Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
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Bluesky is open source though
No, aspects of the Bluesky system are open source. The moderation and filtering layer is effectively centralized, is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing as on users, and even if you could theoretically run your own Bluesky network... it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.
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I'd reckon that managing a social media server is more involved than just using social media.
Not required to join the fediverse, only to host your own community yourself, which is NOT what scientists need to do (unless they want to).
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University IT departments don't want to be running some random Mastodon on the server anyway. It's got nothing to do with the universities day-to-day operations it's just an extra thing that would be required on top of what they already do.
Also the only university professors who would actually be able to run the mastered on server themselves will be those in the computer science domain. A biologist isn't going to know how to do it any more than any random member of the public.
It doesn't make any sense for the University or specific professors to officially host a fediverse community, it is the wrong system of governance and community ownership here. Something like a student club or independent association of professors and students should host fediverse communities that then become unofficially associated with the University and the University should be hands off unless something really egregious happens.
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No, aspects of the Bluesky system are open source. The moderation and filtering layer is effectively centralized, is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing as on users, and even if you could theoretically run your own Bluesky network... it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.
3rd party moderation tools already exists, using the same API as the official moderation system, available to subscribe to even directly in the official app. If you don't want bluesky's moderation decisions enforced, you can run a different client which don't apply the bluesky labels (or if the bluesky appview blocks something entirely, you can circumvent that and retrieve it directly from that user's PDS)
is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing as on users
What
The network is specifically designed around portability and content addressing so they can't lock you in
it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.
There are already plenty of people running their own self hosted PDS servers to host their account, talking to the rest of the bluesky users, using 3rd party moderation filters and 3rd party clients, with 3rd party feed generators to view stuff like topic specific feeds
Also there's bridgy so you can talk across Mastodon / bluesky by letting bridgy mirror posts and replies between the two networks
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Being a scientist also kinda means understanding what are your strengths, and how you can combine them with other people who are smart along very specific narrow vectors.
Being a scientist means understanding that if you work together with the right kind of smart, curious people you can build amazing things that will improve the world.
Being a scientist means understanding the modern business world is utter bullshit and will rot any science it touches to the core.
Being a scientist, like truly living that ethos means being someone who believes the truth is important and that there are power structures who will fight tooth and nail to subdue that truth or hoard it to themselves for personal gain.
Being a scientist thus effectively means I would expect that after having a brief conversation with you that you would at least understand the grave danger that entrusting science communication in another for profit social media company poses and how it doesn't seem sensible to take that risk when the actual material barriers to creating Fediverse communities aren't actually that high.
Don't get me wrong, those hurdles are real, the fediverse can be confusing, there are lots of growing pains here.... however, not every scientist needs to become an expert in selfhosting Fediverse software, and not every scientist needs to become a Fediverse evangelist (although it wouldn't hurt), but we do need to connect boldly and clearly the hypocrisy of supposedly truth valuing people all shepherding dutifully onto another platform that will silence and betray them violently.
Scientists are inherently aligned with modern progressive politics, or rather scientists need to understand they are at everything up to physical danger from being hurt by conservatives and they need to understand that makes them fundamentally aligned with modern progressive politics.
There is no "I don't want to get political here" and the failure of the science community at large to recognize how embracing Bluesky as if it was a genuine solution to the unfolding catastrophe of science being defunded and destroyed is embarrassing. Those of us on the Fediverse should be kind, but also we should make fun of them for not using their brains. They clearly have them. Fucking use them you fools.
Bluesky is a public benefit corporation. That's very different from for profit
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Bluesky is a public benefit corporation. That's very different from for profit
It has investors, those investors are going to want money.
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3rd party moderation tools already exists, using the same API as the official moderation system, available to subscribe to even directly in the official app. If you don't want bluesky's moderation decisions enforced, you can run a different client which don't apply the bluesky labels (or if the bluesky appview blocks something entirely, you can circumvent that and retrieve it directly from that user's PDS)
is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing as on users
What
The network is specifically designed around portability and content addressing so they can't lock you in
it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.
There are already plenty of people running their own self hosted PDS servers to host their account, talking to the rest of the bluesky users, using 3rd party moderation filters and 3rd party clients, with 3rd party feed generators to view stuff like topic specific feeds
Also there's bridgy so you can talk across Mastodon / bluesky by letting bridgy mirror posts and replies between the two networks
Is the appview part of Bluesky open source? If so why not? How does that not make saying "Bluesky is open source" an inaccurate statement, or at least an incomplete statement? Can somebody reasonably run their own relay while handling a realistic amount of data from interactions?
Also there’s bridgy so you can talk across Mastodon / bluesky by letting bridgy mirror posts and replies between the two networks
A bridge is something you build and maintain, requiring constant maintenance, that joins a place that is connected with a place that is not.
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He's not a shareholder, and also it's a public benefit corporation so shareholders have less power over the board
Equity ownership is not public. Why would he sell?
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Equity ownership is not public. Why would he sell?
https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3krxdfy6koc22
He never had ownership. Not all investments provide ownership.
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It has investors, those investors are going to want money.
Sure, but the openness of the protocols, especially the portability of accounts, makes it hard for them to push negative changes on users.
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Is the appview part of Bluesky open source? If so why not? How does that not make saying "Bluesky is open source" an inaccurate statement, or at least an incomplete statement? Can somebody reasonably run their own relay while handling a realistic amount of data from interactions?
Also there’s bridgy so you can talk across Mastodon / bluesky by letting bridgy mirror posts and replies between the two networks
A bridge is something you build and maintain, requiring constant maintenance, that joins a place that is connected with a place that is not.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages/bsky
The old design was built to scale to a few million users. The new backend is revised to handle ~hundreds of millions. They'll releasing bits and pieces at a time.
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Friendica aims at that. I'm not sure about the results as I haven't tried it.
It still needs polish, but the biggest deficit is lack of adoption.
Platforms like Twitter encourage casual breaks between public and private space, but Facebook-like platforms are better for passively extending existing friendship circles. Or so it seems to me.
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I mean, I hate BlueSky too, but I think the reason it's more popular than Mastodon is that it's more centralized and in practical terms that means it's easier to adopt and engage with.
The biggest headache I have with Mastodon (and Lemmy, to a lesser extent) is defederation. I understand it's the most practical thing to do sometimes, but it's waaay overdone. Like, there needs to be a culture of only defederating as a last resort due to pratical concerns (e.g. bots I guess). Unfortunately the current culture is one where many instance admins treat defederation as a personal blocklist. I wish more admins would leave it to individual users to decide who to allow or not.
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https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3krxdfy6koc22
He never had ownership. Not all investments provide ownership.
Thanks. I'm now about 80% convinced he has no influence.
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I mean, I hate BlueSky too, but I think the reason it's more popular than Mastodon is that it's more centralized and in practical terms that means it's easier to adopt and engage with.
The biggest headache I have with Mastodon (and Lemmy, to a lesser extent) is defederation. I understand it's the most practical thing to do sometimes, but it's waaay overdone. Like, there needs to be a culture of only defederating as a last resort due to pratical concerns (e.g. bots I guess). Unfortunately the current culture is one where many instance admins treat defederation as a personal blocklist. I wish more admins would leave it to individual users to decide who to allow or not.
They planned ahead to make it popular, twitter developed it while losing money, my conspiracy theory is their goal was always to transition to bluesky since its model is more sustainable for long term control
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I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be be easily discoverable.
What's blocking Mastodon's posts to be discoverable?
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Mastodon is great.
The only reason why it doesn't get as much traction is because it doesn't manipulate your dopamine and serotonin receptors like other networks do with their black box algorithms that are designed to steal as much of your attention as possible, while almost certainly throwing you into an unhealthy filterbubble/echochamber.
That is also true to Bluesky, and to a lesser extent, even for the Lemmy-Reddit divide. I've seen people leaving the alternative platforms for the mainstream ones, because the alternative ones "didn't made them stay as long". For me, being less addictive was part of the reason why I prefer the alt platforms, although with reddit, I had to browse through a lot of garbage already, long before the API drama.
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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).
Because Bluesky keeps to what made Twitter popular in the first place. The UX. You make a post and its syndicated to a federated feed that anyone can search for, and you can tag content using hashtags.
It's a great concept. There's a reason a lot of people use it.
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What we need are good algorithms
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It doesn't make any sense for the University or specific professors to officially host a fediverse community, it is the wrong system of governance and community ownership here. Something like a student club or independent association of professors and students should host fediverse communities that then become unofficially associated with the University and the University should be hands off unless something really egregious happens.
The thing about federation is there isn't really any particular reason to even set up a community over simply using one that's already in existence except possibly to enforce your own moderating rules.
