Use Mastadon, Bluesky will eventually have to enshittify as they are a corporation.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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They literally owe money to *checks notes... Blockchain Capital. A bunch of fucking cryptobros venture capital firm.
Enshittification is coming, people are stupid for falling for this again. I'm sick of fucking hearing about how all-volunteer created & funded Mastodon isn't as slick as the fucking venture capital funded Bluesky. "It's too hard to use!" Wah, go cry about it into a corporate teat some more, sucker.
people are stupid for falling for this again.
It's a better, more usable platform than mastodon for the average user today, it makes sense people will move to it instead - it's human behavior.
I wish more than people treated these platforms as disposable like they are. Just dump their ass like a shitty ex if they start abusing the platform. Remind folks that Yahoo, Myspace and Digg seemed unreplaceable at one point, and now they are irrelevant.
I never used twitter, I tried to use mastodon about a year ago and hated it, I joined bluesky a few weeks back and love it.
Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween. I never found anyone I wanted to follow while sifting through screenfuls of firehose, so I didn't bother.
Bluesky has nice UX, the posts on Discover are mostly engaging content, there's a bunch of people i've heard of over there, tags are encouraged via feeds, the starter packs are nice and the blocklists are amazing.
Will it enshittify eventually? Sure.
But then you just move on to the next free trial.
It took me a week to find a bunch of lefties, journalists and shitposters on bluesky; whatever comes after it will doubtless be just as quick. They're a fungible commodity - if I can't find the same specific set of people on the next one, ehh.
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It's a better, more usable platform than mastodon
I haven't yet heard an explanation for this that makes sense. It looks more like Twitter and it has VC money behind it. That's it, as far as I can tell.
I wish more than people treated these platforms as disposable like they are.
It would be easy if they were actually decentralized. The way it is now, if you leave, you leave all of your friends. Getting all of your friends to leave with you is a ridiculous task. You can't even get 3 of your friends to agree on where to eat for lunch. Try getting all of your friends to follow you to a different social network, where they have to create new accounts, etc. If you have that kind of clout, you should start a religion.
I'll just paste here what I wrote elsewhere:
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The average person is tech illiterate, so having them understand what a "federated platform" is, is too much to ask. It may be easy for you or me, but we're here on Lemmy, so that immediately makes us not the average.
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The average person also doesn't care what a federated platform is. They just want something that is convenient and works. Same as the above point; maybe we would be willing to sit down and figure things out, but others will consider that a waste of time and bad.
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In that sense, federated platforms are a major failure, as picking instances and creating accounts is a hassle rather than a convenience.
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From personal experience, trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating. Some rules were too restrictive, some rules were too vague, other rules looked like they were created for sensitive little snowflakes. It was like reading through the rules of Discord servers. Not a good look for a social media platform.
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Something like Bluesky tries to be both; a platform without algorithms (or only user-created algorithms that you can choose to subscribe to), where you can make your own instance or just be part of its centralised instance. The fact that the overwhelming number of people choose the latter should tell you enough about what people want.
The signup process for Bluesky is the same as Mastodon. You can join the "main instance" at joinmastodon.com or choose an alternative instance. Most people aren't going to wade through the sets of rules on alternative instances like you did; they'll just join the default instance at joinmastodon.com.
having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask
Email is the usual analogy.
trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating.
Your average person will just land on mastodon.social without bothering to read the TOS... i mean rules, you know that.
And you missed a real key argument: network effect. If average person's friends are on platform XYZ, that's where average person will be (although this is stronger with messengers).
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UX is always going to be the number one priority for a SoMe, when people have to pick one. People are not suckers for wanting proper solutions. FOSS projects need to prioritise this much higher that many of them do, otherwise they will never crawl out of the shadows and in to the light and forever stay with the nerds willing to accept an inferior UX.
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Much like lemmy, my mastodon feed and general engagement has started to fizzle out. I’m seeing people I used to follow on mastodon no longer active, but now on Bluesky. 🤷♂️
My Lemmy feed is bangin'. Live long and prosper 🖖
It's hard for communities to switch from twitter to bluesky eve with starter packs, custom feeds, etc. Not all people are into programming and that's basically the only community in mostodon.
I have no complaints about Lemmy, but posting on Mastodon is basically screaming into the void - I've been trying for more than a year, and I basically hardly ever get any reaction at all. In comparison, in the first week on Bluesky I found multiple people following me, commenting on my silly wine and cactuses posts, and in general just interacting.
Don't get me wrong, I still prefer Mastodon technically and ethically, but it's just so goddamned barren and dead I feel completely unmotivated to post there...
On Mastodon in settings you need to enable your account discoverability. Otherwise people will see you only if they know about you. This is weird default and my main complain about Mastodon :(
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can we "use" mastodon if we already have lemmy accounts?
Yes (somewhat), just like you can post on Lemmy with Honk, but note that all ActivityPub software, while speaking the same protocol, interacts best with its own kind. Yet.
Yep. They’ve only raised $15M so far which is a modest amount by relative standards. If they paid it back right now then I would give them some breathing room for these naive, grandiose statements. Oh but then how would their staff get rich without an IPO? If they could become profitable NOW they could maybe go employee-owned and avoid selling their ass to the stock market.
Of course none of that will happen. Optimistically they will take on more investment money and then go public or get acquired by some other entity and these hippie-ass remarks from their CEO will look like what they are: pipe dreams brought on by their first blush of success. And that’s charitable. Her comments are so naive it’s plausible she’s straight up lying through her teeth right now.
Everyone in tech wants to get buy-a-house rich and quit. No one is in this for humanity.
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Venture capital and crypto money do not last forever and they need to maintain and run a for-profit corporation.
The question is not IF they will sell some soft of “pro accounts” and have advertising, the question is only WHEN they will have it. My guess is before Q3/2025.
Exactly, they're in the "growth" part of the business stage, where they get investors giving them money because of the explosion of user growth. In other words, the explosion of available eyes to put ads in front of. They're literally investing based on the growth of the user base, which is tied to how much ad-buy can be involved.
Growth phase = lucy holding the football
I expect subscriptions soon. I don't mind subscriptions as much as I mind advertisment honestly. Advertising is negative content for these types of services. It detracts and makes the service way less useful but subscriptions at least will fund upkeep at a greater efficiency of user per dollar than ads.
To lurkers, consider financially supporting the fediverse particukarly the homeservers you use if you aren't running your own.
And at the same time they will offer a premium plan in which there are no ads.
They are VC backed. Enshittification incoming.
Reshaping!?
Its a washed down solution of half Twitter half Mastodon
Since the barriers of entry on mastodon are too high for mainstream users, Bluesky is probably a good thing imo.
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I mean, of course they will. They've got bills to pay, after all.
Out of curiosity, I checked her wikipedia page. How did she jump from a relatively regular tech career to CEO of BlueSky in 2 years?
This is just my opinion.
There were only 50 employees in BlueSky in 2021. She was probably one of the few people that started a company out of those employees. That's what I got from her Wikipedia.
I'm gonna guess is she is liked by her coworkers, she does well in presentations.
Also bluntly, her background of being Chinese and Swiss is a good look if they plan on marketing internationally. Her age probably plays a big role. No one wants to follow a company with a CEO that's too old or too young.
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Got to wait until the network effects make it hard to get the momentum to go elsewhere before really turning the enshittification screws. Look at how much it's taken to dent twitter significantly.
I watched her talk and she is clearly not being honest. She uses a lot of buzzwords without any of the deeper philosophical underpinnings that would be necessary to truly create an open platform.
She plays like it will always be the way it is now which is frankly a lie being a for-profit entity with startup money from crypto bros.
Their terms of service will be changed when it suits them and already allow for their complete control of anything you share with them. Retaining your copyright means nothing if they can do whatever they want with what you share with them.
Finally we see the coupe de grace of binding arbitration in their terms. This is just another corporate attempt to be the next big social media thing. They will be hovering up all your personal details and selling it to marketers and AI bros before you can finishing signing on.
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As long as that philosophy doesn't reach FOSS philosophy, that's fine. Imagine if Fediverse social media suddenly didn't really want to "enshitify" their platforms, but included trackers and ads?
See that's kind of the thing though, Ads is a broad spectrum. We can think of it as small things like the old google one blue line of text off to the side in the old days, the huge popups that force you to view them etc...
Bottom line there's a scale there.
|few and easy to ignore] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Many and forces you to pay attention to them before you can reach what you came for]
and the bottom line is, far left on that spectrum, is negligable profit. If you can tune out the ads easily and just focus on the content you want... that means the advertisers aren't getting new sales/visits etc.. that they want. Which means, they will pay very little for them.
Point is, the hypothetical hope of "well when their investors ask them to make it profitable, they will just put a tiny banner in the far corner", is a no go.
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I reject the idea that things like Mastadon, Bluesky, Lemmy, etc will ever actually be good things.
Elon turned Twitter alt right, but it was a shithole for years before he bought it. Twitter started being a bot infested outrage farm echo chamber with questionable moderation practices in like 2014.
Reddit was in some ways better before it went corporate, but in a lot of ways it was much worse. Like all things considered I'd rather be on a website that has a shitty mobile app and mods that sell access to corporations than a website where there are communities dedicated to softcore child porn and teenagers getting death threats over jackdaws.
Even if the fediverse fulfills its promise of not going down the corporate rabbit hole, they are still going to end up being a collection of inherently toxic echo chambers.
I reject that you lump a commercialized platform with decentralized ones. It kind of makes me think you are full of it to begin with.
What happened to Twitter after Muskrat can't be compared to anything I have ever seen. It is a disservice to reality to try and play like Twitter was already like that. It is now purely a propaganda platform used to subvert democracy.
Reddit was way better before going corporate. You have to be a real bootlicker to think the corporation improved it. You cite some questionable reddits as proof corporate cleaned it up. I just see them commercializing the hard work of millions of people without compensation.
The Fediverse has already fulfilled it promise. While it may not be the final version of the future of decentralization, it is a great start.
I will never give my information or time to another corporate ran social media platform. They proved they are all abusive fucks aand are at war with the very users that allow their platforms to exist.
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