Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
www.wired.com
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
21 comments
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This article is all you need to read to understand why bluesky will just be another shitstain in the history of social media.
Let’s back up. How did you end up starting a decentralized social platform?
Its still not (in any practical way) and never will be.
How do you plan to make money?
Subscriptions are coming soon. [...] Other apps in the ecosystem are experimenting with sponsored posts and things like that. I think ads eventually, in some form, work their way in, but we’re not going to do ads the way traditional social apps did. We’ll let people experiment and see what comes out of it.
As literally everyone with a brain expected. This is also why there will never be unrestricted federation because it would threaten their profit model.
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https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3loe7iy2gdc2c
Now that dozens of people are hosting their own relays and we have third-party AppViews, the first posts are being made to Bluesky without using any of Bluesky PBC's architecture, but sure it's not decentralized and will never happen or whatever.
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I dont think you understand how and why decentralization works. Its about democratization of digital platforms and that requires a power hierarchy that is as flat as possible (in terms of AT Protocol instances).
To achieve this bluesky.social would have to close registrations and push people to other instances. Unless you have a roughly equal user distribution between at least 4-5 instances that are completely independent in terms of financing, governance and location, there will never be a bluesky that is resistant to enshittification.
Basically as long as any decision that bluesky.social makes is considered absolute law, all existing federation has zero effect.
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First of all it's incongruent to talk about "instances" in a Bluesky context, there are no instances, there are PDSes, relays and AppViews.
Second of all, people have only been starting to self-host these branches of the architecture in the last few months. You could make the same argument about mastodon.social, especially when the service was still in its infancy. Even now that it is more mature, mastodon.social still has an outsized influence over the entire fediverse with Rochko acting as “benevolent dictator for life”.
There are initiatives to shepherd users away from Bluesky PBC servers like Blacksky, Northsky, Free Our Feeds etc. and Bluesky PBC has not given me any indication that they are trying to hamper these initiatives—they are making small incremental changes towards a more democratized ecosystem all the time, for example just last week they implemented a new atproto account management, that was rolled out for all self-hosters and is by default free of Bluesky branding.
edit: to make my point more clear, yes, obviously Bluesky could be more democratized, but given how young the service is, it's being held to an impossible and ever-shifting standard and also I can't stand how people here baselessly insinuate that any non-flat hierarchies are somehow a nefarious plot by Bluesky PBC to "federation-wash" their product.
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People here are going to celebrate when Bluesky fails and people are left with less and much worse options again. People here have been clamoring for Bluesky's downfall since I got here and it's pretty ridiculous. At least women didn't have to scratch and claw and fight just to exist on that platform. For all of the pearl clutching and purity checking that goes on here on Lemmy, there's a lot of neckbeards that are terrified of cooties who can't understand why someone would choose to be somewhere else.
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Not sure if that has anything to do with gender.
Bluesky has always appeared as billionaire-vulnerable as Twitter was, and that's the biggest issue people have with it.
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I'd still rather there be more choices personally. Not everyone is going to go for the Fediverse, so in that case rather Bluesky than Twitter or Facebook.
Also, recently feddit just announced that they're going to be using their subjective discretion to remove "anti Israel, pro Palestine" comments and posts, out of fear of regulations back home. So it turns out that Lemmy instances are just as vulnerable to government censorship and / or bad actors being in charge as any other platform. There's nothing really stopping any large instance from deciding to monetize or whatever that I can see.
And it's really not as simple as just moving to another instance if the one you're on becomes questionable because then you lose your entire comment history and if you mod a community, you lose everything you've built and have to start over. Just like if you moved from any platform to any other platform, decentralization isn't a benefit here.
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So it turns out that Lemmy instances are just as vulnerable to government censorship and / or bad actors being in charge as any other platform.
The feddit.org interpretation of that law is debated. Lemmy.world is hosted using a German company (Hetzner), and LW doesn't have such policy.
There’s nothing really stopping any large instance from deciding to monetize or whatever that I can see.
People would leave for another instance.
you lose your entire comment history
Add a link in your bio to your old profile, and vice-versa. Keep the same username and avatar. None of my current alts are from June 2023, but people still recognize me since then as I kept the same username and avatar.
you mod a community, you lose everything you’ve built and have to start over
https://lemmy.world/c/football is a good example of smooth transition to !football@lemm.ee: pinned post that pinged everyone who interacted recently in the community to make sure everyone is aware, and several announcements about the move. You don't have to completely start over.
A few other examples
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It works as a bandaid solution, but a more seamless account migration would go a long way to make the fediverse as a whole better imo.
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How often would the average user use this feature? Maybe a few times during instance hopping at first, and then that would be it.
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I'm more thinking about users on small instances that are being abandoned or perhaps fall victim to some defederation drama (or similar) over time.
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The feddit.org interpretation of that law is debated
Sure but that doesn't change that they interpreted it the way they did and now they're enforcing that interpretation. Theoretically any instance could do whatever they want but in reality this instance did the thing that everyone worries about centralised platforms doing.
I get that you can leave links to your old profile and communities, you can also do that on forum sites and any other platform when you switch. I still don't see any difference or benefit here. As an end user that just wants a place to shit post and isn't trying to run a server or write code or whatever, the experience is the same, whether I'm trying different Lemmy instances or different centralised platforms. And it'll be the same until I can take my online presence and all of its history, pack my bags and go elsewhere with it. Not sure how that would work though, I'm just spitballing here.
Anyway, I think this is probably a conversation that I'm gonna avoid and ignore in future here though. I get the sense that the only place to discuss certain aspects of the Fediverse without people getting angry or taking things personally is somewhere outside of the Fediverse. Because people are weird and defensive about it and make it part of their personality, which I think is the reason for at least 50% of the hate towards Bluesky.
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Sure but that doesn’t change that they interpreted it the way they did and now they’re enforcing that interpretation. Theoretically any instance could do whatever they want but in reality this instance did the thing that everyone worries about centralised platforms doing.
Indeed, but the main difference between a centralized platform and a decentralized one is how easy it is for users to change communities.
If Reddit bans a subreddit, users cannot create any alternative subreddit on the whole platform.
In the feddit.org case, other users have set up !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com , which everyone can use instead of !europe@feddit.org without having to create a new account.
I still don’t see any difference or benefit here.
See above.
I get the sense that the only place to discuss certain aspects of the Fediverse without people getting angry or taking things personally is somewhere outside of the Fediverse.
You could create a Fediverse-critic community here, and establish rules who would shape the community that way. There was a !linuxsucks@lemmy.world community that was active for a while.
Because people are weird and defensive about it and make it part of their personality, which I think is the reason for at least 50% of the hate towards Bluesky.
People have seen Reddit and Twitter enshittify because of their centralised model. A decentralized model is considered a solution to this.
I think Bluesky would get less criticism here if they were honest about the fact that they aren't really going for a decentralized model instead of pretending they are, but then it costs millions to run an independent node would require a whole company
The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.
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You mention the costs of running a relay as mentioned in the Christine Lemmer-Webber piece, but since that piece was written, Bluesky made a significant update to how relays work, making them much cheaper to operate. Bryan Newbold made a blog post about how he managed to run a relay for $34 a month. Dozens of people run such full-network relays now! Christine Lemmer-Webber herself even first assumed those were not pulling the full network, but later corrected herself!
It remains to be seen how well all of that will scale if the network continues to grow, but can we please please move away from completely exaggerated claims like "it costs millions to run an independent node"?
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Oh, very interesting!
Seems like the blog post and Christine's updates are quite new, maybe they deserve their own post here in the community?
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You could create a Fediverse-critic community here
I wouldn't go that far lol. It's just interesting watching how people vote on certain posts and opinions. I'll most likely still speak my mind regardless, it'll just be one of those things that I know will be 'controversial' around here every time lol.
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At this point, I would not cheer.
I just want Twitter and Reddit to fall.
The problem is that the more popular bluesky becomes, the more it seems it will become the thing it’s meant to replace. Also, these articles always lie about what it is and does.
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Obi Wan Kenobi was right
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21 comments