This is good. I know Mastodon would be better, but right now I’m just happy that public agencies are moving away from that far-right platform owned by a fascist asshole who gained global political power because of money…
Some day? Probably. But if it isn’t for now, I’ll take it as an improvement for now
Exactly. It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement. They might have said something equally bad like “we are moving to facebook”.
We need visibility to such institutions because the younger generation is not interested in parsing a website or RSS feed for information and news (this is a sad fact) but rather parse social media. Far right, mis/disinformation will be there for everyone to see. We need scientific and public institutions to be visible.
I think enshittification of “traditional” software already gave enough initial visibility for fediverse and the word “decentralization” that when bluesky goes to shit it’s already less of a new thing to move to - let’s say - mastodon hosted by EU or whatever.
Edit: added more to the second paragraph.
Its impossible for it to not go to shit. The only way to prevent this is proper federation/account migration, because with those any server will just instantly die from users leaving when they start going bad. Lock-in is the biggest reason for everything wrong with the internet.
Yes. Once a large enough concentration of users is achieved, the network effect kicks in and the users are locked in.
With that amount of users, it becomes a juicy target for businesses who colonize the place to milk said users. That’s assuming the original founders haven’t already been kicked out and replaced by suits who just invite businesses, influencers, creators, propagandist and so on in and charge them for the privilege. That locks in businesses.
With users and business both locked in, squeeze them for an they’re worth until the pain gets too big and the users leave for another platform. Go to step 1.
Too Bad it wasn’t Mastodon. They just chose a different corporate master
Mastodon as a mass market solution has failed. It’s essentially irrelevant outside of a tiny niche
What are you talking about? It has a million active users. With an advertising budget of zero.
I wanted to leave Twitter too. I’m a professional engineer in tech and I found setting up in Mastodon to be… …not straightforward, as did a whole load of other people. I eventually got set up. I couldn’t find anyone or anything, the whole model being based around local instances rather than users or topics but… I tried to make the best of it and I followed the other people who had left Twitter that I had followed there when they said where to find them on Mastodon. Then I found I had run into a ‘silencing’ drama where some other instance admins had taken issue with an admin for the instance I was signed up to and as a result everyone on my instance was essentially shadowbanned in a whole load of other places. It had been happening maybe a month before I even found out about this. I’m a grown up, I don’t have time for school time drama. I found that I was using Mastodon less and less and so were the people I had been following. Then my BlueSky invite came through. I can find topics and I can find users. People post and people respond. I don’t have to worry which of 100 identical usernames across different instances is the ‘real’ one or my instance being defederated or silenced.
The problem with Mastodon is it’s basically a social network for people who are into Mastodon, and enjoy centering around their specific instance. It might work for Warcraft guilds but it doesn’t work for me, or any of the people or topics I want to follow, ostly current affairs and tech. As opposed to BlueSky which is a social network for people who:
- Want to move on from twitter
- Are interested in finding and following people and or topics
No doubt at this point you will want to tell me how I’m all wrong, clearly tech illiterate and how Mastodon has at least as many users as BlueSky. Sure, whatevs. It’s like Linux on the Desktop, not a viable mass-market proposition at this point (saying this with 25 years Linux desktop experience).
Swapping Twiddle-Dum with Twiddle-Dumber
out of the frying pan, into the fire
This is my biggest issue with discourse on here or Reddit. If something isn’t literally perfect it’s treated as being absolutely horrible.
I’ll take minor improvements here and there over sticking to something awful and endlessly complaining about it.
The level of effort to move to mastodon is not that much more than moving the bluesky. I agree not letting perfect be the enemy of good but this is a situation where they could have done something substantially better with only slightly more effort.
Am I glad they left Twitter? Sure.
Is there anything wrong with bluesky? Not right now.
Even if they moved to a managed mastodon instance, it would have been better.
