@Teri_Kanefield Your caution and skepticism is warranted. The real mystery here is how Jack Dorsey has suckered everyone into believing that he has a "distributed" "open" system, when the current system is neither. Back in the day we would have called it "vaporware", but if Trump proved one thing, it's that we are living in a particularly credulous, gullible time.
@mastodonmigration@Teri_Kanefield “Vaporware” — It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen that word. It fits though. I’m sure it will be distributed Real Soon Now…
@Teri_Kanefield I prefer to be as far away from him as I possibly can be. He threw me off of Twitter for a tweet insulting TFG and begging the incoming Biden/Harris administration to not pardon him or lose the republic, which his team decided was hate speech.
After that it was talk to the hand. Yet, if I had another Twitter account it could STAY? He's very Elon-like.
I hope it's an utter failure. I'll bet it's a nice article. Not going to read anything about him who I consider an ass's ass.
Mastodon instances don’t and have no way of making enough money.
You have any idea how many Mastodon instances are self-sustaining based on donations? There are some that charge a monthly subscription to fund themselves.
That's enough.
They aren't millions of dollars in debt in investment capital and needing to dig out of some big investment hole by selling ad space or impressions or ad clicks or user data to a third party.
The Fediverse exists without any need for that at all. Literally without any actual need for monetization, just enough donations to keep the lights on, and volunteers.
Meanwhile capitalist social media exploits users as products, monetizes their data and usage of the platform so they can entice advertisers to the platform who will--in turn--give them the revenue they need to turn a profit.
I make enough money to host my server, therefore I make "enough" money.
@staidwinnow@oliphant@robertnorlyn@Teri_Kanefield
Very much "citation needed" here. For-profit social networks will use the minimum number of moderators needed to protect their profits, which means their advertisers. Just e.g., on Twitter, if you're not in Germany, Nazis are OK. Advertisers are okay-ish with Nazis. Nudity, for some bizarro reason, not.
So we don't even know if they have more moderators per user, and they're darn sure not actually serving the users.
@HistoPol@staidwinnow@oliphant@robertnorlyn@Teri_Kanefield
Twitter, at least pre-Musk, conformed to German law regarding Nazi speech, meaning, not allowed (also demonstrated that they could filter if they wanted to). In the US, it needed to be overt to be banned, otherwise a fair amount of nudge-nudge-wink-wink was tolerated -- advertisers did not demand the German standard.
Volunteers cannot compete with paid employees in the long run.
Volunteers have been running this thing for 6 years (Mastodon). Longer, really, with other parts of the fediverse and before ActivityPub.
And the creators of ActivityPub went through all the hard work of becoming a public, open standard and protocol.
Work that Bluesky is reinventing, but okay.
Bluesky has had $13 Million and 3 years and this is all they've come up with.
The underdogs--the volunteers--are winning. They've sustained it for six years, how long do they need to sustain it?
The reason companies give up and can't sustain is that they run out of funding.
We're not running out of funding here, because it's self-funded.
It's the different between a nonprofit and a capitalist megacorporation that dominates the world (Meta, Twitter, etc).
Since when do nonprofits focus on endless growth at all costs? That's what companies who have millions or billions of dollars in investment do, because without it, they die.
If you're not in debt, and if you're not trying to create a business, you don't need to sustain endless growth.
@Teri_Kanefield thanks for both sharing the article and your thoughts on it. As you mentioned, I wouldn't trust Jack with much of anything right now though. Kind of appropriate that the most logical abbreviation for Bluesky is BS
@Teri_Kanefield Clearly Jack isn't to be trusted. I no longer care what happens to the bird site or any of its competitors.
I like it here. There are no advertisers, no rage click bait and it has settings to allow me to decide if I want to view an image, so no visual clutter.
@Teri_Kanefield Thanks for the article.
The Bluesky AT Protocol had some differences with the ActivityPub we enjoy here. The "jury is still out" (pun intended 😋) on whether Dorsey will come through on his promises.
Have you read @raccoon’s thoughtful & sourced analyses of the design & coding choices #Dorsey made with #Bluesky? They are worth it. They cast doubt on every one of those 3 assertions you cite from the article.
As you pointed out, Dorsey earned a general distrust from pro-democracy factions by his choices at Twitter & pushing hard to sell Twitter to Musk.
One thing I notice immediately, because I’ve seen it from all the tech journalists, is the failure to inform readers as to who the owners of #Bluesky are, what is the corporate structure is, and who owns the various IP here (protocol, app, “Bluesky Seevices”). It appears they aren’t even asking these questions, let alone independently investigating them. The answers matter a lot.
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