Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
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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)
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I’ve yet to find a multi language or English speaking misskey it appears they’re all Japanese
Gotta try the Misskey forks for English
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And it's ridiculous because the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is minuscule.
I remember following some popular Twitter Head. Someone made a fake account on Mastodon and started getting followers but only posted once. Since then, his followers have grown to around 11k without any content at all! Imagine if it had been a real account. But the Twitter Head would rather switch to Bluesky instead. Such bullshit.
It really isn't minuscule, it's still confusing enough for the vast majority of people. Just the fact that there are different servers and them having to learn about that is enough to put people off. Anything more complicated than basic sign-up/in weeds out 90% of people, every tiny little thing they need to learn makes it less likely they'll even think about using it.
This is obvious. The way you and many others here think about how knowledgeable, tech-literate and willing to lift just one extra finger the average person is isn't correct, people are dumb and lazy. And it hurts the fediverse as a whole and slows adoption.
Your opinion and my reply here have been said thousands of times, I don't understand how your kind of ignorance and misunderstanding is still so prevalent, I see it almost weekly.
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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).
The other issue is, nobody is trying to take on Facebook. Not really anything in the FLOSS community like it.
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I have no clue on the reasons people like Bluesky (or threads). None at all.
At least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, so they at least have to consider the public good in their decision-making and not just profit. May not be much, but it's a start.
