Mastodon and Pixelfed got a short mention on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
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It also means decoupling the recommendation system from people's feeds.
Having a "you may like this" section is a lot less abusable than "the next item in your doomscroll is <recommendation>".
Bluesky is just another Twitter. Everything that happened to Twitter can happen to Bluesky. It's not fundamentally changing anything except trading Elon for a different owner.
It's not a bad change, people want Twitter after all... but it isn't fixing any problems in the underlying incentive structures or algorithm control.
The core problem is that curated feeds allow the owner to substitute their recommendations in place of recommendations that would interest you.
Until the owner can't do that, the social network is always one sale away from being the next Twitter/Truth Social.
Bluesky is fixing social media by changing the owner, Mastodon/ActivityPub is fixing social media by getting rid of the owner.
I think the latter is the better choice for how to structure these things.
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Better marketing, better UI, lots of users, and plenty of non-political content.
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It's no different than signing up for an email account
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What's non-political content, Lemmy?
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Email? Do you mean Gmail?
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We're the non-political ones
- everyone on the Fediverse who keywordblocks everything political
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Looking at my current feed, that would remove ... upwards of 90 percent of the content.
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Just FYI, fedidb is wildly wrong on the numbers lately. You may want a different source.
For example, there are instances on GoToSocial that have 2-3 users showing up with thousands on fedidb. And some lemmy servers show up multiple times on their statistics.
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The cat pictures community mostly.
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And you don't see that as a problem for most users?
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Huh. Do you know of a better alternative?
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That's double our monthly size in a single day, ignoring all Bluesky users outside of America, and using their stats from several months that ago when they have probably grown since.
So yeah, they are way bigger than us.
Bunch of spambots there though, but that goes for Fedi as well. So making a proper comparison is impossible. No doubt they have way more users than Mastodon though.
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Closest thing we have is people really hating Windows.
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I mean, again this doesn't surprise me, Bluesky not only has the money (and promises of future money if things go well) to go viral, it has to in order to survive.
If Bluesky grew at the rate Mastodon grew in the beginning it would already be dead and abandoned by investors, that isn't a knock on Mastodon it is a statement about how problematically unstable and fragile the traditional approach of building for profit corporate social media spaces is that Bluesky embodies.
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Wish I did! I know lemmy has https://lemmyverse.net which seems accurate. Maybe others can chime in?
Ive been keeping my eye on fedidb for a time, after they stated we had over 12 million users...then it dropped off to 11 almost overnight. It did some retroactive counting. I then looked at software in general and found they are not counting things correctly. Some things overestimating wildly (like the example above) and some its not indexing at all.
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As is reasonable
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I'm carrying on multiple conversations in this thread, so I'll just copy what I said in a different thread:
Of course people like these features, these algorithms are literally trained to maximize how likable their recommendations are.
It’s like how people like heroin because it perfectly fits our opioid receptors. The problem is that you can’t simply trust that the person giving you heroin will always have your best interests in mind.
I understand that the vast majority of people are simply going to follow the herd and use the thing that is most like Twitter, recommendation feed and all. However, I also believe that it is a bad decision on their part and that the companies that are intaking all of these people into their alternative social networks are just going to be part of the problem in the future.
We, as the people who are actively thinking about this topic (as opposed to the people just moving to the blue Twitter because it's the current popular meme in the algorithm), should be considering the difference between good recommendation algorithm use and abusive use.
Having social media be controlled by private entities which use black box recommendation algorithms should be seen as unacceptable, even if people like it. Bluesky's user growth is fundamentally due to people recognizing that Twitter's systems are being used to push content that they disagree with. Except they're simply moving to another private social media network that's one sale away from being the next X.
It'd be like living under a dictatorship and deciding that you've had enough so you're going to move to the dictatorship next door. It may be a short-term improvement, but it doesn't quite address the fundamental problem that you're choosing to live in a dictatorship.
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Non-political Lemmy is... Bluesky?
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My dude I agree with you we are saying that we need to fulfill the request for an algorithm.
