Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
(www.theverge.com)
from geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.world on 01 Sep 2024 19:56
https://lemmy.ml/post/19826757
from geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.world on 01 Sep 2024 19:56
https://lemmy.ml/post/19826757
Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
threaded - newest
What are blueskys current userbase numbers, mastodons current userbase numbers, and are they federated with each other?
fedidb.org
That does not seem to know about Bluesky
It does, however, know about Mastodon.
Right, because FediDB tracks activitypub, which bluesky is not built upon.
…right but, as I said, Mastodon is. Which is what they asked about…
Oh, right. I guess I forgot all the individual questions. My bad.
.
Is there a point you’d like to make or are you just here for the personal insults?
How did you take away "they were asking about Mastodon" when the question mentioned bluesky first? OP was asking for a comparison of the two, which your link does not provide, putting your answer somewhere between unhelpful and irrelevant.
You keep arguing with people pointing this out as if your response was a complete answer... It seems like you cherry picked the middle of their question and ignored the rest. The more-generous interpretation of this scenario is that your reading comprehension sucks. That's my point.
And if you're really feeling so insulted by my pointing that out,
edit: and it would have taken such a small additional effort to maybe clarify that you were only addressing part of the question instead of dropping a link with no explanation. You could've prevented a lot of confusion by being a little less lazy in your original reply.
Because it mentioned Mastodon second? Is the order really relevant here?
In order to make a comparison, you need data about both. I gave them half. I don’t have the other half. My sincerest apologies for trying to be helpful, sire.
That never happened. You just made that up.
The most generous interpretation of your replies is that you’re an ass who likes going around picking fights with people for the most ridiculous and mundane bullshit imaginable.
Sure, but dari does not address 2/3rds of their answer. Just posting a link makes it seem like it does. You could’ve added that it only addresses Mastodon’s user base from their answer and not Bluesky’s nor wether they can communicate.
Dude, grow up.
that’s for fediverse. not bluesky
They asked about Mastodon…
no. there’s a sort of a third party bridge, but it requires an account on one platform to follow a bot in order to show up on another, so if someone on Bluesky doesn’t explicitly do it and you’re using Mastodon, then you’re not going to connect.
Two competing federation standards. The VHS and Betamax, or Blu Ray and HD-DVD, of 2024.
They do not federate with each other AFAIK, Mastodon’s user base is in another user’s answer, Bluesky’s IDK except apparently one million more than before
Bluesky: bsky.jazco.dev/stats Mastodon: fedidb.org/software/mastodon
There isn’t a 1:1 comparison. But the closest comparison looks like Mastodon is on a bit of a decline at 800k MAU. Bluesky is roughly 400k daily likers.
The fediverse is seeing an uptick as well. Els enshitofication continues. Good for us I suppose.
I had originally been 100% against Bluesky because of Jack Dorsey, but when he got so steamed about them doing things like actual moderation and left entirely back to Twitter to pettily suck up to Musk, I really started feeling like maybe Bluesky might not be so bad after all.
Create, Grow, Moderate, Sell, Repeat.
I prefer Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Is there any relation between Bluesky and Dorsey now? Does he own any of it?
No relation now
Non-twitter is fine in any form. Real progress is gonna be going to Mastodon, although that’s hamstrung by user-unfriendliness.
While I agree with you. I don’t think Mastodon is user unfriendly I think of it as a normie blocker. That being said, bluesky is owning class social media, I expect the enshittification to start now that they have a million + users.
“Normie blocker” is just how abnormies rationalize bad design
Except it’s not. It’s real easy to learn you can choose any instance you’re welcome to. Normies are the ones choosing not to learn.
I do feel sorry for them because they’re probably going to get pushed to the next billionaires social media in the next decade to be exploited there too.
Unless I’m completely missing something? What’s so bad about the design? I’m pretty dumb and uneducated and I dig me some federated social media purely because it’s genuine compared to the owning class social media.
Personally I wish there was a better way to link multiple accounts together to say they’re the same person. When I switched to hosting my own instance, I basically just abandoned my old account, but I would have loved to link them to have the history there.
We have the technology, it could be as simple as SSH keys, or like how bitcoin wallets are unique and don’t require internet to verify a match.
Edit: I actually just discovered that this is one of the main feature differences between ActivityPub and BlueSky’s AT Protocol. BlueSky has “account portability”, and now that you can self-host it, I’m seriously considering setting it up. It would be really nice if we get an update that lets the protocols federate with each other. I think that BlueSky has said they intend to support ActivityPub federation in the future.
ActivityPub actually has a similar mechanism of a “Move” activity. There are just very few implementations that support that kind of thing.
The main problem with that seems to be that the original server needs to be active to migrate. If the instance I’m on shuts down or is uncooperative, then my account history is gone. And for Mastodon, that’s even worse if you have a bunch of followers. These are all reasons I decided to self-host before I built up too much of a presence.
Right, of course. I don’t really see any way any protocol can get around that though. If the original server is suddenly just gone, there is no way to tell it to move your account elsewhere. Hopefully such a situation should happen very rarely though.
Supposedly BlueSky has solved this by separating the data storage servers from the “relays” and “app view” servers, and since your account’s posts are cryptographically signed, they can come from any instance as long as the signature matches.
That at least covers migrating followers and new posts, but I’m not really sure what would happen to old posts if a data server just went offline. I’ve still got more reading to do.
But what if the server that holds the cryptographic keys is suddenly gone? Then what?
Or does Bluesky use client-held keys? I just think client-held private keys is probably too complicated for most people to realistically and safely use.
I assume you hold your own cryptographic keys, but I’m not actually sure how that works. Your client needs access to them to make posts, and it wouldn’t make sense for the server to hold your private key, since that would mean the owner of your instance could make posts as you.
I haven’t actually signed up to BlueSky to figure this out yet.
Edit: So it looks like users are authenticated using github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc But the keys are stored on the server, with an option to view your key for backup and migration. That does mean a certain level of trust with your instance, but you can self-host if that’s a concern. A malicious host at least can’t prevent you from rotating your keys and leaving (unless of course they steal your account entirely by rotating your keys themselves)
I mean, this is quite normal and common for all traditional social media (or any site really) you sign up for. It’s what most ActivityPub instances do too, though there’s nothing in ActivityPub that requires the server to hold the private key. It could in principle be held by the client but I don’t believe there is any implementation that does that currently.
Yeah, this is just me tacking on extra features I’d like. My security-minded programmer brain can’t help but think of all the edge-cases. It’s something that is suddenly possible with distributed social media that never was before.
Statistically speaking, the mere fact that you are here indicates that you are among the top percentages of tech literal people. This isn’t necessarily about intelligence or general education, but about tech literacy.
Brah, I’m not a normie. That’s why we’re talking on Lemmy. /s
That’s… exactly what I’m saying. Did you misunderstand my comment perhaps? Normies are not “choosing” not to learn, they just literally don’t have the tech literacy skills to easily participate in the fediverse. The fediverse should improve its UX to allow more people to participate.
Sadly literate and tech literate don’t always go hand in hand.
Sounds weird from inside the echo chamber though
Seriously yea. Same reason Linux user experience is generally bad. Unfortunately engineers usually make for poor designers.
Mastadon has definitely improved it’s user onboarding process. When I first tried, and failed, to use it 3 years ago it was awful. Signing up a year ago was a painless process. It may not be fully ready for the mainstream just yet, but it’s definitely getting there.
I can’t really disagree with this, since I’ve personally seen folks make a casual attempt and bounce off Mastodon, and it comes up enough online that it feels like it has to be true, but at the same time I’ve got this reflexive skepticism since I’m an absolute idiot and managed to figure out how to have a good time on Mastodon and really enjoy it. (I signed up in the spring of 2023, though, so can’t speak to earlier times.) I think I’m probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person. So I really wonder what it is specifically that frustrates folks enough to just give up on Mastodon when I, an amiable doofus of the highest order, love it so much.
I have additional Thoughts on cultural issues that might disappoint people who were expecting Mastodon to replicate whatever specific era of pre-Musk Twitter they yearn for, but it can’t *just *be that. There has to be some technical barrier a lot of folks are stumbling over, right?
I never used twitter anyway so idk I never got into Mastodon. Didn’t help that the few people I thought to follow basically pulled the “yeah this is cool #fucktwitter buuuuuut everyone is still on Twitter okbaiiiiiii”
In reality, mastodon doesn’t achieve the same dopamine hit by design. This is both a good thing (less addictive, more conversational) and a bad thing (less retention, more opaqueness in statistics) depending on why you want to use or don’t want to use social networks.
Just from the fact that you are here, it is statistically likely that you are much closer to the tech literates than the normies. Can you search for a specific email in your email inbox? You’re already way ahead of many people. You are severely overestimating the technical literacy of normal people.
Yeah, and it’s getting worse not better.
I have a potentially really dumb question: how is mastodon different from the assorted lemmys and such? I originally thought mastodon was just another fediverse instance but now that I think about it I don’t think I’ve seen posts and content from others on a mastodon instance, either on .world or where I am now at .ee. is this just due to defederation with mastodon or is mastodon different in some way that I am missing?
Mastodon works more like twitter, several microblog posts that you only see if you search or check:
Meanwhile, lemmy works more like reddit, easier to find “specific content”, with posts neatly separated by community/instance and easier to find/search/interact with in the future. It’s less about individuals and more about communities
I think mastodon only interacts with lemmy as comments on existing posts, though there’s probably a way to post to a community from a mastodon client/site
Gotta disagree with you there when it comes to Threads. We have seen how Meta is also trying to influence global politics. Threads should not be encouraged either. On top of that, their privacy policy is a nightmare.
qz.com/threads-meta-delayed-launch-eu-privacy-pol…
Purely anecdotally from what I’ve been reading online, it seems most younger folks hate Threads.
Not necessarily because of privacy issues or social impact, mind you. They also think it just sucks to use, don’t like the UI, don’t like the content—which turned out to include a lot of people trying to build a personal brand and sell you things. Just like Instagram, where most users came from.
Excluding content details, Mastodon fails similarly. Requires learning, unsatisfactory UI, more difficult to find and engage with content you like.
Didn’t India just ban Twitter or something?
Edit: It was Brazil.
BJP would never as they’re fascists themselves.
I’m sad that a lot of people couldn’t perceive the mastodon in the room.
Mastodon isn't a straight replacement for twitter, bluesky is.
Why is that?
Mastodon does not have as many arbitrary restrictions for one.
From what I can tell from within the Mastodon echo chamber: quote replies and moderation
Sure, but there are other ActivityPub protocol softwares that have quote replies and moderation, that aren’t Mastodon. I think the challenge is getting the average user to seek out an instance running one of those softwares and not just mastodon dot social.
Problem is there’s no marketing money to make the better platforms more widely known because there’s not as much monetization of the users to fund it.
I’m perfectly fine being part of a community not driven by capitalism. It means there’s a lot less incentive to create spam bots. I also can’t run my own BlueSky instance, but I can run Lemmy/Mastodon pretty easily, just like an email server.
Edit: I didn’t realize BlueSky was also federated, but just using a different protocol. I don’t think that was an option back when I set up lemmy.
.
Also a bunch of hinky weirdness and slowness.
The Technology Connections guy (Alec) threw some shade on Mastodon yesterday that seemed like a good example:
I thought his name was Alec, not Alex.
It is. Autocorrect and bad proofreading. Thanks, fixed.
Jah, cool! Yeah there’s a whole other set of problems for people with real followings… Not good
Also from my experience the users on BlueSky are pretty much a straight swap from Twitter. And by that I mean nobody ever bothers interacting with me at all.
On mastodon if I so much as rip a fart on there, *someone* will engage with it. On BlueSky? Nada.
I do really wish mastodon had normal quote replies. I believe they decided not include it for reasons related to harassment or bullying. I don’t really get it since you can do practically the same thing but just linking to the post in yours. The mastodon UI even makes it look almost the same as a quote reply.
I do kind of like how it makes mastodon feel smaller since I cannot interact with or post quote replies, unlike Tumblr or Twitter. Those sometimes accrue millions of interactions. But it is a choice that will keep Mastodon small
Federation is a pretty straightforward concept once you understand it and have basic knowledge of networking and software. However many people (apparently the majority of people) find it to be too complicated to understand.
Yes, I tried the mastodon app probably about 4 years ago before I knew what federation was. I could not figure out how to sign up and ultimately gave up. There needs to be an app/website that explains it well and guides you through the process.
And honestly both bluesky and mastodon do a poor job if this.
The average user is unfortunately, still to this day, an idiot.
Mastodon is a bi replacement for twitter.
Wait people didn’t join Mastodon as well? Just Bluesky?
That’s actually a good question. Surely Mastodon and Lemmy instances should have also seen an uptick in registrations?
I saw some posts on Mastodon yesterday celebrating an influx of Brazilian signups, but it was pretty modest compared to the massive exodus to Bluesky. Which, honestly, seems about right and proportionate. (I love Mastodon, but it doesn’t feel like a 1:1 replacement for Twitter the way Bluesky does.)
They did, but it’s nothing huge.
Finding the right mastodon instance was incredibly annoying. I use it, but barely. Most of the artists I follow are on Bluesky, anyway, which is a lot easier to use.
Mastodon allows you to transfer your followers when you migrate, so it’s not a big deal if you change your mind about the first instance you had chosen.
You lost an average user at “instance”, long before “transferring an account”. It’s a big deal.
That may be true for someone just looking to sign up with no help, but if they come across a guide or if their friend helps them, then it’s easy.
So you agree with me. To succeed, a product shouldn’t require a guide or a friend’s help to install and configure it. I work in IT, yet I don’t see people around me bothering with all that. Now think of your relatives, friends, people you see every day on the street or in a mall - they couldn’t care less.
Well, entering Mastodon in the search bar of a search engine today shows that it’s even easier than it was during the big Twitter exodus. The first link is mastodon.social. Clicking that lands you on a page where Create an account is highlighted in blue. From there, it’s the standard signup process everyone is used to.
Edit: Rewrote the comment to focus on the actual flow today rather than anything speculative.
Transferring also means losing your post history, it all gets stuck on the instance you left behind.
Mastodon’s original app is just trash Threads are completely unreadable, it should be like that of X
The thing that goes against what most people are used to is the fact that most fediverse services either don’t have an official app or the official app is just a proof of concept. You’re kind of expected to use either the website directly or third party apps, which are usually much better.
When I still used my Mastodon account I used Megalodon and was testing Moshidon as well. Now I just use the PWA for the Sharkey instance I’m on.
+1 for Sharkey. It’s my favorite of the protocols, so far.
What makes it your favorite?
Mainly the 5000 character limit. It handles MFM (though I don’t really use it), and features like antennas (very specific follow lists).
Which instance are you on?
Sakurajima. They have a Mastodon instance too.
Very japan focused. Be warned if you’re not some kind of weeb.
the last time I tried to make a mastodon account I had to type a paragraph about why i want an account and then wait for an email approval and I don’t know what the hell happened because I forgot to look for the email and by now I don’t give a shit
I didn’t even know Mastodon has an exclusive club streak lol.
Just like Lemmy, some Mastodon instances have measures in place to try and prevent bots.
And it’s also a way for topic focused servers to filter out signups as well. There are general purpose instances with open sign ups that don’t do that.
Yeah, I got into Fosstodon right before they went invite only. And then I moved to a Sharkey instance.
When you try do sign up on the Mastodon app it defaults to and recommends mastodon.social, which does nothing of this sort. The average user will just keep this default and be fine.
im not sure what happened i think i was taking a shit
Early in, the Fediverse gained traction with people that were banned from Twitter and others when it had moderation besides for the word “cis” and to suppress leftist viewpoints. Now that Twitter has none, those people have crawled back alongside with the crypto bros, but the bad name generated by gab, truth social, etc. still prevail.
Also people are way too dumb to realize what an instance is (people already have trouble realizing e-mail is not a tech invented by Google for Gmail), defederation dramas, drama around loli, no algorithm “to suggest the users whatever they interested in”, less users, generally fediverse apps being way less addictive, etc.
Or, more likely in most cases, don’t care and don’t want to care.
isn’t that another way of calling ignorance aka being dumb?
There’s only so many hours in the day. There is something to be said for doing the convenient thing that doesn’t have a learning curve if you’re just trying to enjoy yourself.
Of course, imho, being aware of your own lack of knowledge is something already.
Can’t fault them. I went through three different instances, one because I disagreed with some of their policies, I don’t remember why I left the second one, I want to say it was technical issues but I honestly don’t remember. Then the third one got closed down because the owner had IRL issues they needed to take care of. Also that instance was on some defederation list because some mod from a large instance had an argument with a mod on my instance.
Ultimately I ran my own solo instance for a while but lost interest eventually. Mastodon is frankly a shitshow and as long as it stays like that, federation or not makes it just a slightly worse twitter, just with some mods taking the role of Elmo instead.
Frankly? I’m happy that they didn’t end in Mastodon. Most of those users would have negative value there, and in the Fediverse as a whole.
Twitter was always a cesspool of assumptive, entitled, whiny, nationalistic, context-illiterate users, who’d spend most of their time finding reasons to screech at each other (and at you) than sharing interesting content. That’s regardless of language, but it was specially egregious among Brazilian users there. And it got only worse when Musk bought it, as suddenly the alt right users felt themselves justified to soapbox nonstop there.
Most people with a shred of dignity got the fuck out of that shithole ages ago. The ones not doing so were, most of the time, the ones saying “this is fine, this is how it’s supposed to be”. And those are the ones migrating to Bluesky now.
Someone might say “but we could integrate them into Mastodon. They’d behave better.” Well… we’re talking about a large horde of users, they’d be more likely to bring the place down than let the place bring them up. Eternal September style.
I was a redditor pre Eternal September. That was the beginning of the end for old reddit.
Dunno if Reddit got its own Eternal September, but the one that I’m referring to was in 1993, predating Reddit by 12y. It was a huge influx of new internet users, specially evident in the Usenet. Wikipedia has a good article on that, but to keep it short: if you got a huge flood of newcomers at once, you aren’t able to enforce the social norms of a place that keep it friendly and nice; instead the new users force the standard to be lowered.
Wild that Reddit’s creation is closer to the start of the Eternal September than it is to today (19 years).
I agree that it’s wild. And it’s a bit bittersweet for me.
Usenet - and the old internet as a whole - were all about humans sharing stuff between themselves: I see something cool, I give you the link, you see something cool. While modern platforms try to remove the human from the equation, make them invisible: I see something cool, I “endorse” (upvote, like etc.) it, and that endorsement is used by some algorithm to automatically pick what you’re supposed to be seeing.
Reddit is both and neither at the same time. The links are manually picked and shared, like in the old internet; but they’re algorithmically sorted and ranked as in the new internet. It’s like a product of the old internet trying to carve its way into the new internet, but never completely ditching its roots.
Perhaps that’s why that site lasted so long. And I hope that one day we’re going to say “a shame that it died”.
The point of Eternal September is that it happens all the time, so when was that?
Kind of - it doesn’t happen “all” the time; it has a beginning, but no end.
If you consider it’s the influx of new users, then yes, it does happen all the time. Do you have a different definition?
What’s “eternal” in “Eternal September” is not the influx of new users, but rather the disruption of the social norms caused by a huge and sudden influx of new users.
That disruption started in 1993, and never ended. So it had a beginning but no end as of yet.
A not-so-recent fediverse Brazilian user here, before all the X incident in Brazil. I joined Mastodon exactly 1 month ago. Since the beginning, I was only interacting with non-brazilian Mastodon users. In the last few days, however, I’ve been noticing more and more brazilian posts emerging inside Mastodon feeds, even in my home feed (where I follow hashtags such as #poetry, #poems, #occult, #hermeticism, #art and #aiart, as well as non-brazilian users that I’ve been following). Seems like brazilians are spreading across the many existing alternatives, not just Threads or BlueSky. It’s exactly what happened when WhatsApp or Telegram got temporarily blocked here: people started spreading across Discord, Signal, Matrix and so on.
It’s fine if it’s only a handful of users. Even if they’re from Musk’s Xithole*. My issue would be if a lot of people saw Mastodon and said “it’s Twitter, with an elephant instead of bird!”, still behaving like Twitter users.
*desculpe-me pela piada besta; não resisti.
normies are allergic to anything other than corporate social media and software
Good. Super-fast growth fucks with local internet culture. Look at what happened to reddit when digg died.
900k of them are bots getting ready.
Such gross weirdo-behavior to call 900k completely normal people looking to socialize online bots, get off your high horse
I am fine with this.
Wow. Good for Bluesky.
.
I heard Brazil did not ban twitter for good reasons, it can be to block a passage of speech.
elon musk was asked to point a legal rep and show up to answer questions about spreading fake news and promoting criminal activity. He denied point out the rep or participating in the investigation at all. There is some backlash as the judge gave the final warning on twitter since there was no legal rep, which would be a first.
Wrong.
You heard it wrong, we are punishing the ones that did our January 6th and said nazis should have a party to vote, Musk refused, wtf should a country do then?
‘speech’ is just what modern king wannabes use to claim they are above anyone else, including a sovereign state’s laws. People like Elon, Trump, Putin all want to be above any law or form of responsibility.
Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?
I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.
If you follow the AP bridge @ap.brid.gy there you’ll be fine.
It’s more valuable than Twitter and threads to me… It really is only missing video and I’ll be fully sold and hashtags seem to work… I just don’t use them often
From what I heard from a friend that’s pissed at losing access to xitter and begrudgingly made an account on bluesky, it doesn’t have trending topics yet, “How am I supposed to know what’s going on in the world?”
Yep, I saw them coming in. Works well enough for me… Brazilians make the best Sega Genesis games!
Well not anymore thanks to cartridge sellers.
Lake Feperd?
Brazilians make the best programming languages
Lua and Elixir 😙👌
Lua’s origins are from Brazil? Bro so many mods on PC use LUA it’s insane.
Yup, created at Pontifica Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ, a catholic university), originally for Petrobras’ systems in the early 90s.
I know World of Warcraft’s UI and lots of logic runs on lua, also that a good portion of roblox logic can be made in lua instead of C++. Being super light (247kb was small even by 1993 standards) and easy to embed helped it a lot, for sure.
Blue Sky is the only one that allows porn and has no defederation drama, so I’m not surprised people went there. Instagram even put a banner telling people to try out threads but who would trust Zuck?
Twitter allows porn now, no?
Yes, and that’s why it’s hard for artists and their fans to leave, a social media that allows that and normal people posts together has massive visibility compared to enthusiasts site.
Can someone explain to me the difference between bluesky and twitter?
One is going down the drain first
Unfortunately dark money from Russia is keeping it afloat to provide misinformation for the United States election
Ooookkay,
what
yahoo.com/…/russian-oligarchs-investments-elon-mu…
Wow, the emerald mine heir that wants to go to mars is getting support from the ex-KGB agent with a penchant for poisoning. I honestly don’t know why I expected anything different
Bluesky is built on an open source ActivityPub alternative called “AT Protocol”. However, Bluesky itself is not open source* and afaik does not yet federate with any other software. The company is a “public benefit corporation”.
From my understanding, Bluesky has good moderation, to the point where Jack Dorsey (the Twitter founder) condemned it and withdrew from the project. That’s a big plus in my book.
Bluesky has opt-in federation with the fediverse: techcrunch.com/…/bluesky-and-mastodon-users-can-n…
mastodon.social/@bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy
It’s a third-party project, not an opt-in feature of Bluesky.
Wait, Dorsey left? That might actually make it interesting
Yep, and he soon after started praising musk and Twitter, calling it “freedom software” lol. Him leaving was what drew my attention, I like the way it’s heading so far.
Am I missing something? github.com/bluesky-social
As far as I understand, the protocol and client apps are completely open souce. I do not believe the Bluesky software is open source, so you could not host an instance the same way you would with Mastodon. I could be missing something or not underatanding, but that’s what it seems to me.
The latter has been taken over by ElMu and his shenanigans, the former was originally a Twitter-internal project for a decentralised social media interfacing protocol, got forked out from Twitter in 2021 (the year before Musk took over Twitter), has a lot of Ex-Twitter people on it and promises to do a lot of things a lot better than either Twitter (now X) and offer a little more resilience against things like moderator abuse.
Curiously, that last bit is the first time I’ve seen a reasonable use case for Blockchain: Your content can be stored on arbitrary servers and migrated to others. Your identity is tied to keys that can be used to verify your content is actually yours. The info where the public half of the key and all your content are stored is recorded in a public, distributed, append-only ledger, where each entry verifies the integrity of the previous one. Thus, once you’re registered on that, no single moderator can arbitrarily ban you anymore. (Pretty sure there’s a hole in that logic, but I’m not versed enough to confidently assert as much.)
Of course, there’s a caveat: To discover content, you need an index (“relay”) of all the content feeds. That takes some of the content aggregation load off your individual content servers and makes hosting them easier. However, it shifts the content moderation / federation power from the individual instances to the shared index: If a given index blocks your content, people using it won’t see your content.
In theory anyone can host their own relay and everyone can choose which relay they want their content feed to use. In practice, hosting a relay is resource-intensive, bsky have a solid headstart and probably more resources, and their app also obviously uses their own index by default, so if you do want to create a “competitor”/alternative index, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. They even state that expectation: “In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers” ^src^
Which is basically a small-scale version of Google and Bing (and the AT Protocol Overview explicitly uses that comparison): Sure, you can make your own search engine, but if Google is the default everywhere, has a lot of storage and computing power to serve more requests and has way more indexed content, why would people use yours instead? Thus, if you want your content to be seen by many people, you have to play by the big relays’ rules.
Much decentral. Very open.
(I’m being snarky here, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt: They probably do mean to make self-hosting your personal data and content easier, and it’s easier for custom feeds to use single, big relays to draw from rather than doing the indexing and collation themselves. However, it provides them with a lot of leverage and just because they call themselves a “public benefit corporation” doesn’t mean I trust them not to start enshittifying for profit at some point.)
Downloaded it. Signed up. Replied to a post about rechargeable batteries. Account got restricted. Left.
Restricted to the whole site or just that user? The user tools are pretty powerful on their own.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/898fb5b0-2a66-4b8e-872a-705989155da7.png">
Not sure what I got blocked from. Might poke around later and see. Guess I upset a bot by using a colon or something.
Maybe the phrase “white ones are better” triggered some moderation bot?
Good point!
I feel so sorry for you about this WTF but I can’t stop laughing!
.
and
don’t go particularly well with automated detection and moderation tools.
Well, everybody knows Black Eneloop Batteries’ Lives Matter!
Bluesky has gained a
millionbrazilion new users…I’m so sorry, it was right there. And yay for Bluesky!
As a brazilian, I’m now deeply offended that the ISO does not recognize brazilion as a valid amount
I can’t help but pronounce it like a Slavic surname.
“Bluesky! You didn’t file your paperwork last night.”
If that ain’t the name of a New York police chief from the 80s with Polish heritage, I don’t know what is
Not enough crossed L’s or áććéńtś to be polish
inb4 in 8 years time “Greensky a.k.a. Trust Me Guys This is THE New Twitter Forever” gains a million new users in the last 3 days.