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An exploration of Bluesky's public opening
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- underseacables 2y agoThe decentralized social media drum has been going before this, but nobody is flocking to it. Nobody really seems to care. Facebook and X will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future.
- immibis 2y agoYou're here on a forum that is outside the usual centers. The centralized equivalent is /r/programming and you are not there. Why?
- krapp 2y agoHacker News is still a centralized forum, owned by a single company and run on a single server. Being niche doesn't make it decentralized, it's just as centralized as Reddit. I'm not aware of an actually decentralized equivalent of what Hacker News is (basic threaded text forums) but that might be an interesting project for someone to build on an existing protocol.
- porkloin 2y agoLemmy is probably the closest thing you'll find in activitypub/fediverse https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://lemmy.world/ https://lemmy.world/ the second link goes directly to the largest instance. It has all the same federated interoperability features that Mastodon or Bluesky have, but with a thread/topic format instead of a microblog format.
- immibis 2y agoDecentralized means there are many centers and if you don't like one center you can go to another one - the system as a whole has no center. You are here on the non-reddit forum system, which has no single center, but rather one or more separate centers for each discussion topic, unlike the reddit system, which has one center. You may be thinking of distributed systems, like blockchains, which have no centers at all. Nobody is using those for social media yet.
- krapp 2y agoIf your thesis is that simply having separate threads with different topics counts as being decentralized, then Reddit is decentralized because it has different subreddits for different discussion topics as well as different threads. And literally every other social media platform counts as well, for similar reasons. The "center" that matters in this context is the server and owning entity, not the taxonomy of the content. Decentralized platforms aren't owned and operated by a single entity, centralized platforms are. You can't just spin up a new instance of Hacker News with different moderators and just federate with it, because "Hacker News" as a network is entirely owned and controlled by YCombinator. Not so with, say, "Mastodon." Also yes unfortunately there are already multiple blockchain-based social media platforms.
- immibis 2y agoNo, you are on a separate SITE with different topics. One or more sites exist for each topic, run by different people. They all compete, with no obvious single center. You are on Hacker News to talk about technology, mostly software. To talk about mostly networking, you could go to #networking on Libera. To talk about raising fish, you could go to I don't know where. Let's stick to those two examples I do know - why do you think that Hacker News is "the center" of the non-Reddit forum ecosystem, and #networking on Libera is not "the center"?
- OxfordOutlander 2y agoI think you mean r/programming unless you actually meant /g/ :)
- grishka 2y agoThis time it might be different. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all terminally enshittified with no hope for reversal. A social media service that makes enshittification a technical impossibility has a lot of appeal in this context.
- outside2344 2y agoBluesky is such a great community - and I agree with the findings of the paper that it is remarkably non-toxic.
- omoikane 2y agoFrom section 4.7: > English content tends to have higher toxicity scores [...] on average, the toxicity of English content is three times higher than that of Japanese content This is remarkable especially since section 4.3 says there are more Japanese posts compared to English posts after the public opening.
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoThis is unsurprising, Japanese and English culture are incredibly different, with the former being far more (outwardly) respectful of each other and of the belief that you don’t rock the boat.
- Loughla 2y agoI would rather have toxic nonsense than a culture where you don't rock the boat. Maybe it's just because I'm American, but I think most people have some amount of rebellion in them. It's necessary to look at other viewpoints if for no other reason than to know what alternatives exist.
- krapp 2y agoMost people are capable of exchanging alternative points of view without seeking out or engaging in toxic behavior. Being an asshole doesn't make you a cultural rebel or iconoclast, it just makes you an asshole.
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoSure, but their point was that it’s better to be able to question authority and be an asshole than to not question authority at all.
- Loughla 2y agoThank you for saying what I couldn't figure out how to say. That's exactly it.
- BitWiseVibe 2y agoI've never heard a convincing pitch for BlueSky over Mastodon/fediverse in the decentralized social media debate. Anyone want to give it a go?
- wmf 2y agoBetter moderation and account migration come to mind.
- omoikane 2y agoI like the fact that Bluesky is topic-agnostic, unlike a lot of the Mastodon instances which are organized by community (except some large ones such as mastodon.social). I always felt awkward of having to commit to a specific community upfront when signing up. Some might argue that Mastodon lets you follow users on other instances, but my experience is that the federation depends on agreement between the instance operators, and it didn't work for the two instances I was using (mastodon.social and doll.social). It's also unclear if posting things that are off-topic to a particular instance is good etiquette.
- jtwoodhouse 2y ago[deleted]
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoBrian Newbold has an update post on how atproto is doing at moving towards their stated goals, which is to be distributed. > Fast-forwarding a year and a half, today the network is openly federated with hundreds of PDS instances. https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ He goes over everything else required to be truly distributed... The multiple PDS's isn't everything. But it's been a lot of progress. Decentralization & walking away remains a focus. And there's a fairly strong 3rd party developer community that's very promising. (Personal note, your post in my view contains reprehensible & gross mud-sling & slant. Holier than thou left-leaning academics itself sounds like a really judgemental case of projection.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jtwoodhouse 2y agoMy comment came on a bit strong so I'm sorry for that.
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- krapp 2y ago[flagged]
- jtwoodhouse 2y agoYeah, I came on a bit aggressive. A person is allowed to change their mind and delete something, and that decision is none of your business.
- janalsncm 2y agoWe already have decentralized social media. Make your own website with an RSS feed. It will be yours forever. You can post whatever you want. It is decentralized in that it can be shared anywhere else but you own the content.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoBroadcast only with no way for anyone engage you back doesn't feel very social to me.
- crtasm 2y agoWe still have email :)
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoGenerally for me, there's something amazing about having conversations available online for the world. Email really is more like a modernized mail system; yes it's about, but it misses the core strength of the internet & the web to be broadly available. It again feels like a very ineffective way to socially network. It feels narrow cast. No one else is going to show up one day and contribute something to your email thread. It's again not very social, to me.
- noman-land 2y agoThis isn't social media. It's yelling into the void.
- Loughla 2y agoIsn't that also what social media is? With the VAST amount of content posted by the second, it's a bit like shouting into an already loud void.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago> It will be yours forever. You can post whatever you want. It is decentralized in that it can be shared anywhere else but you own the content. Unfortunately this is not the case. The current structure of the Internet is surprisingly fragile, and a dedicated attacker going after your website’s various network dependencies can cause a lot of headache. It’s rare, but it is still something important to note, especially if you have beliefs that are unsavory to those in power.
- jackmalpo 2y agowhen will people realize that most consumers don't care about the infrastructure of the product they're using. they don't care if it's on a single server, blockchain, yada yada. they really only care about the experience of using the product.
- wmf 2y agoSo you're saying we need to cancel a lot of people to drive them to decentralize...
- jackmalpo 2y agoX is already getting worse and worse, so maybe that's enough
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y agoConsumers chose the internet over AOL already, they go where the best content is.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoAOL was a website and messenger app, i.e. internet.
- sundarurfriend 2y agoI tried Bluesky a year or so ago, before this public opening. It felt like a mirror-universe version of what I imagine Truth Social is like: the vast majority of the posts were people approving each others' American left-leaning politics. Even having gotten used to Mastodon - where every post has a chance of turning into a culture war and a good chunk of the posts are rants about politics that people don't agree with - I found it excessive as a non-American. I have no issues with that kind of a site, I just didn't find anything there that would make the site interesting or worth returning to, for me. Spending some time on finding the "right" feeds and trying to curate my timeline didn't really help much either. Maybe the surge in popularity has helped with this issue though, with people actually posting stuff in other, non-political feeds. It's plausible that the English vs Japanese toxicity difference also comes from this: political posts tend to be rant-y and negative even when people are agreeing with each other, and the English community developed from such a nucleus. Maybe the Japanese community didn't have any such initial influencing factors, and maybe developed more diverse, less toxic community overall.
- ruthmarx 2y ago> Maybe the Japanese community didn't have any such initial influencing factors, and maybe developed more diverse, less toxic community overall. I think this would be more to do with individuality being so taboo.