👉 Wieso die teilweise ablehnende Haltung auf #Mastodon ein Fehler ist
👉 Wieso Threads uns und die Netzkultur offenbart
👉 Welche Daten Threads im Vergleich zu #Bluesky & Mastodon sammelt
So, #Bluesky is all the hype now and a lot of #Mastodon people are falling for the olde "invite link" trick which not only paints, what is ultimately going to be another social media shitshow, as an exclusive club, but also sneakily turns everyone's curiosity into a vessel for word-of-mouth advertisement to ride piggy back on.
Well, maybe the AT Protocol is at least better than #ActivityPub. So, since it is on #Github [1] , let's have a quick look and ... Aww shit! Thread time..
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.
To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is sent to a third party for AI labeling.
BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called https://thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they can use content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.
— Decentralized
Like #Mastodon, #Bluesky intents to be decentralized. This means that not Bluesky as a company will be part of it, but others can also join in.
The exciting part is that this is happening on multiple levels: where your data is stored, and how your feed is composed for your timeline.
Note: Right now the devs are working hard on making this happen, while currently everyone invited is on the same server.
#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...
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.
I truly wish #Mastodon did not bomb it with BIPOC during the Twitter migration. #bluesky is becoming a crap show. I can't even invite people here b/c of what they have experienced or heard about others experiencing.
#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.
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>
Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx...
> 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)
Funny how when #BlueSky got the first few thousand accounts all of tech media immediately started tripping one over another covering it and getting a collective aneurysm. :blobcatroll:
Meanwhile, #Threadiverse gets ~70k accounts over 2 weeks, and (with the fine exception of #Techdirt) not a peep. :blobcatgiggle:
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?"
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.
Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter (www.theverge.com)
Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx...