Why I ditched Twitter for Bluesky - and hope you will, too!
Why I ditched Twitter for Bluesky - and hope you will, too!
THE SHORT PITCH Twitter is a cesspool and I’m only posting there now to tell people to find me elsewhere. That elsewhere? Bluesky, a new social media site that’s become the best place on the internet for me… and maybe you too? If you’re not already on social media, congratulations — you should proba...
Surely nothing will go wrong with THIS corporate owned walled garden.
How any times do they have to learn the same lesson?
Technically it's an open protocol. Whether or not any other implementations will surface remains to be seen.
I know a much better place. It is called mastodon.
Just pointing out the author mentions they used mastodon for a time too, his argument is that bluesky interface, content and moderation are better for them.
Unfortunately not. For me the main problem is discoverability. There's no recommendation algorithm except for boosts. I'm not suggesting Mastodon integrate some kind of machine learning or other advanced stuff, but number of likes from followed accounts and a threshold would be nice for a start. As it is, Mastodon is just bad for entertainment purposes. Maybe it works for other purposes, but for entertainment I'd rather have the algorithm-fuelled quote-tweet dunking on Twitter.
There's the explore tab in the mastodon app that shows you trending hashtags, and recommends people to follow based off who you already follow. There's trending accounts that just post about trending items too. Use them as your algorithm.
There's definitely an opportunity for someone to run their own curation service for personalized feeds based on a user's activity on other social networks.
I tend to just check All periodically for the first couple of months and follow tags and people that suit my own interests and build my own feed from zero. But that takes effort and time, and for folks who want an option further toward the convenience end of the privacy/convenience spectrum I suspect it would be a fairly popular option.
Leaving one privately run garden for another sure seems like a choice 🤔
It's built to be decentralized though, from what I read.
It's centralized. They allow federation using their own protocol.
But all you need to know is that it's a capitalist, for-profit undertaking.
When it's built around lage aggregators, running which privately is rather hard, there's a bias in favour of centralised, large operators thereof, which mitigates some of the advantages.
Now ditch that for mastodon
Mastodon is much better for that
There is another alternative to twitter
Its pretty unknown, especially on lemmy, so i dont think many people heard of it, its on something called "the fediverse" and is called "mastodon"
Uhmmm... Mastodon works on the ActivityPub protocol, just like Lemmy. So why not use that?
You can even find your Lemmy account on there, and Mastodon accounts on here.
Bluesky is just a lot better. I have no particular commitment to the ActivityPub protocol.
The one drawback to Bluesky’s block feature is that a user’s block lists aren’t private. Through third party apps, you can find lists of everyone anyone’s blocked. That probably won’t bother most people, but it’s a potential issue for those who worry that public block lists could be used perniciously by persistent stalkers or harassers.
The only missing function is the ability to lock your account or go private as you can on Twitter, which would let you hide your account from non-followers while still posting to folks who already follow you.
But Bluesky has gotten considerable criticism at key points over the last year and a half for failures in handling anti-Black racism in particular. Rudy Fraser wrote extensively about some of these issues along with a deep dive into his goals and challenges as the creator of the now legendary Blacksky feed in a great post a year ago.
Every time someone recommends me Bluesky, I learn something else about it that makes me never want to make an account. Any one of these three quotes should be a dealbreaker on their own
His profile is sign-in blocked.
“Public square” indeed.
My experience with BlueSky has been that it is better than Twitter because it is smaller and doesn't cater to the far-right.
BUT...
It can become extremely toxic very fast because they implemented the same poorly executed features Twitter did that fucked things up. In fact, it's way worse than that...
The two features they copied from Twitter that hurt them the most are site-wide search and quote posts. Site-wide search enables people to "namesearch" or to monitor keywords for issues they want to fight about. Quote posts are a well understood "dunk mechanism", that largely encourages dogpiling.
As for being free of a central algorithm, that seems good, until you see that there are tons of community algorithms you can subscribe to instead. Now there are algorithms for things like "anti-Zionist posts" and "pro-Israel posts", which not only let people find their preferred echo-chamber, but also provide trolls access to exactly the groups of people they want to argue with or harass.
These algorithms can be built to detect certain hashtags and phrases, or they can just be big lists of accounts like a Twitter group. There's no telling when you might show up in one of these algorithms or why.
As a result, if you say anything less than agreeable about any issue, there's a chance you're going to hear from a bunch of accounts you've never met before, regardless of what side of an issue you are on, or how extreme your view actually is.
I don't recommend it. It's a pro-profit company that seeks to be a wholesale replacement for Twitter. AT Proto federation is a complete joke, it'll never expand if it doesn't have a flagship open source server. They'll give up on it just like Twitter did and just be another centralized, toxic, microblogging community.
The fucking lack of site wide search is why I hate these federated services. Such a glaringly missing feature.
I prefer allowing hashtags over site-wide search. People can use hashtags specifically when they want their post to be associated with a specific search, rather than letting people search for specific words and phrases.
Site-wide search works way better for communities structured the way Reddit or Lemmy are structured, since people can easily run afoul of different moderation policies, and get themselves banned from communities for bad faith interactions. You have no such protections on a microblogging service.
Yeah it really makes Mastodon unusable as the "one big forum" that twitter was and bluesky is trying to be.
Thanks, this was helpful! Sounds like I’ll pass on Bluesky!
I tried Threads and it was horrible. Honestly not using Mastodon that much. But maybe that format is just not my thing.
See the thing is........you have to microblog like a crazed hobo yelling things into the void. It doesn't need to make sense. It's better if it DOESN'T make sense.
Yup, I've tried Twitter and hated it. I remember when Mastodon launched, and it was described as "federated Facebook" IIRC, and now people are claiming that it's more like "federated Twitter." I hate both Facebook and Twitter, so I use neither.
So honestly, I don't really care about Twitter/X vs BlueSky vs Mastodon, because I don't want to use any of them. Reddit/Lemmy is a much more interesting format to me TBH.
Bluesky is also about as dead as tumblr
I barely see anyone interacting with anything, or anyone for that matter
How about, no
Another idea: ditch Twitter and learn to play the ukulele instead