I guess I'm glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn't a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.

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[–] 139 points 7 months ago (17 children)

Everything was pointing Mastodon until Bluesky came. And guess what? Turns out the problem is and always has been corporations and centralized ownership.

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  • [–] 44 points 7 months ago (15 children)

    Mastodon has shit branding and I'm not afraid to say it.

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  • [–] 48 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    In general, I'd say the fediverse as a whole has shit branding and is probably a bit too confusing and/or too much initial setup work for the average inertnet user.

    But I'm glad it's like that, to a degree, because it helps lower the amount of people overwhelming places like here with all the people who would gladly allow the place to be overrun by ads and corporate astroturfing.

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  • [–] 40 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    The barrier to entry acts as a filter. Which is crazy to me, because it’s still so easy to sign up and conceptualize, imo.

    I guess it just goes to show how accustomed people have become to uncanny and frankly insane levels of convenience.

    I remember the first time I logged in to Gmail without putting my password in — when all of a sudden the entire internet used cookies in lieu of credentials (is that how it works? I’m not qualified).

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    I can absolutely understand that it's difficult to conceptualise. For someone who already understands, the concept is dead simple.

    But I still remember the confusion trying to join Mastodon all those years ago. You are shown a list of servers, huh? Never being introduced to the concept of federated social media, just being asked makes you feel like you don't belong because you don't understand what's happening.

    Ok, so you search around and work out that it's across many servers. You now have to somehow pick a server with no frame of reference. Pick randomly and hope you don't pick the lemmdgrad equivalent (which is always high on the list on join-lemmy.com BTW). Then you go to join and you have to apply - oh, but what if they don't want me? How do they know who I am, why would they approve my application?

    Each one of these things is a barrier to entry, they stack like swiss cheese so that very few people make it through.

    Then there's the part where all these people have friends that could help them through it, but the friends never mention the fediverse to them because of the whole don't talk about thing. I am guilty of this.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

    And then on top of that you find a random Mastodon link in the wild, click it, a Mastodon instance loads, but you can't reply/toot/do anything, because it's not your instance and you're not signed in. I still don't know how to "convert" a link to my own instance (granted, I haven't looked into that much really).

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    There must be some sort of way to do it.

    Lemmy doesn't handle this nicely either, though I still use this extension last updated 3 years ago: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

    If you're the one posting a link, you can use a service like https://lemmyverse.link/ which will redirect a user to the same items on their own instance (after they set their instance the first time), though that site is run by the guy behind lemmings.world that's shutting down in a couple of months, so it's future may be a little uncertain. I've also seen https://threadiverse.link/ but I don't know who run it.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Right, so it's all "this might work, or it might not, or might die in a bit" - it's chaos. It should be a native feature of the fediverse to auto-redirect to your instance.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    I guess the question is... how? Browsers isolate what they know about you to domains. When you go to Gmail, it doesn't tell Gmail that you have a Hotmail email.

    As far as the browser knows, lemmy.world and lemmy.ca are as different as hotmail.com and gmail.com. The token that knows you are logged into lemmy.world is not sent to any other site, that would be a huge security risk. And the browser doesn't know what is being stored in the cookies, just that it's there and it should only send it to the domain it came from and never another.

    I don't disagree that this is a big problem. I just don't know how it would be solved while keeping the fediverse decentralised.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    That's one of the many fundamental design shortcomings of the Fediverse.

    But, in this particular case, the "how" could be a simple "redirect to a different instance" button, where you could select yours. Or the site could check for the cookies of known servers and check if one has a valid login token, and automatically redirect there.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    could be a simple "redirect to a different instance" button, where you could select yours

    Though not perfect, that would be a vast improvement on now. There are thousands of instances (remembering content is shared to Mastodon and others), and not every instance knows about every other, but you could auto-fill from the list the instance knows about, and if you end up back on that site it should remember what you selected last time and prefill it. Great idea!

    Or the site could check for the cookies of known servers

    This is simply not possible because browsers don't let a site do this.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    Though it's better now, it used to be that Lemmy and a lot of Lemmy-type alternatives' documentation were more for people who wanted to host their own server, rather than someone who wanted to join a social network.

    But at much the same time, that complication also hurts adoption, so if people ever wanted Lemmy to be a proper social media site to replace the existing ones, the barrier to entry does also need to go down.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago

    Mastodon has a very singular type of user and circle jerk communities. Maybe it'll grow out of its tweeny phase some day. But until then, it will only attract more of the same crowd. Much to its detriment.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    No way man, this time it will be different.

    You would have thought people would have learned that this doesn't work from Digg but you what I think affects it? I think the generational divide that exists between social media networks serves to stratify this learning such that each new generation gets to experience it for themselves because they were not on the last social media that turned to shit.

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  • [–] 122 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    Corporate owned entities will always enshitify.

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  • [–] 21 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    This is why I moved away from Gitea to Forgejo. Nothing wrong with Gitea. I just can't trust the corporate model anymore, especially not for something as critical as my code repos.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    I didn't realize Gitea was corporate...

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    The elected leader transferred all the trademarks to a company he owns, and (I think) did away with elections.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I didn't realize bluesky was corporate.

    I did try it when it was new, but it always felt like kind of a circlejerk. Like it was good to be surrounded by mostly like-minded opinions, but I felt like everyone was trying to say something profound or boldly controversial and I was just like... "Yeah, we all pretty much agree, so... that's that, I guess?"

    But then again I was never really into the whole microblogging thing even before, so maybe that's always how it was supposed to be...

    Before I found the fediverse my main platform was reddit, though. Good ole anonymous forums, that's all the social media I need...

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    If something isn't very specifically only fediverse (and not just able to federate) or open source it's corporate. You'll always know because everything that isn't corporate is very obviously not because it'll tell you. I'm very surprised that anyone could think bluesky isn't corporate.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    It was before I really knew about the fediverse, so when I read about how it was able to federate I didn't really fully understand it but I thought it was this new radical thing that could revolutionize the internet.

    I didn't really discover the fediverse proper until I found matrix and lemmy, and the word kept popping up until I finally read about it.

    I always considered myself tech unsavvy, but I now know that was because I've spent my whole life being gaslit by proprietary tech that's virtually unusable because of the corporate obsession with control, and deliberate obfuscation of settings. I just kept despairing about privacy infringements and bad UIs, and felt resigned to that being the norm, so I avoided technology as much as I could. I didn't truly understand FOSS and why it's so important until maybe less than a year ago. Anything that sounded like tech jargon just kinda went over my head.

    And then I found Linux and read a whole lot about it, got really excited to try it, and eventually got a computer with Endeavour. Now I'm in love with it. All my life, I thought I hated computers, but it turns out I just hated Windows (and Mac, hated that too).

    I feel reborn, like there's so much potential ahead now, so much to learn and explore. Sure, maybe tech jobs are dying out. I'll never get a job as a software engineer, even if I learn programming. But outside of that I mean, pursuing tech as a hobby, there's just a whole new world opening up for me, and it's cause I finally opened that door labeled "FOSS"

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago

    Back when meta was pushing threads a lot of lemmy was suggesting blue sky as the "safe" alternative. I thought it wasn't corporate at that point, though I never looked into it. At the time I thought federating was proof a site was one of the "good guys." Lots of us here aren't really techie, and we're just bumbling along picking stuff up over time, with none of this as a priority, just trying to take baby steps towards a safer, more private net experience.

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  • [–] 156 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    If I had a nickel for every time a corpo CEO who founded a microblogging social media platform stepped down to pursue even shittier corpo endeavors, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?

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  • [–] 44 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    The irony is that Doofenshmirtz is pretty good standin for an out of touch corpo CEO

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  • [–] 27 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    Even Doofenshmirtz wouldn't stoop so low.

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    In one of the Season 5 episodes, Doof runs a gym as a front to get people to power his building, so he's not too far off...

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    And over 90 percent of the time, his products are fully functional and fail only due to outside interference.

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  • [–] 60 points 7 months ago

    Oh damn. It's rotten all the way to the core.

    Oh wait. I'm on mastodon. The correct platform to have migrated to

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  • [–] 56 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Ok it's not BlueSky as in the BlueSky social media website. It's another separate tool they're developing.

    The title is very misleading.

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  • [–] 40 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    Bsky enhittified the day it was formed.
    The problem: Twitter is being centrally controlled, by one large corporation which can be corrupted.
    The solution: A new "company" with a "trusted board" instead of investors!
    Bsky is slowly becoming twitter because someone who thinks like businessman can't comprehend running a project without a company and a "trusted board" behind it, with capital from elsewhere fueling the whole thing. Jack Dorsey probably had good intentions, but he's just too near sighted (or not the right person) to create a viable alternative disconnected from the business minded framework a true open decentralized twitter replacement needed.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    It's basically just Twitter in the early days, way before the Musk takeover. It will follow the same path eventually, as all VC funded tech

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    People forget that Twitter turned to shit long before musk showed up. They were the ones who refused to enforce their own TOS for trump for years.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    i stopped using twitter around 2013 after adopting it in 2007. i deleted my account entirely when it sold

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I used it in 2011, because I was trying to make sense of what the hell even is this? It made no sense to me. Stopped using it until 2014, when I made my second ever post, and then stopped using it again until 2018 when a professional athlete that I happen to share the same name with tried intimidating me off my handle. That didn't work (how you approach people matters!). But I still never used it.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    That's the thing, like it's just twitter with a different logo. Does nothing different, still has questionable ties to questionable people, monetization in its short term future. It's basically a Twitter clone.

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  • [–] 35 points 7 months ago

    Jay Graber is not CEO anymore, but that doesn't mean she hasn't been busy.

    Valorizing CEOs is for idiots and suckers.

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  • [–] 34 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    The bluesky rise kinda pissed me off. More so because all my artist friends that were on twitter went to bluesky instead of Mastodon when I told them about it as an alternative. everyone collectively decided to ignore a system that already existed and to the centralized thing again. Big suprise.

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  • [–] 23 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    Bluesky was easier to sign up and less confusing to use. It had a much better mobile app. A lot of pro newsies came to Mastodon and were roundly ejected and abused, so they up and went to Blurdky instead. That was a major shooting your own foot moment for Mastodon because those newsies would have brought engaged audience. I saw people celebrating at Mastodon when news reporters up and quit. Idiotic. I hope the Lemmy community doesn't repeat that mistake.

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  • [–] 22 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    For those curious it sounds like the app is an ai powered discovery tool, where you tell it what kinda stuff you like and it tries to find stuff from across bsky to show you based on your interests you told it about

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    FWIW

    Most of the people I know who moved to Bluesky instead of Mastodon specifically cited the ability to easily index/discover stuff from a single location as the reason.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    I'd honestly agree. It's fine after you get established and a feed set up, but before then, not having a good way to find stuff to follow in the first place hurts it a bit.

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  • [–] 20 points 7 months ago

    With Attie, users apparently enter what are essentially chatbot prompts. The app will process whatever the user types, find posts they might be into across Bluesky and other atpro-friendly networks, and use that to customize their feed and overall experience.

    It sounds like a stupid app, but of everything going on, this is just not something I care about.

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  • [–] 38 points 7 months ago (16 children)

    Use mastodon and the fediverse

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  • [–] 27 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (14 children)

    Dude, not trying to throw shade at Mastodon, but where on Lemmy I get tons of interaction, on Pixelfed and Loops I get a solid amount and on Bluesky I get plenty in comments and some on my own posts...

    I have had ZERO ANYTHING on Mastodon, and the content I post is more or less the same as the others. The app looks sleek and upload quality is better than the others, but it feels like being shadowbanned on Meta... Photos, memes, text, political, personal, you name it, nothing.

    I make a point to use each of these apps once a day. No one is reciprocating anything on Mastodon. Again, it feels like being shadowbanned. I honestly hate it at this point. I'm trying to engage with those people and they're giving me nothing.

    Maybe it's literally a technical issue, no joke. Or maybe I'm like the old lady in the "If my phone isn't broken then why don't my relatives call me?" story

    EDIT: I'm surprised to hear I'm not alone. I thought my little rant would get downvoted. Well, dang! We need to fix Mastodon then!

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    For me it's not as bad as you described, people reply if i ask something or comment but i don't know how to find the content and the people that I'd like to follow. I do follow some accounts that I like but still my feed feels dead :( I think Lemmy is easier because it's a "subject/interest first" place whereas mastodon (or twitter) is "people first" place. I was never a twitter fan either so I actually don't quite know what to expect from it neither.

    I still keep visiting Mastodon after I get angry to Instagram though, which happens quite often (I know mastodon is a twitter alt and we have pixelfed for ig)

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    That's true about Lemmy. It's been a good replacement for both Reddit and Facebook groups, though smaller.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    It's been but it's kind of starting to really reflect some of the crap you see on reddit. Thankfully not too much mod or monetization drama as of yet, but I've noticed we are really starting to draw in some wackadoo users from Reddit as of late. Just even over the past month, I've had to start blocking some subs, I've been starting to see waves of some pretty unhinged stuff. Thats what's great about the fediverse, is it can grow and evolve. But that still doesn't solve one of the biggest primary problems with social media, and that's its public users, some of whom are just straight up people I don't want to be near, even virtually.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    I hear you. Even in places where everyone mostly agrees on politics there are still niches that are bizarre, offensive, cult-like or aggressive or individuals that turn every disagreement into a fight. I stumble upon them sometimes on all the new platforms. What can I say? We're definitely not living in an echo chamber. Right-wingers are wrong about that one

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    I know why this happens. My comments get more, sometimes many more, comments and likes on Mastodon than on Bluesky.

    On Mastodon, it's all how many people you follow and who follow you back. There are other ways to find posts on Mastodon, like the federated tab on your server, but many people don't seem to use them as much. To find things on Mastodon you must follow lots of people. You have a lot more work to do on Mastodon if you want things to read and for people to read you.

    Compared to Twitter, this is also true on Bluesky, but management there has tried to give users ways to find people other than an algorithm (which Bluesky does have in its Discover tab, which I notice post quality drops substantially from my curated following list), in the form of starter packs. On Mastodon the account FediFollows is a good place to find groups of people to follow, and FediTips for general ideas and advice.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    that's not been my experience. I set followers to needs approval as well, fuck if i can figure out why anyone would follow me. I have kind of abandoned my masto account and now use Goto Social

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds like there aren't as many users on mastodon as you would like. Next time you see a public figure using only bluesky and not the fedevirse make sure to call them out.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Will do. If I can find the time to be on 5 different platforms, they can too. I've been itching to log into the ol'gram (Instagram, that is) and nudge some of my favorite indie bands towards joining fediverse

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  • [+] 35 points 7 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    As fake as it may sound, chief innovation officer is a real job title

    Oh wow, an AI feature that nobody asked for. Such innovation, much wow!

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago*

    At my second-to-last job, the company did a reorganization and I was given the title of "Visionary". It really pissed me off because I was a programmer who actually did all the work. I also knew that it meant I was going to be laid off soon and sure enough I was.

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago

    I knew it. Investors started pouring in, it was only a matter of time.

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago

    From the article:

    New Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider told TechCrunch, “We’ve launched a lot of things inside Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one that’s built by Jay’s new team.” [emphasis added]

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago

    took a role as chief innovation officer of the social media platform.

    Uhmmm.... chief what...?

    As fake as it may sound

    LOL exactly what I thought.

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  • [+] 35 points 7 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago

    It seems this fediverse thing is the real innovation, not twitter clones.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I really wonder if Mastodon would have done better with a nicer, more techy name. Also, it’s silly but the double @ usernames look worse than the AT proto usernames.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    I'd argue that it was more to do with the fediverse setup being confusing/complicated, if you're not used to it.

    People would think you'd need to sign up to all the servers that you wanted to access, rather than using just one account for everything.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago

    It's funny, I bailed when they started doing age checks. It made my life better

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    I know this goes against the whole culture but we are going to do it anyway -Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, etc.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I get the same vibes from this woman I get from Sam Altman and Zuckerberg … just this cold, dead, vacant stare like there isn’t anything caring behind those eyes.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago
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