stolen from @rolle@mementomori.social
I feel like a lot of people don’t seem to realize why the average person uses a platform like Bluesky. They’re not going down a checklist of features they want to see. Most people see the artists/celebrities/politicians they want to hear from on a given platform, and make an account on that platform so they can follow them.
And sure, nothing is stopping Bluesky from ending up like Twitter, at which point the users will find another platform to use. Such is the circle of Internet life.
Yeah, my brother is only joining Bluesky simply to follow journalists.
And sure, nothing is stopping Bluesky from ending up like Twitter, at which point the users will find another platform to use. Such is the circle of Internet life.
That is with anything, mate. Even South Park made point about enshittification before the the term was coined lol.
you analysis is correct i just disagree in that i think plenty of people realize this :)
even before celebrities, the huge hurdle is “well my friends and family aren’t on there.” very few people who aren’t redditors want a social platform where you can’t be social with people you know.
I see that, in addition to calling proprietary LLMs “”“open source”“”, we’re just calling everything that every company has done “”“open source”“” as well 😑
The closest thing they have to an accurate point is Android, but Google didn’t start with open source shit, and Facebook and Twitter sure as shit didn’t either.
Chrome as well, but the point stands that it is wild to say those companies started from open source like Bluesky has.
The closest true interpretation I can think of is that they, and most companies, fork open source software with permissive licenses since they can legally derive proprietary software from it. That’s why I’m a staunch (A)GPL boi myself.
nothing prevents them
–>
everything is pushing them to
go the exact same road as other megacorps.
When they reach a certain threshold they gonna start monetizing all the this and aging new revenue streams (so ads, censorship, political megacorp bribery, etc).
This is why we foss (and federate).
Can’t have equals in a 0 sum game of capital hoarding.
That’s where the “free market” should apply. You only use companies with the best practices, and when that company turns greedy, you go to another company. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Companies know that people will sacrifice quality for convenience. We just have to keep trying.
Social networking makes alternatives particularly difficult. The most important feature of any social network is that everyone uses it. The second best social network in a given niche is rarely worth talking about. After all, what good is a social network with no people?
and that’s the reason bluesky is worth celebrating… sure, it’s not really distributed but the fact that it’s making concessions to look like it is means it’s far more open, and bridges to the real fediverse work… the second social media network becomes a lot more attractive when you can still interact with your family on the first: this is why my parents can still be on gmail and i can make better choices for myself… they’ll eventually come around, because they can switch and not worry about where their contacts are
Keep pushing forward and leaving behind the toxic “RTFM” culture that many free and open communities inherited from Unix culture. Mastodon is setting a great example by prioritizing user-friendly support guides and intuitive UX over opaque documentation of idiosyncratic design.
There’s four possible legal structures that could be behind a messaging service:
- political domain (state, city, …)
- corporate entity (typically for-profit)
- clubs (typically non-profit)
- individual humans
I think it fits the spirit of the Fediverse best to consider the lower two options. A club is a free get-together of humans for some purpose, such as sports club, literature club, you could have a Fediverse club. I highly support this approach, because it is non-profit-oriented, lives off donations, and is rooted by responsible individuals who do something good for the community. Also, individual humans can host smaller instances, but as the instances grow in size, having multiple people behind it to back it up could make things more stable over time.
Honestly a mix all four doesn’t seem bad to me. For example, a public library hosting an instance, or a for-profit research or reporting organization federating sounds unproblematic.
For-profit always has to be handled with care, but for example Flipboard hosts an instance and I haven’t seen any issues yet.
