why are people frothing over Bluesky? this is just Twitter but owned by a different oligarch
Because it isn’t just Twitter. Nobody can buy the network, the same way nobody can buy email.
- Anyone can host a server.
- Anyone can make an app.
- Anyone can make an algorithm.
- Anyone can make a moderation service. Users can freely pick a server, app, algorithm, and moderation service.
Yeah, no, not anybody can host a server. Sure, you can host a PDS, but the AppView still wasn’t open source last time I looked, and hosting a relay requires tens of terabytes of storage, not to mention the bandwidth to keep up.
Meanwhile, people host actual activitypub instances on repurposed routers and their car entertainment system…
Ngl thanks for the detail, I went and had another look so correct me if I’m wrong.
- Anyone can host a open source PDS like the Bluesky PDS.
- Anyone can make an AppView to view these PDSs.
- Someone with many resources needs to host a relay.
- Also it seems that Bluesky is able to gatekeep access to its federation of PDSs on a per AppView basis? The details are a bit confusing.
So if we wanted to undermine Bluesky’s currently - hopefully temporary - centralised state, we would need multiple community modified PDSs, a widely rehosted open source AppView webapp & iOS/Android clients, a very expensive relay that is community controlled via non profit or something, and then we would be federated with each other and the bluesky infrastructure too?
Sounds like a lot of work just to recreate the user-end functionality of ActivityPub :/ Very confused why they felt the need to invent ATProtocol? I have heard some vague praise of it over AP but I think I’m not technical enough to really properly make that comparison. It’s nice that ATProtocol gives you ownership of your data though.
Perhaps Mastodon/ActivityPub-apps need to improve their onboarding process and user experience. Maybe include the custom feeds feature for Bluesky too. Something has to have gone wrong for Mastodon to have failed where Bluesky succeeded.
Bluesky is like Twitter but with about 1/10th the idiots, and no mechanism that the idiots can elevate their racist, moronic hot takes above other comments.
Bluesky will follow the same enshittification trajectory Twitter did, it is just the beginning of the rollercoaster where the coaster is slowly brought up to the top to be launched… and everyone is exclaiming “wow I haven’t even thrown up yet!” as if that was any indicator of how much they were about to throw up…
Maybe it will, but for the time being it hasn’t. The experience is so vastly better than Twitter, that it’s a no brainer to jump over. It also helps to have a decent competing platform that people like to suck users and influence away from the platform that Musk turned into a cesspit.
I don’t think it will go down the same path as Twitter, since Bluesky is open source and available on Github other devs will have the possibility to improve it or create a better version of it but with the more users joining it might necessary to monetize it to better cover the costs. I would love to see everyone switching to the Fediverse but it’s not very intuitive for the average end user with the instances and the fact that you need to target a user and an instance to follow it
Good with some competition. We need much more in that area.
Decentralized FOSS socials are great technical achievements but I feel like the actual product that users will interact with are worse copy cats of already established social platforms. Mastodon is a Twitter clone, Lemmy is a reddit clone, peertube is a youtube clone. I love these FOSS/decen. platforms but the frontend that users actually interact with are just copies of already popular platforms, just with another backend. What innovative FOSS/decen. social platforms exist? Not talking about the backend but the user experience.
I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.
Pass
Unfortunately that’s standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There’s zero benefit to them.
Let’s not call disabling the right to sue a “business risk”. That’s like calling the right to stop paying for the service a “risk” - it’s riskdiculous.
Let’s not call disabling the right to sue a “business risk”.
…and why not?
That’s like calling the right to stop paying for the service a “risk”
But…that’s what it is? I promise if they could remove that risk with a few words in the TOS, and it was legal, they’d all be doing that too.
Doesn’t matter if you should or not. Point is you accept it or you don’t use any service whatsoever.
I don’t think forced arbitration has really been tried in court. I remember Disney kind of trying, but it was completely unrelated (e.g. argued that arbitration agreement from Disney+ applied to issues on physical Disney properties).
In order to hold up in court, the contract needs to reasonably benefit both parties instead of only the contract issuer. So there’s a very good chance a court will dismiss the forced arbitration clause, especially if it’s just in a EULA and not a bidirectional contract negotiation.
That said, I tend to avoid services with binding arbitration statements in their EULA, and if I can’t, I avoid companies that force acceptance of EULA changes to continue use of the service.
While I understand that, I’m in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.
Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It’s the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.
But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I’m not going to fight it. I’m having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I’ve written the media address of environments I’m familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.
Good take. Bluesky is a good stop-gap.
I’ve also been thinking, if Bluesky never federates and enshittifies in a similar way to Twitter (which it will do much faster, just cause it’s a different era), then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…
then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…
or people will have lost the ability to imagine alternative and better places…
…which is where we come in to make sure they don’t forget!
Arbitration of what? It’s a free service. What money could they possibly owe you?
If the mods or admin do something that causes you injury, such as ignoring requests that will prevent harassment.
…how would them ignoring requests cause injury??? We’re still talking about bluedky, right? The online twitter clone without musk as it’s main selling point?
You’re not thinking evil enough, honestly. Two examples off the top of my head, each being fairly innocent mistakes: If you enter your phone number for 2FA, it’s not going to be public-facing. It’s their responsibility to keep that information private from internal and external threats. Ok, so what if it leaks… right? Oh, it turns out the hacker SIM swapped your phone number for the 2FA, and did a password reset on your account via support chat. Still no big deal, its just social media… Except you’ve been giving updates to all your patreon backers on your project that’s shipping soon. It suddenly vanishes off the internet, replaced with a crypto scheme, and all your supporters just flooded your bank with chargebacks. Your attempts at getting your account back are met with silence and your supporters are now furious. Was any of that your fault? No. You get $100.
Let’s try another example: Bounty programs are used by companies to collect bugs and other possibly exploits so they can be fixed. “Too expensive, nobody will know if there’s a bug anyway.” So the app on Google Play store gets installed by 30 million users with a critical flaw… if a very specific image is opened in it, the phone bricks. All the news sites cover the bug, pushing the image to the front page. You open the app and… Your expensive phone just died. Were you at fault for that? No. You get to join the arbitration group and get an individual settlement of $12.
Think more evil. Don’t stick with the “I have nothing to lose” because you almost always have something to lose. The fact these terms were even thought of and written means you do have a financial investment in the platform.
Ok…and why would they pay YOU that money? Wouldn’t it be companies and governments they pay?
Off topic, but I pointing this out reminded me of visiting some ancap circles to see the crazy stuff they discuss. At one point there was a question about how externalities would be handled in their system of private courts and such. When ever I do read some terms and conditions there is almost always something in regard to arbitration. Predictably they were not happy about someone pointing that out and explaining that it is for the benefit of corporations not the customers.
Funny, someone shared an article in another post about all corporate money going to Delaware, https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2022/06/delaware-is-everywhere-how-a-little-known-tax-haven-made-the-rules-for-corporate-america/
