Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
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Why are they selecting BlueSky over the Fediverse?
B/c people are indoctrinated under capitalism to need some kinda daddy.
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The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it's still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.
Bluesky wants to tell people they're not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that's their key advantage.
The only thing that will guarantee they don't end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven't come up with a long-term revenue model, so it's not clear how they can avoid it.
an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
This question is extremely easy to answer. We all did it. I don't think people on Lemmy are some kind of master race. smh.
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No that decision is, for most people, made for them. You use the server provided for you by your ISP/work/university or the one that's associated with logging into your smartphone.
Most people use several email servers for work, school, personal, etc.
Somehow those dolts figured it out. Shocking. \s
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For e-mail, it does not really make a difference.
Good luck with you hotmail account... Or using Outlook... etc.
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Problem is it absolutely will turn when the Bluesky owners Jay Graber and Jack Dorsey decide it's time to cash in. The project started out as a way to start decentralizing twitter, but they never actually accomplished that goal.
Jack Dorsey never had ownership (just directed an investment) and left the board (didn't agree with moderation, lol)
Jay also isn't majority owner.
It's a public benefit corporation too so they don't have a profit requirement.
The harder parts with decentralizing content-addressed systems like it is scaling open spaces (like how a microblog is technically one big shared space). You need big caches and big indexes. They're working actively on making it easier for others to run those app servers. There's already a few independent projects building them. Federating account hosting and feed generation and moderation services are all live already
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Your email server doesn't also run the group email list and all the join/drop/approve/ban operations. And if you bring your own email domain name, you can go somewhere else and get no disruption. But if you sign up for [email protected] and hotmail bans you, you'll lose all your connections and conversation history.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board, or a messaging service group. It's apples and rocket ships.
Bluesky is offering simple one-stop answers to a lot of these concerns. Fediverse needs to answer all these, plus address the whole long-term financial sustainability question.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board,
This is just untrue. There's almost nothing to Twitter, IG, etc., while many bulletinboards are far more complicated.
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Aside from being its founder. I know he left the board, but I haven't seen any reason to believe he gave up ownership rights.
He never had ownership. The investment was in the form of a contract to build the protocol, not buying shares.
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Leaving the board of directors means no day to day control, but he could still exert influence on a shareholders vote.
He's not a shareholder, and also it's a public benefit corporation so shareholders have less power over the board
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i have accepted that most of the internet will be a vicious cycle of enshittification. go to cool new site, site gets too popular for its own good, monetization kicks in, site now sucks, rinse and repeat.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon just will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
FOSS is the final destination after people get sick of capitalism ruining every other app/site.
People usually don't go back to shitty products unless they have no choice. Linux users don't go back to Windows. I'll never use an Adobe product again. Etc.
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From what I understand, Bsky didn't actually provide much (if any) OSS code to create the federated apps, just the protocol. So there would need to be tons of work done to create it. Some people were (rightly) pointing out that time might be better spent improving existing solutions like Mastodon, rather than freely providing more value to a for-profit company.
Almost everything is available. You can run your own account host, feed generators, moderation services, app servers (appview, relay) and most code is open. The only thing not open is a bunch of custom scaling optimizations (like database configurations) and configuration for the official recommendation algorithm & spam filtering mod tools, and stuff like that. All the rest is available, and the things that's missing aren't necessary unless you want to match their user count (but then you can probably build it yourself)
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Just because they know using Mastodon they are bad people? What the hell kind of take is that?
It's a take that apparently requires a lack of reading comprehension on your part.
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I feel like scientists should move towards open source solutions ... I feel like most scientists are smart enough to launch a mastodon server, but well.
Being a scientist doesn't mean you have the technical knowledge to run a public facing server.
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Most people who work as "scientists" aren't actually scientists.
Define "Scientist".
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Would he better if it was Mastodon, but I suppose I shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good, and good riddance to Twitter, indeed.
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There's a new option available now for reply controls, you can limit it to just people who follow you. While it's a very low bar, it's enough of a threshold for most randoms to not bother following just to reply to you
And even without that, I still have felt that the quality of replies doesn't drop THAT much one it hits Discover - but it may be partly who I follow/am recommended, that block lists are doing a great job of eliminating trolls+spam, and I just automatically ignore any stupid/low effort stuff ("wow you are the best at that thing you posted about", "that js amazjng i have never seen a linux before" or whatever).
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I have no clue on the reasons people like Bluesky (or threads). None at all.
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First time seeing HTTP code 451
"Sorry, it's literally impossible for us not to sell your data!"
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Just because they know using Mastodon they are bad people? What the hell kind of take is that?
I'm just saying, because someone is a scientist absolutely does not absolve them of human fallibility. I just don't like the take of "because scientist, therefore smart or wise" and that's not true, they're just (hopefully) educated and credible in their one specific field and nothing else.
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Going to play devil's advocate here.
Bluesky is just...better than any Fediverse microblogging platform. In terms of UI, discoverability, and keeping a balance of users in the community.
Mastodon sucks for regular people. And none of the other better platforms like Firefish ever gain enough steam to beat Mastodon because of existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub (this also includes Mastodon itself to an extent).
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I have no clue on the reasons people like Bluesky (or threads). None at all.
Bluesky has a lot more normies on it while mastodon is mostly early-adopter types. Mastodon, in my experience, is either very technical people (software engineers and other tech people) or very political people. Bluesky has normal people on it
I checked out threads for a day and I liked it because the algorithm wasn't jamming a bunch of outrage content down my throat but that's the only thing I can say about it. Haven't used it since then (deleted my entire meta account)
