from geosoco@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world on 22 Sep 2023 01:15
https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/477236
Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.
Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform's entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.
The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website "Bluesky Stats." Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.
It's impossible to know whether Musk's comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.
threaded - newest
isn’t bluesky invite only?
Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.
Google+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.
In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that’s been way more successful than G+
Gmail was also both "federated" and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn't all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.
Gmail was literally the best. 1GB space at launch when you’d get a dozen MB in Hotmail and others, slick fast UI in a browser.
And you got more space the longer you had the account! Then everyone got the same no matter what. I was sad to loose all that free space.
“Never delete an email”. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
IIRC, that was rolled out as a surprise after a few years. People were just like, "WTF, my capacity is getting bigger?". For a while there, Goggle could do no wrong from a marketing standpoint. That, uhh, changed.
Hotmail was 2mb.
It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.
Gmail was invite only at first probably because Google didn’t want it to grow faster than they could buy hard drives. It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge. I’m certain they did that for technical reasons.
Might Bluesky be doing the same?
Slow roll until the infrastructure can handle it and a little bit of that “exclusive” feel to it since not everyone can just join immediately.
So more Gmail than G+
Yeah they’re working hard on scaling, they’ve had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now
“i am the choosen one!” As if…
Boy, our servers are ducktaped!
It's also easier to find and fix bugs with smaller numbers of people, especially performance bugs which can be amplified at scale. So it gives them a lot of time to work through issues over the beta. It also gives them time to build teams around the expanding infrastructure and build processes for monitoring and handling issues as a larger team.
Plus, these invite only periods start with more tech savy early adopters who more willing to put up with issues, and willing to provide decent bug reports to fix them.
You’re right, but for those who may not know the details or the impact at the time, Google was offering 500x more storage - at the free tier - than some of the competition - hotmail - who were charging people for just 10 MB of storage. This forced hotmail to increase its free tier to 250 MB and 2 GB for customers paying $20 USD/year.
Source: web.archive.org/…/hotmail-to-offer-250mb-of-free-…
It's hard to explain what an absolute paradigm shift Gmail was. It was about as drastic a difference as you could have with personal email without altering the core service. Orders of magnitude more storage, completely free to the end user, a responsive and usable web interface, a single unobtrusive 1-line text ad when we were used to at least half a dozen that were often full-size banners or even popups, and a good search tool.
My wife (then fiancee) got us invites, and it was like Christmas. And all from the company that was way less creepy than Microsoft! I'm sure that part would never change.
I’m still salty about that. Google+ was fantastic on release. Simple, clean, elegant, and fast. Then they steadily, systematically fucked it up. By the time it was cancelled, it had become unusable.
G+'s downfall was they kept it invite-only too long. Demand was there, people wanted in but Google was like, “Nah…”
By the time it was open-access, everyone had moved on or back to their old social media platforms. It could’ve been great, but Google, in typical Google fashion, got distracted by something shiny and killed it.
The sad thing is, if they'd thought even a tiny bit laterally and leveraged the fact that Google Reader was getting a lot of traction and a core of people were beginning to use its social functions, they could have backdoored themselves into being Digg/Reddit/Etc. and had the social media userbase to take on Facebook organically.
Instead, they fought the last war (Gmail vs Hotmail), intentionally eroded and then killed Reader, and with G+ they completely fucked up what was a cleaner interface (if not all that special) and a better technological experience, all while they were a brand that was at that time more trusted than their competitors.
Yep. Once they screwed up G+, I committed to never becoming dependent on any Google service beyond Drive and Gmail, and only those two because they’re completely untouchable - Google couldn’t break those without having a mass rebellion on its hands.
So, in the shape of a pyramid? Sounds like a good business model. I wonder if anyone has ever done that before? (yes, it’s a joke)
Yup. I have a bunch of invites (for sane people only)
Uhh… I can’t prove I’m sane, but a DM would be nice…!
This guy is crazy! Don’t listen to him!
Welp. Was worth a shot…
I requested an invite a couple of months ago when I downloaded the app. Wish someone would invite me!
If I could have one, I’m waiting for months now. :(
I would love one if you have a spare.
I would love an invite if you have any left
I’d love an invite if it’s still available (:
Yes but I’m sure many recorded invites and didn’t bother. Musk musking TSFKAT ( the-site-formerly-known-as-twitter) was the needed motivation to accept it.
I didn’t bother and was gonna give it a walk around. Downloaded but can’t access without an invite.
.
I would prefer not to use the letter in any form.
Fuck Ruskie Muskie
Xitter (pronounced shitter)
Yes, that's part of what's surprising about the number.
It says that in the first sentence
lol they didn’t even bother reading the lemmy description. 😂
I’ve been trying to get an invite since June.
Apparently if you ask, you’re not good enough or some shit.
You’re not missing anything. I eventually got an invite, found that 40% of the content was furry and I deleted my account.
Invite only is a fascinating choice for a social network that requires network effect to succeed.
Gmail is the most famous/successful example but interesting to note that email is a federated network that can interoperate with every other email address too.
What about this bluesky network?
Record sign-ups my ass. I just joined today. Sites dead. Dorsey doesn't even have an account there anymore. Jimmy Wales social media site is doing much better albeit way less people.
Weird I signed up to be notified whenever it went active and have never received an invite.
I signed up ages ago too, but I don't think they ever sent them out like that. I got an invite from someone else.
Oh well sounds like I’m not missing much.
Depends on your interests, my feed is too active. It's a lot of shitposting, some academics, journalists, and some just very online people.
A lot of very prolific folks from Twitter moved there.
Have any extra invites?
Sadly, I'm out at the moment.
They did early on. I got one that way when it was mostly developers and the app was basically a super early beta.
It seems like that slowed down when they realized the invite tree is a really good moderation tool. Like if they catch a spammer or CSAM pervert or whatever, they can see who invited them and nip that shit in the bud.
Also, they recently passed 1 million users and the developers said they’ll have to make some backend changes to handle 10 million users. So, they apparently really do need to manage growth and can’t just open it up.
They do send out invites to the waiting list but it definitely don’t represent the majority of invites being sent out
Incorrect. My bluesky feeds are lively af, it doesn’t work the same way twitter works. Spend more time looking around on there, maybe find some reading material on how to make bluesky engaging for you? It did take me a few days to figure the app out.
Same. Mine's too lively, but it is fairly heavily skewed towards some specific interests.
I check maybe once a day, but I can't keep up with all that's going on there.
I haven’t been on long but it’s definitely active.
Care to share an invite?
I guess I gotta find more people. I'll keep posting and see if anything changes.
Check out the feeds section, do some searches for your interests and add those feeds. I also lucked out by finding bluesky’s version of “black twitter” fairly quickly.
Jack Dorsey had an account but he got run off for being an anti-vaccine crypto dork. People just mocked him so he left and went to Nostr where his crowd hangs out. (He’s a significant investor in all of the for-profit ones, including Twitter. He doesn’t run any of them day-to-day, though, so there’s not really any reason for him to be on BlueSky socially.)
Lmao I thought it was cause he got bullied by the 196-crowd but that's equally funny. I always figured him to be the Bluesky main guy so it's kinda weird he isnt active on his own site.
And Threads?
Or Mastodon?
Yes, I also want to know how it is affecting the Mastodon user base.
You can check on fediverse growth anytime on fediDB, though not with daily granularity.
mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
You can see a spike in the last couple days. We went from about 30k/week to a 50k+ in this past week.
I found this which has registrations and posts for mastodon / fediverse over hour / day / week / month but it breaks it out by instances so can be a bit difficult to tell overall. Here's mastodon in the last 7 days for example.
I'd bet mastodon saw an increase, but i haven't seen the numbers.
It's also hard to get a good count since it's not centralized. So whatever numbers we do see, could be wildly underreported.
mastodon-analytics.com
Although it looks like this is 3 days behind.
mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount I discovered this after searching abit
I refuse to touch anything related to Facebook. I’m shocked that people would use Threads or Instagram for that matter.
I’ve been on the waitlist for awhile now. I don’t know anyone on it so I can’t get a code, unfortunately. Wish I was
.
I got an invite from the only person I actually know on it and it’s not bad. I’m interested, but still messing around with it to get the most out of it.
I have some left, message me if you still need one.
Ooo me please :)
Waitlist? Are you in USSR?
Bluesky's really highkey. You need an invite or gotta sit on the waitlist for months to get an account. Real elite stuff.
.
I do wonder how many are bots. Most of Twitter is bots anyway
Always good to see more people looking into platforms besides Twitter, plenty of great places out there
Until they sell that platform too and you have to grow your follower base somewhere else yet again.
Bluesky has federation in testing in a sandbox open to external developers, already interoperating with 3rd party implementations
.
It's not even Fediverse either. It's their own protocol. Can't even really federate much either.
.
They have federation on in their sandbox network with 3rd party clients already working, but it’s not going to talk activitypub
Non-activitypub federated protocols? Who is even the 3rd party in this instance? Nostr?
Nostr is a wildly different protocol from atprotocol and activitypub.
Activitypub is very much like email (SMTP) over http, pushing messages between servers. Atprotocol is instead using a model of a repository with profile and posts per user on federated servers along with aggregation servers (CDN-ish) and a pull model for retrieval. Nostr is a P2P protocol with “gossip nodes”
Yeah, I more I learn about this stuff I can't see the purpose of this new protocol versus the existing ones (not to even mention all the activitypub/fediverse spinoffs too).
Account portability for one thing, with accounts being defined by the DID and repository and not server name + path you can easily switch servers
They don’t use AP, so there is no federation to begin with.
.
They don’t intend do use open protocol. And it’s more centralized than you expect.
They do have an open protocol (atprotocol) but it’s not compatible with anything existing
Yeah and also Gmail should defederate Skype.
… Wait what’s that it’s different protocols? Oh well
Hahaha, no. It’s like MTProto in Telegram, but without being honest that it’s centralized.
Every single component have 3rd party implementations or an alternative which doesn’t depend on them (standard account DID lookups go through their servers but web DID is fully independent). The options he says nobody will create ALREADY EXISTS
The protocol literally doesn’t allow them to be gatekeepers.
Authentication is heavily tied to their servers
You can initialize your account with your own DID key using web DID instead of the current (technically placeholder DID) and you won’t be dependent on their servers for authentication. Especially in the federation sandbox that’s available for 3rd parties
From what you say I can approximate how it will go. First perpetual in-dev federation, then once they get enough people, they will say “not enough interest in federation” and stop development or pull the plug completely.
Except federation is already functional with 3rd party implementations. Sure it’s possible they would choose to diverge in the official implementation in a closed branch, but that would not stop the rest of the clients from working. It’s like if the biggest Mastodon instance went proprietary and shut down federation, the people who care would leave.
The main things they’re working on are moderation tools suitable for federation as well as scaling
Strange to measure it against an invite only site, I would love to sign up but I haven’t been able to find invites. I think between Mastodon, Bluesky & Threads via ActivityPub (eventually) will get most of my communities back.
I love Mastodon & prefer it in many ways but there just aren’t enough people there. The tech & dev community is lively, everything else is essentially non-existent.
It's a convenience article. They're just reporting some number they have access to.
And why Threads instead of Mastodon if you belive it will use ActivityPub.
Broners are pretty active there. Biggest instance is equestria.social, some people use or run smaller instances, some use GP instances.
Threads has momentum and easy signups, it’s simple for people. I wouldn’t use it myself directly but I’m sure it would help expand the communities that are available via a Mastodon client.
Do you want one? I have a spare.
Sure, that would be amazing. Thank you!
I just realized I have no idea how to pm someone on here
Not sure via the mobile apps, and there are so many. From the regular Lemmy web interface, you just tap their name anywhere which takes you to their profile and then tap “Send Message” in the top right corner.
Found it!
Great another social media platform from the same fart huffing dumb asses that sold Twitter… it’s like people don’t learn lessons.
.
FYI jack isn’t in control of the site and in fact even deleted his account after the userbase mocked him hard enough, he’s all in on nostr now
Also it has federation in testing in a sandbox environment open to external developers, it will work similarly to Mastodon in that regard
“Mr Dorsey, ypur new platform is picking up, people are starting to use it”
“… I’m bored”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to have a social platform. I just want to make them” *Starts to leave*
“Mr. dorsey? Where are you going? Jack!?”
“Federation”, yeah…
Nope, it works more similar to MTProto for Telegram.
Uhm no not at all, 3rd party servers already exists and people can talk across them, telegram has no relevance here
I love that I mentioned fart huffing and you automatically assumed I meant Jack.
I learned today that you’d have to be confined in a small room with approximately a year’s worth of farts before you risk asphyxiation.
Not my farts, that’d only take about a month
TIL
Americans be like “I like fascism I just don’t like THIS fascism”
I firmly believe Elon is trying to run Twitter out of relevancy, or business entirely.
As Twitter is a big PR tool for Ukraine he’s again doing Putin a favour.
I agree but I don’t understand why. What motivated him to sink 1/4th of his net worth into Twitter then kill it?
Knowing this nutter he’s probably doing it so people can’t talk about the crappy Tesla QC.
Or that the cybertruck is a pathetic failure amd all his engineers hate it
The jet tracker
Twitter is a huge place where leftists organize
Probably wants to pull a reddit and push Trump
It’s also used by fascists but there have been a lot of genuine leftist organizing going down deep in the cracks of that hellsite.
The lawsuit he was destined to lose. Why do people here so often act like this was his masterplan all along? He fucked around and tried to back out, then Twitter sued him into buying the company. From what I can tell this is just Musk being Musk, reportedly he has surrounded himself with yes-men.
If that were true, the investors who paid him billions for the take over will want his head on a spike.
If you’d know who these investors are, you’d know running twitter to ground is their goal at this point as well
Ok, but why though? How do you make money when the stock value is falling?
The theory is they’re not trying to make money, but is trying to make it harder to use Twitter for organizing protests or share ideas that threaten their status quo.
Interesting. So are you saying there’s government money behind this?
Biggest investor is Saudi Arabia.
Ok, so this is just a way to prevent another Arab spring from happening. Seems like a smart move until you realize that people have lots of alternative platforms too. It’s a bit more fragmented, so organizing a demonstration on mastodon probably won’t get that big that fast.
Musk is government money
.
Plausible deniability, combined with opportunism. If they brought it, and shut it down, it would be painfully obvious. This could cause significant problems or pushback on them. Musk being an idiot provided an opportunity to them. They back musk, and he makes it non viable, however he wants. All the public outrage gets focused onto musk (who likes the attention).
I still can’t decide between the 2 options. Either musk is just THAT big of an idiot, or if it’s the result of some backroom deal. Both seem feasible.
I suspect that might have been their intent but they didn’t tell Musk. They knew him doing his best would be enough to tank it.
Yeah, his ego won’t allow him to fail with grace.
His investors are the Saudis.
The biggest funders are the Saudis, who hate Twitter for the way it allowed communication during The Arab Spring. 42 billion is nothing to them. They want Twitter to die, or be run the way the want it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
Lose $42 billion speed run challenge
Brewster’s Billions …except Brewster is a c*** this time around
I didn’t know a coffee shop owner was so rich.
Who holds WR in EU%? You know, where endgame is getting wrecked by anti-monopoly agency.
I think his Saudi funders are pleased.
If anyone has a Bluesky invite lying around, I wouldn’t mind a PM.
Pretty pleeease. 😁
Downvoted. Oops. Am I not allowed to ask that?
.
I see it like this. Ignoring it won’t do me any good. It won’t go away. So better to see what it’s all about. Like so I can have an informed conversation.
.
Not sure if I’m getting suckered into conspiracy theories with regards to Elon, the Saudis, Russia and Twitter but this article has an interesting (albeit extreme) take on the matter.
“No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating.”
…medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-…
Medium is a bad source but there’s truth that Bluesky’s CEO is a musk toesucker.
Underrated link
100% - Allied partners.
How do you sign up? I’m on the wait list for about a half year.
Mastodon or bust!
Hard to convince people. The twittersphere has fractured into about 4 different places, and masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.
And? Servers are inter-operable.
Until your home instance defederates from another instance. Sure, you can always make another account, but your average user wants a lower friction experience.
I’m reasonably active in the fediverse, but I recognize that the more explaining it takes to the average user the less likely they’re going to want to join in.
The old old top gear cool wall tried to hit on this concept. You could have a very technically excellent car classified as uncool because if you had to explain why it was cool to a normie you had already lost them.
It will be hard for the fediverse to get over this hump, which is probably why you see so many Linux users here and so few say woodworkers or other (somewhat) more niche communities.
Most average people would never notice defederation unless you told them. It’s pretty frictionless and drama free.
The niche communities are always the last to come. It’s why they’re niche. That techie people are the first is nothing damming. It’s always been that way for every service.
That’s a good point. Branding is done for a reason. When I buy a car, I don’t need to know which companies made each and every component, it’s enough for me to know that “Audi” made it.
I guess if someone made an easy entry-point for users to sign up, that became the defacto way to start with Lemmy, then it would have a lower barrier to entry. Maybe it asks them some likes/dislikes, and then it would route them to the most appropriate instance to sign up.
That the normie can’t just sign up and figure it out by using it is the problem. We have too many stupid and lazy people
Honestly I think Mastodon needs a third party app that makes it feel more like Twitter, similar to how reddit apps are switching to lemmy. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there were any third party Twitter apps that had the name recognition of the reddit ones.
THere were a few but they got bought (eg. tweetdeck).
There are also 3rd party apps for mastodon that a lot of people like, and they try. But for many people, mimicking the parts of Twitter they value is difficult to do without proper backend support for supporting algorithms, and even then the way activitypub works it still makes it difficult to support for most developers.
Two of the key features are discovering new or related content, which is hard to do in mastodon as it needs to calculate similarity across all of the profiles and their content in order to make recommendations -- or collect data like your cell contacts to help you connect with people you already know. Most people don't want contact sharing, and indexing all of the recommended profiles, especially across federated servers is challenging.
The second is engagement based recommendations. Many social media users aren't incredibly active. They want to open the app in specific moments to quickly catch up with everything since they last opened the app. To do this well, you need to know what they've engaged with and look back at content since they last logged on and rank it based on that. People may follow 1000 people, but really care about maybe 30-40 accounts the most. Friends, family, specific journalists or famous people. Mastodon just gives you like a sample of the last 50 or so items. If you follow anyone super active, you may just get a lot of noise in those updates.
Obviously, there are times when everyone wants a linear timeline, but it depends upon their daily use.
Cheer up, mastodon also gained 30000+ new users in the last two days
Edit: Source: mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
Literally. The android app is superb. It has come a long way with Material You theming, smoothness, and stuff. Compare that to the crap you would call twitter, X or whatever.
Mastodon is for mentally ill people :/ bsky ftw
Glad cracker musk is losing money over this, I just wish people wouldn’t just jump into the next boiling pot because the current one got too hot.
How the hell do you even sign up
I think you have to be invited to join BS (fnar!).
Yeah that’s why I’m wondering how the heck are they signing up
Users who already have accounts on Bluesky get access codes they can give out to others over time. You don’t even need to open the app to earn access codes. You just need an account.
Basically, as the devs let more and more people in, the platform will experience exponential growth. If the devs let in one person, that one person can let in 5 more in just 2 months time, and those 5 can let in 5 more each, and so on.
Why the hell Bluesky is still invite only is beyond me. They killed their hype during the most important time, during multiple Twitter exoduses. People wanted to swap to it but couldn’t. They were so desperate that Threads got 100m users really quick, just because people so badly wanted a Twitter alternative. Invite only doesn’t even provide any benefit.
Bluesky doesn’t apparently have all the user safety tools that it needs before opening the flood gates.
Wow we have a lot in common, neither does Lemmy lol
Artificial scarcity.
That’s the only real reasons anybody goes the invite-only route, (that and extremely lazy moderation) it’s mainly to create FOMO for popularity. That’s also why they aren’t publicly visible and require you to login to view posts.
But Twitter has been dead ever since threads took over…
Twitter has been dead for over a year. Well before threads. It started with the shadowbans and the tweaking of the algorithms to push media down our throats when all we wanted was cat photos and to talk about music.
Twitter was dead long before another billionaire bought it, you just didn’t listen to gamers.
Twitter died when they decided to tweak your timeline so it wasn’t chronological. I deleted my account back in 2013 because of that shit.
Why would anyone listen to gamers ?
I ignore the opinion of anyone who has an anime chick as their avatar.
It’s because a lot of them use anime PFPs to dog whistle their pedophilia, kind of like how neo-nazis use squidward PFPs.
The Squidward thing is new to me, whats the deal?
It’s a reference to an old nazi meme which I will not go into detail, but it involves squidward edited to have dark skin.
This is a problem. Bluesky is privately-owned and will do same shit.
Here are some explainations. And more.
It’s also controlled by another crypto shill, so it has that in common with Twitter too.
Vbe. T. Cv. C n vbubvcui… Vnx, a, a t. a. Chào. X x ih. X, nhưng, it’s x u. But v v b
Anything in form of competition is good imho.
Not too surprising.
People are so desperate for anything RESEMBLING twitter, that they’ll sign up for a trash service like BS.
Mastodon undoubtedly has more brand recognition at this point.
Honestly, before reading this comment I never noticed that BlueSky shortens to BS, lol
Apparently not. Outside of you Lemmy assholes jerking each other off nobody even knows what the fuck Mastedon, Lemmy, or any of this is. Everyone still uses Reddit you cunts.
Go home, Spez, you’re drunk
Go home overused memer, you’re a cunt.
Lol
I was interested in it but at the end of the day Dorsey got Twitter into its initially mediocre state, and he’s endorsed RFK Jr. as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter. So should I really expect it to be any better? I’ll keep an eye on it but my expectations aren’t terribly high.
I signed up just to see the hype, and it’s the same boring Twitter, with less commitment. People just grabbing namespace.
Gross. Yeah Dorsey sucks generally.
But I don’t hold this part against him. If some moron came along and offered to drastically overpay for my house, for example, I’d endorse the fuck out of that even if he’s a shitheel.
“I have never met Elon, and by all accounts he is terrible. However, I have seen the yacht that he paid for, and it is terrific.”
Did you not read the text messages between them? Jack was being a real fan boy
Of course he’s endorsed Musk purchasing Twitter, he made billions off it
I’m so glad people are calling Bluesky out for the trash service it is. I just mastodon outlasts this crap and we get more people on there than bluesky
What’s wrong with Blue sky?
It’s still a centralized. Single owner platform. Srop making assholes into millionaires
Oh, but mastodon doesn’t have a good algorithm like Twitter it is hard to switch
The whole point of Mastodon not having an algorithm to show you things is to put the user in control of what kind of content they want to see.
Why do you need an algorithm to tell you what you are interested in? You go on Mastodon and subscribe to what you want to.
Because it’s hard to find things, the normal person is used to an algorithm
I remeber Facebook before algorithms took over.
You friended and followed things, and then you’d see content from those things only in either chronological order or by recent activity. People loved it and as “the algorithm” took over people complained that they were no longer being served the content they wanted and expected and were also seeing content they did not want to see from stuff they had never followed or shared interest in.
Fuck the magical algorithm that’s tailored to serve me divisive content because that is what drives the most engagement. Or serves me content to sway my political and moral opinions to the benefit of some wannabe oligarch or government entity (looking at you TikTok/CCP).
Mastodon has algorythms. Otherwise it couldn’t display the posts in the right orders, by example.
You’re right. That word has always been kind of dumbly used as a replacement for something like, “feed manipulation controlled by corporate interests”. Every computer application uses algorithms in some way.
Yeah, but they work until someone decides to fuck it up. Federation isn’t the holy grail you think it is.
Admins (often a very very small group if not a single person managing an instance) still make unilateral decisions about federation and content or the very existence of that instance, and if your home instance suddenly defederates or goes poof, too bad, time to start over on a different instance with a new account with the exact same risks or maintain multiple accounts.
If this sounds familiar, it’s awfully similar to what reddit did with their API by cutting off access points to content which is why most of us are here. Same shit, different shade of brown.
Still not the same
Having been active on mastodon.lol and watching it get shuttered because the admin didn’t have teeth in the game shows how dangerously fragile the fediverse can be. My engagement with Mastodon as a whole has been less since mastodon.lol shut down. You can move accounts but you can’t move posts and 301s only work until the instance is gone.
I have to agree. Federation only goes a little way on the path to a proper decentralized social media system. Ideally, defederation should not be possible, and rather, community subscription should be the norm without concern over what instance it exists on.
I’m not saying it should become Usenet, but it should be more similar to Usenet than it is now.
CEO is a musk toesucker.
And of cource i misread that as “CEO is Mr. mark toesucker”
If you run “Mark Zuckerberg” through google translate a few dozen times I’m sure it’ll spit that out at some point
I want to like it but they refuse to open up the platform still after Twitter keeps handing them opportunity after opportunity and I’m afraid their chances to succeed are going to wane.
They’re focusing on scaling and moderation tools that can handle federation better (especially spam management), they don’t think that’s ready yet. But you can federation it in their sandbox environment
I wonder why people aren’t going for mastodon.
They are as well!
Was a open source platform run on donations entirely ever be a competition for something huge like Twitter? This is a first afaik.
I’d say Bitcoin is a bigger example.
yeah but like yesn’t. bitcoin isn’t a good example imo
How so? A decentralized open source platform with no owner which has a 500B market cap and 220 millions users.
I feel like that’s exactly what we are talking about. I understand the negative sentiment over crypto, but this is a fact.
Or maybe the difference is that it hasn’t stifled some competitor platform yet. I can agree with that because it’s not a parallel in that it’s competing with nothing.
Do people either make money or think they’ll make money simply by using the Fediverse? One can certainly advertise via guerrilla marketing on a Fediverse platform but it’s far more lucrative to advertise on mainstream social media.
Are you saying brands don’t want to come to the fediverse to market their products? I mean if that’s true that seems like a good thing, and even if it wasn’t I’m sure they would once Lemmy/Mastadon are big enough
No I’m pointing out why the comparison to Bitcoin is inaccurate. It’s like saying that your open-source software project will work because the Linux kernel worked. The sole point of similarity has little relevance.
The Fediverse isn’t asset speculation, Bitcoin is.
I’m on there, but I use Twitter and mastodon as a follower, I don’t post. So until most of the 40ish people I follow move I’m stuck with Twitter if I want to see their posts. And I do.
depending on how popular the user is on Twitter, you may be able to follow them on Mastodon via bird.makeup. I use it to follow things like larger content creators, NHL teams, stuff like that.
Oh interesting. I was unaware.
The same reason people aren’t going for Lemmy.
Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user, those same users are entrenched and connected to everyone they already want to be connected to on the same platform. Until they are essentially forced to move, they’ll stay on Twitter. The people on Lemmy and Mastodon right now are a tiny but vocal minority compared to the massive userbases of the platforms they abandoned.
Yeah there really needs to be a rethink of how the Fediverse works.
I don’t want to have to subscribe to 8 different “Games” subs each with under 3000 users.
It really should be like “topics” more than “sublemmys” (or whatever) where every post on the Fediverse tagged “games” will appear on your feed when you subscribe to the topic.
The topics still get moderated by the local instance topic moderators and instances can defederate from troubled instances, but discoverability would improve exponentially.
Maybe how it could work is sublemmies could agree to link up and share posts so for example the posts from one games sub would appear in the other games sub and vice versa.
It seems the limitation with the topics idea is who would decide what the topics are? Would there just be a list of like 20 topics baked into Lemmy and people that create sublemmies would tag their sub with a topic? I think the only limitation with that is there would be so many niche subs that don’t fit cleanly into one topic, or will be drowned out by the big subs in there maybe. Maybe it could work though if anybody could create new topics, then there could be a Fallout for example with the Fallout subs being in that rather than having to be in the games topic and being drowned out
Yeah it sorta needs to be back to hashtags to tag content so that it can all be in a community despite being in different instances and subs. It’s really disjointed and currently the fediverse feels like we went back to AOL chat rooms where it’s a lot of people waiting in their own room for someone to come in and talk to them.
It doesn’t work and it doesn’t really inspire conversation anymore.
Yeah it is like that unfortunately. I mean the larger subs are fine but the niche ones just aren’t working on Lemmy atm and some way of addressing the sub splintering would help a lot. And yeah hashtags would probably be a solid way of addressing it.
How did the average user ever figure out email?
Mastadon (and the Fediverse in general, to some extent) has problems with discoverability and the average user finds federation confusing. People tend to either use microblogging to see what’s going on with people they’re interested in or to broadcast their activities to a large group of people, and Mastadon currently doesn’t fit that niche very well.
Pretty much this. It’s why I love it for my use case (microblogging journal that only I can see), but it’s definitely not for everyone else.
It’s why if your average influencer or news consumer wants a Twitter alternative, it’s likely Threads or perhaps BlueSky, not Mastodon.
.
different features and scalability
.
Whut? github.com/mastodon/mastodon
github.com/mastodon/mastodon
Have you at all attempted to look? It’s open source.
.
What is why it is not being “downloaded”? It seems you don’t actually understand how it works. You realize we are talking on a federated network right now, yeah? You must be trolling.
.
.
Point it out and share it with everyone. That’s what FOSS is all about. I bet you won’t.
.
I’m not going to entertain your buffoonery.
but it is under the: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 Permissions of this strongest copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. When a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source code of the modified version must be made available.
So he cant revoke anyone of using the software he contributes
It seems like you’re deliberately misrepresenting, but I’ll explain anyway because I know that some people might be confused.
The Mastodon app is a client on your phone which accesses servers in the network.
The network consists of multiple servers that are interconnected to each other. Content from one server is automatically cross-hosted to other servers when it is discovered on those other servers. That’s how Federation works. I know it’s probably an oversimplification of how activitypub works, but it’s generally good enough for most people, and the important part is really that content is present and visible on other servers.
When you sign up to a server your account is stored on that server, the posts that you make are stored on that server, as well as automatically cross hosted to other servers which have people following you.
If the owner of a server pulls the plug for whatever reason the content on that server will no longer be directly accessible, if your account is there you will lose your account. The copies on other servers will remain as they have been copied. The rest of the network will continue operating without that server and the accounts that were hosted on it.
About asking whether or not an instance owner can sue instances they don’t like, that sounds like absolute nonsense and I’m not even going to bother trying to understand whatever point you’re trying to make with this.
Of course they won’t. They’re shilling their own product which is a competitor to Mastodon.
.
Not only is it open, but you can check it out yourself and install right from source if you really want to get under the hood.
I’ve seen folks out there running a 1-person masto instance, just so they can partake in the fedi from their own fully sovereign platform. Bit extreme for me, but cool that it’s an option. Definitely not just another FB in other words
EDIT: Oh dang there’s a one-click app on DO even.
Congratulations of joining mastodon today. 😆
.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, 42k out of 528M is nothing
Who is the target audience for BlueSky?BlueSky’s tech isn’t as open or developed as the alternatives though, is it?Edit:
Not sure why I asked that first question, answer’s obvious, so it was more out of frustration I think. Sort of in a similar way towards people moving to Threads or any other corporate social media again after getting screwed before.
it’s invite only, which first makes you think, “oh cool - no spammers!”
but then you realize you just need one spammer to get in and now they only invite spammers, and control their invites… as a form of spam! Flooding the net with “cheap” invite codes (only $10!) and multiplying.
Invite only makes people think no spammers? Have they never been in any space with minimal obstacles to entry like that? Any place people are, there’s going to be someone or some activity you don’t care for.
Makes me think of folks thinking there will be fewer annoying people in online games with sub fees. 😂
Seems pretty easy to control though.
Once spammer is detected, you just ban them and the account that invited, all the way up a down that invite tree.
And in the process nuke every legitimate user who may have used their codes, great way to build trust in a new platform. You can’t even vet users to see if they are spammers or not because you need an account to view the service.
Wellp, Nintendo intentionally breaks their own games if you pirate their stuff. Not allowing bribes is a simmlar looking situation. “This product is defective the last person who had their hands on it mustve screwed it up somehow.”
I’m not aware of them doing this all that often. In fact, it’s more something that game developers do from time to time, rather than Nintendo specifically. The classic one being when they introduce a bug that only affects the pirated release, then every time they get a report on that bug they know the user pirated their copy.
Yeah I’m not sure what exactly they’re referring to. if they’re referring to the N64 games that was the developer Rare who did it, not Nintendo, Nintendo is just the publisher. If it’s related to Switch games then it’s possible they’re referring to Online only games or the many many Piracy-related myths as well as disinformation that plagues the Switch Modding scene to this day.
I mean I’ve been running a cracked Switch for years, and while my finger isn’t on the pulse entirely I’m not aware of any of this either. They definitely ban people (I’ve had one banned) but even then you can still use the device, just not online or in their store (as if you were in there much anyway).
The bigger issue in the Switch modding scene is that half the developers are divas.
Some examples of the misinformation include:
banning preventing people from using Installed Software (one person actually referred to it as bricked)
Bans preventing use of Wifi hardware (FTP or Local play)
Banned Cartridges will get other Switches banned, or that cartridges are still getting banned
Things like that are the most egregious ones.
Lately though it’s mostly been what is ban worthy and what isn’t. For that there are two camps, there are the conspiracy minded, and there are the more reasonable people.
For conspiracy theorists it’s as simple as plugging in RCM (or Booting from the Modchip if they have that instead) and booting into Stock, that’s enough for them to consider ban worthy. Some of them draw the line later at the actual firmware but the thing that these claims usually share is that they lack data backing them. It’s usually influencers who make these types of claims (hence why it’s become a cultural phenomenon, Yay 😒).
The more reasonable ones group the actions that are and aren’t ban worthy through testing and historical evidence which is mainly:
Guaranteed Ban:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/comment/3744900">
Things that don’t cause bans:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/comment/3744900">
Things still up for debate:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/comment/3744900">
(They also give methods for preventing bans, unlike the first kind of people like Using emuMMC to separate Identities, blocking Nintendo domains in the hosts file, and even using Incognito to erase the Identifier data.)
Unfortunately Popular Culture tends to prefer the first type of person’s opinion so I’ve found that when discussing Homebrew with people outside of the community it can lead to some pretty nutty arguments, even going back to ones from before, such as banning cartridges.
That is very true, many of them are assholes, I visited GBAtemp’s politics section and was astonished to find out how many of them are Bigots, at least judging by the crap they spouted about “pronouns being forced” and “not wanting to call a man Ma’am” really disgusting shit that no respectable person should ever say. Nor should any forum ever put up with (basically GBAtemp is a Nazi bar).
Those all just seem like misunderstandings from users who aren’t tech savvy, coupled with a little bit of urban legend gossip.
Hah, yeah homebrew stuff isn’t generally meant for proper conversation. You’re either interested and ok with it, or you see it as just about piracy.
Yeah I think many of them serious misunderstandings by the people who posted the videos and articles, though also some of them seem to have been to cause fear since many of them tried to make it seem like they knew what they were talking about.
I don’t think the ones who talked about systems being bricked actually knew what bricked means since they also said in the same breath “it can only play cartridges”, which isn’t what happens when bricked, in fact as I know from recovering a Switch with Prodinfo_gen that’s one of the things a previously bricked system likely can’t do if you had to generate a new prodinfo from scratch without a donor.
I could normally forgive the wifi misconception normally, however in the case of the person who was talking about Wifi not working when banned they explicitly stated that Local play between Switches won’t work anymore, even when offline, which obviously isn’t correct.
In the case of cartridge banning which was a thing it was always the cartridges themselves that were banned, but many news outlets both tried to frame it as if it was the user who would get their account banned, they also tried to make it seem like it’s an Ongoing issue and that it’s the end of used game sales.
I agree that homebrew stuff isn’t really the best thing to talk about with most people who don’t understand it well enough, usually does come up though in discussions whenever I open my Home Screen since I do have custom Themes with Wildly different layouts that obviously aren’t stock (this is the one I’m using at the moment, but I have a few others I cycle through to keep things fresh).
Invite only is a technique that becomes a hinderance and gimmic after about 100k members.
Huh I wonder why
rain is wet. hope they like starting new instances here. feel the fediverse creaking already
How is it on shakey ground, We may for a while just stay niche but active and high quality.
Can’t say I’ve felt any such issues. Probably comes down to you being on the biggest instance.
Excuse me, signups on an INVITE ONLY platform?
Ot makes no sense,
I have few invites if anyone needs
I’d like one if still available, please.
bsky-social-6yprh-qgtd3
Would appreciate one :)
bsky-social-ylgua-e7m7l
I think other miscreants have already swiped it :(
Did you check all 5
Yes
Bad luck then
.
I d like one if you can spare one
bsky-social-k4wtu-albgr
If you still have any, I’d appreciate one.
bsky-social-f36an-iw7gb
Thank you 🙏
Welcome
.
I could make use of one of those invites. Thank you.
bsky-social-ahf2c-hwzzy
Appreciate it, but you should have sent them by DM. It’s used by someone else now.
Same here :(
Any chance you have any more? I’d love one
bsky-social-exmoh-54452
Thank you!!
.
Dm me
what the fuck is Bluesky
It’s Jack Dorsey’s “Twitter but federated this time”, except there is only 1 instance, run by Jack…. But don’t worry, “Trust me bro” it will totally be federated/open.
Maybe it will be but until it is it’s just as bad as Twitter.
So is it going to be part of the fediverse at one point or will it be a separate federation?
separate federation, they use their own home-grown protocol called ATProto
Ahh as an alternative to Activity Pub or whatever it’s called? That’s a shame
Seems like it
That hasn’t been specified, which suggests they’re aiming for the latter.
God… I’ve been on the “fediverse” for months and
A: have no clue what it is
And
B: am not even entirely sure I’m on it anymore
Love Lemmy but lol this is getting confusing, is Mastodon on Lemmy or… just federated or… sheesh I need to search this
It doesn't really matter. If you find value in using it, just keep using it.
The fediverse is basically anything that uses some means of connecting to other sites. A lot of them now use ActivityPub, a standard for this kind of thing.
Mastodon isn’t “on” Lemmy, but they can communicate with each other
Why would anyone think Bluesky is any better than Twitter? There are no fundamental differences.
I mean, if
TwitterX keeps changing like it is, there will be a whole bunch of differencesIt’s not owned by Musk, which is what the average casual internet user is currently upset about with Twitter.
You are right. In principle, the AT protocol is designed for federation. But at the moment, there is only one Bluesky instance that everyone is signing up on. This makes it effectively centralized like Twitter. It is mind-boggling that people are ignoring Mastodon for this.
From a feature-functional perspective, sure, but it's not entirely true. The biggest differentiators for social media are rarely the core features, but the content and friends. There's a few specific groups that have slowly been migrating from Twitter and Mastodon there.
There's a couple of very famous people that have moved over and because the audience is smaller, they tend to engage with people more often.
Less fascists for one
God I hope he gets gaslit into actually making Twitter a subscription. It would be so funny
I’m starting to suspect he only wanted Twitter to kill it…
It is weird how he’s just completely running it into the ground… I don’t really buy that though because he never actuslly wanted the company and only bought it because a court forced him to. Also I honestly don’t think he’d want to wash 44 big ones down the drain just to own the libs.
All I can think of is that he’s just… maybe kind of an idiot and has just gotten lucky so far lol? It’s the only thing that fits as far as I can see.
Some have suggested that the purchase was partly to prevent a second Arab spring. Saudi funding and increased cooperation make it a possibility but I’m not sold on any particular idea besides “avoid everything Elon touches.” Why anyone stayed on ragebait bot network: the website is beyond my understanding.
I saw a claim that Elon never said that but actually said: we will ad a lower cost tier.
“The” alternative platform?? Shots fired.
Serious question, why would you consider Bluesky? I would argue that mastodon is “the” decentralized social media platform, I mean it’s not owned by some billionaire; and if you mostly care about audience size, nothing beats twitter. I’ve never felt any inclination to try bluesky for these reasons.
I like Firefish way better. It has great design and is very positive.
Maybe they just don’t have the infra (and if they still don’t, I don’t believe they ever will). Turn off invites and make it open-season or shut the whole thing down. It’s not a competitor like this.
Scaling is hard. You need time for hard things
Nostr is the easiest to use decentralized Twitter alternative I’ve came across.
Really liking Bluesky so far, hope it picks up some steam soon. It really is something special and way less confusing (at least for me) than Mastodon.
E: But to add, let’s face it, no decentralized platform will ever replace a centralized one unless something major happens. I just don’t see the mainstream adopting Bluesky/Mastodon/Nostr unless something incredibly drastic happens. As much as I’d love for Bluesky to get some more steam, it won’t at this rate. People want to get on it, but can’t.
What’s confusing about Mastodon? Just join a random server and you can find everyone else on any other server. (Or are these called ‘instances’? I don’t know or care, fact is it works without problems.)
Switch to Mastodon. It’s a great alternative.
Yeah, I suspected this would be a real point of no return. Mastodon will also benefit, but naturally the fediverse isn’t the first thing people think of. Fortunately, Mastodon has been working on this.