If you move from twitter thinking it'll not end up like twitter you're wrong. It'll go through the same growing pains process and you'll end up right back where you started with nothing to show for it.
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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Centalised as in not federated. Which means we've basically set a timer until it starts acting like Google or Facebook, or even "X" if a crazy person buys it out.
That being said, I welcome any kind of actual competition.
Isnβt it Twitter before musk?
I remember the olden days when people said Twitter was shit and it wasnβt intentionally bad.
People dislike it because it's not federated, but hot take: federation doesn't solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms. It doesn't do anything to prevent the inherent problems that arise as a result of having everyone freeball a random moderation structure, where they can outsource their agency to some guy they don't know, with the illusion that there's some clear set of rules or useful tools that exist somewhere off in the distance, being used by the "correct" actors and moderators. Which in turn means that everything becomes vulnerable to any abuse of the static, singular, broad rules, inside of these walled gardens that people are basically locked into.
You get bait, you get ragebait, people taking advantage of the singular "algorithms" in order to game the system for maximum attention, and you incentivize that behavior because you make it way too easy to engage in. You get people paying to get on the front page of reddit, and you get eglin air force base being the most reddit addicted town. People think that AI abuse is some recent phenomenon, but it's not, bots have been on the internet forever, and people have been incentivized to engage in bot-like behaviors forever. Eventually you get a huge, hollow system, where everything has the guise of legitimate human interaction at the surface level, but is really just subject to this huge system of incentives and planned interactions which people are made subconscious of.
You'd really need the ability to have account migration for a better decentralized network, and you'd probably actually just need self-hosting for everyone. You'd probably want blocklists to easily propagate around (+2 for bluesky), and you'd probably actually want those to have easily copied and pasted rules that could be shared between users to prevent spam and make it so abuse is less common and easily prevented before it happens.
Which is what the usenet already had/has. It's just that the common consensus (which I believe to be false), is that the usenet is too hard to use, and requires demands too much intellectually from its users. If you decide to take this philosophy to the extreme, you end up with something like tiktok, where the idea is that people use their premade google account, scroll downwards forever, and that's it.
I wouldn't mistake this as being some sort of like, natural occurrence, though, that's an intentional decision, made by businessmen, that want to maximize sales through an in-app store and control a massive cultural space. That's a specific decision that they've made, and they've tuned their platforms to take advantage of people's worst instincts in order to perpetuate that. Often with the assistance and explicit consent of governments which want these platforms to be used to track everything.
They pour money into that system, it's an explicit decision they're making to push that onto people as a result of current economic and political structures, and it's due to those structures that they have that power to be able to do that, and due to those structures that these shit systems succeed, keep being cycled out in boom and bust cycles, over the better systems that people create.
but hot take: federation doesnβt solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms.
Enshittification, by definition, is a result of profit seeking, especially from venture-capital funded projects.
Shitty internet fiefdoms are shitty, but it's got nothing to do with enshittification.
Yeah, the broader point I'm making is that the federation doesn't solve the entire encompassing system in which this all exists.
Federated projects both have their own problems in those shitty little fiefdoms, as said, and are probably never going to succeed in this broader economic context where huge, profit seeking, venture capital funded market actors are able to spin up a new twitter ripoff in no time at all. This is while similar market actors in the form of spam farms, bot farms, adversarial influencers looking to make a quick buck, and moderators themselves, have incentives to game whatever systems are in place on any platform, not just the large ones. This then increases the strain on smaller projects, and decreases their ability to actually be sustainable long-term, especially in comparison to these huge market actors and their platforms.
The systems that are gamed, in the modern internet, are cordoned off and channeled by a bunch of moderators that we all trust to kind of do the work for the rest of us, apply the rules, use the tools to their discretion. Federation just makes it so you can jump from one moderated section to the other, one administrated section to the other, while on the same "platform". But it doesn't solve the inherent problems at play here, where moderators and higher level administrators are incentivized to make their platforms shittier with the invitation of advertisers, the invitation of more bad faith posters which can increase engagement, the adoption of shorter form, less substantive content, things like that. Those drive up traffic, and make more money, money they can use to then make their platforms "better", or basically, to eat up more of the market share. Eventually you play the short term gains game long enough, and then your platform's growth sputters out, and then venture capital dries up, and then you end up making the moderation more lax as a last resort, and then nazis come flooding in. Then the platform either dies, or mutates into a horrible shambling corpse.
Even if you were to cut out all of that as a possibility, say, by trying to make your stuff copyleft, then you just cut out the route towards short term growth for anyone using your particular platform, and then you'll just get outdone by all of the other market actors which lean into that short term growth, while still filling your platform's niche, while using none of the specific parts of your platform.
It's basically not going to succeed as an approach because it, as we keep learning on the internet over and over and over and over, it exists in a broader material context, the context of the market.
the one thing that most federated platforms have over centralised structures is the possibility to migrate out of your current shitty fiefdom and the fact that the actual code is open source, so a community can make the choices about the possibilities the technology provides (which is mostly usually better than whatever a for profit company is "forced" into), whereas a centralised platform like bluesky can just ruin the codebase and keep it's users hostage... which after all is one of the key factors to enshitification
edit: i do agree on your other points though, social networks are bound to turn into bubbles and we've already seen defederation based on petty squabbles :shrugs:
Nothing is "wrong" with it. Its just a different platform.
The "problem" is that its just a different platform. Nothing is really different. It's like choosing Pepsi over Coke. Its a choice and maybe one is flavored more to your liking, but they are both full of the same ingredients and unhealthy with continual ingestion.
I haven't used it either, because I didn't like Twitter or X. Today I suspect Bsky is fine, because it hasn't been around long enough to become toxic or to censor discussions etc... Just give it time, it will get there.
The issue most people are bringing up is that there are "better" platforms (i.e. fediverse) that aren't getting any traffic instead.
I can understand this, but the flip side is that the voices promoting the fediverse usually arent very compelling either in voice or ease. Think of it like somebody wanting to buy a PC. One person says to get Linux (and arch of course) because it's the best and you're a fool to get anything else. Here, take it and figure it out. Another person says to get a Mac, because it can do everything you need it to do, easily and without work, plus has added features you didn't even think about that seem useful to your life. And if you get stuck they have a genius bar to assist. So people choose Mac. Similarly people are choosing Bsky because it's easy and straightforward.
I disagree with saying there's nothing wrong with it, just as I would disagree that there was nothing wrong with the original Twitter. It is creating conditions which lead it towards for-profit behaviour which will end up hurting users, unlike some other platforms which are not run for-profit.
This is a far-reaching difference with real societal impacts if the platform becomes dominant, not just some difference in taste that can be hand-waved away as nothing.
I get that, and I'm sort of saying that. The only difference is that I'm not calling for profit businesses wrong. In agree that its a non sustainable model for social media from the users perspective, but it's a very sustainable model from the company perspective.
But that's why I choose differently now. And others might choose differently when the platform gets to be in a poor state.
The key here is I can't make that decision for others. Now or later. If you want people to go to another platform, then build a better platform and market it better.
When it converts to the profit extraction phase the cutting edge folks will move on. Then the content will slowly become dominated by corporate auto created content. And then eventually the average person will look for the next place to go.
This is just the new cool local bar hangout at scale. This is how human socialization works. It has worked like this for hundreds of years.
You say this as if it's some inevitable law of society, but I disagree. The profit extraction phase isn't an inevitability, especially online where digital hosting is relatively cheap and services can be run with 0 income, and many larger sites have run off unconditional donations only (and therefore without having to compromise for investors). The domination of content by exploitative actors can be combatted, especially when you aren't desperate for income from corporations.
It's obviously an uphill battle, but it's been done at smaller scales for social media sites and had been done at large scale for other sites like archive.org and Wikipedia.
I think the big difference here is that to the average user they see archive.org or Wikipedia as being a onesided transaction. An Archive where folks store information for you, an encyclopedia where information is stored by folks for you. There is no expectation of engagement of the average user. It is rare for someone to wake up and think "Man I gotta put something up on Wikipedia today or people are going to think I'm not the person I act like I am".
People go to social events to keep up appearances. People participate on social media to keep up appearances. Maintaining these types of things require you to effectively help people balance their ability to participate in society with their ability to communicate. A Wikipedia contributor is a scholar. A community moderator is a bartender and a bouncer rolled into one. It doesn't have the stability because the work required to keep things going is high stress for the majority of the people doing the work.
Lemmy's solution is nice because the smaller instances can just ban whole cloth the larger ones and everyone gets to move forward. It means you never are burdened by having a ton of users, but that then also defies the goal of some of the larger social media platforms.
It's corporate social media.
You'll get ads. You'll get your privacy invaded. You'll have an algorithm pushing content toward you. Eventually, they'll open the floodgates to fascists because pissing you off keeps your eyes glued to ads.
BUT, it's also familiar, and that's more important to people than having to do leg work, though personally I prefer Mastodon and it's really not that hard to use once you've spent a few days there and gotten used to it.
Yep i like mastodon. I'll stick with it surely for long.
it's microblogging
I never used Twitter personally, only exposed thru osmosis, so a reboot is very underwhelming. Seems perfect for somebody.
Complians about microblogging
Comment doesn't actually answer the thread question
Try it out, it seems like you might like it!
It claims to be decentralized but normal people can't reasonably spin up a server like you can for Mastadon.
Which means, if it goes to shit by whoever is holding the power behind it, then it will go to shit exactly like Xitter.
With Mastadon, you can easily make an instance and jump to different instances that haven't gone to shit.
Normal people can't reasonably spin up a mastodon server either.
Everyone here seems to vastly overestimate the general public's technical knowledge and desire for this kind of thing.
You have technical knowledge hurdles, financial hurdles, ISP hurdles, government hurdles (in some countries), bandwidth hurdles, storage hurdles, and more.
Running a server even on a raspberry pi takes a decent amount of effort, and when your server is down, because regular people aren't going to have HA and battery backups and multiple Internet connections, etc, your service goes down.
Most people, like 99.9999 percent of people don't Want to deal with any of that, I mean hell, regular people don't use ad blockers, know what linux is, what a raspberry pi is, what a server is, how any of this works, or care at all. So many people here or so drastically out of touch it's wild.
Why aren't there a bunch of bluesky instances? Genuinely curious, cause after a couple searches I found guides on how to self host bluesky
Because they didn't turn on federation until last year, and at that point it was still limited to fewer than ten users per alternate server, and you had to manually request federation through a Discord server from an actual human. This year they've automated the federation process, but you still have to start with a tiny server, and they claim they're going to raise the user limit gradually as new servers remain federated with the main server.
But yeah, the upshot is bsky.social has 13 million users, and there are no other servers with notable numbers of users. That's a pretty notable difference from ActivityPub.
It has some flaw, but overall it's actually usable.
Nothing is wrong with it. Fediverse bros are just salty that itβs getting all the traffic instead of mastodon.
I disagree with saying there's nothing wrong with it, just as I would disagree that there was nothing wrong with the original Twitter. It is creating conditions which lead it towards for-profit behaviour which will end up hurting users, unlike some other platforms which are not run for-profit.
This is a far-reaching difference with real societal impacts if the platform becomes dominant, not just some difference in taste that can be hand-waved away as nothing.
Imo the fediverse should stay away from the Twitter format, following people is not a good way to do social media.
uhh could you clarify for me how the fediverse works? I thought it was like 90% mastodon which is very much the twitter format
what? so there's nothing wrong with centralized commercial services? please explain what's good about ANY centralized commercial service.
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ATProto Federation is hypothetical at best. Bluesky remains centralized for all intents and purposes.
Founders are all cryptocurrency dorks. The CEO got her start in selling shitcoins and peddling AI slop. Not a lot of confidence in their ability to lead a successful social media company.
It's a for-profit company, and so far their actual profit-generating function has yet to be determined. Maybe it's ads. Maybe it's subscription fees. Maybe they just end up selling all your data off to their 1,000+ data broker partners. Nobody knows yet, but it isn't going to remain free and open permanently.
ActivityPub is already fully federated with dozens of different services, and thousands of different instances. Every instance has its own leadership, and most are run by generous sysadmins, donations, and volunteers. It can't make top-down decisions, it can't go out of business, and it can't be bought.
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