For it to have a future, it needs to sell itself to the folks operating servers. Those are the people that will actually fulfil what Bluesky aims to do.
Instead, it’s selling itself to “influencers” who just want pre-Elon Twitter. They don’t care about nodes or servers or decentralization or DIDs. They just want to shitpost.
@atomicpoet my (subjective) take on Blue sky is it's just 🐘 for shitposters. If it succeeds that will only be due to the fediverse having a reputation among those types as being stodgy
@hobbypainternyc@atomicpoet ironically, I've read Dorsey has mostly moved on from Bluesky, so he's not running the show. Maybe just putting on pressure to go public before it's ready :ablobcatcoffee:
For a decentralized social network to actually be successful it needs to build two kind of network effects:
Social graph for accounts
Connectivity for nodes
Bluesky is doing a decent job of the first kind of network effect. It’s not only failing at the second kind of network effect, it doesn’t seem to be trying.
@atomicpoet helluva lot of projection there from the Bluesky fella. 🧐
Anyway, as a Non-American I'm not invited to this little Silicon Valley project. Big ol' world out there lads....
@atomicpoet it's really a bummer that a lot of folks first heard of the concept of decentralization from crypto scammers. Decentralization was crypto's lure because it has genuine appeal - it would have been a much less successful grift otherwise
@atomicpoet most people use Outlook or Gmail for their email. Most people just use Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, sometimes more than one, but always for different types of things. The Internet is already complicated enough that Google exists and is used religiously by what was it, 98% of the Web? Even to get to Google.
@atomicpoet being a fan of decentralizing away from corporate control of social media transcends traditional political leanings. This is just a way to smear us as “crypto bros”.
@atomicpoet if Bluesky is one node, how is it decentralized? Doesn't that just mean that its one node is a centralized platform? Maybe it was designed to permit decentralization via some protocol or other, but if it's not federating with anything else, is that a distinction that makes no difference?
@atomicpoet
The 'selling to influencers' bit relates to something @chuckwendig commented on, though you've taken a step farther than he did - he was just observing that they seemed to be targeting shitposters. ("Interesting", he said, but didn't go further.)
@atomicpoet this is a bit idealistic view on things. I have a feeling that a big percentage if people using mastodon don’t really understand how it works. Mastodon was just better then BlueSky at spreading the word
@atomicpoet fair enough, I haven’t been able to check it out yet because of the invite system but I’ve seen that particular account pop up a lot in screenshots shared here. I guess at first glance it seems like bluesky pays lipservice to the right ideas but fails in execution of those ideas so far. The shitposting/toxicity levels over there appear to be more similar to twitter than activitypub instances. Im intrigued but don’t really see a reason to want to jump ship at all.
@atomicpoet well it's true, I'd say most regular people only care about content and vibing with friends. but the AT protocol has some budding open source implementations. if those continue evolving and become viable, it has promise.
@atomicpoet Is this just one guy ranting? And I do entirely sympathize with his point. People just want a social network that your friends actually use and for there to be good social content there. The vast majority of people don't care about the tech details. Mastodon is a bit of a tech nerd echo chamber that doesn't represent the "normies"
@jbwharris Which is fine, but for Bluesky to succeed, it shouldn’t be appealing to normies right now. It should be appealing to folks who run servers. How else will AT protocol gain additional nodes?
@atomicpoet You are definitely identifying a fatal flaw. It's all normies banging on the door wanting onto Bluesky, but they haven't done any leg work on the decentralization piece and they're probably all Mastodon types who might have been here pre-2022.
@atomicpoet WTH is a Senior PowerPoint Engineer anyway??? Years of experience in creating sh*tty presentations with fade in star-shaped transitions for pie charts? LOL
To those who maintain that this is decentralization’s problem, not an issue with user culture — sincere question: is it not an issue for you if the new platform we try to rebuild the digital “commons” upon is just as susceptible to being bought and perverted by a billionaire as Twitter was? Like… don’t you want to solve the problem? Because if so, there are trade-offs — a minor collection of unimportant trade-offs. You can have a better platform or you can have an equally mindless one, not both.
@atomicpoet Nope, we've had this conversation before. No one outside of techfolk cares about the #fediverse. They only care about having no ads and less Draconian policies.
The fact that Mastodon is decentralized is double-edged sword. It's technically and architecturally more flexible, but at a significant cost to UX. Those costs spring mostly from hindered interoperability, a lack of feature parity, and UI consistency.
And as I predicted months ago, we've already seen bad fiefdoms pop up.
@atomicpoet - Bluesky's larger initial problem is that is already has a "built in" following who are expecting the Twitter-of-Olde and it's not going to be precisely that. And those legacy followers are going to be sorely disappointed. So they'll get a bounce, and then an exodus, and then perhaps maybe start to grow again. I expect a rough birth and a torturous youth for them.
@atomicpoet
Do you have any evidence that those 12 million people “love” decentralization?
I would guess most of those people just wanted a Twitter replacement and went to what seemed like the most likely.
@atomicpoet I used to follow that guy on Twit and I think he specifically is averse to decentralized platforms as evidenced by him not being On Here even though there's a lot of geeky people that talk about the same things he does. It's not his vibe and that's ok, but it doesn't mean his prefs are universal
@atomicpoet How influential is "Senior PowerPoint Engineer" in Bluesky though?
I'm more concerned that Bluesky is the for-profit company doing decentralized protocol. They might not want to create open & free client API and make strings attached for federation.
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