4 ms·

I went to the homepage for the first time. First post was someone saying they want to be a designer for the campaign that had Waltz name on it. Then you have

by ipaddr 2y ago

I went to the homepage for the first time. First post was someone saying they want to be a designer for the campaign that had Waltz name on it. Then you have Patton Oswald tell people never be friends with Nazis because they have Nazi friends. I decided to visit twitter homepage but it asked me to signin. I went to the homepage for Mastodon. It had comments about new science discoveries, tech, some politics but more thoughtful if not humor full. I went to threads and they had a variety of posts in different languages. Top link: Tiktok style guy from Japan who does wall pushups. A newspaper cartoon and netflicks infograph follow. I'm not sure why we are not all on Mastodon it's similiar content to this site. Bluesky is getting so much hype but the frontpage content is a tarpool of vile content like someone trained an ai on salon.com and decided to spit out the worst nonsense.

unethical_ban 2y ago
Perhaps the Bluesky recommendations are less tailored/curated and have to do with globally trending comments. Which while having some downsides, it is nice that the filter bubble doesn't close around someone too quickly. I also assume that Bluesky as the political refugee camp from Twitter means it has a lot of participation from the liberally politically active at this moment. (Patton Oswald's post was not vile, just to be clear). Honestly I thought Mastodon and Bluesky were part of the same fediverse, I guess I need to do some learning.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  Really I found Patton Oswald post to be so vile it tainted all the other posts. Don't ever listen to people outside of your identity group even when they are right and they are helpful, save your kids from drowning because you may form a bond and then one day you realize you are close to someone outside of your identity group. Of course his story had strawman of a Nazi in some impossible scenario. How truly awful to break out of fake identities and connect to a real person on a human level. On the one hand you have Martin Luther King Jr sacrificing his life just so others can do that and on the other side you have some drunk, almost famous pile of garbage who wants to separate anyone different so he can live in some bubble in some world where the biggest bubble gets to crush everyone elses. He needs to crawl back into the segregated hole he came from. I didn't expect it from someone so privileged. It's just the worst of humanity. Parts of bluesky are parts of the fediverse. So are parts of threads and wordpress now.
  - unethical_ban 2y ago
    I don't know what you're talking about. The post o saw was about not allowing nazis into a bar.
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      It was about not letting anyone not like you in a bar. If they are black and you are white watch out he might be nice but he is going to bring his black friends. You can replace Nazi with any strawman group.
      - unethical_ban 2y ago
        Ah, I see. You seem to think that there is a spectrum of benevolence when it comes to people who wear Nazi symbology.
        ipaddr 2y ago
        Of course a spectrum exists. For example Prince Harry on one side and Hitler on the other. Misses his original point. Exclude those different from you and segrate. That's the one lesson he always remembers. Truly sad individual.
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        > It was about not letting anyone not like you in a bar. No, it was about Nazis. You’ve chosen one of the infinitely many different arguments that would imply the conclusion argued for but are not implied by it, and chosen to claim that is what is being argued for. If done in good faith, this is just embarrassingly sloppy reasoning. If not...
        ipaddr 2y ago
        It was about excluding people different from you. He uses Nazi as straw men because they reference a character that doesn't exist and that would never be in a bar in New York. But this is the one thing he remembers and lives his life by. He has never met or even seen a Nazi. He wants you to exclude those different from you. We need to include.
arrobbiato 2y ago
Oswalt, not Oswald.
halyconWays 2y ago
I think Bluesky's content is largely defined by the crowd of people that left Twitter. Like Voat when Reddit had its embrace of censorship, only the other way around: opposite politics, and it's more based around being upset that perceived extremists are being given a platform.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  This is incidentally why Mastodon seems to be less bad now. That group of people went there first, but then Mastodon's user growth stalled by some strange coincidence. Then they didn't want to be on the one that was apparently in decline so more of them switched to Bluesky. Which is kind of sad because from a technical perspective Bluesky seems to have some advantages (provided they fully extricate any dependencies on the corporate entity soon, which is supposedly the plan, but we've seen this play before and know one of the ways it can end). Whereas Mastodon/ActivityPub has some flaws that are going to cause real long-term problems if they're not addressed, e.g. tying accounts to a specific instance combined with the propensity for instances to ban other entire instances or ban small/new instances by default, which will have the unfortunate propensity for market concentration. Which is almost like the opposite problem: Instead of being centralized right now but they might fix it later, it's federated right now but they might break it later.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    >Whereas Mastodon/ActivityPub has some flaws that are going to cause real long-term problems if they're not addressed, e.g. tying accounts to a specific instance combined with the propensity for instances to ban other entire instances or ban small/new instances by default, which will have the unfortunate propensity for market concentration. Which is almost like the opposite problem: Instead of being centralized right now but they might fix it later, it's federated right now but they might break it later. This, among other issues with Mastodon, is what made me try Bluesky. Unfortunately, like I said in another comment, the feed crap is breaking me. Even my facebook feed is better than this, and I spent more time pruning Bluesky's.
  - shafyy 2y ago
tpm 2y ago
> I'm not sure why we are not all on Mastodon it's similiar content to this site. Mastodon is a nonprofit and a federated network with no single powerful entity marketing and managing it. It does not have enough pull.
- openrisk 2y ago
  This can quickly change if the public sector ever wakes up and smells the coffee. Imagine if every city would run activitypub type servers and offer them to their own residents as local tax funded service. Its an entirely plausible scenario, cities are managing far more complex infrastructure. Suddenly you have the pull of the entire planet and resources to keep evolving and innovating the software stack. We have the cesspool social media that we have because society is forgeting what democracy and sovereignty even mean. One just hopes that the in-your-face possibility of better alternatives will tip the balance somewhere in the world and start the revolution that will help us out of this sorry period.
  - briandear 2y ago
    So would the city government allow criticism of government officials? I specifically don’t want the government running anything like that.
    - openrisk 2y ago
      What people say on such platforms would be down to charters, democratically agreed. Everything is in principle open to design so as to prevent abuse. So is the possibility of checks and balances, observers etc. People abandoning their civic responsibilities is what delivered "government" (and practically everything else) to the oligarchs.
  - tpm 2y ago
    > and offer them to their own residents as local tax funded service. Its an entirely plausible scenario It sadly isn't, if by this you mean that residents can create their profiles there and use it to post stuff. Because now every city is a social network operator that has to police the server. But even if the city only had a server with accounts for the city admin and only posting city stuff, that by itself would be great. > We have the cesspool social media that we have because society is forgeting what democracy and sovereignty even mean. Maybe, but more specifically it's because social network operators refuse to police them properly. I have seen that scenario play out on a small non-commercial social network in the 00's and then countless times again: well-meaning people are too pacifist (at least online) and the rest is hands-off. Not very good people are always going to exploit weaknesses like that. And then it's too late, you can't put the cat back into the bag, the whole network is gone. And if the society as a whole doesn't act, well we are seeing what happens. > One just hopes that the in-your-face possibility of better alternatives will tip the balance somewhere in the world and start the revolution that will help us out of this sorry period. I don't think there will be a revolution. What I hope for is there will at least be a slow trickle of people into stuff like Mastodon, so that we leave behind the era where 99% of value was captured by facebook/instagram/tiktok/twitter.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, etc are all social networks; they are not specialized communities like HN is. It sounds like you're looking for a smaller specialized community moreso than a big social network. That said, a social network's home page is rarely representative of the value most people get out of it, that's down to the networks and curation you set up yourself. I mean open up Youtube in an anonymous profile. It's all caps football reporting, all caps "challenges" from influencers, Russian, shorts of double-cropped old videos with 50m views, music videos of people unknown to me, etc. Nothing I'm interested in, and yet I frequent youtube when I'm signed in.
leonidasv 2y ago
What I don't like about Mastodon is the way it federate servers. For example, if someone on server B "retweets" a post from server A, it does not carry over likes and comments from server A. That means personal instances are cumbersome and big servers always have a bigger leverage. That also implies you have no single page to just see all the comments about that post. Bsky, on the other hand, does not have such hard splitting between servers (comments belong to the post on ATProto network, not to the instance) and allows you to run your own personal instances (PDS) natively. You can even transfer your profile and data (including followers) to other instances. IMO, it's a better tackle on building a federated social network. But yeah, the native recommendation algorithm is lackluster.
- iteratethis 2y ago
  True. Federation is a disaster. Like you say, the simple use case of having consistent likes and replies doesn't even work. This breaks conversations. An OP hosting a popular thread will see the same/similar reply many times because people can't even see each other's replies. Federation makes discovery and search impossible or at the very least extremely hard to implement, whilst this is such a core feature of social networks. Federation is extremely wasteful. People hosting instances with just a few thousands of users are reporting gigantic bandwidth consumption and hefty bills. Not to mention storage bills for all that media. Federation does not allow for the independence it suggests. A bitter activist can advocate for other admins to defederate you and then your instance is cut off. You're not independent, you answer to the rule of the purists and the Mastodon way.

by ipaddr 2y ago

unethical_ban 2y ago

Perhaps the Bluesky recommendations are less tailored/curated and have to do with globally trending comments. Which while having some downsides, it is nice that the filter bubble doesn't close around someone too quickly. I also assume that Bluesky as the political refugee camp from Twitter means it has a lot of participation from the liberally politically active at this moment. (Patton Oswald's post was not vile, just to be clear). Honestly I thought Mastodon and Bluesky were part of the same fediverse, I guess I need to do some learning.

ipaddr 2y ago
Really I found Patton Oswald post to be so vile it tainted all the other posts. Don't ever listen to people outside of your identity group even when they are right and they are helpful, save your kids from drowning because you may form a bond and then one day you realize you are close to someone outside of your identity group. Of course his story had strawman of a Nazi in some impossible scenario. How truly awful to break out of fake identities and connect to a real person on a human level. On the one hand you have Martin Luther King Jr sacrificing his life just so others can do that and on the other side you have some drunk, almost famous pile of garbage who wants to separate anyone different so he can live in some bubble in some world where the biggest bubble gets to crush everyone elses. He needs to crawl back into the segregated hole he came from. I didn't expect it from someone so privileged. It's just the worst of humanity. Parts of bluesky are parts of the fediverse. So are parts of threads and wordpress now.
- unethical_ban 2y ago
  I don't know what you're talking about. The post o saw was about not allowing nazis into a bar.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    It was about not letting anyone not like you in a bar. If they are black and you are white watch out he might be nice but he is going to bring his black friends. You can replace Nazi with any strawman group.
    - unethical_ban 2y ago
      Ah, I see. You seem to think that there is a spectrum of benevolence when it comes to people who wear Nazi symbology.
      - ipaddr 2y ago
        Of course a spectrum exists. For example Prince Harry on one side and Hitler on the other. Misses his original point. Exclude those different from you and segrate. That's the one lesson he always remembers. Truly sad individual.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > It was about not letting anyone not like you in a bar. No, it was about Nazis. You’ve chosen one of the infinitely many different arguments that would imply the conclusion argued for but are not implied by it, and chosen to claim that is what is being argued for. If done in good faith, this is just embarrassingly sloppy reasoning. If not...
      - ipaddr 2y ago
        It was about excluding people different from you. He uses Nazi as straw men because they reference a character that doesn't exist and that would never be in a bar in New York. But this is the one thing he remembers and lives his life by. He has never met or even seen a Nazi. He wants you to exclude those different from you. We need to include.

arrobbiato 2y ago

Oswalt, not Oswald.

halyconWays 2y ago

I think Bluesky's content is largely defined by the crowd of people that left Twitter. Like Voat when Reddit had its embrace of censorship, only the other way around: opposite politics, and it's more based around being upset that perceived extremists are being given a platform.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
This is incidentally why Mastodon seems to be less bad now. That group of people went there first, but then Mastodon's user growth stalled by some strange coincidence. Then they didn't want to be on the one that was apparently in decline so more of them switched to Bluesky. Which is kind of sad because from a technical perspective Bluesky seems to have some advantages (provided they fully extricate any dependencies on the corporate entity soon, which is supposedly the plan, but we've seen this play before and know one of the ways it can end). Whereas Mastodon/ActivityPub has some flaws that are going to cause real long-term problems if they're not addressed, e.g. tying accounts to a specific instance combined with the propensity for instances to ban other entire instances or ban small/new instances by default, which will have the unfortunate propensity for market concentration. Which is almost like the opposite problem: Instead of being centralized right now but they might fix it later, it's federated right now but they might break it later.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  >Whereas Mastodon/ActivityPub has some flaws that are going to cause real long-term problems if they're not addressed, e.g. tying accounts to a specific instance combined with the propensity for instances to ban other entire instances or ban small/new instances by default, which will have the unfortunate propensity for market concentration. Which is almost like the opposite problem: Instead of being centralized right now but they might fix it later, it's federated right now but they might break it later. This, among other issues with Mastodon, is what made me try Bluesky. Unfortunately, like I said in another comment, the feed crap is breaking me. Even my facebook feed is better than this, and I spent more time pruning Bluesky's.
- shafyy 2y ago

tpm 2y ago

> I'm not sure why we are not all on Mastodon it's similiar content to this site. Mastodon is a nonprofit and a federated network with no single powerful entity marketing and managing it. It does not have enough pull.

openrisk 2y ago
This can quickly change if the public sector ever wakes up and smells the coffee. Imagine if every city would run activitypub type servers and offer them to their own residents as local tax funded service. Its an entirely plausible scenario, cities are managing far more complex infrastructure. Suddenly you have the pull of the entire planet and resources to keep evolving and innovating the software stack. We have the cesspool social media that we have because society is forgeting what democracy and sovereignty even mean. One just hopes that the in-your-face possibility of better alternatives will tip the balance somewhere in the world and start the revolution that will help us out of this sorry period.
- briandear 2y ago
  So would the city government allow criticism of government officials? I specifically don’t want the government running anything like that.
  - openrisk 2y ago
    What people say on such platforms would be down to charters, democratically agreed. Everything is in principle open to design so as to prevent abuse. So is the possibility of checks and balances, observers etc. People abandoning their civic responsibilities is what delivered "government" (and practically everything else) to the oligarchs.
- tpm 2y ago
  > and offer them to their own residents as local tax funded service. Its an entirely plausible scenario It sadly isn't, if by this you mean that residents can create their profiles there and use it to post stuff. Because now every city is a social network operator that has to police the server. But even if the city only had a server with accounts for the city admin and only posting city stuff, that by itself would be great. > We have the cesspool social media that we have because society is forgeting what democracy and sovereignty even mean. Maybe, but more specifically it's because social network operators refuse to police them properly. I have seen that scenario play out on a small non-commercial social network in the 00's and then countless times again: well-meaning people are too pacifist (at least online) and the rest is hands-off. Not very good people are always going to exploit weaknesses like that. And then it's too late, you can't put the cat back into the bag, the whole network is gone. And if the society as a whole doesn't act, well we are seeing what happens. > One just hopes that the in-your-face possibility of better alternatives will tip the balance somewhere in the world and start the revolution that will help us out of this sorry period. I don't think there will be a revolution. What I hope for is there will at least be a slow trickle of people into stuff like Mastodon, so that we leave behind the era where 99% of value was captured by facebook/instagram/tiktok/twitter.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, etc are all social networks; they are not specialized communities like HN is. It sounds like you're looking for a smaller specialized community moreso than a big social network. That said, a social network's home page is rarely representative of the value most people get out of it, that's down to the networks and curation you set up yourself. I mean open up Youtube in an anonymous profile. It's all caps football reporting, all caps "challenges" from influencers, Russian, shorts of double-cropped old videos with 50m views, music videos of people unknown to me, etc. Nothing I'm interested in, and yet I frequent youtube when I'm signed in.

leonidasv 2y ago

What I don't like about Mastodon is the way it federate servers. For example, if someone on server B "retweets" a post from server A, it does not carry over likes and comments from server A. That means personal instances are cumbersome and big servers always have a bigger leverage. That also implies you have no single page to just see all the comments about that post. Bsky, on the other hand, does not have such hard splitting between servers (comments belong to the post on ATProto network, not to the instance) and allows you to run your own personal instances (PDS) natively. You can even transfer your profile and data (including followers) to other instances. IMO, it's a better tackle on building a federated social network. But yeah, the native recommendation algorithm is lackluster.

iteratethis 2y ago
True. Federation is a disaster. Like you say, the simple use case of having consistent likes and replies doesn't even work. This breaks conversations. An OP hosting a popular thread will see the same/similar reply many times because people can't even see each other's replies. Federation makes discovery and search impossible or at the very least extremely hard to implement, whilst this is such a core feature of social networks. Federation is extremely wasteful. People hosting instances with just a few thousands of users are reporting gigantic bandwidth consumption and hefty bills. Not to mention storage bills for all that media. Federation does not allow for the independence it suggests. A bitter activist can advocate for other admins to defederate you and then your instance is cut off. You're not independent, you answer to the rule of the purists and the Mastodon way.