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Mayor Adams' office directs NYC agencies to launch Bluesky accounts amid growth
- evbogue 2y agoThey should really take some money and use that to set up their own PDS.
- silenced_trope 2y agoPDS?
- evbogue 2y agohttps://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
- verdverm 2y agoPersonal Data Server Bluesky is built on their open protocol ATProto (https://atproto.com https://atproto.com) One of the core issues of social media and mastodon they aimed to change is account portability. Every user has an sqlite database which is trivial to move. The other part is using DNS for DID
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rvz 2y ago[flagged]
- ghaff 2y agoWorth checking out, for me at least. But honestly enough people seem to have moved on from this type of platform that the combination of fragmentation and just less overall participation means there probably isn't enough critical mass and excitement any more.
- tbrownaw 2y ago> Why not Mastodon? Which one?
- numpad0 2y agoThat depends on whether you're from Eurasia or Eastasia.
- devjab 2y agoWell… any form of serious organisation should frankly house their own Mastodon instance so that they are not moderated by a big tech company. I’m Danish, I’m not a fan of right wing politics but at the same time I find it absolutely insane that an American tech company can ban our elected officials from the “town square” if they say something horrible. Of course this is more a failing of our own institutions than anything else. The EU has hosted their own mastodon instances for their organisations and personnel for a while now, but here in Denmark our institutions have been too addicted to the popular platforms in my opinion. I think media companies should really do it as well, both to “own” their content but also to not give over their business to social media. Anyway, I don’t see the issue with “which one” since that part is one of the main features.
- rvz 2y agoExactly this, lies the whole problem with Mastodon.
- slater 2y agostill banging that “mastodon suxx amirite???” drum, ey?
- rvz 2y agoSee. This is the sort of childish rhetoric one will get from Mastodon showing why little to no-one will take the site seriously, let alone the other fundamental problems that still exist. So when are you going to tell me how many DAUs Mastodon has, to show after the failed migration from Twitter / X?
- tokioyoyo 2y agoMastodon is just not simple enough. If you need to add a “it’s like Twitter, BUT …” clause, it already loses its appeal to some people.
- TeeMassive 2y ago> Why not Mastodon? Not simple enough for normies. Not enough people. Who wants to be on the 10th largest social media? Full of sketchy content.
- tekchip 2y agoPretty tired of this rhetoric. Mastodon functions basically identical to email and damn near every normies has figured it out. Pick a server, sign up, share your handle(email address) with your friends. Type in box zoom zoom. Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow. Sure local server timeline and global is an option but then it's no better or worse than the random crap X's algo throws, uncontrollably, in your face.
- BoiledCabbage 2y ago> Pick a server, sign up, share your handle Except nobody picks email servers really anymore. And even back in the day, during the main growth phase, people didn't really pick email servers. They picked an ISP (like AOL) which gave them an email server. And there really was very little choice. > share your handle(email address) with your friends. People don't use twitter to talk to their friends. They use twitter to hear from people they don't know. And they won't know which server people they want to follow have signed up for. Now they need to figure out how to search for them across all servers. People don't adopt "tech", they adopt "solutions". And everyone I hear about that tries Mastodon says it's tech, maybe even good tech, but nobody says it's really a one click solution. Make Mastodon adoption as familiar and easy as Bluesky is and it would will growth faster. Saying "you just have to understand these 3 things" isn't how to get adoption. And saying how easy they are to understand doesn't help either. Figure out how to make it so they have to understand 0 new things - that's how to grow adoption.
- theshrike79 2y agoBut, like email, there is a discoverability issue. I want to find person X's email/mastodon. I know their name and they use that name attached with the account, how do I do it without leaving the application? With Twitter, Threads and Bluesky, I can just search and find the person.
- BobAliceInATree 2y agoGovernment entities should post to their own Mastodon instance first, but then also syndicate to other social media sites. That way they always maintain control of their main outlet (even if not many people actually access it there) and not have to worry about who controls other sites in the future.
- dyauspitr 2y agoI’ve never used mastodon but what you just said already sounds too complicated.
- aaravchen 2y agoRealistically there's no benefit to this. Why should the government(s) have to be on social media at all? They're just looking for a broadcast channel, not crowd feedback or interaction, especially not ownership of that public reaction/interaction. Twitter started as basically just exactly that. (Formerly) a democratized way for anyone to broadcast anything to the world for others to find. Measuring reach of the message became useful when you're trying to become a growing voice, but governments aren't. Replies and replies to replies are primarily people broadcasting their own separate messages, just with context for the topic. The back and forth becomes a public discussion (as in the "public at large"). But governments don't care about that, they're just broadcasting their messages somewhere people can find them. It's purely a convenience to the public if they post them in a forum that facilitates easy authoritative reference, but that could just as easily be blog posts on their own website.
- aaravchen 2y agoMastodon has done a lot to clarify their branding, and most of the tooling is a lot smoother now in terms of asking for your home server for you to log in when you click Follow on someone's profile. However it is fundamentally flawed for how online social media works in the modern era. Primarily Mastodon decentralizes so much, there's no possibility of discovery. You can join a server with the people you already know, or guess about whether you'll like people on a server and join one, but ultimately your ability to discover content is restricted to known accounts found outside the Fediverse, or (effectively) friends of friends. Unless you join a megalith central instance (defeating thr decentralization purpose). This lack of discoverability defeats the entire purpose of the modern social media internet age where you're able to join global communities of topics rather than just people you know. That said, BlueSky is an easy answer right now, but it's basically just old Twitter with pubic DNS for a centralized username manager. Sure, in concept you can almost host your own, but there's multiple discussions about how actually hosting your own data still isn't possible after 2 years of promises from the development team, and it would be against both their economic and technical interests to ever make it possible. Furthermore, the actual broadcasting is also still centralized (the PDS I think it's called?) so everything has to go thru them still. While I don't like it, Nostr is technologically probably a better way forward, but it needs a big funding injection (and developer interest) to setup some reference implementation relays and moderation servers.
- onetokeoverthe 2y agoMeet the new boss, same as the old boss. Jack.
- timmytokyo 2y agoJack Dorsey left Bluesky's board in May. I don't believe he has anything to do with the company anymore.
- onetokeoverthe 2y agoShocked and saddened that the info at littlesis.org has not yet been updated with this news. https://littlesis.org/org/429239-Bluesky_Social https://littlesis.org/org/429239-Bluesky_Social
- astrange 2y agoThe CEO of Bluesky is Jay Graber. (Who despite the name is a Chinese woman.) Jack got mad that people were making fun of him for being into crypto, left for another decentralized service Nostr, did too many psychedelics and fried his brain, then moved back to Twitter.
- aaravchen 2y agoJack invested to get BlueSky moving, and his company has been a major investor since the beginning. He also invested in Nostr. Only just this last week did his company divest from a lot of their social media stuff and invest in Crypto instead (given the company's basis in the US and recent politics that experts are predicting a decline in social media and huge increases in crypo ventures)
- ryzvonusef 2y agoSo soon, all the democrats will be on BlueSky and all the republicans will be on X/Twitter? Meanwhile us foreigners will have to maintain an account on both platforms to understand what our global overlords have decided for us today ;p As an aside, my country has banned Twitter... yet everyone in the government, from the prime minister to the junior bureaucrat, uses twitter to issue announcements. They all use VPN. The whole thing is hilarious and sad. And I have to use VPN to find out if the road I'll go out yet is blocked or if we will have electricity today. Basically, the international market is unlikely to move to BlueSky, then again I could be wrong.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoOnce funny people and porn completely migrate to BlueSky, it might gain proper adoption. Gotta keep in mind $10/month will keep away a good chunk of demographics, if without it your posts/replies are basically unseen.
- calculatte 2y ago[flagged]
- jorvi 2y agoThe Guardian deleted their X account and will probably get on Bluesky at some point. There seems to slowly be a groundswell developing.
- threeseed 2y agoThe Guardian has 1.3m followers on Threads. So pretty sure it was an easy for them to move on from X.
- astrange 2y agoBluesky is a decentralized service similar to Mastodon, so you don't need to maintain an account on the US service if you don't want to. I don't know if they're actually connected or not.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoI don't care who owns it, social media is a cancer. Decentralized social media is actually worse because it fragments information, which makes it harder to access, harder to collaborate on, hides subtle knowledge, and creates further in-groups and echo chambers. What gets highlighted is almost never what is more intellectual, moral, factual, important, or curated. Instead it's whatever is entertaining, angering, scary, validating. It's a machine for capturing people's baser instincts and biases and weaponizing them to make people stupid and reactive. And it's designed to be addictive. This isn't even just the "big" social media sites. Anything with a "feed" or "endless scroll" is designed to hook you, keep you there, keep you engaging. Cigarettes may not be your drug of choice, but TikTok may be. Go ahead and quit social media. You know what people almost universally report? They feel calmer. Happier. Healthier. Less scared. They have more free time. It's a weight off their shoulders. Now imagine the opposite of all that, affecting nearly everyone connected to the internet. Imagine what that does over decades. This machine is eroding society. In the future, we're going to find out that social media was worse than cigarettes. The addictive habit that slowly destroys lives - even nations - over decades. I'm not the only person who has had friends have nervous breakdowns from social media. This is a pubic health emergency, but we're treating it like its politics. Politics is just a symptom of the greater disease: an epidemic of manipulation machines designed to ruin our health for clicks. The machine doesn't even know it's doing this to us. It's just doing what it was programmed to do. And we lap it up, like so many flies wandering into the fly trap.
- MrDrMcCoy 2y agoWhile I agree for the most part, I have an observation and a question: Social media, specifically microblogging networks like old Twitter, were uniquely effective at delivering near real-time breaking updates in ways that left older news delivery systems in the dust. I could do without the vapid comments, but this one aspect has real utility and I don't really know of a way to replicate that in other systems. I say this as an outsider that would only occasionally use the site to search for breaking news that hasn't hit other outlets yet. My question is about where you draw the line on what constitutes a social network as the edges get blurry. Are comment sections social media? Are sites like Reddit and hacker News? Blogs? Blog networks with social features like Tumblr?
- muddi900 2y agoTwitter at it's peak had less monthly active users than Facebook Stories. Outside of the journalist and media class, nobody used twitter. 300M+ people are a huge number, but barely scratches the surface in the Social Media world. What can bluesky do different to attract normies?
- jazzyjackson 2y agoWhy would a normie be attracted to the stream of conscious timelines of randos?
- muddi900 2y agoWhy would a normie join a crocheting group on Facebook?
- tonymet 2y agoMAU doesn't mean influential. There are forums of less than 100 people that have more influence than stories.
- muddi900 2y ago"Influential" in terms of reach for a normal person. Twitter now a great space for anyone to buy influence in the upcoming US administration. But if you want to reach an audience as normie, it is less useful than posting cheap chinese slop promotional compilations on LinkedIn.
- forgotoldacc 2y ago> Outside of the journalist and media class, nobody used twitter. ??? What??? Twitter has basically been the place for artists to share their stuff. It's a huge place for game and tech discussions and sharing knowledge. It lets absolute normies share stuff with thousands of people. Meanwhile, facebook stories is much more limited in reach. People sharing pictures of their baby and vacations with family who'll click a thumbs up just to show they know you exist but don't care about the content. Instagram, facebook's other child, is for people to pose and post pictures of their lunch in an exotic location and pretend they just casually decided to eat 10000 miles from home because they're rich and spontaneous like that. Twitter has been huge for creative types, and the content that thrives on Facebook-style platforms struggles there. A lot of them are currently migrating to bluesky due to various problems recently. Tumblr still kind of has a thing going on, but it's for much more niche art/fan fiction type stuff. But they're all for normies to go and see cool shit and not have to stare at endless feeds of "Me and my baby. Did you know I have a baby? I have a baby btw" type stuff.
- sonia598lewis 2y ago[flagged]
- TibbityFlanders 2y ago[dead]
- zimpenfish 2y agoProbably just a coincidence that the recent investment in Bluesky came via a friend of Eric Adams[0] and absolutely not at all any kind of backhanding going on. [0] Brock Pierce, crypto lunatic.