#Bluesky offers this concept of a nomadic identity that would allow you to move your social media profile [1] . How does that work? Does it work at all? As advertised? Why is it a selling point to begin with? And why are people falling for it?
If there's one thing, Bluesky is good at, it's marketing and they understand one thing very well that #Mastodon doesn't: who to pitch your product to and how...
So, how does this promise of "A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol" [1] work on a technical level?
First of all, it is important to understand, that Bluesky has two classes of users: those who own a domain and those who don't. Only the former may take advantage of nomadic identities, the rest simply gets a handle on the bsky.app domain and is as locked in as everywhere else.
but since web browsers can't render them, it is more or less pointless. And that is the endgame: locking creators in into a search engine that only Bluesky can run.
We have talked a lot about the positive sides of the Fediverse, but not as much about the downsides. For me the top negative things of this free and healthier social web are:
People are patronizing. This happens a lot more than in other places. I mostly mean the unsolicited advice: Alt text, don’t post this or that, avoid commercialism, other social medias and use content warnings for everything. While many mean good, it has been often very aggressive. This happened a lot in 2022. For a while it made the bar to post much higher because I was afraid to make a mistake. Today I don’t care as much.
Nitpicking. Comments are nice, but not when people are overly criticising about what you do or concentrating in irrelevancies. Whataboutism is the worst side effect.
Everyone has their own rules and they are often contradicting each other. Some are extreme and block every other instance, some more allowing. You might accidentally break many rules around the Fediverse without even noticing it (some servers don’t allow posts about meat or alcohol for example).
Politically too left. It seems it is not allowed to be very conservative here. People are anti-commercialism, anti-capitalist, anti-anything.
While saying this, I do not stumble upon these downsides very often since I am quite a chill guy and have my own server. I feel like I can post whatever the fuck I want.
However, I do wonder if these things are the ones that make the Fediverse less approachable by new users. On the other hand I believe the new open social web will transform the way we see the social media in general and soon it does not matter, we don’t have to think what is ”here” when the big players like Threads and Tumblr adapt ActivityPub.
@rolle I know where you're coming from here and, for myself, being on a single-user instance means that a lot of the drama on the fediverse passes me by.
I think the main thing is that people need to understand that this isn't a single thing, and there isn't one person setting the rules for everyone.
Different instances have different standards, and this is good. But it does mean that people will need to take some time to fine the instance that suits them best.
Wenn #SocialMedia zu Social Selling wird, dann ist da gar nichts mehr "Social" dran, wie diese Content-Farm in Indonesien zeigt!
Wie der Like Button das Internet zerstoert, das habe ich vor einiger Zeit hier 👉 https://t.ly/LikeButton ausgefuehrt. Die im Video gezeigten Beispiele sind wirklich nur die Spitze des Eisbergs.
Ramsch-Shops wie #Shein, #Temu, & #Wish haben diese Form des Vertriebs perfektioniert. Alle aus #China & selbstverstaendlich ist der Hauptdistributionskanal #TikTok
@pallenberg
Erinnert mich schon bisschen an die Leute um Unge, die alle unter Vertrag einer Agentur waren und dann in einem Haus gewohnt haben.
Aber da ging es natürlich noch nicht vorrangig um die Produkte.
@energisch_ ich hab noch mehr. Von Chinesinnen nachts unter Bruecken in gutsituierten Bezirken... Weil der Douyin Algo, also die Chinesische TikTok Variantw, es abstraft bzw dich bei diversen Produkten schlechter rankt, wenn du im "Armenviertel" streamst.
@tequila0341 First, that's a four year old article, and YT has made enormous strides in control over that sort of content since then. And there's zero proof that any of these people wouldn't have ended up in the same place without YT -- there are plenty of other sites that directly radicalize. People love to blame their own problems on Big Tech and the Net. I'm pretty sick of it. Years ago it was comic books! Yes, comic books! Calls for bans, congressional hearings! After that it was violence on TV! Then lyrics in songs (Tipper Gore!). It's always the same story. Try to blame someone else for your problems, ideally someone like Big Tech with deep pockets.
Update. "We evaluated how the #gender composition of top-cited authors within different subfields of research has evolved over time…Men outnumbered women 1.88-fold among all authors, decreasing from 3.93-fold to 1.36-fold over time. Men outnumbered women 3.21-fold among top-cited authors, decreasing from 6.41-fold to 2.28-fold over time." Imbalances varied greatly by discipline. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.25.542328v1
Update. "We argue that [the] collaborative knowledge practices of inclusive editorial governance, #OpenAccess, and #OpenPeerReview of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, [#JITP] are fundamentally #feminist, as they diversify scholarly voices and increase access to the material channels in and through which knowledge circulates."
So, who knows, maybe something like a Truth Social walled garden based on ActivityPub, that scrapes user info from the Fediverse and gives you a one button sign up to Threads.
Seems they are more scared of their users getting a taste of freedom and escaping to the Fediverse, but again, who knows. 🤷
Point is, we don't know what they are up to, and until we do we should save our powder, have faith in each other, and continue building out this great platform.
@jynersolives@BlackAzizAnansi One thing you can be certain of, is that tech reporters rarely understand what they are talking about. This is what makes them so useful to corporate marketing communications campaigns. We are going to be seeing a lot of nonsensical BS over the next days and weeks. Best not to get too spun up about anything. As the old adage goes, "watch what they do, not what they say."
I see (and enjoy) a lot of satisfied commentary on the End of #Twitter and the rise of #Mastodon, and I’m very happy here. But if I’m honest, a great part of my former Twitter community is still there. Some of them tried Mastodon early and gave up quickly. None of them can be happy about Musk. Still — is there anything to be done?
@JamesGleick I think that part of the differences in "culture" is the fact that the majority of people in the world today just want something to complain about for the sake of complaining.
@JamesGleick
Last Autumn's mass-migration to Mastodon was a mixed blessing: the relative complexity of the joining process was a hurdle, people's signing up to unsuitable (or worse) instances another, the vocal disdain for people not immediately entranced by the Fediverse a third. I think the biggest drag currently is the news community's being dug in at Twitter and journalists/commentators confusing the number of followers with their reach and being scared of losing them.
Day 177 and #Twitter users are surprised that #ElonMusk’s decision to remove #bluecheck validation is causing chaos and the creation of impersonation accounts. That could never have been predicted?
#Decentralized#SocialMedia is the solution for exposure to willful and arbitrary behavior by egomaniacal billionaires
/7 Day 185 - #JackDorsey now regrets #ElonMusk’s take over of #Twitter. I guess there were no signs of toxic narcissism and egomania when he advocated for #Musk as the owner a year ago
I wonder if Dorsey is feeling more anti-Musk now that #BlueSky is making the news?
Things are not going well at a #SocialMedia service, when it‘s on the receiving end of a scathing take from the sober pages of @foreignpolicy
I’d also suggest that the financial situation for #Twitter is increasingly precarious. The debt burden of $12 billion and Twitter’s ability to service the payments is questionable and may threaten ongoing operations. #ElonMusk May need to ante up again.
@ddbkultur Bemerkenswert! „Als öffentliche Institution mit öffentlichen Ressourcen kommerzielle Plattformen zu nutzen, ist .. ein Dilemma – und ein besonderes im Fall von X, #Meta und Co.: Verstöße gegen #Datenschutzrecht, #Hatespeech, Beteiligung extremistischer und/oder menschenverachtender Accounts an Werbeeinnahmen, … Ignorieren von Hinweisen zu gefährlichen Inhalten, Sperren kritischer Accounts, Abbau von Moderationsteams – die Liste ließe sich weiterführen.“ #twitter
@paisley_peinforte@atomicpoet Do imports count as posts and federate to followers at the moment of import? It would make more sense to me that they don't, as they're historical and not new posts.
I am starting to miss the "hide reply" option from #Twitter. Some of my toots attract reply-guys with their typical negativity that I would really like to remove from some threads to keep the positivity of other replies alive. UPDATE: Or implemented as a Content Warning style option (“Hidden by thread owner/curator”) where the reader has to consciously click to reveal the content.
@craigmaloney Yes, I can mute them in my timeline. But the "hide reply" option twitter style hides that specific reply for everyone reading the thread. Big difference!
"But social media also exposes movements to many vulnerabilities. The solidiarities it generates are often superficial: movement use of social media can easily devolve into repetitive messaging in echo chambers without collective gains in narrative power—a change in the stories and values that hold sway in society—or a translation to real-world militancy."
Currently co-founding a co-op, using my freedom to...
> seek employment elsewhere or build a business yourself
> Having to play politics to get my colleagues to agree about my compensation would be a special kind of hell.
I don't understand why negotiating with a superior is better than negotiating with equals. That's not the experience of people I know who work for co-ops. But whatever, different strokes for different folks
@strypey@galdor@mjgardner I guess a business's power is approximately its size, so a co-op would be in some sense a shortcut to creating a large, flat business that is your own and others' employer to reduce personal risk for everyone involved.
In that taxi service platform co-op, people aren't earning the same per se- but there are rules such that which taxi receives a request for pickup is decided in a consistent manner, and fares are set by a global scheme.
> Almost exactly six months after #Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.
tl;dr:
#BlueSky seems designed to get secondarily centralized in the "reach" layer (as they call it)
@rysiek > The “speech” layer should remain neutral, distributing authority and designed to ensure everyone has a voice. The “reach” layer lives on top, built for flexibility and designed to scale.
So... It's just a way to offload the cost of hosting data to third parties with retaining all of the benefits to capital that come with owning and controlling an arena of public discourse? Yikes.
"...The recent takeovers of #CNN and #HBO have prompted similar questions about why they were targeted for purchase, and the changes being made there. None of these moves makes very much sense if you’re looking backwards...
And there’s the matter of “X,” Musk’s proposed “#EverythingApp.” It’s been floated as a response to [#Tencent's] #WeChat, #China’s ubiquitous app, that’s come to dominate both payments and the social sphere. Supposing such an app starts to take on the task of..."
I'm skeptical of #Bluesky because it's built on the same tech VC mindset that has been so harmful in prior generations of social media.
I'm skeptical of the #fediverse and #Mastodon because Black and brown people get shouted over by tech leftists when they have the audacity to name their experiences here.
That crap shows up in my timeline every single time I log on.
Before you say, "my feed isn't like that," let me ask, "How many Black and brown people do you follow?"
quote tweets. if we had better search on Mastodon, I'm sure I could pull up a conversation about this. but that's another thing some people desperately want, others won't accept. and like QTs, other server software that's part of the #fediverse has it.