X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research
X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research
www.timeshighereducation.com
X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research
71 comments
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It's great that Bluesky is gaining traction, but how sure are we that it won't turn to shit before other relays come online and make it actually decentralised?
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We aren't sure. It's still a billionaire owned social media. For some reason people are too afraid of the freedom actual decentralized social media gives them and they want a billionaire behind the scenes running everything and coralling them to the correct opinions.
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It's not fear of the freedom, it's choice paralysis. People want to go to one website, sign up for one account and then be part of a network with absolutely zero research beforehand. I like the fediverse, but the barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.
Internet services getting shitty and then dying is nothing new. Look at MySpace, Digg, or any BBS. people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They'll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing
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I don’t believe it has anything to do with people’s fear. More money means more marketing power. It’s that simple.
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“But none of my friends are on there.”
Make new friends then.
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Most aren't even aware that a decentralized option exists.
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My tenuous understanding from an article I read about the AT protocol but barely remember is that it can't be fully decentralized. I think you have to use bluesky for user authentication. And I think it said the hosting hardware requirements would be significant to the point where it's not very feisable. I welcome corrections/clarifications.
Point is, assuming that's reasonably correct, true decentralization isn't possible. And by it's nature as a big corporate owned site, enshittification is inevitable.
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Yes, apparently their protocol sends everything to every node, so it would overwhelm anything but a very powerful and expensive server. The Fediverse's ActivityPub protocol is more efficient and only sends traffic where it is needed.
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It's federated in name only.
I blame ActivityPub. W3C didn't get their shit together when they invented the standard and now we are paying the price.
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it requires a very large investment to run a node, but the fact that it’s possible means it’s open by necessity, which means we can bridge to mastodon etc
this means that it will be a lot easier for people to migrate, since they don’t have to give up their entire social network
imo it’s a good jumping off point: people clearly have problems with the mastodon “on ramp” and are having no issues with bsky, so imo it’s a step in the right direction and we can’t let perfect be the enemy of better
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The authentication parts uses a standard w3c developed format called DID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier it's basically a more general form of a url that must point to a specially formatted file. There are several did methods. atproto supports did:web which stores the doc at a user-set http URL path, and also did:PLC which stores the doc in a special database controlled by bsky. They plan (hopefully) add more methods in the future.
But yeah, the currently supported did:web authentication method is fully independent of bsky inc
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Well, Mastodon is still up and running. And people can always migrate.
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It 100% will, it has already started
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I'd say that we're sure it will. It has begun making the same shady practices like redirecting all out going links through go.bsky*app 🙄
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Ah yes, to prove they drive traffic to places, they funnel all outgoing links through themselves for tracking.
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Can you please explain? Is that like the amp prefix or more sinister?
go.bsky.com does not even exist. Do you mean go.bsky*.com?
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is it really shady when they stated up front they're doing it so posters and journalists can see where their traffic is coming from?
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What else is there though? Mastodon by design is counter-culture, so why then are people surprised when "culture" in turn does not like it?
As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person's followers could get confused. Throwing out right or wrong, famous people worry about stuff like this, which would require a level of coordination and communication across the Fediverse - i.e. a type of "centralization" (even if accomplished via possibly decentralized means?). I'm not sure if I am remembering correctly or not, but I thought there was even a fix submitted to the codebase, which has sat for YEARS without being reviewed or approved. If not this feature though, other features have definitely followed this pattern.
TLDR 1: you snooze, you lose.
TLDR 2: ideological purity
testsbeatings will continue, until moral improves.TLDR 3: FAAFO means, it turns out, that if you entirely ignore everything / most things that the users that you hope will use your platform ask for, they might just go elsewhere, where they feel welcomed.
Is Mastodon behaving similarly to an incel culture, demanding that people like what a "nice"
manplatform it is, rather than do the work required to make people actually happy with what it offers? And if not (due to other reasons, perhaps funding), then what is the functional difference really, between that vs. whatever it is doing?So yeah, Bluesky it is then. If we want something better, we had best get to actually building it.
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As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person's followers could get confused.
Tbf, you can basically do this now - throwback to the start of paying for Twitter verification...
On Mastodon, the simple answer is you use the verification to prove it's you by using rel=me links.
It's not perfect, as you'd expect, but in an age where everything is suspect anyway...
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I'm sure it will.
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Aah, rather choosing the next company which can turn into corporate bs than using federated Mastodon. I don't get people.
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It's not the users, it's the developers / investors. I've tried so many times to get into Mastodon, but it sucks compared to Bluesky. It lacks content and polish, so it's no wonder everyday people choose Bluesky over it.
The real conundrum is why isn't there a for profit company with big money behind it, investing in ActivityPub. I guess you could point to Threads? But insert your "not like that" meme of choice.
Fwiw, apparently Bluesky did initially look at activity pub, but found the protocol lacking, which is why they invented ATProto. I don't know the details though.
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What do devs/investors have to do with content? The users are creating the content. And then, there's not really an algorithm rooting you in. You are free to follow the people you're actually interested in, how it is supposed to be.
I also don't have any polishing problems myself. It all just works, there are nice apps, etc.
Why would you want to have a for profit company with Mastodon? That's what would probably ruin it in the long run, as they would go for their interests, instead of interests of users and the platform itself. Of course it's hard surviving by donations and so on, but I think that's the way it should go.
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Even as a Lemmy user, I still don't know how the Fediverse works completely. You're just lying to yourself if you think understanding Mastodon is easier then just making a blue sky account.
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Do you understand how email works? You dont have 1 centralised email server. You pick one and thats your email address name@emailserver. It then talks to other email servers unless its blocked emails from that server.
In principal, Mastodon and Lemmy are exactly the same.
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I didn't say that. But it's still not that complicated, as someone else also replied with the email example
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Centralisation makes things easy.
If it takes more than 1 minute to onboard to a new service, and especially if you have to overcome any learning barrier (such as what 'instances' are and how to choose one) then the vast majority of people will immediately throw that option out and won't even consider it.
People like bluesky specifically because it gives them something almost identical to what they had before.
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Much less people on mastodon, while most accounts I used to follow on Twitter have migrated to Bluesky or at least use both it and Twitter now.
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But that's not a problem of Mastodon. It's the problem of people not switching here
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because mastodon had an opportunity for a migration from twitter and they spent it attacking journalists who started posting on there
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Do you have any summary for this? Would like to read about it
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surely that corporation won't be evil
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I thought the title was hyperbole at first, but I just checked the Google Play charts, and it's not even in the top 200 under the Social category anymore. Less than a month ago it was in the top 5. Talk about a rapid decline...Edit: See below
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I went on Twitter to download my data pre-deletion (still nothing) and Billy Bragg was on there. What the hell?! That’s practically on a par with guesting on Joe Rogan by now.
71 comments