Use Mastadon, Bluesky will eventually have to enshittify as they are a corporation.
They literally owe money to *checks notes… Blockchain Capital. A bunch of fucking cryptobros venture capital firm.
Enshittification is coming, people are stupid for falling for this again. I’m sick of fucking hearing about how all-volunteer created & funded Mastodon isn’t as slick as the fucking venture capital funded Bluesky. “It’s too hard to use!” Wah, go cry about it into a corporate teat some more, sucker.
people are stupid for falling for this again.
It’s a better, more usable platform than mastodon for the average user today, it makes sense people will move to it instead - it’s human behavior.
I wish more than people treated these platforms as disposable like they are. Just dump their ass like a shitty ex if they start abusing the platform. Remind folks that Yahoo, Myspace and Digg seemed unreplaceable at one point, and now they are irrelevant.
I never used twitter, I tried to use mastodon about a year ago and hated it, I joined bluesky a few weeks back and love it.
Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween. I never found anyone I wanted to follow while sifting through screenfuls of firehose, so I didn’t bother.
Bluesky has nice UX, the posts on Discover are mostly engaging content, there’s a bunch of people i’ve heard of over there, tags are encouraged via feeds, the starter packs are nice and the blocklists are amazing.
Will it enshittify eventually? Sure.
But then you just move on to the next free trial.
It took me a week to find a bunch of lefties, journalists and shitposters on bluesky; whatever comes after it will doubtless be just as quick. They’re a fungible commodity - if I can’t find the same specific set of people on the next one, ehh.
Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween.
If only people make an effort… most mastodon clients allow you to configure the timelines and if you have an empty wasteland of subscribed tags well, you’re subscribed to some very niche stuff… try posting about it, maybe others are listening - that implies effort, though, so be careful.
It’s a better, more usable platform than mastodon
I haven’t yet heard an explanation for this that makes sense. It looks more like Twitter and it has VC money behind it. That’s it, as far as I can tell.
I wish more than people treated these platforms as disposable like they are.
It would be easy if they were actually decentralized. The way it is now, if you leave, you leave all of your friends. Getting all of your friends to leave with you is a ridiculous task. You can’t even get 3 of your friends to agree on where to eat for lunch. Try getting all of your friends to follow you to a different social network, where they have to create new accounts, etc. If you have that kind of clout, you should start a religion.
I’ll just paste here what I wrote elsewhere:
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The average person is tech illiterate, so having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask. It may be easy for you or me, but we’re here on Lemmy, so that immediately makes us not the average.
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The average person also doesn’t care what a federated platform is. They just want something that is convenient and works. Same as the above point; maybe we would be willing to sit down and figure things out, but others will consider that a waste of time and bad.
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In that sense, federated platforms are a major failure, as picking instances and creating accounts is a hassle rather than a convenience.
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From personal experience, trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating. Some rules were too restrictive, some rules were too vague, other rules looked like they were created for sensitive little snowflakes. It was like reading through the rules of Discord servers. Not a good look for a social media platform.
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Something like Bluesky tries to be both; a platform without algorithms (or only user-created algorithms that you can choose to subscribe to), where you can make your own instance or just be part of its centralised instance. The fact that the overwhelming number of people choose the latter should tell you enough about what people want.
The signup process for Bluesky is the same as Mastodon. You can join the “main instance” at joinmastodon.com or choose an alternative instance. Most people aren’t going to wade through the sets of rules on alternative instances like you did; they’ll just join the default instance at joinmastodon.com.
having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask
Email is the usual analogy.
trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating.
Your average person will just land on mastodon.social without bothering to read the TOS… i mean rules, you know that.
And you missed a real key argument: network effect. If average person’s friends are on platform XYZ, that’s where average person will be (although this is stronger with messengers).
Everyone is using Gmail or Hotmail. So it’s not the same, even if it technically might be.
When I searched for Mastodon a few years back the first page I landed on was one where I had to browse and choose an instance. If that was what most people saw back then during the first Twatter exodus, then nobody is going to look back.
The average person is where all their friends, who are also average people, will go. And that’ll be on the platform that requires the least effort to sign up to. Which isn’t Mastodon.
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UX is always going to be the number one priority for a SoMe, when people have to pick one. People are not suckers for wanting proper solutions. FOSS projects need to prioritise this much higher that many of them do, otherwise they will never crawl out of the shadows and in to the light and forever stay with the nerds willing to accept an inferior UX.
Removed by mod
Consider the following: No.
It’s not our responsibility to make FOSS projects better, blaming consumers for wanting a feature prioritized is ridiculous and counter productive. Ease of use is something FOSS projects need to have to be viable to the general populace
You aren’t a consumer with FOSS. You’re part of a community. It’s an entirely different paradigm.
If you don’t like the service that you’re getting for free, there are a couple of options. One that’s already been suggested is to pitch in and help make it better yourself. Another is to start paying. Make donations. Offer to pay developers for the features that you want. Pool your money with other users who also want those features. Developer bounties are a thing.
My wife and daughter use LibreOffice, neither one feels they are part of a community because they’re using FOSS. That’s not how this works.
People use a tool or piece of software because it does what they need and generally stays out of their way. They’re not going to jump ship to be part of a community because. Sure there are people that enjoy working on it, and there’s people who will donate money to make the software better, but you’re not going to convince people to choose FOSS for “the community”. You’re going to convince them by offering a better tool, at a better price without negatively impacting their workflow. That extends to all FOSS just as it extends to normal software and services.
I’m not trying to convince people to use FOSS here. I’m explaining how users of FOSS aren’t “consumers”. It’s understandable that you’d make demands for a service which you are paying for. In the case of FOSS, you’re using a free service, so you can threaten to take your “business” elsewhere, but it makes no difference because you aren’t contributing to the project in the first place.
Imagine if a user of Wikipedia started making demands about what features the site should have, how it should be run, etc. Somebody who had never donated or even edited an article. What do you think the reaction would be?
Or just use a better interface somewhere else 🤷 there is no reason to use a service, free or not, where ur expected to make it better yourself instead of just using a better service
Damn you’re an insufferable asshat
Yeah he beat that horse to death but he has a point.
Snot’s just frustrated watching history repeat again with literally the same exact people running it. I get it completely.
I know what you are but what am I?
Also, no one is expecting bluesky to avoid succumbing to enshittification. People will just jump ship to a new social media platform as they always have. Mastodon has been around for a long time at this point, but people jump to Mastodon, find it confusing, and leave for something easier to use
People will just jump ship to a new social media platform as they always have.
That isn’t how this works. Nobody’s jumped ship from Facebook despite all the myriad complaints people have had about it for over a decade now.
The only reason why people are moving to BS is because Musk helped a wannabe dictator get elected. In the USA. That’s pretty extreme, and if BS didn’t exist, they would still be on Twitter.
Ur on lemmy, ur literally proof people will jump ship eventually
Mastodon could have perfect UI and still lose to bluesky. Normal people don’t trust foss and mastodon has no advertising budget.
“Normal people” don’t know, or care, what FOSS is. The lack of advertising does hurt, though.
Much like lemmy, my mastodon feed and general engagement has started to fizzle out. I’m seeing people I used to follow on mastodon no longer active, but now on Bluesky. 🤷♂️
I have no complaints about Lemmy, but posting on Mastodon is basically screaming into the void - I’ve been trying for more than a year, and I basically hardly ever get any reaction at all. In comparison, in the first week on Bluesky I found multiple people following me, commenting on my silly wine and cactuses posts, and in general just interacting.
Don’t get me wrong, I still prefer Mastodon technically and ethically, but it’s just so goddamned barren and dead I feel completely unmotivated to post there…
On Mastodon in settings you need to enable your account discoverability. Otherwise people will see you only if they know about you. This is weird default and my main complain about Mastodon :(
Perhaps try to interact with other people on mastodon instead of expecting to grow a follower base? It ain’t tiktok, ya know?
Something is wrong with you.
My Lemmy feed is bangin’. Live long and prosper 🖖
It’s hard for communities to switch from twitter to bluesky eve with starter packs, custom feeds, etc. Not all people are into programming and that’s basically the only community in mostodon.
can we “use” mastodon if we already have lemmy accounts?
Yes (somewhat), just like you can post on Lemmy with Honk, but note that all ActivityPub software, while speaking the same protocol, interacts best with its own kind. Yet.
Yep. They’ve only raised $15M so far which is a modest amount by relative standards. If they paid it back right now then I would give them some breathing room for these naive, grandiose statements. Oh but then how would their staff get rich without an IPO? If they could become profitable NOW they could maybe go employee-owned and avoid selling their ass to the stock market.
Of course none of that will happen. Optimistically they will take on more investment money and then go public or get acquired by some other entity and these hippie-ass remarks from their CEO will look like what they are: pipe dreams brought on by their first blush of success. And that’s charitable. Her comments are so naive it’s plausible she’s straight up lying through her teeth right now.
Everyone in tech wants to get buy-a-house rich and quit. No one is in this for humanity.
They have already started letting transphobic journalists harass people without consequence. They are repeatedly unbanning Jesse Singal. Its already enshittified.
Tried mastodon, went through three instances, at the end hosted my own single user, ultimately decided the hassle was not worth it. I would rather use nothing than mastodon.
Using nothing is preferable to feeding the beasts that consume and control us.
Mastodon sucks really bad. It’s a complete dead end for an artist.
How does it suck?
Its one if the most well made Android apps I have used and everything so far is intuitive other than DNS website verification
I’ll just paste here what I wrote elsewhere:
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The average person is tech illiterate, so having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask. It may be easy for you or me, but we’re here on Lemmy, so that immediately makes us not the average.
-
The average person also doesn’t care what a federated platform is. They just want something that is convenient and works. Same as the above point; maybe we would be willing to sit down and figure things out, but others will consider that a waste of time and bad.
-
In that sense, federated platforms are a major failure, as picking instances and creating accounts is a hassle rather than a convenience.
-
From personal experience, trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating. Some rules were too restrictive, some rules were too vague, other rules looked like they were created for sensitive little snowflakes. It was like reading through the rules of Discord servers. Not a good look for a social media platform.
-
Something like Bluesky tries to be both; a platform without algorithms (or only user-created algorithms that you can choose to subscribe to), where you can make your own instance or just be part of its centralised instance. The fact that the overwhelming number of people choose the latter should tell you enough about what people want.
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Venture capital and crypto money do not last forever and they need to maintain and run a for-profit corporation.
The question is not IF they will sell some soft of “pro accounts” and have advertising, the question is only WHEN they will have it. My guess is before Q3/2025.
Exactly, they’re in the “growth” part of the business stage, where they get investors giving them money because of the explosion of user growth. In other words, the explosion of available eyes to put ads in front of. They’re literally investing based on the growth of the user base, which is tied to how much ad-buy can be involved.
Growth phase = lucy holding the football
I expect subscriptions soon. I don’t mind subscriptions as much as I mind advertisment honestly. Advertising is negative content for these types of services. It detracts and makes the service way less useful but subscriptions at least will fund upkeep at a greater efficiency of user per dollar than ads.
To lurkers, consider financially supporting the fediverse particukarly the homeservers you use if you aren’t running your own.
And at the same time they will offer a premium plan in which there are no ads.
Reshaping!?
Its a washed down solution of half Twitter half Mastodon
Since the barriers of entry on mastodon are too high for mainstream users, Bluesky is probably a good thing imo.
They are not.
Having users get use to switching platforms again is a good thing. People who are new to the Internet have always known a hand full of sites and have never had to hop platforms. The zoomers and boomers need to learn that not everything is forever.
I used to think so too, but talking about it with a few friends that genuinely gave Mastodon a shot, I changed my mind.
Federation (not easily understandable) + Lack of users (and thus content) are the main reasons.
Federation (which Bluesky also strives to achieve) is not something that you’ll even notice once registered, and the lack of users (and thus content) is a self-fulfilling prophecy, don’t you think?
What I meant behind federation was that the registration process can be hard to understand. But you’re right, after passing this step, you don’t really notice federation.
As for the self fulfilling prophecy, I think you’re right, which is why I still try to nudge my friends towards mastodon / pixelfed. I still believe in these projects, but I also don’t think Bluesky will be too detrimental to their growth.
They are VC backed. Enshittification incoming.
I mean, of course they will. They’ve got bills to pay, after all.
Out of curiosity, I checked her wikipedia page. How did she jump from a relatively regular tech career to CEO of BlueSky in 2 years?
This is just my opinion.
There were only 50 employees in BlueSky in 2021. She was probably one of the few people that started a company out of those employees. That’s what I got from her Wikipedia.
I’m gonna guess is she is liked by her coworkers, she does well in presentations.
Also bluntly, her background of being Chinese and Swiss is a good look if they plan on marketing internationally. Her age probably plays a big role. No one wants to follow a company with a CEO that’s too old or too young.
Also bluntly, her background of being Chinese and Swiss is a good look if they plan on marketing internationally. Her age probably plays a big role. No one wants to follow a company with a CEO that’s too old or too young.
You mean not cis straight white old western male, got it.
How did you get gender and sexual orientation from anything I said?
That’s what I thought, too.
Got to wait until the network effects make it hard to get the momentum to go elsewhere before really turning the enshittification screws. Look at how much it’s taken to dent twitter significantly.
I watched her talk and she is clearly not being honest. She uses a lot of buzzwords without any of the deeper philosophical underpinnings that would be necessary to truly create an open platform.
She plays like it will always be the way it is now which is frankly a lie being a for-profit entity with startup money from crypto bros.
Their terms of service will be changed when it suits them and already allow for their complete control of anything you share with them. Retaining your copyright means nothing if they can do whatever they want with what you share with them.
Finally we see the coupe de grace of binding arbitration in their terms. This is just another corporate attempt to be the next big social media thing. They will be hovering up all your personal details and selling it to marketers and AI bros before you can finishing signing on.
It’s a company, they need to make a profit. that’s fair enough when you sell an actual service or good, but in this care you just rent out a platform for people to talk from, financed by shareholders.
Renting out a speech platform for money from shareholders and being open and fair are not compatible with eachother. Even if she is genuine, she will have to respond to shareholders, she will need to make as much money as possible.
Shareholders are almost never a good thing, but for internet platforms, they’re the worst
As long as that philosophy doesn’t reach FOSS philosophy, that’s fine. Imagine if Fediverse social media suddenly didn’t really want to “enshitify” their platforms, but included trackers and ads?
See that’s kind of the thing though, Ads is a broad spectrum. We can think of it as small things like the old google one blue line of text off to the side in the old days, the huge popups that force you to view them etc…
Bottom line there’s a scale there.
|few and easy to ignore] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Many and forces you to pay attention to them before you can reach what you came for]
and the bottom line is, far left on that spectrum, is negligable profit. If you can tune out the ads easily and just focus on the content you want… that means the advertisers aren’t getting new sales/visits etc… that they want. Which means, they will pay very little for them.
Point is, the hypothetical hope of “well when their investors ask them to make it profitable, they will just put a tiny banner in the far corner”, is a no go.
Not to mention the algorithms that lock your attention to the ad. YouTube does this a lot. I just watch all the commercial, because it knows well (through diffing and other techniques) what I will watch completely. I guess I’ll get used to it. I have also been clicking more on ads around the webpages, but I don’t think this is to my liking. The technology is just getting better. This is really bad, but it’s beyond salvation right now. I believe all we can do is mitigate the effects of ads on the Internet. I’m glad we have alternatives.
I reject the idea that things like Mastadon, Bluesky, Lemmy, etc will ever actually be good things.
Elon turned Twitter alt right, but it was a shithole for years before he bought it. Twitter started being a bot infested outrage farm echo chamber with questionable moderation practices in like 2014.
Reddit was in some ways better before it went corporate, but in a lot of ways it was much worse. Like all things considered I’d rather be on a website that has a shitty mobile app and mods that sell access to corporations than a website where there are communities dedicated to softcore child porn and teenagers getting death threats over jackdaws.
Even if the fediverse fulfills its promise of not going down the corporate rabbit hole, they are still going to end up being a collection of inherently toxic echo chambers.
I reject that you lump a commercialized platform with decentralized ones. It kind of makes me think you are full of it to begin with.
What happened to Twitter after Muskrat can’t be compared to anything I have ever seen. It is a disservice to reality to try and play like Twitter was already like that. It is now purely a propaganda platform used to subvert democracy.
Reddit was way better before going corporate. You have to be a real bootlicker to think the corporation improved it. You cite some questionable reddits as proof corporate cleaned it up. I just see them commercializing the hard work of millions of people without compensation.
The Fediverse has already fulfilled it promise. While it may not be the final version of the future of decentralization, it is a great start.
I will never give my information or time to another corporate ran social media platform. They proved they are all abusive fucks aand are at war with the very users that allow their platforms to exist.
So, this is a lot.
I guess I’ll start with you calling Elon Musk “Muskrat”. This is like a middle school level insult. It makes your already immature argument seem even more immature. I’m straight up not sure if I’m arguing with a literal child at this point.
Two, Twitter was better before Musk bought it, but it wasn’t in any way good. A million different toxic trends either started or blew up on Twitter. The 2010s was filled with a million different dumbass pearl clutching moments that started with a bunch of terminally online Twitter users making a mountain out of a molehill. It was basically just a constant stream of outrage and sanctimonious nonsense.
That’s not to mention there was plenty of hate speech and attempts to undermine democracy, because the moderation team only really enforced the rules when it came to conservative talking points. You had NYTimes reporters tweeting out how white people should all kill themselves without consequences, while Twitter went around banning people for clowning on laid off journalists by telling them to “learn to code”. Donald Trump was banned, but the Supreme Leader of Iran was welcome with open arms.
Even then, Twitter played a huge role in the formation of the alt right because they were always at least six months too late when it came to banning anyone. The culture war doesn’t get off the ground if Twitter just blacklists a bunch of straight up Russian propaganda websites and banhammers Milo. They also were extremely late to the party when it came to banning those ISIS recruitment videos, which is even more inexcusable.
I reject the idea that reddit was ever really that good. It was better in some ways, but a lot of the most toxic reddit moments happened before it went corporate. Off the top of my head:
- The softcore child porn
- The stalker pictures of women
- The time they had a huge thread where they all collectively gained sympathy to rapists
- The “seduction” subreddits that basically attempted to convince naive young men that “seduction” meant putting women into a situation where they consented due to extreme social pressures.
- The time they identified the wrong person as the Boston bomber
The non toxic content was extremely hit or miss. You’d get more in depth discussion, but it would be between a ton of extremely myopic pseudo intellectual posts. Basically half of reddit was something like:
- Religion bad, but only Christianity
- I am euphoric because my atheism and intelligence enlightens me
- Republicans bad
- I have literal superpowers now that I stopped masturbating
- Some half true historical fact that gets repeated a million different times because it fits everyone’s worldview
- Keanu Reeves
- Rage comics
- DAE hate sportsball ???
Finally, a huge portion of the reason reddit went downhill was the unpaid mods. They were often unwell individuals who used their position to push progressive politics. There was a good five years where basically every sub over a certain size was essentially a progressive politics sub, because they were all modded by the same people who saw the users as a captive audience.
Social media just isn’t a good place for unique content or discourse. That’s not gonna change no matter who the owner is.
That was a lot. Just kidding, you basically confirmed everything I said, you just took your time doing it. I find it funny you think insulting poor Elon would somehow detract from what I said.
Let me break it down for you. Elon is a Nepo baby manchild sexually assaulting conman. The real immaturity is people who are boot lickers buying into his propaganda that he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else.
This is of course bullshit as the thing he knows the most about us fucking his own employees to produce twelve, that we know of, crotch goblins that he does not take care of. Not only is he a shit dad he has already disowned one of his children confirming the garbage human he is.
He is not really CEO of two companies, this is a fantasy as it is not humanly possible. He does not really have involvement in five other businesses, he doesn’t even have the time to be two CEO at once. He does not care of his children. He does spend a lot of time voicing his shit opinions on Twatter, doing drugs, and playing video games. These are the things we can confirm he does
So please tell me I am child because I recognize he is a charlatan.
My original comment was about how that Twitter and Reddit were toxic long before they were “ruined”, and that Bluesky/Mastadon/Lemmy will probably run into the same problem even without any corporate interference.
You are a child because you just saw Elon’s name and had a complete conniption, and have repeatedly attempted to make the entire conversation about him as opposed to the nature of social media.
You also have the tone of a teenager who is arguing against someone obligated to listen, be polite, and attempt to get you to grow up even in the most minor of ways. You have this “fuck you I’m right” level of vitriol is designed to either piss people off or shock people into backing down. You have this prose that alternates between oddly formal and shit you’d see in a discord chat rooms. Anyone who doesn’t already emphatically agree with you is just going to tune you out.
As I have stated earlier, Twitter was toxic before Elon. Reddit was arguably more toxic before it went corporate. I dont think any of these fediverse sites solve the fundamental problems that made these sites so toxic.
Your original statement was designed to conflate entirely different platforms as all toxic inherently regardless of corporate influence. This is demonstrably wrong.
Corporations have pushed these communities to become far more toxic through algorithms to push engagement thus creating the echo chambers you seem to be so concerned about.
Listen, I know it is not always easy to agree with people and I agree with most of what you say. I am just pointing out you are a little bit wrong about this one thing and that is open platforms that are not controlled by a singular entity are better and should not be lumped in with the corporate trash.
I am sorry you have a boner for Elon. That is you boo. You brought him a up so I talked about him. That is how conversations work in the real world.
Let me explain how stupid your prose of you must be a teenager which is meant to demean your fellow commenter is. You talk about being polite when you are the one being an asshole. So please spare me your shit.
You think open non-centralized platforms are no better than commercialized monetized platforms that actually create echo chambers. Your opinion is simply garbage.
i like jay but they need to do something about the brewing aaron rodericks/jesse singal drama and actually ban him permanently if they want to keep the trust of trans users
Just another parasite leeching folks…
“thanks to vibrant community of posters” ,🤣
Bluesky is already coming apart. My partner uses it and last night she got a video of a person being shot in her feed. No warning. No label. Just blam!
Their influx of new users don’t all want to participate in labeling and moderation and they don’t seem to be able to handle it.
Why would the users participate in moderating? That’s the job of the commercial platform holder.
I mean labeling their posts accurately to give other the choice.
That’s mostly a Mastodon thing. Part of the reason why Mastodon has a weird reputation is that you are more than encouraged to label your posts there, or there WILL be comments.
Let’s just hope that Jay Graber is another Jack Dorsey and that the company Bluesky is bought by an Elon Musk 2.0
