@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews I also don't agree with:"there are absolutely people trying to do the work, but they’re dependent on the choke-point of what Mastodon-the-company decides is valuable. (Almost like something…centralized?)"
If enough people don't like what the Mastodon foundation is doing (and believe me there are loads of them, on Mastodon even) they can and have built alternatives that can federate back to Mastodon. Calky (SP?) and Pluroma are a couple examples.
@objectinspace@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews Thats true to some extent. I've tried out both Calckey and Akkoma recently and they both have a lot of capabilities that Mastodon should learn from, and I'm seriously considering moving to a self-hosted GoToSocial solo instance once it's closer to complete (it's currently in alpha).
At the same time, Mastodon is where the bulk of the attention & users are, which means it's got most of the inertia.
@KelsonV@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews This is esentially the same argument for staying on twitter: "everyone is there so that's where change needs to happen." which made sense right up until people started leaving twitter in droves. If someone builds a thing and it's better and people like it, they can vote with their feet. If all of the energy goes into turning one thing into an end-all-be-all for everyone (which is a doomed enterprise anyway IMO), those alternatives never materialize.
@KelsonV@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews Furthermore (though I can't prove this of course) I feel pretty confident that the whole reason we are now getting things like search and QT's on the roadmap for mastodon is not because a bunch of people were asking (which had been happening for a while) but because alternatives built them and were gaining traction. This is actually a pretty normal progression for mastodon features like poles and post editting.
@objectinspace@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews That's basically what I think she was saying: lots of improvements/innovation on the other projects, but they don't get to the bulk of users until the people running the Mastodon project decide to incorporate them.
@KelsonV@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews Ah gotcha. I think this is okay! A lot of people on mastodon like things the way they are and don't like change, I think that's valid. Folks who want to try different things can choose that and remain on the fedi so everyone can interact with them. Then mainline can implement things "the right way" once thee use case is clear. This cycle is much slower, though, than software development at a twitter or Facebook. Which is a huge problem!
@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews Without diving into any one particular point, I read this essay not as anti-Mastodon but almost as a pained love letter to it. It read to me as being written by someone who wants Mastodon to succeed and cares enough to critique kindly but directly.
@atomicpoet@fediversenews Chris, are you sure you're summarizing accurately when you say it's "Anti-Mastodon/Pro-Bluesky"?
She writes:
> I—a nerd—actually really like Mastodon most of the time, but I would like it so much more and feel like it was doing a lot more good in the world if it were more welcoming and easier to use.
There's a "tl;dr" section at the bottom that says:
> If we want more people to enjoy what we believe are the benefits of something like Mastodon, it’s on us to make it delicious and convenient and multi-textured and fun instead of trying to shame people into eating their soysage and unsalted soup.
> I hope all of that is actually possible for Mastodon, because a lot of great people very much want it to become a more welcoming place.
What part equals "anti-Mastodon"?
It seems to me much more "pro-user-friendliness" & "pro-community," and hoping that Mastodon puts efforts into those. She also points out that Mastodon (the app) is awkwardly centralized.
@ryanrandall@atomicpoet@fediversenews to me it read more like a criticism-sandwich. The author seems to depict some kind of battlefield between Mastodon and BlueSky but only mentioned Activity Pub in the very intro only to conflate it entirely to within Mastodon. They proceed to hold up one ‘softball’ moderation event where the ‘right’ outcome was blindingly obvious (my controversial opinion: Nazis do deserve a space if they want to make one, even if I personally want absolutely nothing to do with it). Then the conclusion is that Mastodon just isn’t putting in the effort for vague qualities that, again are easily solved by other Activity Pub projects that are never discussed.
Zero mention of the number one missing showstopper feature in BlueSky, actual implemented federation. Activity Pub and Mastodon are entirely about empowering the communities they serve. Never mind that, BlueSky kicked out a Nazi so it must on the right path.
@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews i read this earlier this morning and would not even remotely describe it as 'anti-mastodon/pro-bluesky' -- it's a 'mastodon become a better platform instead of shaming people' article imo
@atomicpoet Well to start with in your first sentence you call it "anti-Mastodon" when it is obviously being written from the perspective of someone who supports/prefers Mastodon and wants it to be better.
My problem with this thread is less the specific points you make (I appreciate that on multiple occasions you point out where you agree with Kissane) and more about your framing and tone. It seems needlessly inflammatory. Why not give the author the benefit of the doubt?
@atomicpoet I appreciate you taking them down. I think it could be worth re-posting if you are willing to go through and figure out where the tone was off. I know tone is subjective and it can be quite difficult to figure out why people aren't taking your words as intended. I struggle with this occasionally myself.
This is an important discussion to be having and I'm grateful for both your and Erin Kissane's voices. I think we're all allies in wanting to make the Fediverse the best it can be.
I saw that original post and didn’t understand the whining.
Mastodon works peachy. It’s as engaging and interactive as one makes it. It may not have groupies clustered around big accounts praising “the algorithm,” but Jesus, it’s JUST SOCIAL MEDIA. 🤬
@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews “Mastodon fans know that the network absolutely cannot compete on user friendliness and basic social functionality.” is just pure BS. 🙄
@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews I feel like these kinds of caparisons are pointless. Bluesky is little more, at this point, than a tabula rasa where people can project all their hopes and dreams of social media and contrast them against production system serving millions of users.
@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews Chris, I'm frankly disappointed in you. This is such a misrepresentation of her piece that it comes across as bad faith. Please reread it and reconsider.
@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews Anyways thanks for the article! Was very interesting and thought-provoking. I really wish we could do things like actual user research to inform some better product direction for this project but I don't see it happening any time soon, I guess they don't have the money. Too bad.
> There is some of this. I think it's more that most of us simply aren't on bluesky, so we hear things like "bluesky has no block button" and stop listening. Which is not great either!
Yes, this is why I refrain from sharing stuff I have no expertise about, which includes comparing Bluesky with Mastodon and everything that I see about Elon Musk. It isn't true because it's on TV; it isn't true because it's on social media either.
AI/ChatGPT takes? I'm a sociology student. Unless I trust someone's expertise, or unless it actually makes sense in a way I can understand, sharing it will probably degrade my profile, the network, and my communities.
@Oceane@fediversenews@kissane@atomicpoet I don't think it's bad to share what you're seeing, even about stuff you don't know well; that's how we learn! If I only talked about stuff I knew, my feed would be nothing but accessibility/windows audio subsystem posts... which would be pretty boring. But yes people should be more open minded about things and not jump to firm conclusions. Especially without hearing from people who actually like the service!
@objectinspace@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews Microblogging is an interest network. There are actual communities on IRC, XMPP, and Discord, among others; not here. This is deliberate (and I don't mean to suggest it would be a good thing).
@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews "Mastodon fans know that the network absolutely cannot compete on user friendliness and basic social functionality, so they’re leaning hard into the things it does get right—and then, in some cases, trying to shame people into not even thinking about trying a competing network."
There is some of this. I think it's more that most of us simply aren't on bluesky, so we hear things like "bluesky has no block button" and stop listening. Which is not great either!
@ohmrun@atomicpoet@kissane classic fascist propaganda. Our enemy is both weak ‘can’t even kick out nazis or have stellar NUX’ and strong ‘social immune response is overwhelming our earnest efforts’
@skotchygut@atomicpoet@ohmrun@kissane She's right that an awful lot of Fediverse discourse, especially Mastodon discourse, tends toward knee-jerk responses that end up throwing out the valid criticism.
@atomicpoet Oh come on. I literally have a whole section about how it’s totally reasonable to have nothing to do with Bluesky because of Jack Dorsey being involved.
There is zero reason to do bad-faith shit like this, and it’s honestly embarrassing.
@atomicpoet I feel like this post and the one you maybe deleted (my client shows it but replies glitch, idk) are pretty reductive and bad-faith, but I’ll just say this:
I’m not “anti-Mastodon,” and I talk about how much I myself like this place. I’m not “pro-Bluesky,” and I talk about how way it’s too early to know what will happen there. I hope that Mastodon can learn and get better. I hope Bluesky works out to because I want more things to be good for more people.
@atomicpoet@kissane 1) You began by describing her piece as “anti-Mastodon/pro-Bluesky” which plainly it is not. 2) Many of your “rebuttals” are restatements of points she is actually making (VC & Jack being big red flags; Mastodon gGmbH being overburdened) 3) You are eliding many of her points, which are constructive — ironically proving what I take to be her overall point: our biggest obstacle is an us-vs-them posture that takes any critique as attack rather than opportunity.
@kissane@atomicpoet maybe I'd believe that if they weren't running the VC capital playbook to the letter with manufactured scarcity and only high value accounts allowed in the club...
Your thread does raise a lot of points, not all of which I necessarily agree with - but I do appreciate seeing the breakdown and criticism. Fans can absolutely want something they like to be even better!
I will say that for Mastodon's failings, I'm really not even looking at Bluesky, mostly because of "VC-funded and following the Silicon Valley hype machine." I like that Mastodon is, at least on the face of it, non-profit.
@walkerb@atomicpoet are you saying if I can get access it will become my ticket to extra-marital affairs with ultra-rich? Can I get funding for my $800 internet-aware walnut cracker?
@skotchygut@atomicpoet LOL - I wouldn't know. I looked at the code for the AT protocol a few weeks ago, and gave them my email address for access to the beta.
Crickets.
Whilst I see every douchy influencer on $8chan posting about it.
@atomicpoet One of the key flaws of BlueSky is that people follow, without conversing first. It reminds me of Plurk. It's a network where you get your ego stroked by follows, but end up feeling lonely because interactions are rare. I don't want followers, I want conversations.
@atomicpoet I don't understand why people continue to think that Mastodon can't resolve its UX issues... it's not like it's tied to this interface forever, no?
@atomicpoet My biggest concern with Bluesky is that it's a project created by someone known to conspire with fascist white supremacists. Jack cannot be trusted.
I think of you more as a Calckey fan, than a Mastodon fan. :blobcatgiggle:
However, I think I may know how they're planning to make money off of this. Make this one instance or a group of instances owned by Bluesky the largest in the AT Protocol universe, not only harvesting metrics off its own servers, but require anyone who will federate with agree to have their data harvested as well.
@atomicpoet@kissane I think the mastodon community really fucked up in the wave because everyone was just like "come join me on mastodon!", when we should've been like "we found all your friends on these servers, maybe you'd like to join one of those?"
@orionkidder@dukane@atomicpoet@kissane the tools I saw just said "here's the list of accounts to import to follow the same people. Anyway, what's done now is done, only possible to move forwards and do better in the future
Chris, really. This thread doesn't come across as being a good faith discussion of Erin's post.
Maybe I'm still damaged by GamerGate, but this thread feels—whether or not it's intentional—like an open invitation for harassment of someone who dares to want improvements on the Fediverse, and whose articles says they like the promise of Mastodon.
You can post your own thoughts on Mastodon, the Fediverse, Bluesky, etc without positioning Erin as an antagonist.
An opinion piece is a self-contained work. Posted on a blog, perhaps. Like Erin's was originally.
An ongoing thread with less-than-accurate characterizations and that continually shows up in someone's mentions feels quite different in nature, and with a very different likely outcome.
This is precisely the sort of difference in experience / outcome we nerds on social media need to internalize and get better at anticipating.
@ryanrandall@fediversenews@atomicpoet Sorry, but I can’t compare old school definitions for where/how opinion articles are published to new world social interactions on the Internet. IMO, the old rules no longer apply.
If an "opinion piece" pollutes the recipient's mentions to the point that it's functionally indistinguishable from sealioning, that's a behavioral problem.
That's a current consideration of other people's boundaries that I believe we should all learn.
@ryanrandall She has an opinion, and I have an opinion on her opinion.
Further to that point, I addressed every single one of her points in great detail. It took me 3 hours to write.
Not once did I make her opinion out to be something it was not.
If your point is that I should have written a blog post, well, that wasn't the correct format either since I addressed everything she said paragraph-by-paragraph.
I obviously have nothing against @kissane -- but the comparison was unfair.
@atomicpoet Yes, it was 3 hours during which I and other people reached out to you multiple times asking you to stop including her handle.
You could have only linked to her once, and you need not have ever positioned her as an adversary.
I don't know you well enough to pretend I could gauge whether you're intentionally routing harassment her way, but I'm almost certainly going to unfollow you because of this.
It's a bad behavioral pattern, the type that drives people away from the Fediverse, and I think you at minimum owe Erin an apology.
@atomicpoet@kissane Seems like a lot of unnecessary handwringing AT THE PRESENT.
Let Mastodon work to become its best self at the moment, while BlueSky works on becoming its best self. When BlueSky turns on federation and ceases being a shinier Truth Social, we can do an honest comparison between the two (currently) different systems.
Maybe BlueSky will teach Mastodon some lessons that can be used to improve onboarding, and Mastodon can teach BS how to federate better.
I left twitter and I am never returning.
No interest in Bluesky - a twitter clone that ignores all of the ‘good’ things learned from building twitter - all in the interest of promoting growth. Moderation & security are huge expenses that do not promote growth.
I like mastodon - it keeps getting better. I repost & follow people that have interesting takes on issues. mstdn.ca is well moderated. Mastodon has a bright future. #mstdn.ca
@atomicpoet to his kind of posts almost always fail to answer the question "who pays for all this that should have done?".
It's always very easy to critique things when assuming infinite time and money.
@atomicpoet@kissane The added complexity Mastodon brings should be compensated by its added coherence to individual goals. For now it's mostly compensated by its added coherence to values (e.g. decentralization, much fewer dysfunctions/power dispositives, etc.).
@atomicpoet@kissane the "interviewing potential users for what they need" part also reminds me of that old, possibly inaccurate adage of "users never know what they need" or whatever, where you could have interviewed Twitter users about Mastodon, but most probably would've been like "meh, I like twitter" before the collapse.
I think there's also a lot of "Mastodon is a replacement for Twitter" which set the wrong expectations, as it doesn't and can't operate the same
@atomicpoet perhaps to @kissane's credit though: this November migration wasn't the first Twitter to Mastodon migration that's happened. We had the 2018 switter.at migration, where a lot was learned and a lot of improvements & new tools were made, maybe not enough though.
@atomicpoet@kissane That quote assumes the goal of Mastodon is to replace Twitter. I don’t think it is. I think the goal is to be a Twitter alternative. They’re related, yes, but not equivalent.
@Chris Trottier Also, this implies that Mastodon was created as a reaction upon Elon Musk's announcement to take over Twitter.
Mastodon was launched almost six years before that. It wasn't created around a huge Twitter exodus, just like Friendica wasn't created for the event of millions wanting to leave Facebook.
@atomicpoet@kissane Personally I see a lot of missed opportunity. We (the fediverse) should have built out much better tools during previous migrations
The bad first impressions a lot of people got last November wasn't over anything new - these were all issues that had been raised over the past (checks notes) 5 years.
@atomicpoet@kissane
We would have to first agree on what "user-friendly" means.
It seems to be very vague and biased in thee article referring, I guess, to easy no-need-to-think onboarding, extra functionalities and maybe aesthetics.
User-friendly to me encompasses users protection, rights, respect and privacy.
It is clear that the priority is functionalities, not moderation and there is the TOS debacle.
I don't know how Bluesky can be called user-friendly when user is not prioritised.
@atomicpoet@kissane I think it's fair to point out that they took too long to address some of these issues, long enough for Bluesky to start to feel as a viable alternative to Twitter.
The pressure to implement quote posts has been building for years*, and I wish we could see how things would look if this feature was added just a few months ago.
@atomicpoet@kissane this is the crux of the issue, IMO. Yes, Mastodon is doing an amazing job considering the circumstances, but over time, will Mastodon ever have the funds to do enough of the things it needs to do?
@atomicpoet@kissane For what it's worth, the more I delve into how Ruby / Mastodon is coded, the more I appreciate how stable the platform actually is for all its quirks.
I wonder how many baffling design decisions are simply just carried through from the mindset needed to be a successful Ruby dev.
@atomicpoet@kissane take it slow tweeting took time before it was Musked! FaceSlap struggled with myspace (what ever that is! 🤓!!) You want it sorted now? Geddalife!
We don't know how the culture there will develop once it's more widely accessible, and once the features are developed and released.
I'm curious to try it out. At the same time I'm still waiting for an invite code, as are plenty of other people. Mastodon was also a pretty different place before the number of users grew so rapidly and the growing community effectively started stress testing the broader platform.
There is still a way to go before declaring Bluesky a better platform.
@atomicpoet So, Bluesky users don't like decentralization because “Makes things difficult with no benefits” when they're using a network that is going to decentralize at some point.
@atomicpoet@kissane seriously! that's the thing i thought i was just not understanding but yes if it actually does decentralize and can gracefully contract and expand and allow for other communities to federate in some way we're still beholden to a board of directors and leadership even of a bcorp! i'm already annoyed Cloudflare has waded out to show us an incompatible mastodon service. great thanks just what we needed, special relationships with vendors to function, right? :facepalm:
@atomicpoet@kissane We have to remember the background, context and people behind the apps.
I think it's totally unrealistic and unfair to have same energy and level of expectations.
It's like being upset at your local shop that needs up to 24h to ship your order because Amazon can deliver within 1h.
@atomicpoet@kissane The good new is that with the net economic crash (ie quite soon), VC funding for bluesky is likely to evaporate, at which point we'll see if it has enough community to keep going
@Chris Trottier This implies that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. That there's nothing else in the Fediverse than Mastodon. That the only viable alternative to Mastodon is Bluesky.
That Pleroma (older than Mastodon), Akkoma, MissKey (currently exploding with Japanese Twitter refugees), CalcKey, FoundKey, GoToSocial, Socialhome, Friendica (much older than Mastodon), Hubzilla (much older than Mastodon, too, but not as old as Friendica), (streams) etc. don't exist.
But they do. And if people want something shinier or something with more features than Mastodon, they can go there without leaving the Fediverse and while still staying in contact with the self-same people they've befriended on Mastodon.
Nobody needs Bluesky for that. Not even for nomadic identity. Bluesky has yet to prove it can do that. Hubzilla has proved that eleven years ago and has been nomadic ever since.
@Erin Kissane I sincerely hope I'm not the first Fediverse user from whom you've heard the above.
Indeed, very frustrating. People who claim that Mastodon is the choking point of the Fediverse and that 'Mastodon-the-company' decides what is valuable or allowed, have really no idea of what Fediverse or Mastodon is.
The only thing that we can do about that, is publicising about the Fediverse/Mastodon. Informing and explaining. Not here on Mastodon, but in and on the media outside the Fediverse.
@atomicpoet@kissane I think an issue with open source is product goals are different. With FOSS your user count / community frustration aren't inherently important. If you measure success by how pretty your code is your sense of priorities is different to your users'.
@atomicpoet@kissane
It's the age-old question. Is a program/app/system created to server the users or because that's how the develop wanted it to be.
Especially difficult with FLOSS because people need to be interested and involved enough to not only maintain it but also develop on it, and without the latter you don't get the former.
@atomicpoet@kissane I am fine with full text search being offered, being put in front of everyone as an opt-in, but even as a relatively recent newcomer, I think I would opt-out. That's fine right?
Maybe I know of one opt-in system that already exists, but because people have to go find it uptake is very low?
@atomicpoet@kissane One big hurdle for Mastodon is that it can't market itself like a commercial monolithic service can. There is no slick lobbying team that can approach the social media manager for AOC and lobby them to join Mastodon.
@ericfreyss@atomicpoet@kissane I'm actually about to place a bet on that, but what I'm referring to is the fact that Mastodon distributed and non profit means it doesn't have paid evangelists and sales people.
@atomicpoet@kissane fwiw neither of them is currently delivering what i am looking for, which is a way to connect rapidly and globally - if the news shows me people hurting in Sudan, I want to talk to them and then connect them to people with influence to make change. The birdsite used to do that. So far the fediverse has fallen short but maybe will be better at this as more folks come, I hope so.
@atomicpoet@kissane I love soysausage, and Iove Mastodon more than anything Dorsey is trying to recreate ,so she loses me on the negative connotation.
My only question is, will Bluesky be open sourced so that others can create their own servers/nodes,(Yes) and will it connect to ActivityPub? (Unknown)
<strikeout>Dorsey has been down on AP while touting something that hasn't been expanded beyond a single instance. </strikeout>
Edit: added strikeout tags, answer to one question.
@peterkal@atomicpoet@kissane But will AT talk to ActivityPub or will be it it's own thing? Is my question. Stating it's the same/similar doesn't mean it will work together and connect the Fediverse.
Good that it's open source so it sounds that devs from both sides can see how to get things working on both sides.
Which begs another question, why not use and extend ActivityPub?
@atomicpoet@kissane
While it's true that Bluesky hasn't federated yet, their implementation is better:
Your ID doesn't change (I know you already know this with your DID toot the other day)
Account portability is not limited to followers, and doesn't require your source server to be up and running
I hope Mastodon can fix those two things (the first is not easy to fix), but perhaps we can extend ActivityPub to support this, or even better, have an Atprotocol and ActivityPub be compatible
#Zot may actually be "better for the fediverse" in a sense, especially since it has been supporting #NomadicIdentity, Bluesky's alleged killer feature, since 2011, seven years before the ActivityPub standard was published. Since 2012, it has been the base of #Hubzilla (which I'm on, by the way), and it has been evolving. Its most recent version, renamed #Nomad, is what powers the most recent streamlined Hubzilla decendent, #Streams.
So there's no need to check out a commercial, corporate, VC-backed walled garden created by a power-hungry, alt-right billionaire for that, especially not since this walled garden has yet to prove its claims of decentralisation, much less nomadity.
@jdst258@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews these days I still have to use Windows for my job. Most any issue I have to research has solutions that vary between windows 8, windows 10, and windows 11 and almost always start with ‘edit this registry key and these five others, then download some weird driver, bypass the signing mechanism, etc, etc.
I give up. Windows is not ready for widespread use.
@atomicpoet@kissane@fediversenews that section raised my eyebrows too. I refrained from commenting directly because, shockingly, I do not use Mastodon, I use pleroma. User friendliness and basic social functionality experience has been phenomenal for me. To such extent that I have not even considered using any other services. I honestly can’t figure out what their expectations are. I am not willing to try #BlueSky to find out though.
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