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I switched to Bluesky but then moved back to twitter. I'm glad that they are trying to compete with Twitter (Twitter is a conservative cesspool), but all of my

I switched to Bluesky but then moved back to twitter. I'm glad that they are trying to compete with Twitter (Twitter is a conservative cesspool), but all of my non-technical friends have stayed on Twitter. So, I end up going where they are. I think the reason my friends did not join Bluesky despite me inviting them is that it just isn't as good of a product as Twitter. You can't post videos or DM. I am not a tech executive and have no idea about corporate strategy, but it seems like Bluesky should focus less on technical differentiators and more on building killer features that have mass appeal and a community that people want to join. IMHO this milestone, while cool, means absolutely nothing to people outside of the hacker news crowd. I'm rooting for Bluesky, but it seems to me it will die without a critical mass of users. Again, I'm kinda dumb, so this may all be wrong.

pfraze 3y ago
It's a fair point and we definitely debated it, but it was too important to us that we complete the mission.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Debated videos and DM? Mastodon has those features; if you're not doing them at all you may want to reconsider.
  - pfraze 3y ago
    Debated prioritizing them before federation, not debated their existence. They are a must-have for social.
  - danabramov 3y ago
    We definitely want to implement these features, the question was whether they should hold back releasing support for federation or not. Since federation is a core constraint on any features we'd like to build, the team felt that there is no reason to hold federation back, and that releasing it as it's ready makes sense. We're thinking about Bluesky as both a product and a protocol (informing each other's design), and you're 100% right that for the end user, the product itself is what matters. Because we've taken on the decentralization constraint, we take longer to "catch up" to features that centralized platforms tend to have from the start, but it's definitely going to be a major area of focus for us going forward. (Ofc Mastodon isn't centralized, but note that it's had a few years of head start on feature development. We'll get there.)
  - pr337h4m 3y ago
    Mastodon DMs have absolutely no privacy: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards compatibility.
    - Repulsion9513 3y ago
      DMs on any other service also have no privacy. Signal or Telegram could read your DMs by simply releasing an update to their code, for example. You always have to trust the person running the service you use. (Unless you have E2EE/something like OTR, in which case you have to trust the persom who makes that code!)
      - pr337h4m 3y ago
        The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use. If Signal releases a malicious update (and they don't provide reproducible builds), it is very much possible for you to know about it, as everything is on your device. Even if the binaries are different from the source code, decompilers, analyzing network traffic, etc. gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates. Mastodon admins can simply pull up your plaintext DMs on their servers and no one will ever know.
        Repulsion9513 3y ago
        > The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use. Well then I guess it's pointless because it doesn't accomplish that. (The actual point, FYI, is that you don't have to trust all of: them, their hosting providers, your ISP, the ISPs between, the government, and their mom.) > it is very much possible for you to know about it "Possible" != "done" > analyzing network traffic How are you gonna do that? Surely if they wanted to sniff it would still just look like any other encrypted data > gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates Sure, when the same application is used by everyone, which is not true in either the Mastodon world or the new Bluesky-small-instances world
  - jug 3y ago
    I think it's sensible to have at the very least federation function as intended ahead of DM's as I imagine DM is another part pretty contingent on federation due to the privacy issues becoming approximately 10x more complicated with federation. ;-) Twitter is having it easy. Videos might be more of a resource issue. Hardly a good time to launch videos almost at the same timeframe as they spike their user base by going public.
- emceestork 3y ago
  Ah yeah, I get that. I don't mean to be cynical on the day you complete that mission. Congrats on launching! Excited to see what y'all do next.
- kunalgupta 3y ago
  this is the correct order of operations for sure
- DevX101 3y ago
  You guys made the right call. You're not trying to become the next TikTok.
elpool2 3y ago
I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Federation is nice but when the platform only does one-third of what the platform you're trying to leave does then the whole thing feels like a toy
- celdon25 3y ago
  It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.
  - 1shooner 3y ago
    Of course people are going to complain about content they don't want. That's the product. Twitter changed their product to deliver different content, so its audience has changed. Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.
    - dools 3y ago
      FYI a government can’t borrow a currency it issues, there is no national debt (or all money is debt).
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - screenoridesagb 3y ago
t_mann 3y ago
Not sure I agree. Being the thing that the tech folks find cool isn't a bad starting position at all. And it's significantly harder to achieve than DM's.
303uru 3y ago
I've been using Bluesky for a week and I'm impressed. I actually appreciate that there is less media, it's more about conversation. So far it feels very much like Twitter before it became a cesspool. I'm conversing with local journalists, prominent scientists, sci-fi authors, etc... It's wonderful.
sergiotapia 3y ago
> Twitter is a conservative cesspool I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or worse. I like it a lot more! Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.
- emceestork 3y ago
  Yeah, maybe we just have different politics and I'm too dismissive of alternative worldviews. Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative stuff is surfaced by the application to me. [Proof](https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN) I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest fucking takes. I don't get them for liberal people. Possible I am just in the demographic of people they think would swing conservative so they target me.
  - MaxHoppersGhost 3y ago
    This is funny to read since this is basically what conservatives experienced for the last ten years on Twitter pre-Elon.
  - nivenhuh 3y ago
    It’s not just you. I echo your sentiments. I use Twitter for tech, but my feed is now conservative politics, gore video, & tech tweets intermingled.
- kouru225 3y ago
  Navalny’s wife was just banned and then shadow banned. There are countless examples of leftist accounts getting banned just for being critical about Musk. It’s absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there are no consequences.
  - sureglymop 3y ago
    To think that Navalny or his wife are in any way leftists is insane. They were leaning more towards nationalism (just for Russia instead of the US). In the face of current events though, that can be overlooked as it is not a narrative that serves western interest. But to give an anecdote about an alternative, I rarely see any bigotry on Mastodon. Instances which allow that or don't moderate it correctly get block listed by instances I like. These instances may defederate into their own bubble in which they can still exist but cause no harm to the general timeline. Yet everyone still remains the freedom to express themselves. I like this because it's just a natural way of how to solve this problem for the end user.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
[flagged]
- hathawsh 3y ago
  That was the problem with Twitter/X. It appears that Elon's tweaking has caused the service to switch from left-leaning to right-leaning. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/01/after-musks-takeover-big-shifts-in-how-republican-and-democratic-twitter-users-view-the-platform/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/01/after-mus...
  - packetlost 3y ago
    That study is based on user sentiment/survey, so I wouldn't really put any stock in to be completely honest. The only thing this study tells me is there was a change relative to some baseline, not that there was any sort of absolute lean.
    - hathawsh 3y ago
      Fair enough. Personally, I like to watch both sides, and it has been interesting to see conservatives becoming more favorable toward Twitter/X. If I were working on a social network (like Bluesky, the topic of this discussion), I would be watching Twitter/X closely right now to try to understand the effects that certain tweaks (such as moderation policy) may have.
      - packetlost 3y ago
        Agreed! My own gut feeling is that it leaned pretty heavily left and it's now closer to center than ever, and people are noticing the delta. Every time I open BlueSky it's like 50% Liberal rage-bait and like 40% people posting mostly about their sexual and gender identities.
        djur 3y ago
        The posts you see on Bluesky by default are the posts made by people you follow. There are other options to select whichever feeds you prefer. If you're seeing a lot of that content, it's because you're following people who post a lot of that stuff.
mvdtnz 3y ago
No video in 2024 is a total deal breaker for most users. That's insane.
- eropple 3y ago
  Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three. As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    Great. But without video you lose most of your users.
    - sfink 3y ago
      I am increasingly of the mind that this is a feature, not a bug. If you want to be Twitter, you'll end up being Twitter. We already have one of those, it sucks, and we don't need another one. Social networks go to crap above a certain scale. If everyone can see your posts, you'll write posts to be seen by everyone. Which, as it turns out, ends up benefiting no one. The magic comes when there is a community, where you give a shit about the people you're sending messages to, and they give a shit about you. If the community is too small, then nobody bothers with it and it dies. If the community is too large, then it ends up being old men screaming at clouds, and (see above) we already have one of those. So a platform that is good enough to use, but limits the number of disaffected members, is the only thing worth creating. If something I'm saying requires a video, then I can always link to one. If something someone else is saying requires a video, and it requires the video to be immediately visible while I'm reading whatever they're saying, then there's a good chance I'm better off not seeing it anyway, even if I think I want to. (Ironically, in this post I am an old man screaming at clouds...)
      - eropple 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
edgarvaldes 3y ago
> Twitter is a conservative cesspool Interesting. I see it as the de-facto journalist platform, which to me (as a non american) make it very left leaning. But then again, I don't use X.
- belkinpower 3y ago
  It was. In the last year it’s become largely conservative, and not in a standard reasonable small-government, etc. way. It’s like reading Facebook posts from your dumbest uncle.
  - j-j-j-j 3y ago
    It didn't become, just suppressing what was already there is gone.
- myko 3y ago
  American journalism isn't left-leaning. At best it is "click" leaning, and say what they need to do to get eyeballs on their content. This is why they helped normalize trump so hard, and repeatedly fail to call out the extremist right wing in the US.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    This is what a lot of people don't get about the "pop feminism" era of online "journalism" in the pre-Trump era: it wasn't feminism, it was clickbait. At best it sold an idea of feminism but the emphasis was always on the selling part and not anything ideological. "Girlboss feminism" helps no-one except the bosses. The same is true about most so-called "left-wing" journalism. Some journalists may be true believers but the platforms exist to make money, not to be any threat to the systems those ideologies explicitly oppose. Heck, this even goes for political parties like the Democrats: the Texas governor literally rejected the authority of the federal government and legislative system by deploying his military at the border and the Democrat president's response was to propose a bill that would have created a legal avenue for what the treasonous governor was trying to make happen. Decorum is used as an excuse to keep intentionally ceding ground to the supposed political enemy.
lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
I'm not sure what kind of "cesspool" Bluesky is, but it's unbearable. It's like 2015-era Tumblr but worse, somehow. Twitter, by contrast, feels like a breath of fresh air.
- hnbad 3y ago
  I'm wondering if you really mean "2015-era Tumblr" or are trying to evoke pre-Trump liberals on Tumblr (i.e. "manspreading is a micro aggression" pop feminism and teenagers creating fan lore about gender identities) by referring to it as that. If anything, my experience of Bluesky has been the inoffensive vapid thought leadering of peak Twitter alongside the playful air-headed liberal self-help that is also fairly reminiscent of peak Twitter. In one word: bland. Being able to paint over the offensive things like nazis and porn by sweeping them under your personal rug rather than blocking or banning them only adds to this impression for me. Twitter, your breath of fresh air, on the other hand is overrun by ChatGPT spam bots and shovelware drop shipping ads worse than the crypto "giveaway" scams and paid tweets of the immediate pre-Musk days and every even moderately left-leaning political tweet is filled with replies describing the violent acts they want to do to that person in excessive detail by accounts that openly post literal neo-nazi propaganda videos of Adolf Hitler denouncing "degenerate art" as a Jewish plot to weaken the German volk and national spirit and going "I don't agree with everything he did but he had a point". Political discussions about the Middle East in turn are split evenly between right wing calls for genocide of all adults and children in Palestine and right wing defenses of Palestinians for being victims of the international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the white race through mixed breeding with brown refugees. We used to always call Twitter "the bad place", "hellsite" or "cesspool" before Musk but it certainly deserves those names now more than ever, arguably rivaling 4chan in its political takes although the depictions of gore are mostly limited to uncensored war footage and the porn is decidedly more tame. The reason Twitter is called a "right-wing cesspool" is not because it's full of right-wing people (that would just make it a "pool"), it's because of the vicious explicit threats of violence and celebration of human suffering propagated by those people. For all its faults, the bland libs on Bluesky don't do much of that. Granted, my experience of Twitter might be tainted by the fact most people I used to follow in the old days have either left or are no longer active and any time I visit the algorithmic timeline hits me at full blast. And a lot of the edgier posts (not replies) by right wing folks the avalanche of drama RTs throw my way are clearly created to farm engagement in the hope of striking it big if the bluecheck authors make the payout lottery.
dustedcodes 3y ago
[flagged]
- troad 3y ago
  Demonstrably false - elder hippies are a hoot. But more importantly, a bit rich for someone still caught up in the left-right dichotomy to be telling others to wise up.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  s/wisen up/develop alzheimer's
AviationAtom 3y ago
This whole thread is oof. Modern politics, to include both sides of the spectrum, has devolved rapidly. It feels like a real-life version of the Spiderman meme.
- cocacola1 3y ago
  If anything, modern politics is better.

pfraze 3y ago

It's a fair point and we definitely debated it, but it was too important to us that we complete the mission.

KerrAvon 3y ago
Debated videos and DM? Mastodon has those features; if you're not doing them at all you may want to reconsider.
- pfraze 3y ago
  Debated prioritizing them before federation, not debated their existence. They are a must-have for social.
- danabramov 3y ago
  We definitely want to implement these features, the question was whether they should hold back releasing support for federation or not. Since federation is a core constraint on any features we'd like to build, the team felt that there is no reason to hold federation back, and that releasing it as it's ready makes sense. We're thinking about Bluesky as both a product and a protocol (informing each other's design), and you're 100% right that for the end user, the product itself is what matters. Because we've taken on the decentralization constraint, we take longer to "catch up" to features that centralized platforms tend to have from the start, but it's definitely going to be a major area of focus for us going forward. (Ofc Mastodon isn't centralized, but note that it's had a few years of head start on feature development. We'll get there.)
- pr337h4m 3y ago
  Mastodon DMs have absolutely no privacy: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards compatibility.
  - Repulsion9513 3y ago
    DMs on any other service also have no privacy. Signal or Telegram could read your DMs by simply releasing an update to their code, for example. You always have to trust the person running the service you use. (Unless you have E2EE/something like OTR, in which case you have to trust the persom who makes that code!)
    - pr337h4m 3y ago
      The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use. If Signal releases a malicious update (and they don't provide reproducible builds), it is very much possible for you to know about it, as everything is on your device. Even if the binaries are different from the source code, decompilers, analyzing network traffic, etc. gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates. Mastodon admins can simply pull up your plaintext DMs on their servers and no one will ever know.
      - Repulsion9513 3y ago
        > The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use. Well then I guess it's pointless because it doesn't accomplish that. (The actual point, FYI, is that you don't have to trust all of: them, their hosting providers, your ISP, the ISPs between, the government, and their mom.) > it is very much possible for you to know about it "Possible" != "done" > analyzing network traffic How are you gonna do that? Surely if they wanted to sniff it would still just look like any other encrypted data > gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates Sure, when the same application is used by everyone, which is not true in either the Mastodon world or the new Bluesky-small-instances world
- jug 3y ago
  I think it's sensible to have at the very least federation function as intended ahead of DM's as I imagine DM is another part pretty contingent on federation due to the privacy issues becoming approximately 10x more complicated with federation. ;-) Twitter is having it easy. Videos might be more of a resource issue. Hardly a good time to launch videos almost at the same timeframe as they spike their user base by going public.
emceestork 3y ago
Ah yeah, I get that. I don't mean to be cynical on the day you complete that mission. Congrats on launching! Excited to see what y'all do next.
kunalgupta 3y ago
this is the correct order of operations for sure
DevX101 3y ago
You guys made the right call. You're not trying to become the next TikTok.

elpool2 3y ago

I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.

phone8675309 3y ago
Federation is nice but when the platform only does one-third of what the platform you're trying to leave does then the whole thing feels like a toy
celdon25 3y ago
It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.
- 1shooner 3y ago
  Of course people are going to complain about content they don't want. That's the product. Twitter changed their product to deliver different content, so its audience has changed. Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.
  - dools 3y ago
    FYI a government can’t borrow a currency it issues, there is no national debt (or all money is debt).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- screenoridesagb 3y ago

t_mann 3y ago

Not sure I agree. Being the thing that the tech folks find cool isn't a bad starting position at all. And it's significantly harder to achieve than DM's.

303uru 3y ago

I've been using Bluesky for a week and I'm impressed. I actually appreciate that there is less media, it's more about conversation. So far it feels very much like Twitter before it became a cesspool. I'm conversing with local journalists, prominent scientists, sci-fi authors, etc... It's wonderful.

sergiotapia 3y ago

> Twitter is a conservative cesspool I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or worse. I like it a lot more! Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.

emceestork 3y ago
Yeah, maybe we just have different politics and I'm too dismissive of alternative worldviews. Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative stuff is surfaced by the application to me. [Proof](https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN) I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest fucking takes. I don't get them for liberal people. Possible I am just in the demographic of people they think would swing conservative so they target me.
- MaxHoppersGhost 3y ago
  This is funny to read since this is basically what conservatives experienced for the last ten years on Twitter pre-Elon.
- nivenhuh 3y ago
  It’s not just you. I echo your sentiments. I use Twitter for tech, but my feed is now conservative politics, gore video, & tech tweets intermingled.
kouru225 3y ago
Navalny’s wife was just banned and then shadow banned. There are countless examples of leftist accounts getting banned just for being critical about Musk. It’s absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there are no consequences.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  To think that Navalny or his wife are in any way leftists is insane. They were leaning more towards nationalism (just for Russia instead of the US). In the face of current events though, that can be overlooked as it is not a narrative that serves western interest. But to give an anecdote about an alternative, I rarely see any bigotry on Mastodon. Instances which allow that or don't moderate it correctly get block listed by instances I like. These instances may defederate into their own bubble in which they can still exist but cause no harm to the general timeline. Yet everyone still remains the freedom to express themselves. I like this because it's just a natural way of how to solve this problem for the end user.

bigstrat2003 3y ago

[flagged]

hathawsh 3y ago
That was the problem with Twitter/X. It appears that Elon's tweaking has caused the service to switch from left-leaning to right-leaning. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/01/after-musks-takeover-big-shifts-in-how-republican-and-democratic-twitter-users-view-the-platform/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/01/after-mus...
- packetlost 3y ago
  That study is based on user sentiment/survey, so I wouldn't really put any stock in to be completely honest. The only thing this study tells me is there was a change relative to some baseline, not that there was any sort of absolute lean.
  - hathawsh 3y ago
    Fair enough. Personally, I like to watch both sides, and it has been interesting to see conservatives becoming more favorable toward Twitter/X. If I were working on a social network (like Bluesky, the topic of this discussion), I would be watching Twitter/X closely right now to try to understand the effects that certain tweaks (such as moderation policy) may have.
    - packetlost 3y ago
      Agreed! My own gut feeling is that it leaned pretty heavily left and it's now closer to center than ever, and people are noticing the delta. Every time I open BlueSky it's like 50% Liberal rage-bait and like 40% people posting mostly about their sexual and gender identities.
      - djur 3y ago
        The posts you see on Bluesky by default are the posts made by people you follow. There are other options to select whichever feeds you prefer. If you're seeing a lot of that content, it's because you're following people who post a lot of that stuff.

mvdtnz 3y ago

No video in 2024 is a total deal breaker for most users. That's insane.

eropple 3y ago
Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three. As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Great. But without video you lose most of your users.
  - sfink 3y ago
    I am increasingly of the mind that this is a feature, not a bug. If you want to be Twitter, you'll end up being Twitter. We already have one of those, it sucks, and we don't need another one. Social networks go to crap above a certain scale. If everyone can see your posts, you'll write posts to be seen by everyone. Which, as it turns out, ends up benefiting no one. The magic comes when there is a community, where you give a shit about the people you're sending messages to, and they give a shit about you. If the community is too small, then nobody bothers with it and it dies. If the community is too large, then it ends up being old men screaming at clouds, and (see above) we already have one of those. So a platform that is good enough to use, but limits the number of disaffected members, is the only thing worth creating. If something I'm saying requires a video, then I can always link to one. If something someone else is saying requires a video, and it requires the video to be immediately visible while I'm reading whatever they're saying, then there's a good chance I'm better off not seeing it anyway, even if I think I want to. (Ironically, in this post I am an old man screaming at clouds...)
    - eropple 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

edgarvaldes 3y ago

> Twitter is a conservative cesspool Interesting. I see it as the de-facto journalist platform, which to me (as a non american) make it very left leaning. But then again, I don't use X.

belkinpower 3y ago
It was. In the last year it’s become largely conservative, and not in a standard reasonable small-government, etc. way. It’s like reading Facebook posts from your dumbest uncle.
- j-j-j-j 3y ago
  It didn't become, just suppressing what was already there is gone.
myko 3y ago
American journalism isn't left-leaning. At best it is "click" leaning, and say what they need to do to get eyeballs on their content. This is why they helped normalize trump so hard, and repeatedly fail to call out the extremist right wing in the US.
- hnbad 3y ago
  This is what a lot of people don't get about the "pop feminism" era of online "journalism" in the pre-Trump era: it wasn't feminism, it was clickbait. At best it sold an idea of feminism but the emphasis was always on the selling part and not anything ideological. "Girlboss feminism" helps no-one except the bosses. The same is true about most so-called "left-wing" journalism. Some journalists may be true believers but the platforms exist to make money, not to be any threat to the systems those ideologies explicitly oppose. Heck, this even goes for political parties like the Democrats: the Texas governor literally rejected the authority of the federal government and legislative system by deploying his military at the border and the Democrat president's response was to propose a bill that would have created a legal avenue for what the treasonous governor was trying to make happen. Decorum is used as an excuse to keep intentionally ceding ground to the supposed political enemy.

lazzlazzlazz 3y ago

I'm not sure what kind of "cesspool" Bluesky is, but it's unbearable. It's like 2015-era Tumblr but worse, somehow. Twitter, by contrast, feels like a breath of fresh air.

hnbad 3y ago
I'm wondering if you really mean "2015-era Tumblr" or are trying to evoke pre-Trump liberals on Tumblr (i.e. "manspreading is a micro aggression" pop feminism and teenagers creating fan lore about gender identities) by referring to it as that. If anything, my experience of Bluesky has been the inoffensive vapid thought leadering of peak Twitter alongside the playful air-headed liberal self-help that is also fairly reminiscent of peak Twitter. In one word: bland. Being able to paint over the offensive things like nazis and porn by sweeping them under your personal rug rather than blocking or banning them only adds to this impression for me. Twitter, your breath of fresh air, on the other hand is overrun by ChatGPT spam bots and shovelware drop shipping ads worse than the crypto "giveaway" scams and paid tweets of the immediate pre-Musk days and every even moderately left-leaning political tweet is filled with replies describing the violent acts they want to do to that person in excessive detail by accounts that openly post literal neo-nazi propaganda videos of Adolf Hitler denouncing "degenerate art" as a Jewish plot to weaken the German volk and national spirit and going "I don't agree with everything he did but he had a point". Political discussions about the Middle East in turn are split evenly between right wing calls for genocide of all adults and children in Palestine and right wing defenses of Palestinians for being victims of the international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the white race through mixed breeding with brown refugees. We used to always call Twitter "the bad place", "hellsite" or "cesspool" before Musk but it certainly deserves those names now more than ever, arguably rivaling 4chan in its political takes although the depictions of gore are mostly limited to uncensored war footage and the porn is decidedly more tame. The reason Twitter is called a "right-wing cesspool" is not because it's full of right-wing people (that would just make it a "pool"), it's because of the vicious explicit threats of violence and celebration of human suffering propagated by those people. For all its faults, the bland libs on Bluesky don't do much of that. Granted, my experience of Twitter might be tainted by the fact most people I used to follow in the old days have either left or are no longer active and any time I visit the algorithmic timeline hits me at full blast. And a lot of the edgier posts (not replies) by right wing folks the avalanche of drama RTs throw my way are clearly created to farm engagement in the hope of striking it big if the bluecheck authors make the payout lottery.

dustedcodes 3y ago

[flagged]

troad 3y ago
Demonstrably false - elder hippies are a hoot. But more importantly, a bit rich for someone still caught up in the left-right dichotomy to be telling others to wise up.
Gigachad 3y ago
s/wisen up/develop alzheimer's

AviationAtom 3y ago

This whole thread is oof. Modern politics, to include both sides of the spectrum, has devolved rapidly. It feels like a real-life version of the Spiderman meme.

cocacola1 3y ago
If anything, modern politics is better.