@ZDF Das Fediverse ist Teil der öffentlichen Infrastruktur, so sehe ich das. Unersetzlich durch private Kommerzunternehmen. Eigentlich wie die öffentlich-rechtlichen Medienplattformen. Schade, dass die wiederum das noch nicht so ganz durchschauen und die privaten nach wie vor mehr unterstützen als das Fediverse, zum Preis der Selbstzerstörung
Eine kurze Meinungsäußerung. Seit 2 Tagen bin ich bei #Bluesky . Es ist voll von all den grossen Selbstdarstellern wie bei T.witter. Geklaute Bilder, Elonhetze, der Ton der Konversation ist der gleiche wie bei T.witter. Sie hoffen, das es gemütlich bleibt und keine Nazis rüberkommen. Sie machen genau so weiter, wie vorher und merken es nicht mal. Hoffnungslos.
(Artist: #TABBY / #TabbyThis in City: #Hamburg Germany 🇩🇪 2023 - Title: "Umbrella Man" #Art#Streetart#Mastoart#StencilArt )
@pluralistic After spending several months on Bluesky and working with the protocol (on building a PHP library for it), I realized it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Even if/when they do federate, the intent appears to be for large companies to run major portions of the protocol.
And Bluesky just converted to a C corp to take on venture capital.
I deactivated my account last week because I won’t get fooled again.
(I now have that song by The Who stuck in my head.)
#BlueSky and #Fediverse developers could learn a lot from each other: right now it feels like they could learn a lot from here on moderation…but seeing their new “anyone can create and use and share their own algorithm” - that’s great and Fedi should immediately learn from, implement and improve on that idea…
@mike@tchambers Even in the client, folks still object to indexing & processing of posts without explicit consent.
Personally, I’m coming to an opinion that if you stick a message in a bottle and toss it into a sea designed to replicate bottled messages, you’ve consented to what folks do with bottles that wash up on their shore. But, there is angry disagreement with this notion.
#Bluesky now allows you to “choose your own algorithm”.
Which sounds “incredible” and “sci-fi”—but it really isn’t.
What it essentially does is give a Twitter-like service Reddit-like features.
As an aside, now I’m wondering why Reddit doesn’t offer an alternative web front-end to make it more Twitter-like!
But how does this apply to the #ActivityPub flavour of the #Fediverse? This feature now makes me realize how big a deal Fediverse groups are going to be, and if I were @Gargron, I’d be even more excited about rolling out Mastodon’s group functionality.
Because while groups aren’t exactly relevancy algorithms, once you add a “New”, “Hot”, “Best”, etc. feed to groups, now you’re in business.
I don’t know if choosing your own algorithm is the killer feature that Bluesky thinks it is. My experience is that most people hate choice. Nevertheless, I still thinks it’s important.
So I'm thinking about this in more detail, and I think the "choose your own algorithm" feature with #Bluesky is really not hard to implement, and something very doable on the #Fediverse.
What do we exactly want from an algorithm? Topics.
And we want topics sorted according to the following:
Hot
New
Top
Rising
Some people would like a "controversial" feed, but we don't have to give it to them 😉
As for "Top", we can sort it according to time parameters.
@TiiaMaija ei mainitse Mastodonia tai fediversumia ollenkaan Kansan Uutisten #Bluesky-aiheisessa jutussaan. On se kumma, kun ei vasemmistolaisia tunnu kiinnostavan tuotantovälineiden haltuunotto, kun siihen kerrankin olisi tilaisuus.
@teemuki en oikeastaan käy, mutta tuli ilmoitus tägäyksestä ja haluan toki vastata. Ymmärrän mitä tarkoitat, mutta itse koen tämän alustan hieman liian monimutkaisena että nimenomaan korvaisi twitterin. Sehän ei tietenkään tarkoita, etteikö alusta voisi jatkossa kehittyä. Mutta toistaiseksi ainakin näin.
Mitä tulee suosioon, se kasvaa mikäli varteenotettavia julkasuja tänne saapuu. Vielä hienompaa, jos pystyvät perustamaan omia instansseja, joissa julkaisijat voivat itse luoda omat sääntönsä, niin ei tarvitse arvailla millon ison somejätin johtoporras päättää myydä kaiken apartheid-teknohemmolle.
”Se on hirveän vaikea yhtälö kaikille ilmaispalveluille. Massan ylläpito maksaa, mutta jos palvelua yrittää monetisoida, tulee näitä ongelmia, jotka tuhoavat sen idean ja käytettävyyden”, Järvinen pohtii.
”X:ssä on edelleen niitä kultahippuja, joiden takia sitä haluaa käyttää. Bluesky tuntuu samalta kuin Twitter viisi vuotta sitten, siellä on vain vähemmän käyttäjiä. Mastodonissa käyttöönoton kynnys oli erilaisen rakenteen vuoksi aika korkea.”
Tämä on se kuva mitä maalataan. Bluesky parempi ja helppo, Mastodon vaikea.
@rolle Tämän Madtodonin hankalaksi leimaamisrn olen minäkin huomannut ja ihmettelen kyllä. Ei minulla ole ainakaan ollut mitään ongelmia seurata muiden instanssien käyttäjiä.
This was enough to lead one Black woman (Aveta) to get a lot of Black Twitter to create BlueSky accounts. Black Twitter is super tight with "People in tech that like: Black folk, brown folk, LGBTQIA folk, inclusion, GoLang, Rust, JavaScript, C++, C#, Swift, Kotlin, Kubernetes, geese committing violence, and anti-fascism."🤷🏿♂️
Recently though, Aveta received a bunch of abuse that was not well moderated.
@misc@futurebird BlueSky lost a lot of good will by initially taking no action.
Earlier, an anti-facist teen girl had threatened a journalist known for promoting anti-trans points. The teenager said "We're going to hit you with hammers!" The teen was quickly banned from BlueSky. Even though the girl's incitement to violence was metaphorical and not credible, it still violated.
People were confused by the difference between metaphorical hammers and metaphorical shoving off cliffs.
For all the people who say ”I had to select a server, it was so complicated to sign up to Mastodon. On Bluesky it was easy” - how are these two different logic-wise? I mean what the hell?
Just noticed Bluesky doesn't ACTUALLY add the alt text in the img itself. This is a big mistake and makes the service very inaccessible.
The text is actually in the very last part of the DOM (Document Object Model) tree... and is triggered via click. So, if the screen reader doesn't support JavaScript same way than for the seeing people, descriptive text is nowhere to be found. Even when it is, it can't be accessed easily.
This is our 3rd quarterly update on which platforms are growing, new entries such as #BlueSky, #Substack Notes, #Nostr & all public data on Meta's #project92
Includes latest on the #RedditMigration,
New polling, new posting data & more.
@oxpal@tchambers I recommend following @donmelton - he’s like a human algorithm here boosting a wide variety of voices, viewpoints, topics, and ideas. Definitely center-left but with reasonable practicality which for me works out just great. I’ve found loads of new and interesting folks to follow from his boosts.
Honestly I think Don is an algorithm vs a person since he rarely posts himself and always favorites any posts I make that tag him. 👍👍
As I've said it ... alternative social has run its course in this post-musk-twitter moment. Everyone's settled down where they ended up.
And yea, either more major disruption or some new killer features (rather than clones of big social) will be needed to shake things up. Neither seem particularly likely in the short term ... your EU-meta smackdown is probably the best bet??
I've been on BlueSky for 10 minutes and... (An Essay)
I get it now. I used to be like "Why can't people just stop using Twitter/Instagram/WhateverTheFuck? If they need social media, why can't they just use Mastodon? Why doesn't Pixelfed get more users? It's literally the same UI".
But I get it. I've been on BlueSky for what? 10 minutes? And I can feel my brain chemistry changing. Mastodon is a coffee shop. It doles out caffeine. You still get the little dopamine hit when you get notifications, you get that kind of substitute for human interaction that feels nice. But Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and these apps from companies with access to inordinate amounts of data to build algorithms designed by psychologists to literally be As Addicting as Possible? These apps are dealing meth. But they've pressed it like ecstasy and made it cute. They've made it socially acceptable. But let me tell you something.
Ever since I logged onto BlueSky, I've been thinking about it. I don't think about Mastodon all day. "Oh my god what should I post next? What will get me followers? Would this be funny? Is this on brand?" I don't think about it. I come here because I have interactions with people without the pretext that they're engaging with me to get engagement in return. Because sometimes in my life I feel isolated and because this substitute for human interaction feels nice.
I thought I'd get BlueSky (despite their horrifying privacy policy - more on that later) because there are some Things Going On that make me need to get a little more serious about making money. But fuck, if this is the only way? I'm taking a vow of poverty, or getting a day job.
Because then there's their privacy policy. Access to websites you visit before and after, identifying information about your device, purchases you make, and it goes on. But even that level of invasive access should give us pause, right? I have a lot of things set up on my computer that mitigate some of that access, but then let's think about how we give the app access to our photos and videos (all of them, not just what we post in the moment), our device's camera and microphone (not just while we're using it) and so on. And then think about how our society grooms us to believe (and maybe in some circumstances this belief is true) that we need these sites for access, for engagement, to make money.
The price of not working in a warehouse is every piece of information we can reasonably gather about you to use and sell however we please, for whatever purpose, indefinitely, and it never expires and we don't pay you for it.
This is exploitation and my ancestry makes me pause, horrified, at what this information will eventually come back and do to us when inevitably the wrong person/group gets ahold of it. And that's pretending like we even know who has our data and what they're doing with it, right? Because we don't know. We really don't. Call me paranoid, say that I shouldn't worry if I have nothing to hide, give me all of the excuses you've been programmed to give about why we should not worry about a surveillance state that we pay for. Then come online and rant about how dangerous governments are and fail to see the irony in it all.
And I'm a hypocrite. I bought in, too. For personal gain. After criticizing others for years for doing the same thing. It's true. But the interesting side effect is that I've gained so much insight into why we're so addicted to sensationalism, why we're so addicted to these sites, why we're so unwell in general. The kinds of things my feed is inundated with, especially since I haven't curated it yet and it's showing me what it wants to? My god. We cannot have a healthy society when this is what we're consuming all day every day. There is no way to be a healthy person, I believe, when consuming this all day every day.
So anyways. As always, perhaps a bit sanctimonious. But I'm a little dumbfounded at the experience of all of this after years off of corporate social.
Thanks for reporting back. I've not posted on #BlueSky yet, but even just looking at the feeds I get that same sinking feeling: here's a platform that, just like the ones that came before it, wants to kick emotional feedback loops into overdrive.
At its best, that's "only" addictive. At its worst, it accelerates and amplifies the worst human behaviors.
@siin@Ruth_Mottram I read this in disbelief, so checked, and there it is:
“Automatic Collection of Personal Information. …..We may also automatically collect information regarding your use of our Services, such as pages that you visit before, during and after using our Services, information about the links you click, the types of content you interact with, the frequency and duration of your activities, and other information about how you use our Services.”
@rolle
It was very nice on the first week, but then everyone went bananas. The collapse was fast.
Like all the assholes who love Musk stayed in Twitter and all the assholes who hate Musk moved to Bluesky.
@rolle Aside from my reluctance to join yet another corporate "walled garden" I'm not interested in a social media platform where you cannot see public posts or profiles if you're not logged in.
Perhaps this will change later on but for now it's a dealbreaker.
If this ever changes I might create an account - not to post but to follow folks in the disabled and chronic illness community who did not join Mastodon.
C'est malin ce système de codes qui circulent pour Blousquaille, ça permet de mettre plein de réseaux en fiche avant même que les gens ne s'abonnent, qui est en relation avec qui, qui sont les maillons qui filent les codes et structurent telle communauté etc ... une base de données très enviable 😐
@Jamaistresloin Musk et Dorsey sont en tandem, ils sont co-actionnaires des deux réseaux. Leurs pertes financières sont énormes, Ils ne poursuivent donc pas un but commercial mais politique. Ceux qui auront refusé de manger la 💩 sur X vont le faire sur BS et en plus leurs adversaires sauront qui ils sont, et comment ils sont liés. J'en peux plus de rire jaune en pensant au moment où les deux RS fusionneront d'ici quelques temps, et retour à la case départ, mais fichés 😂
The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable and dangerous features of the protocol, and makes it seem like theres a lot more choice than there is.
Since the design purposefully hides the architecture: you dont know where your feed generators are drawing from, or those used by your friends. So you cant know what the effect of choosing a different relay would be, aka the main relay is always indispensable. Importantly the relays subscribe to you, you dont push to the relay, and since you arent really supposed to operate your own data store, you can be dropped from the network without knowing - the relay serves as an unaccountable point of moderation.
Its this part for me that tells the whole story: #atproto was designed for a new kind of advertising market, and when their VC money and puttering domain registration revenue streams dry up, control over the main firehose relay is a big gaping profit vector waiting to be capitalized on.
I said this about 6 months ago when I first read the protocol, but as far as I can tell its still true: atproto is about as federated or decentralized as google alerts: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/110552684614320107
They make repeated allusions to designing the system like the web, but really they designed it like Google
I can’t talk about the others involved in BlueSky, but I think Jack Dorsey is genuniely regretful about how Twitter turned out and truthful in his intentions to make a decentralized alternative. I wouldn’t equate BlueSky with the rest of Big Tech. The XMPP creator sitting on the board and the CEO being someone who worked on Zcash, they can’t be that bad.
As someone who’s used both, the way federation works on Bluesky/Atproto is very different to how ActivityPub works. It’s very much a backend thing, letting that do the heavy lifting and prevent the user from worrying about it as much as you have to here, rather than trying to make its fediverse a whole experience.
As for Tumblr, there was talk about bringing it to the fediverse and Wordpress themselves have already allowed users of their hosted blog service to opt-in to this, but have not done it for Tumblr. And Threads? Well, there was a pact to fediblock Threads because of its ties to Facebook, so there’s that.
#Bluesky continues to be entirely non-responsive to the numerous security vulnerabilities I've reported to them, so I spent the evening writing up a nice README and a framework with exploit modules, and just made it all public.
The other thing I've been trying to focus attention on, is that Jack's "solution" to abusers in social media - "algorithmic choice" - is intentionally anti-social & inherently biased towards increasing hate speech &stochastic terrorism.
@chargrille "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." -Albert Einstein.
How can anyone fed up with #twitter join #bluesky without stopping to ask how submitting to the control of one deranged oligarch over another is an improvement.
Will nicht zu sehr mit dem Zeigefinger wedeln (was mir auch gar nicht zusteht), aber genau das sind so diese Verhaltensweisen auf #Bluesky die ich einfach nicht mehr nachvollziehen kann.
Account kennt ihr alle, aber wie um Himmels willen folgt man 5k Menschen in wenigen Tagen? Zumal er wirklich tolle Infos/Mehrwerte liefert & es gar nicht noetig hat.
Diese, excuse my French, Ego-Wichserei der "Likeciety" ist einfach inzwischen nur noch verstoerend>
@pallenberg@ralphkuehnl@novemberregen@alexschnapper@katja Zugestimmt. Geht mir ähnlich in Gedanken. Die Zeit der Barcamps alten Stils, des Kennenlernens und des Ausprobierens, was dieses Internet und Social Media alles kann ist, für viele, lange vorbei, wie mir scheint.
It is beautiful to watch folks organize spontaneously around this. There are some really novel techniques being used that I have not seen before.
Shitposters and sex workers blurring their posts and withholding lewds, if only there was a safe platform to post them. Quote chains of people asking the devs to block them too in solidarity. Users building custom, public mute lists to block out fascists and protect marginalized communities.
The devs are liking nazi callout posts & posting on Twitter
But I would also like to take a second, before you enjoy too much schadenfreude, to point out that by and large PoC communities also are not safe on Mastodon.
A huge amount of the feedback being levied on Bluesky’s lasseiz faire moderation policies also apply to us here.
I have very little faith Bluesky will improve, but we still could.
@rolle
Federating alone won't make it "billionaire-proof." The company can be bought and the federation closed. I'm not sure what they want to accomplish with their reimplementation of federation protocols that are not compatible with established protocols like APub. It seems like a fracture that doesn't really need to happen. They've done a good job at replicating the bird site though.
Seit einer Weile teilt @heiseonline auch Links zu Artikeln auf #Bluesky (aber nicht automatisch wie hier) und da wollte ich jetzt mal vergleichen: Über die aktuell so gehypte #TwitterAlternative sind in drei Monaten so viele auf heise.de gekommen, wie über #Mastodon an einem normalen Wochentag. #Twitter liegt weiter davor.
@heiseonline hat hier aber auch massiv mehr Follower. Gleichzeitig sind die realen Zahlen von Mastodon höher, weil Klicks auf die #Vorschau ja nicht gezählt werden.
@mho Eigentlich aber ein recht positives Resultat für Mastodon? Leute, die euch auf Mastodon folgen sind ja auch offensichtlich an euren Artikeln interessiert, daher vermutlich auch schneller bereit mal auf den Link zu klicken.
