Context:
this is a bit lengthy, so, if you want to go 'Bluesky can suck a dick' and move on then you can, otherwise click here
The election of Donald Trump, with Elon Musk claiming to have been the wind beneath his wings, has been the final straw for a lot of people on Xitter who have, until now, acted like this:
Whole communities have now moved en masse, eg the majority of comic book creators are now on Bluesky, leading some to declare Bluesky might end up defeating Twitter once and for all.
However, Cory Doctorow was written about why he won’t be moving to Bluesky, most recently in a post named Bluesky and enshittification where he looks at the lack of safeguards preventing enshittification:
I’m not on Bluesky and I don’t have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/
When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess
He thinks the fact that a blockchain VC having a financial stake in Bluesky isn’t an issue, if the safeguards are in place, but Dave Troy, who wrote Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn, has has been doing some digging into those currently running BS and finding a lot of post-rationalist and TESCREAL/Effective Altruism links:
3/Now that Dorsey has bailed as a board member and principal funder, Bluesky’s DNA is basically TPOT people. Who is going to win in that scenario? I don’t know, but I’m not putting money on the users. The most recent funding came from Blockchain Capital LLC…
4/🚨It gets worse. Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.
…
6/Possibly Bluesky can address this by discussing their funding in detail, the expectations of the funders, and whether the TPOT/PostRat community is still a principal driver of the vision for the “company.” But this all points to another rug pull in progress, and a lot of credulous people hurt.
While it is reasonable that the company acknowledged that Dorsey’s vision of “moderation by protocol” was unfeasible, it sets up a highly centralized model that is now subject to capture.
So without any safeguards and with some shifty folks involved it feels like the clock is ticking until they enshittify Bluesky and the users either stay locked in thanks to the sunk cost or switch to Threads or, finally, realise they are better off on the Fediverse.
Relevant previous memes:
- Bluesky’s fedi-washing and some context for that
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Fediverse needs to get shiny and intuitive. This “just open the source code and change a few variables” github energy isn’t good enough for a big boy platform.
Which probably means more people need to be working on it, because I’m certain the people who have made the functional thing we have now have their hands full maintaining it and making iterative improvements.
Which probably means more people need to be working on it, because I’m certain the people who have made the functional thing we have now have their hands full maintaining it and making iterative improvements.
There’s enough funds to keep a couple of Lemmy devs beavering away on it and some grants to add specific features but that isn’t going to lead to the rapid addition of features you get by throwing VC cash at hiring engineers. However, someone is going to want something in return for all that money and down that road enshittification lies. The rate of progress on the Fediverse is slower but it is sustainable.
This “just open the source code and change a few variables” github energy isn’t good enough for a big boy platform.
Honest question, who is doing this? All android apps I’ve used have been completely fine and usable out of the box, and you can just go to your instance web address on your computer. Are you on some ancient alpha version of a client that hasn’t been maintained?
Seriously. I downloaded Lemmy connect when Reddit is fun shut down and have used it exactly the same. Setting up an account was the same. The UI is so similar I can’t remember the difference. People choose to get in the weeds with the platform and don’t realise that it isn’t necessary at all.
For the last year I’ve been thinking both Lemmy and Mastodon need a good hard UI/UX polish. But it seems that quite a few want a plain html bullet list for their feed and lose their mind over change. 🤷♂️
As long as you give people choice you don’t have to worry about change.
Look at Reddit. If they hadn’t killed the API myself and many others would still be there. I used Reddit is Fun for 10+ years. Reddit made hundreds of changes, many of them stupid, but I didn’t care because no matter how many changes they made I could choose to ignore them and use the exact same client/UI I had been using.
Also Lemmy and Mastodon have plenty of good UIs in the form of apps. If you want to change the default UI I say go for it, just provide the old one. If you don’t want to maintain the old one, don’t. Just give folks to the option to maintain it.
Lemmy will get a new UI soon™, something much more modern using DaisyUI.
Not that this is all “Bluesky bad, Fediverse good” as a lot of the Fediverse may not be ready for primetime and that’s OK, at least for us early adopters who are not overly concerned with the services being rough around the edges and/or lacking in key features.
An interesting reply to the thread by Dave Troy gives a more nuanced overview:
I still see Bluesky as a useful short-term Twitter alternative (Meta and Threads are already doing all the things that Bluesky is likely do in the future, it’s a lot easier to get up and going on Bluesky than Mastodon, and Blacksky is the only thing I know of in the decentralized world that’s a good path for Black Twitter. Still, even without all the important points you make, and the “we don’t have to ban Alex Jones” factor , they’re a venture-funded startup, so once they need to monetize they’re very likely to turn to an exploitative business model. So while it’s situationally useful, it’s not a promising long-term base.
And later they say:
Right now, Bluesky is a much better place for Twitter-like progressive organizing and activism than anything else in the fediverse. And it’s still contested ground; Jay and the other founders still have the balance of power (not the VC), and it’s not yet clear that they’ll fully side with fascists – and even if they do, the broader ecosystem may well split to at least some extent, and there will be a “free ATmossphere” as well as the “free fediverse” that @ophiocephalic and others (includingn me!) talk about. So building a presence there is a reasonable thing to do,.
Still also there’s a lot more to organizing on social networks than Twitter alternatives, and that’ plays to the fediverse’s strengths. So it’s all the more critical to address the fediverse’s weaknesses so that there’s another organizing and activism platform, both to support the battle on Bluesky and as an alternative power base.
all platforms with investors behind it enshitify in the worse ways possible a la reddit, facebook, etc.
a lot of the Fediverse may not be ready for primetime … lacking in key features
Such as?
Signing up is not very intuitive. My first account was on .ml and didn’t know wtf they were about
I almost signed up on lemmygrad because the pun made me laugh and I didn’t know that it’s an ACTUAL tankie instance lol
Instead I made my first account on the now seemingly nearly dead .wtf and then on the most neoliberal of instances.
If instances had all been walled off rather than federated, I would NOT have had a good time with those choices 😄
I’m sure there’s a big list somewhere but a couple of quick ones from:
I’ve run web forums almost as long as they’ve been around and the Mod and Admin tools are skimpy even compared to clunky early ones. The AutoMods give us more tools but one key missing one is just being able to move a post to another community.
Lemmy also doesn’t allow you to move your account to another instance.
A lot of reasons people give for going with Bluesky is the features it has. This is more a criticism of Mastodon and the *key forks have a lot more available, but Mastodon is the Fediverse’s big beast.
GDPR ownership of your data and the ability to have your data erased
Thoughts on their protocol vs ActivityPub? ActivityPub seems to have inherent issues with scaling and authentication whereas Bluesky’s at:// protocol seems pretty robust at first glance.
Afaik from some folks who claim to have dug through the protocol: the protocol is needlessly complex with some very important parts of the network very unlikely to be decentralized (I think that was called relays) as it requires massive computing ressources.
The benefits of ActivityPub is that it is really really simple (basically just standardized json). Yes it has scaling issues, but those are solvable and partly just a sideeffect of actually being federated
Both approaches have a load the world problem.
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So BlueSky is just a lot of BS. Got it.
