Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains
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Alternatively, no ads and we can support it through donations or anti-oligarchy purchases like this shirt.
Ads open up a pandoras box of monetization of user data/traffic/clicks/links/additional engagement, etc.
It's a dark, dark, dark road, and we've been down it dozens of times with tech giants. It never ends well.
Let's stop having advertising be the way we fund pseudo-free services, and instead just give people options to donate or pay into it some other way. We need to end this reliance on advertising industry for revenue.
Ads are attractive to many users because they have a simple option for universal opt out (adblocking) at the cost of everyone who isn't a Freerider.
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I must admit seeing Mozilla get worse and worse has also made me more cynical on behalf of Bluesky. And then there's the issue of moderation - I'm beginning to think that big ethical platforms cannot really exist, as there is no such thing as a perfect place to draw the line with regards to moderation.
Maybe Bluesky would be the most likely to succeed in operating a large online platform in a good way. I have just lost all faith in such platforms.
One good thing about BlueSky’s moderation over Mastodon’s is that it’s (partially) chosen by users. Mastodon/Lemmy instance hosts almost all do an admirable and often thankless job by defederating and booting people but in the end, you’re relying on your instance host and your own one-off blocks.
BlueSky currently does have centralized moderators who kick people off all the time. But if the law changes in any country, BlueSky has the fallback of relying on user-created blocklists and user-created algorithmic feeds. In the U.S., Section 230 is apparently hated by Congress and, while I agree it could be updated and reformed, I’m not confident our corrupt gerontocracy will strike the right balance.
I’d love it if the future of ActivityPub-based platforms uses that approach. Even Instance moderators would probably be thrilled.
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I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.
Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar? Why is that every time I think I’m up-to-date on the latest weirdness there’s more of it?
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I probably could if I could be bothered to do that.
Which means no.
Why the first comment if you were not going to bother to elaborate?
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But on frontpage.fyi, if you want to sign up, you have to sign up through Bluesky. They direct you to bsky.app to create your account.
I just don't see how this is a real functional example of a portable account. Maybe it is not supposed to be - if so, is the decentralized nature of accounts demonstrated anywhere in a practical way?
I struggle to understand things I cannot see.
Yeah I would say they likely just aren't using the protocol properly, that being said I'm not sure I know of an example who is.
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Ofcourse they ain’t making shit from custom domains. Anyone who is interested in connecting a domain to their Bsky account and has the skills or patience to learn how to probably already has a domain bought at another registrar to connect to.
Also most people won't care anyway. Even big businesses are unlikely to really be that bothered.
For years everyone's been fine with Twitter and that never had custom domains.
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It's funny because if you read history you know that Caesar took down the republic on a wave of populism.
I feel like if anybody knows anything about history that's the thing they know.
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As much as I hate to be that guy, it's worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It's better to leave your money elsewhere.
I don't mind people setting up for-profit businesses. After all it's what you're supposed to do in a capitalist society, but the issue with it is when company start putting profit before people. As long as they don't do that I'm not bothered that they make business-minded decisions.
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What does this mean? Am I old?
probably not old enough
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Are you still attempting to influence that adage becoming well-understood by the common man? I dare say that I don't believe that will come to pass.
cease your attempts at causing "retrieve" to transpire.
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I don't mind people setting up for-profit businesses. After all it's what you're supposed to do in a capitalist society, but the issue with it is when company start putting profit before people. As long as they don't do that I'm not bothered that they make business-minded decisions.
The real problem begins when one has to consider how to make money from a social media platform. Selling T-shirts with sick burns written in Latin is not going to work forever.
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I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.
I bet that if you tell Markie that Caesar was a probably bisexual man affected by mini-strokes and/or epilepsy, he would make those t-shirts disappear in a minute.
Ignorance is bliss.
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I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.
Why is he doing that? Is he competing with Elon Musk on stupidness?
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Ads are attractive to many users because they have a simple option for universal opt out (adblocking) at the cost of everyone who isn't a Freerider.
Yes but a lot of us who do block ads block them largely because they are intolerable. I largly only started blocking ads at all because of how utterly miserable YouTube ads became.
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Which means no.
Why the first comment if you were not going to bother to elaborate?
Elaborate what exactly?
And I honestly thought that he was screwing around with me, because it was such a strangely worded sentence.
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Yes but a lot of us who do block ads block them largely because they are intolerable. I largly only started blocking ads at all because of how utterly miserable YouTube ads became.
Gotta love loading a mobile webpage and 20% of it is readable text and the rest is advertising.
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I'm going to state an unpopular opinion. Bluesky should have ads, not a personalized ads that track users, but just simple ones at the very top of the feed. Consumers today are too addicted to free services, and companies need to be financially independent so that they can support a quality product.
Ads incentivize them to make the platform addicting and to prioritize ragebait because it will cause people to stay engaged in the app longer.
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Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar? Why is that every time I think I’m up-to-date on the latest weirdness there’s more of it?
If you think thats weird you haven't even scratched the surface on Zuck. He actually idolizes Emperor Augustus Caesar so much that he copied the guys haircut for most of his career. Behind the Bastards does a good job of highlighting it. If you want a quick readable version, here's the first non paywalled article I could find. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9
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If you think thats weird you haven't even scratched the surface on Zuck. He actually idolizes Emperor Augustus Caesar so much that he copied the guys haircut for most of his career. Behind the Bastards does a good job of highlighting it. If you want a quick readable version, here's the first non paywalled article I could find. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9
I didn't realize Ed Zitron had another podcast
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Ads are attractive to many users because they have a simple option for universal opt out (adblocking) at the cost of everyone who isn't a Freerider.
Another reason why they just externalize the cost of the website onto anyone who can't use an ad blocker or doesn't know how.
