Bluesky decides to enshittify at record speed!
I guess I'm glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn't a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.
https://gizmodo.com/bluesky-has-a-new-app-and-its-all-about-ai-2000739514Open linkView original on lemmy.world576
Comments129
If I had a nickel for every time a corpo CEO who founded a microblogging social media platform stepped down to pursue even shittier corpo endeavors, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
The irony is that Doofenshmirtz is pretty good standin for an out of touch corpo CEO
Even Doofenshmirtz wouldn't stoop so low.
In one of the Season 5 episodes, Doof runs a gym as a front to get people to power his building, so he's not too far off...
How do you figure? That’s environmentalism at its finest
Doof was helping people get healthy, and using their healthy output so the power they generate didn't go to waste!
And over 90 percent of the time, his products are fully functional and fail only due to outside interference.
While not technical failures, his products tended to be so specific to his own personal issues and tastes that I would bet heavily against their commercial viability if I lived in their universe.
Fair enough.
Everything was pointing Mastodon until Bluesky came. And guess what? Turns out the problem is and always has been corporations and centralized ownership.
Mastodon has shit branding and I'm not afraid to say it.
In general, I'd say the fediverse as a whole has shit branding and is probably a bit too confusing and/or too much initial setup work for the average inertnet user.
But I'm glad it's like that, to a degree, because it helps lower the amount of people overwhelming places like here with all the people who would gladly allow the place to be overrun by ads and corporate astroturfing.
The barrier to entry acts as a filter. Which is crazy to me, because it’s still so easy to sign up and conceptualize, imo.
I guess it just goes to show how accustomed people have become to uncanny and frankly insane levels of convenience.
I remember the first time I logged in to Gmail without putting my password in — when all of a sudden the entire internet used cookies in lieu of credentials (is that how it works? I’m not qualified).
I can absolutely understand that it's difficult to conceptualise. For someone who already understands, the concept is dead simple.
But I still remember the confusion trying to join Mastodon all those years ago. You are shown a list of servers, huh? Never being introduced to the concept of federated social media, just being asked makes you feel like you don't belong because you don't understand what's happening.
Ok, so you search around and work out that it's across many servers. You now have to somehow pick a server with no frame of reference. Pick randomly and hope you don't pick the lemmdgrad equivalent (which is always high on the list on join-lemmy.com BTW). Then you go to join and you have to apply - oh, but what if they don't want me? How do they know who I am, why would they approve my application?
Each one of these things is a barrier to entry, they stack like swiss cheese so that very few people make it through.
Then there's the part where all these people have friends that could help them through it, but the friends never mention the fediverse to them because of the whole don't talk about thing. I am guilty of this.
And then on top of that you find a random Mastodon link in the wild, click it, a Mastodon instance loads, but you can't reply/toot/do anything, because it's not your instance and you're not signed in. I still don't know how to "convert" a link to my own instance (granted, I haven't looked into that much really).
There must be some sort of way to do it.
Lemmy doesn't handle this nicely either, though I still use this extension last updated 3 years ago: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant
If you're the one posting a link, you can use a service like https://lemmyverse.link/ which will redirect a user to the same items on their own instance (after they set their instance the first time), though that site is run by the guy behind lemmings.world that's shutting down in a couple of months, so it's future may be a little uncertain. I've also seen https://threadiverse.link/ but I don't know who run it.
Right, so it's all "this might work, or it might not, or might die in a bit" - it's chaos. It should be a native feature of the fediverse to auto-redirect to your instance.
Though it's better now, it used to be that Lemmy and a lot of Lemmy-type alternatives' documentation were more for people who wanted to host their own server, rather than someone who wanted to join a social network.
But at much the same time, that complication also hurts adoption, so if people ever wanted Lemmy to be a proper social media site to replace the existing ones, the barrier to entry does also need to go down.
What's wrong with toots?
1
I think the mascot is cute
I hope you're equally not afraid to contribute to it then
Mastodon has a very singular type of user and circle jerk communities. Maybe it'll grow out of its tweeny phase some day. But until then, it will only attract more of the same crowd. Much to its detriment.
No way man, this time it will be different.
You would have thought people would have learned that this doesn't work from Digg but you what I think affects it? I think the generational divide that exists between social media networks serves to stratify this learning such that each new generation gets to experience it for themselves because they were not on the last social media that turned to shit.
Corporate owned entities will always enshitify.
Yup.
This is why I moved away from Gitea to Forgejo. Nothing wrong with Gitea. I just can't trust the corporate model anymore, especially not for something as critical as my code repos.
But your code repos are super easy to move. So shouldn't it matter less?
I didn't realize Gitea was corporate...
The elected leader transferred all the trademarks to a company he owns, and (I think) did away with elections.
That's fucked up! How did they even invest that much authority in one position, elected or no?
"Unitary executive" theory has no place in the FOSS ecosystem! (or politics, for that matter)
I didn't realize bluesky was corporate.
I did try it when it was new, but it always felt like kind of a circlejerk. Like it was good to be surrounded by mostly like-minded opinions, but I felt like everyone was trying to say something profound or boldly controversial and I was just like... "Yeah, we all pretty much agree, so... that's that, I guess?"
But then again I was never really into the whole microblogging thing even before, so maybe that's always how it was supposed to be...
Before I found the fediverse my main platform was reddit, though. Good ole anonymous forums, that's all the social media I need...
If something isn't very specifically only fediverse (and not just able to federate) or open source it's corporate. You'll always know because everything that isn't corporate is very obviously not because it'll tell you. I'm very surprised that anyone could think bluesky isn't corporate.
It was before I really knew about the fediverse, so when I read about how it was able to federate I didn't really fully understand it but I thought it was this new radical thing that could revolutionize the internet.
I didn't really discover the fediverse proper until I found matrix and lemmy, and the word kept popping up until I finally read about it.
I always considered myself tech unsavvy, but I now know that was because I've spent my whole life being gaslit by proprietary tech that's virtually unusable because of the corporate obsession with control, and deliberate obfuscation of settings. I just kept despairing about privacy infringements and bad UIs, and felt resigned to that being the norm, so I avoided technology as much as I could. I didn't truly understand FOSS and why it's so important until maybe less than a year ago. Anything that sounded like tech jargon just kinda went over my head.
And then I found Linux and read a whole lot about it, got really excited to try it, and eventually got a computer with Endeavour. Now I'm in love with it. All my life, I thought I hated computers, but it turns out I just hated Windows (and Mac, hated that too).
I feel reborn, like there's so much potential ahead now, so much to learn and explore. Sure, maybe tech jobs are dying out. I'll never get a job as a software engineer, even if I learn programming. But outside of that I mean, pursuing tech as a hobby, there's just a whole new world opening up for me, and it's cause I finally opened that door labeled "FOSS"
Back when meta was pushing threads a lot of lemmy was suggesting blue sky as the "safe" alternative. I thought it wasn't corporate at that point, though I never looked into it. At the time I thought federating was proof a site was one of the "good guys." Lots of us here aren't really techie, and we're just bumbling along picking stuff up over time, with none of this as a priority, just trying to take baby steps towards a safer, more private net experience.
Oh damn. It's rotten all the way to the core.
Oh wait. I'm on mastodon. The correct platform to have migrated to
Ok it's not BlueSky as in the BlueSky social media website. It's another separate tool they're developing.
The title is very misleading.
Thank you! I was wondering if I needed to quit the new Twitter.
Bsky enhittified the day it was formed.
The problem: Twitter is being centrally controlled, by one large corporation which can be corrupted.
The solution: A new "company" with a "trusted board" instead of investors!
Bsky is slowly becoming twitter because someone who thinks like businessman can't comprehend running a project without a company and a "trusted board" behind it, with capital from elsewhere fueling the whole thing. Jack Dorsey probably had good intentions, but he's just too near sighted (or not the right person) to create a viable alternative disconnected from the business minded framework a true open decentralized twitter replacement needed.
It's basically just Twitter in the early days, way before the Musk takeover. It will follow the same path eventually, as all VC funded tech
People forget that Twitter turned to shit long before musk showed up. They were the ones who refused to enforce their own TOS for trump for years.
i stopped using twitter around 2013 after adopting it in 2007. i deleted my account entirely when it sold
I used it in 2011, because I was trying to make sense of what the hell even is this? It made no sense to me. Stopped using it until 2014, when I made my second ever post, and then stopped using it again until 2018 when a professional athlete that I happen to share the same name with tried intimidating me off my handle. That didn't work (how you approach people matters!). But I still never used it.
When Sam Altman buys Bluesky, you can expect the cycle to repeat itself.
That's the thing, like it's just twitter with a different logo. Does nothing different, still has questionable ties to questionable people, monetization in its short term future. It's basically a Twitter clone.
Use mastodon and the fediverse
Dude, not trying to throw shade at Mastodon, but where on Lemmy I get tons of interaction, on Pixelfed and Loops I get a solid amount and on Bluesky I get plenty in comments and some on my own posts...
I have had ZERO ANYTHING on Mastodon, and the content I post is more or less the same as the others. The app looks sleek and upload quality is better than the others, but it feels like being shadowbanned on Meta... Photos, memes, text, political, personal, you name it, nothing.
I make a point to use each of these apps once a day. No one is reciprocating anything on Mastodon. Again, it feels like being shadowbanned. I honestly hate it at this point. I'm trying to engage with those people and they're giving me nothing.
Maybe it's literally a technical issue, no joke. Or maybe I'm like the old lady in the "If my phone isn't broken then why don't my relatives call me?" story
EDIT: I'm surprised to hear I'm not alone. I thought my little rant would get downvoted. Well, dang! We need to fix Mastodon then!
I have the opposite experience. I can post the same thing on both bs and mastodon and got lots of replies on mastodon and crickets on bs.
Damn... 😐
For me it's not as bad as you described, people reply if i ask something or comment but i don't know how to find the content and the people that I'd like to follow. I do follow some accounts that I like but still my feed feels dead :( I think Lemmy is easier because it's a "subject/interest first" place whereas mastodon (or twitter) is "people first" place. I was never a twitter fan either so I actually don't quite know what to expect from it neither.
I still keep visiting Mastodon after I get angry to Instagram though, which happens quite often (I know mastodon is a twitter alt and we have pixelfed for ig)
I tried following hashtags but then my feed was overflowed with a few of them, i couldn't see the posts from the accounts i followed so I dropped them :/
That's true about Lemmy. It's been a good replacement for both Reddit and Facebook groups, though smaller.
It's been but it's kind of starting to really reflect some of the crap you see on reddit. Thankfully not too much mod or monetization drama as of yet, but I've noticed we are really starting to draw in some wackadoo users from Reddit as of late. Just even over the past month, I've had to start blocking some subs, I've been starting to see waves of some pretty unhinged stuff. Thats what's great about the fediverse, is it can grow and evolve. But that still doesn't solve one of the biggest primary problems with social media, and that's its public users, some of whom are just straight up people I don't want to be near, even virtually.
I hear you. Even in places where everyone mostly agrees on politics there are still niches that are bizarre, offensive, cult-like or aggressive or individuals that turn every disagreement into a fight. I stumble upon them sometimes on all the new platforms. What can I say? We're definitely not living in an echo chamber. Right-wingers are wrong about that one
I'm the same, Mastodon is good for some neiche topics. But for following news etc, it's a no go.
Sounds like there aren't as many users on mastodon as you would like. Next time you see a public figure using only bluesky and not the fedevirse make sure to call them out.
Will do. If I can find the time to be on 5 different platforms, they can too. I've been itching to log into the ol'gram (Instagram, that is) and nudge some of my favorite indie bands towards joining fediverse
that's not been my experience. I set followers to needs approval as well, fuck if i can figure out why anyone would follow me. I have kind of abandoned my masto account and now use Goto Social
I know why this happens. My comments get more, sometimes many more, comments and likes on Mastodon than on Bluesky.
On Mastodon, it's all how many people you follow and who follow you back. There are other ways to find posts on Mastodon, like the federated tab on your server, but many people don't seem to use them as much. To find things on Mastodon you must follow lots of people. You have a lot more work to do on Mastodon if you want things to read and for people to read you.
Compared to Twitter, this is also true on Bluesky, but management there has tried to give users ways to find people other than an algorithm (which Bluesky does have in its Discover tab, which I notice post quality drops substantially from my curated following list), in the form of starter packs. On Mastodon the account FediFollows is a good place to find groups of people to follow, and FediTips for general ideas and advice.
"But b'uesky integrated!!!!!!"
How it feels to be vindicated for not trusting/buying-in to a new fad
Not as good as I'd like.
Still kinda good
I'd swap "open source: false" with "closed source: true" so the pattern is consistent.
Android
Valorizing CEOs is for idiots and suckers.
The bluesky rise kinda pissed me off. More so because all my artist friends that were on twitter went to bluesky instead of Mastodon when I told them about it as an alternative. everyone collectively decided to ignore a system that already existed and to the centralized thing again. Big suprise.
Bluesky was easier to sign up and less confusing to use. It had a much better mobile app. A lot of pro newsies came to Mastodon and were roundly ejected and abused, so they up and went to Blurdky instead. That was a major shooting your own foot moment for Mastodon because those newsies would have brought engaged audience. I saw people celebrating at Mastodon when news reporters up and quit. Idiotic. I hope the Lemmy community doesn't repeat that mistake.
Lemmy's been stable and perfectly enjoyable for years.
I'd like to see it grow but even if it doesn't I'm cool with that.
yep, my artists circles all flocked to fucking corporate platform... again. There are artists on Mastodon though, and not just on Mastodon.art !
No surprise. Y'all are dumb if you think the point of all social media isn't to just make money.
Both of those are federated options with no central company behind them. They have issues, but not because they have a corporate algorithm feeding their users.
So not all social media, gotcha.
Is it Social Media if there's no algo? No one called IRC or old forums "social media" when they were at their heights.
Or Usenet. Or BBSs. But one could argue they were all social media. I think the difference is the control that is being exerted by people in power. And that’s likely due to the audience size. It becomes an effective way to guide people’s ideas, decisions, etc. Facebook got there. Reddit got there. Lemmy could.
Who would be the ones to do it in lemmy? People are switching to federated options to guard against that.
It’s resistant for sure. But say one instance becomes dominant and controls most traffic? It’s still possible however unlikely.
It just wasn't a term yet because it wasn't popular. But yes, those were social media. IRC was a medium in which you could be social. I was there.
I was there too. It wasn't a term because marketers didn't invent the term yet. Key part, it was Marketers that invented the term. Marketers didn't care before they found a way to use it to manipulate people. You can argue that those thing are "social media", but not in anyway that makes social media a problem.
Social media invented as a term or not invented as a term, it's still a place where we can socialize on the Internet. 🤷♂️ I don't really care what we call it.
Absolutely.
For those curious it sounds like the app is an ai powered discovery tool, where you tell it what kinda stuff you like and it tries to find stuff from across bsky to show you based on your interests you told it about
FWIW
Most of the people I know who moved to Bluesky instead of Mastodon specifically cited the ability to easily index/discover stuff from a single location as the reason.
I'd honestly agree. It's fine after you get established and a feed set up, but before then, not having a good way to find stuff to follow in the first place hurts it a bit.
Is an important part to me, it's not just a recommender algorithm
Honestly that sounds like a good idea for Mastodon. Something that will help users find their first 100 follows across 10+ instances
It sounds like a stupid app, but of everything going on, this is just not something I care about.
I knew it. Investors started pouring in, it was only a matter of time.
Oh wow, an AI feature that nobody asked for. Such innovation, much wow!
At my second-to-last job, the company did a reorganization and I was given the title of "Visionary". It really pissed me off because I was a programmer who actually did all the work. I also knew that it meant I was going to be laid off soon and sure enough I was.
Uhmmm.... chief what...?
LOL exactly what I thought.
From the article:
As long as it's open source and customizable, I don't see the problem with this.
It's not bad that we have algorithms to find content. I'm sorting the comments of this thread with an algorithm
The key is that I can choose which algorithm I want to sort by, that algorithm is open source, and I can write my own algorithm, if I want.
At some point they are going to have to make money.
The fediverse:
Social media in general don't need to. Atpor servers operators in general don't need to. But Bluesky does, because it's accountable in front of its investors. So yes, they do have to make money, and no, there is no solution that does not go with some level of enshittification. And then they'll get pressed to make more money, to grow their revenues every year. And it can only go down from there.
Social media is simply not profitable without degrading the experience.
I agree that the server operators will need to do something to recoup costs. It's gonna be non-targeted ads, local to a server, or it's gonna be subscription. Or - ugh - it's gonna be selling our activities to some vendor. And there's gonna be a bit where some op goes too far and we all bail. Sure.
But we can bail, almost. And we can pick a better server. And we can vote against the fucking algorithm with our feet.
And while the idea that server ops need to break even is unpopular, it is the reality that's coming.
Everything from lemmy.world all the way up to Wikipedia do just fine on donations.
AI is totally profitable!
It seems this fediverse thing is the real innovation, not twitter clones.
ITT: headline readers that judge with their full weight on minimal information
Lemmy really is just like reddit :)
It is. But it think the fediverse is the next evolution of whatever is going to replace social media as we know it. So while I think this place is part of the journey, and not necessarily the destination, I think there's also some important things here that are getting glossed over by just saying it's new reddit. Like the control of it, and how it's connected and whatever else.
Take reddit for instance, like I've had some pretty big blowouts with a specific reddit power mod before, and he's the mod of what seems like a billion subs. Buddy's just a zeeb, but ive lost my patience with him, and I've had usernames be totally banned. It hinders your ability to maneuver through the entire platform, like you can do new usernames or whatever, but if they start IP blocking you, or my total all time favourite, the "shadow ban" (what a gross thing), it gets harder to maneuver around.
Whereas here, that same power mod could show up, but as fast as he can ban me, I can join other instances and basically be back in 20 minutes. It enacts freedom of speech, and allows people to circumvent suppression. Sometimes thats not such a great thing, but I'd rather be offended by something, than enable someones voice to be suppressed only entirely because one absolute skid stain loser doesn't agree with them.
Are you lost?
"A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype."
We don't need nuance to hate on every appearance of AI enshittifying something.
I have no problem with people talking shit on AI, my comment is about the fact people are reacting to what they think the subject of the headline is as opposed to what is written in the article.
FYI "are you lost" is a pretty rude way to start a conversation. I wasn't trying to hurt you
I really wonder if Mastodon would have done better with a nicer, more techy name. Also, it’s silly but the double @ usernames look worse than the AT proto usernames.
I'd argue that it was more to do with the fediverse setup being confusing/complicated, if you're not used to it.
People would think you'd need to sign up to all the servers that you wanted to access, rather than using just one account for everything.
It's funny, I bailed when they started doing age checks. It made my life better
I know this goes against the whole culture but we are going to do it anyway -Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, etc.
I get the same vibes from this woman I get from Sam Altman and Zuckerberg … just this cold, dead, vacant stare like there isn’t anything caring behind those eyes.
Ceo material
I can kinda see the idea. Instead of putting the AI recommendation engine in the app, you have a separate app for it. Instead of relying on your behaviour, you decide what to prompt it to recommend.
But I think I'm probably being way too optimistic with this perspective description. If it is like I just described, though, I can see why some people would want to use it.
But it would likely still have to rely on collecting behavioural data to be any good, and it would cost humongous amounts of energy and resources... For very little benefit.
if only this could have been foreseen!
had there been a better alternative!
/s
Hubzilla
It's literally a twitter clone, what did you expect?
Just get off twitter, FFS. That entire website is a bane on humanity.
They're not doing anything to the app though, this is a standalone thing.
Yet. They aren't doing anything to the app yet.
Call me when they do. Until then I'm using it. 🙂👍
How is it a bane on humanity, the different opinions people have or are you saying its all AI now?
Booosky
So, another Caesar huh?
Sensationalist headline that is not Gizmodo's. OP, please use the original headline.
This is a product built by a group at Blusky. It's not part of their core app.
Are you lost? This ain't some news comm, it's Fuck AI and I'll title my posts any fucking way I want.