoughts can be adequately expressed in small bursts of text.
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"Well-intentioned people: let’s wait and see if #Threads is, for example, a privacy nightmare
“Facebook: we’re not launching in Europe yet because right now it would be illegal”
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Except the ceo invented a cryptocurrency specially designed to appeal to money launderers and other criminals, the board has Nazi sympathizers on it, and the ownership is opaque (and probably includes the nazis).
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The current user experience is of a very liberal community getting together to energetically stop any hint of the things you mentioned infecting the actual posts, but as I said above, I do expect it to implode in the future.
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I am skeptical that the person that sold „the global townsquare“ to the likes of Elon Musk on a dare is doing better the 2nd time around.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
I am absolutely pro-Fedipact btw. I have posted about xmpp/google a number of times on lemmy already.
I have been musing today about how these services could work. None of the current ones are profitable and its getting worse. I have seen a theory linking rising interest rates to the current speed of enshittification taking place. None of them have a business case except their users‘ data and places like the EU are shutting that down maybe not completely but more and more in a way that needs users to agree to being exploited…
And the fediverse seems to insist on running on donations. I just don‘t think that will scale. But I am also enjoying it while I can and obviously plan to donate in the very near future (my lemmy instance is currently refusing donations as far as I am aware because they are still surprised by all this, and I need to figure out if I am staying on my current mastodon instance)
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There are three ways a service can pay its bills: subscriptions, advertising, and some chump paying for it. (sorry, off to send roger some cash.) Or course, some combination of the three. Lots commercial sites have been operating on a mixed model. For instance, Reddit is full of ads (which is what the third party app fight is really about: those users don’t see reddit’s ads), but also have subscriptions (and meaningless tokens you can pay for), and have been burning the cash venture capitalists have given them (in exchange for a slice of ownership in the future profits, of course).
VCs have been willing to burn money on things like Reddit and discord because interest rates were low, and so expected returns on capital were low. They’re no longer low, so returns need to be higher, and the VCs are squeezing their investments for payback.
Some chump paying for it isn’t going to work long term for any large service. (I expect Roger to keep running this and related sites until he’s sick of the time involved, not the cash outflow. But if traffic were to increase by an order of magnitude, that might change, and the time input would be quite a bit higher, tooo.) Mastodon servers are going to get sick of begging for money, and shut down, or they’re going to figure out how to shove ads at you.
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The follow on is also bad. If I can’t order newest to oldest I get frustrated.
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Facebook will facebook…
Though I didn‘t expect it to facebook this hard right out of the box, so I will not quite rule out some too-real satire.
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I think “Our privacy policy is literally illegal in Europe” is pretty strong Facebook-ing, perhaps only beaten by “Once you create a Threads account you can’t ever delete it unless you also delete your Instagram account”.
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Just saw this gem on lemmy
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