Everything was pointing Mastodon until Bluesky came. And guess what? Turns out the problem is and always has been corporations and centralized ownership.
post
Corporate owned entities will always enshitify.
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.
But your code repos are super easy to move. So shouldn't it matter less?
I didn't realize Gitea was corporate...
The elected leader transferred all the trademarks to a company he owns, and (I think) did away with elections.
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...
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.
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"
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.
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?
The irony is that Doofenshmirtz is pretty good standin for an out of touch corpo CEO
Even Doofenshmirtz wouldn't stoop so low.
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...
And over 90 percent of the time, his products are fully functional and fail only due to outside interference.
While not technical failures, his products tended to be so specific to his own personal issues and tastes that I would bet heavily against their commercial viability if I lived in their universe.
Oh damn. It's rotten all the way to the core.
Oh wait. I'm on mastodon. The correct platform to have migrated to
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.
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.
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
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.
i stopped using twitter around 2013 after adopting it in 2007. i deleted my account entirely when it sold
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.
When Sam Altman buys Bluesky, you can expect the cycle to repeat itself.
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.
Jay Graber is not CEO anymore, but that doesn't mean she hasn't been busy.
Valorizing CEOs is for idiots and suckers.
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.
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.
yep, my artists circles all flocked to fucking corporate platform... again. There are artists on Mastodon though, and not just on Mastodon.art !
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
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.
with the help of Anthropic’s Claude.
Is an important part to me, it's not just a recommender algorithm
Honestly that sounds like a good idea for Mastodon. Something that will help users find their first 100 follows across 10+ instances
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.
Use mastodon and the fediverse
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!
I have the opposite experience. I can post the same thing on both bs and mastodon and got lots of replies on mastodon and crickets on bs.
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)
That's true about Lemmy. It's been a good replacement for both Reddit and Facebook groups, though smaller.
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.
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
I'm the same, Mastodon is good for some neiche topics. But for following news etc, it's a no go.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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]
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.
I'd swap "open source: false" with "closed source: true" so the pattern is consistent.
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.
It's funny, I bailed when they started doing age checks. It made my life better
I know this goes against the whole culture but we are going to do it anyway -Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, etc.
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.

top 94 comments