I have a really hard time seeing a difference between X and Bluesky. Both are run by billionaires for their amusement and benefit. Why are people so hopeful about bluesky?
Oh, really? OK, that makes it definatelly less terrible. I guess I need to update myself about the organization behind it then. Thanks for the correction!
They got funding from Twitter and Jack was on the board for a bit, but he bailed and formally quit (funny enough he bailed because they did more moderation than he wanted)
Having used it for several days now, I can tell you the difference is that Bluesky is a lot like Lemmy - not filled with hate and vitriol, and easy to make it what you want by selecting your feeds and following things you care about while pruning the rest.
The people who can’t socialize properly with others are swiftly dealt with. Subscription blocklists make it really easy to just annihilate any possible interaction between yourself and undesirables. I have several blocklist subscriptions for MAGA chuds and White Supremacists for example. And when you block someone on Bluesky they can’t see what you write and you’ll never see anything from them ever again. Zero interaction from that point on. So the housekeeping actions actually keep the house clean.
Once you’ve done the initial housekeeping, it’s just full of people talking about cool stuff, and when someone crashes the party to be nasty they are quickly shown the door. It’s wonderful.
Also trying out Bluesky, and it is a lot like Twitter used to be, but it has the potential to turn out like Xitter is today, because at the end of the day Bluesky is a for-profit startup corporation.
Sooner or later, Bluesky is going to want to make money for its shareholders, and that means any of: 1) Selling advertisements, 2) Selling your personal data, and/or 3) In a classic tech startup play, selling itself to the highest bidder like: Android, YouTube, and yes, Twitter.
And with commercialization, or in Xitter’s case a fool with too much money, comes enshittification.
Lemmy is nothing like a for-profit startup company, as far as I know, but that doesn’t make it enshittification-proof, but at least it won’t take the commercialization route.
It’s not the unusable firehose that mastodon is, and it’s a lot less fediverse-stanny. (it’s not actually federated yet).
I kind of like it, it feels like the right level of engagement, and there’s a culture of just block the assholes, grownups are talking.
It’s worth a few days to try it out. Nice place.
Because one of them is actively promoting and favouring viewpoints many people find abhorrent.
The fact it’s owned by a billionaire isn’t the major concern for most people.
Yes. Having centralized ownership (to whatever extent) is a concern for sure, but it’s a hypothetical concern in and of itself: “what if the leadership does bad things?” Is different from “the leadership is currently doing bad things.”
Decentralization helps. But if the networks effects aren’t behind it, jumping from platform to platform when things DO get bad is also viable.
It’s run by a millionaire, not a billionaire. People like it because it’s Twitter without Musk. That’s it.
That’s a big motivator for the migration but that’s not “it,” people on bsky seem to prefer the way blocking on bsky works, especially since X made your posts visible to people you have blocked.
The problem is not that they are billionaires. But one is run by an obvious malignant narcissist, and the other is not.
One is responsible the other is not.
Here’s a very down to earth explanation of why Twitter after Musk became an ethical problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8zfgIgZ4c0
