Bluesky Deletes AI Protest Video of Trump Sucking Musk's Toes, Calls It 'Non-Consensual Explicit Material'
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until a viable federated system arises
I fundamentally disagree that a federated system is the desired end goal.
One of the problems it seems to try to solve is eliminating the risk of a service going down. Just like a centralized service, a federated service lasts only as long as the maintainers want it to last, and I think the risk of important services disappearing is higher when you remove the profit motive to keep it going. Hobbyists' pockets are only so deep, and they'll eventually die or lose interest. Yeah, I guess another service will pop up, which perpetuates some portion of the platform, but it doesn't really preserve the data.
So I see things like Mastodon (and Lemmy) as more complicated alternatives to services like Twitter or BlueSky, but with many of the same downsides. Will the data still be there in 20 years? 50? 100? Idk, probably not. Maybe if you put together a non-profit or something, but even then, I have my doubts.
So in that sense, I don't really see a technical advantage that the Fediverse has that BlueSky doesn't. If anything, I'd expect BlueSky to potentially stick around longer, assuming they can find a decent profit model, because money coming in tends to keep the servers running. Maybe they go bad like Reddit, maybe they get bought like Twitter, or maybe they stick it out longer (or maybe they open up to hobbyists). Whatever the case, I highly doubt Mastodon and friends will actually take over when they do disappear. It'll likely remain a hobbyist project until the next hot thing comes out (Fedi v2?), and never really reach mainstream success.
Maybe I'm wrong. But given how the Reddit and Twitter exoduses have worked out, I don't think so.
I want to see more projects looking into P2P, so that's where my interest lies. That way data and platforms can truly live forever, provided new people constantly come around to provide more storage. Communities and posts wouldn't live anywhere in particular (no single point of failure), but instead get distributed so there's a very low chance that any given bit of data will be truly lost, kind of like how torrents tend to keep on keeping on as long as someone is seeding (but people would only need to seed a small subset of the total data). I think that's a much more interesting idea than the Fediverse.
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I meant a community on another server.
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If you can explain the existence of wikipedia under your theory then I'll listen to you, but like... wow. Profit motive, what a joke. That's literally what causes enshittification.
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More trash
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Bluesky will become just the same az elonx...
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I miss the early days of the internet when it was still a wild west.
Something like I hate you myg0t 2 or Pico's School would have gotten the creators cancelled if released in 2025.
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existence of wikipedia
They got the ease of use down, largely due to it being a centralized service. You can literally go there, click edit, and submit a change, and you can also make an account if you want credit. It was also largely the first of its kind, so it was easy for people to get passionate about it. I made a bunch of edits in the relative early days (2000s), because I thought it was really cool. I do the same for OpenStreetMaps today, because it has a good amount of info, but it still needs some data entry here and there (I use Organic Maps on mobile).
That said, projects like Wikipedia aren't very common. It started around the time the dot-com bubble burst, so they had a fair amount of cash to kick things off with, and it got traction before the money ran out. They were able to reuse a lot of what they learned from another commercial project, and the community project ended up eating the original project's lunch.
I'm not arguing that profit is required for something to succeed, I'm merely arguing that money really helps a project get off the ground, and if there are multiple competing projects, the one with better marketing and a smoother user experience will usually win.
I didn't say profit guarantees projects live a long time or anything of that nature, I merely said users tend to flock to platforms that have a strong profit motive, probably because they have better marketing and funding for a better UX. First impressions matter a lot when it comes to a commercial product, so they tend to do a good job at that. That's why BlueSky is more attractive than Mastodon, and why whatever comes next will also likely be more attractive than Mastodon.
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It's just really weird that you turn to profit motive as a benefit when we're talking about systems that tend to enshittify, and that's like, the main thing that makes them enshittify.
My argument is about how enshittification destroys platforms, and platforms that don't do that will retain their growth. Bluesky has all the ingredients to enshittify, mastodon doesn't.
Yes they need to work on their onboarding, but unlike bluesky, they can keep going at it till it sticks. Centralised platforms get a launch, and a lifecycle, and then they tend to go away.
Quite literally the opposite of what you said. If a platform is central, it can be switched off tomorrow. Nobody can do that to the fediverse as long as the internet exists. The idea that hobbyists are somehow less reliable than fucking corporations is also absurd. Have you met corporations?
This is literally a tortoise-and-the-hare situation.
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It’s just really weird that you turn to profit motive as a benefit
Why? That's pretty much the common thread in successful SM apps vs unsuccessful SM apps. The ones w/ profit motive attract investors, which means better marketing and initial rollout, which leads to more users.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, just that it's effective.
destroys platforms
What's the benefit you're trying to get out of platforms?
Mastodon will probably stumble along in some form for a long time, but servers will come and go, meaning content will come and go. The same is true for Lemmy, many of the bigger servers will likely go away in 10-20 years, if not sooner, as the admins get tired of hosting them (it's pretty expensive). The platform will likely continue to exist, but you'll probably need to jump between servers every so often.
I guess I don't see that as hugely different from jumping from Twitter to BlueSky. Twitter had a good run, and maybe BlueSky will have a similar run.
Nobody can do that to the fediverse as long as the internet exists.
Maybe the entirety of the fediverse won't die, but significant portions will disappear from time to time as servers drop out and new ones join.
I really don't see a case for the Fediverse "winning" in any meaningful sense. The reason Wikipedia succeeded is because it has permanence. The Fediverse lacks that, so why wouldn't people just jump to the flavor of the week instead? You know, the flashy new thing that uses the latest designs and has some interesting gimmick.
I think the Fediverse will always be playing catch-up. Development is relatively slow, and it has proven to be less capable of taking advantage of opportunities than BlueSky. Why? Because BlueSky is swimming in money, whereas Mastodon, Lemmy, et al are hobby projects. Hobby projects work well in some areas where they form a foundation (e.g. Linux), but they don't work as well at chasing fads. Why isn't there a popular alternative to Snapchat, TikTok, or other "flavors of the week"? Because FOSS moves slowly, and will never keep up with the fads in SM.
So my issues with the Fediverse are:
- data is unlikely to be permanent
- development is slow
- hosting is somewhat expensive (~$150/month for my instance, which I think is low and doesn't include labor); not sure what Mastodon costs
- not very discoverable - SEO is almost nonexistent
- UX is a bit... lacking... compared to commercial alternatives
I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it's an uphill battle with a fair amount of caveats.
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Elon acts like a new Reddit mod drunk on power. He is the guy screaming in the comments that he knows how to run a forum better and seized the chance, and now he cannot fathom why people hate him.
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I am standing on the wire
what is the problem with satire and AOC (whatever that is)? -
Note on the term canceling. Independent creators cannot, by definition, get canceled. Unless you literally are under a production or publishing contract that gets actually canceled due to something you said or did, you were not canceled. Being unpopular is not getting canceled, neither is receiving public outrage due to being bad or unpopular. Even in a figurative sense, just the fact that the videos were published to YouTube and can still be viewed means they were not canceled. They just fell out of the zeitgeist and aren't popular anymore, that happens to 99% of entertainment content.
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I think there's a huge difference between fighting bullying or hate speech against minorities. Another thing is making fun of very specific and very public people.
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You clearly never were the victim back in those days. Neither do you realize this approach doesn't work on the modern web even in the slightest, unless you want the basics of both enlightenment and therefore science and democracy crumbling down even faster.
Anarchism is never an answer, it's usually willful ignorance about there being any problems.
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Many FOSS nerds don't even understand the necessity of a user-friendly GUI…
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The sad truth is that the vast majority of people WANT an algorithm to tell them what they like.
Mastodon requires you to actually have your own opinions going in, and follow material based on that.
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I'm weirded out when people say they want zero moderation. I really don't want to see any more beheading or CSAM and moderation can prevent that.
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Yeah I really don't like that this is probably going to end up being used to argue that deepfake porn of public figures is ok as long as it is "satire".
I don't really care about the Trump x Musk one but I know for a fact that this will lead to MAGAs doing the same shit to AOC and any other prominent woman on the democrat side.
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Moderation should be optional .
Say, a message may have any amount of "moderating authority" verdicts, where a user might set up whether they see only messages vetted by authority A, only by authority B, only by A logical-or B, or all messages not blacklisted by authority A, and plenty of other variants, say, we trust authority C unless authority F thinks otherwise, because we trust authority F to know things C is trying to reduce in visibility.
Filtering and censorship are two different tasks. We don't need censorship to avoid seeing CSAM. Filtering is enough.
This fallacy is very easy to encounter, people justify by their unwillingness to encounter something the need to censor it for everyone as if that were not solvable. They also refuse to see that's technically solvable. Such a "verdict" from moderation authority, by the way, is as hard to do as an upvote or a downvote.
For a human or even a group of humans it's hard to pre-moderate every post in a period of time, but that's solvable too - by putting, yes, an AI classifier before humans and making humans check only uncertain cases (or certain ones someone complained about, or certain ones another good moderation authority flagged the opposite, you get the idea).
I like that subject, I think it's very important for the Web to have a good future.
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people justify by their unwillingness to encounter something the need to censor it for everyone...
I can't engage in good faith with someone who says this about CSAM.
Filtering and censorship are two different tasks. We don’t need censorship to avoid seeing CSAM. Filtering is enough.
No it is not. People are not tagging their shit properly when it is illegal.
