I just can't be bothered to join one of these twitter alternatives. Takes too much time and effort to curate a list of people worth following. And anything I say on there is like yelling into the...
I just can't be bothered to join one of these twitter alternatives. Takes too much time and effort to curate a list of people worth following. And anything I say on there is like yelling into the void anyway. So it's not useful for starting discussion, I can't be bothered to hunt down discussions worth having, and social media is generally a terrible format to have full discussions anyway.
I've settled into mostly just ignoring social media. I've got a Facebook to keep up on funny things a few IRL friends post and coordinate D&D/hangouts with them, but that's about it. And a TikTok for mindless scrolling while I'm on the toilet. That's about all the social media I need these days.
I tried Mastadon and couldn't figure out how to follow people properly. I still have it, but don't use it - the feed is just like, 2 guys. I follow a bunch of people on BlueSky, and it's still...
I tried Mastadon and couldn't figure out how to follow people properly. I still have it, but don't use it - the feed is just like, 2 guys.
I follow a bunch of people on BlueSky, and it's still just 2 guys in my feed, but that's because one of those guys is Neil Gaiman and he posts constantly. CONSTANTLY. It's hard to see anything else for all the Neil Gaiman posts. I have an account because I think this is where social media is headed, I want to understand it and be familiar with it, and I want to be ready for when major personalities/companies start making the move.
Plus, it's kind of nice to have a new social media space without ALL the companies; lots of conversation, but less corporate noise at the moment.
If you hop into the settings for Bluesky, there's a setting for how many likes a reply needs to have to be shown in your feed, setting that significantly up from the default of 2 cleared a bunch...
If you hop into the settings for Bluesky, there's a setting for how many likes a reply needs to have to be shown in your feed, setting that significantly up from the default of 2 cleared a bunch of Neil off of my follow feed. I still enjoy seeing his replies and stuff in general that he posts, but the default 2 likes was far too few. You can also enable a setting that will only show replies in your feed if you follow both of the users involved in the transaction. I don't have that one on, but I might use it some day once the userbase starts to flesh out.
I don't use any twitter-like social media, but some people whose opinions I trust do, and from what they said it sounds like the biggest achievement of Bluesky seems to be just the right amount of...
I don't use any twitter-like social media, but some people whose opinions I trust do, and from what they said it sounds like the biggest achievement of Bluesky seems to be just the right amount of gatekeeping (through their invite-only phase) but still attractiveness to "normal" users (unlike Mastodon) that it kind of feels like old, pre-constant culture wars twitter.
Of course, this may all be temporary, if it continues to grow for enough time. But some social networks, like Lemmy, failed to do this from the very beginning, so it's a really good start.
Personally I fail to see how it could be anything but temporary, when all the same preconditions for enshittification are there, and when the Twitter user base will surely all trickle in there...
Personally I fail to see how it could be anything but temporary, when all the same preconditions for enshittification are there, and when the Twitter user base will surely all trickle in there eventually as Twitter falls out of fashion.
That's why I'm personally sticking it out with Mastodon; there's at least the hope that a different model will be more sustainable in the long term.
Mastodon is already lousy with culture warriors in a way that BlueSky isn’t. They happen to be on my side of the culture war generally so it’s not as hostile of an environment as Twitter, but...
Mastodon is already lousy with culture warriors in a way that BlueSky isn’t. They happen to be on my side of the culture war generally so it’s not as hostile of an environment as Twitter, but they’re still annoying and I’d prefer to spend my time hanging out at whatever party they’re not at.
Mastodon has to have some of the single most annoying user-bases of any currently promoted social media website. I've tried it, three times now, and just left because of how inane I felt...
Mastodon has to have some of the single most annoying user-bases of any currently promoted social media website. I've tried it, three times now, and just left because of how inane I felt everything was over there.
Actually stuck with BlueSky, though I don't think their version of "federation" is really going to work out. I feel a lot of what we are seeing right now is going to be a stepping stone for whatever the next big social media websites end up being, whatever that may be.
I had to block a long list of words like “fascist” and “republican” and “gop” and also be pretty heavy with blocks and mutes to be able to stand Mastodon. I still have a pet peeve for angry image...
I had to block a long list of words like “fascist” and “republican” and “gop” and also be pretty heavy with blocks and mutes to be able to stand Mastodon. I still have a pet peeve for angry image memes, if I ever get around to rebuilding my RSS reader around ActivityPub I want to make something that OCRs images and blocks images with a high text content.
Commenting is a problem for two reasons: (1) the UI completely fails to put replies in context, I don’t remember Twitter being that bad back when I used it but today it seems pathological too, one of the worst problems is people abusing the reply mechanism to reply to themselves 100 times which breaks… Everything. (2) Some people being really prickly about being replied to: the first person I replied to immediately wrote something that denied my humanity. One woman who wrote something about how impressed she was that she’d read an article about “beaver deceivers” got furious that I had written something that was carefully fit into the character limit of my multi-year history of managing a beaver population “just 15 minutes after I posted it.” She posted an angry image meme that somehow didn’t appear in my notifications and that I didn’t find out until another Mastodonster told me about. So I don’t reply unless I have watched the person for a long time and never seen them take a spaz.
Experience will probably vary by instance. I'm on an geographically-defined instance rather than one set up around a single topic, maybe that's why I've seen a more chill and varied timeline than you.
Experience will probably vary by instance. I'm on an geographically-defined instance rather than one set up around a single topic, maybe that's why I've seen a more chill and varied timeline than you.
I find the idea of "oh you just didn't try the right instance, take time to browse the couple hundred that exist" to just be a massive cope from most Mastodon users (not saying you in particular,...
I find the idea of "oh you just didn't try the right instance, take time to browse the couple hundred that exist" to just be a massive cope from most Mastodon users (not saying you in particular, I just find it to be a bad thing to bring up).
I tried going through the list of different instances on fedidb, and the vast majority are just ghost towns or still populated by the absolute schizos that put me off the platform in the first place.
Mastodon will never take off. If a tech inclined individual has tried on three separate occasions to try and use a service and was put off by it by both it's user base and instance hunting, not many other people will care to or they will shortly abandon it. I'm happy that you had a good experience, but I would be willing to go out on a limb and say that your experience is the exception and not the norm.
Feelings seem to run high whenever Mastodon gets brought up in discussion. Personally I don't want it to "take off" and become a replacement for the major social media sites, I just want something...
Feelings seem to run high whenever Mastodon gets brought up in discussion. Personally I don't want it to "take off" and become a replacement for the major social media sites, I just want something that remains viable and doesn't gradually descend into a money hungry manipulative mess. So I'm not trying to convince anyone to move over there, and I'm not at all certain that I'm right about any of this.
Fair enough, and that's my bad if it came across that way. I think I got so tired of people in certain corners of the internet evangelizing about it so much that now I just got left with a bad...
Fair enough, and that's my bad if it came across that way. I think I got so tired of people in certain corners of the internet evangelizing about it so much that now I just got left with a bad taste.
If it meets your use case, it's all good. I just found nothing I was particularly interested in there.
I welcome the differences in opinion. I think a lot of people would agree that the Internet has gotten far too centralized but still don't see that that makes this kind of fragmentation desirable....
I welcome the differences in opinion. I think a lot of people would agree that the Internet has gotten far too centralized but still don't see that that makes this kind of fragmentation desirable. Can't turn the big four platforms into 12 or 15 without some schisms.
I used to take the edge route of “if they dislike the Fediverse, they’re probably not worth speaking to.” Doesn’t work for IRL people, but a good filter to cut down on parasocial relationships.
I used to take the edge route of “if they dislike the Fediverse, they’re probably not worth speaking to.” Doesn’t work for IRL people, but a good filter to cut down on parasocial relationships.
I think with both of them, it depends who you follow, and it takes a while to find interesting people to follow. (It took a long time on Twitter, too.) I don’t care all that much who the average...
I think with both of them, it depends who you follow, and it takes a while to find interesting people to follow. (It took a long time on Twitter, too.)
I don’t care all that much who the average or worst people are on large social networks, since I don’t follow them. It might be different if one of my posts got attention, though.
Bluesky doesn't work the same as Twitter, and while the differences may not be enough, I don't think all the same preconditions are there. I respect that, but for me personally the people present...
when all the same preconditions for enshittification are there
Bluesky doesn't work the same as Twitter, and while the differences may not be enough, I don't think all the same preconditions are there.
That's why I'm personally sticking it out with Mastodon; there's at least the hope that a different model will be more sustainable in the long term.
I respect that, but for me personally the people present on a social network are by far its most important feature. From the point of view of decentralization and long-term viability, Tildes can look even worse than reddit when you describe it as "an ex-reddit mod built his own little social media with strict moderation that he has exclusive control over", especially compared to Lemmy.
In reality most Lemmy instances are insufferable echo chambers with worse culture than reddit, whereas Tildes is pretty good.
I’m curious to hear more. Do you mean they’re on the path to have Voat-like culture or that it’s the same evaporative cooling effect applied to a different ideology?
I’m curious to hear more. Do you mean they’re on the path to have Voat-like culture or that it’s the same evaporative cooling effect applied to a different ideology?
How to put it... I naively joined Voat way back when as I had a (somewhat naive but not entirely wrong) view that Reddit was becoming more corporate and clamping down on free speech to become more...
How to put it...
I naively joined Voat way back when as I had a (somewhat naive but not entirely wrong) view that Reddit was becoming more corporate and clamping down on free speech to become more investor friendly. That kind of messaging can attract a diverse group of people, but it obviously became a Nazi bar over time (I dropped off way before that though).
What it feels like is the very extreme ideologies end up congregating and developing a lot of in-group signalling that promotes their platform as superior. I think Hexbear as an offshoot of ChapoTraphouse is probably the best example.
Unrelated to Voat, Lemmy also doesn't seem to have many, if any, design decisions to prioritize positive community interaction. Instead there seems to be more brigading like the old internet on much of the Fediverse.
Obviously Tildes isn't immune to some of that feeling of superiority, but there's a very very different culture that reminds me more of old Reddiquette like remember the human etc. There seems to be more focus on interactions than a low-effort scrolling content stream.
They absolutely did. It feels like banning the outright neo-Nazi circlejerks somehow made it easier to radicalize disaffected right-wing boys into IRL violence with dog whistles than when their...
not entirely wrong view that Reddit was becoming more corporate and clamping down on free speech to become more investor-friendly
They absolutely did. It feels like banning the outright neo-Nazi circlejerks somehow made it easier to radicalize disaffected right-wing boys into IRL violence with dog whistles than when their hives were visible for all to say, "What a bunch of losers." It probably has to do more with userbase growth than any moderation decisions. Increase the denominator by that much and the impossibly rare events suddenly aren't so rare.
Lemmy also doesn't seem to have many, if any, design decisions to prioritize positive community interaction.
At long last, a critique of Lemmy that's more substantive than "Fedi is too hard for normies to understand."
What are some of the missing design decisions & features that would create a healthier community?
brigading
I can't believe I'm nostalgic for when subreddits had distinct flavors and you could tell when a brigade happened. Everything is so homogenized and the meta drama hasn't been fun in years.
I'm not a web designer, so I don't have many informed opinions on the subject. I mostly recognize dark patterns and terrible choices like new Reddit sharply limiting the number of replies shown in...
What are some of the missing design decisions & features that would create a healthier community?
I'm not a web designer, so I don't have many informed opinions on the subject. I mostly recognize dark patterns and terrible choices like new Reddit sharply limiting the number of replies shown in top level views.
I can't believe I'm nostalgic for when subreddits had distinct flavors and you could tell when a brigade happened. Everything is so homogenized and the meta drama hasn't been fun in years.
I do kinda miss sub wars. There were some great memes created by collaborations between subreddits...
Did you read the piece? I (like the author of the piece) think the abstracted moderation and decentralized nature will probably do a decent job of keeping enshittification at bay. It's entirely...
Personally I fail to see how it could be anything but temporary, when all the same preconditions for enshittification are there
Did you read the piece? I (like the author of the piece) think the abstracted moderation and decentralized nature will probably do a decent job of keeping enshittification at bay. It's entirely possible that some new path towards enshittification emerges, but for the ones we know of now, it looks like they're doing their honest best to keep them in check.
I read it, I just see the pre-conditions for enshittification to be the financial incentives: bluesky was made by a for-profit company, and I don't think they would set it up the way they did if...
I read it, I just see the pre-conditions for enshittification to be the financial incentives: bluesky was made by a for-profit company, and I don't think they would set it up the way they did if they didn't know they could still reap their profits from it in the end. That means they think they can keep control of most of the ecosystem either through the software or by policy.
They are for profit, but they have chosen to be a Public Benefit Corporation which allows them (and their board) to take actions they otherwise would be liable for, in the interest of serving the...
They are for profit, but they have chosen to be a Public Benefit Corporation which allows them (and their board) to take actions they otherwise would be liable for, in the interest of serving the Public Benefit they've identified (In this case, "open and decentralized public discussion.") So there's even a hedge there.
As a PBC they have a duty to (a) the shareholders, (b) the constituencies materially affected by the PBC's conduct, and (c) the public benefit(s) identified in their charter; and crucially shareholders cannot end or dilute the public benefit commitment of the PBC from year to year. Which isn't perfect, but what really is? They're trying, and as a user of both Mastodon and Bluesky, I have to say that they're doing the better job. I can't get my socials to join Mastodon for anything, but many of them will hop onto Bluesky easy.
For them as a PBC, the financial incentives only exist so long as they're serving their charter public benefit, so while it's entirely possible that they one day choose to reincorporate or something (I don't know if that's allowed/possible) to drop their charter cause, I think their mission to build a functional protocol above and beyond the platform itself has ensured that they wouldn't be able to do so without materially ending their existence because the genie is already out of the bottle and their product is out there for anyone to duplicate if desired. 🤷♂️
I think it's different for everyone based on their online groups. I (and the people mentioned) am not from the anglosphere, so about a decade ago it was still quite easy to be isolated from all...
I think it's different for everyone based on their online groups. I (and the people mentioned) am not from the anglosphere, so about a decade ago it was still quite easy to be isolated from all the bullshit.
I tried Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. I have to say, the only one I've been able to stick with is Threads. It might be because the community there is more aligned with the type of content I'm...
I tried Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. I have to say, the only one I've been able to stick with is Threads. It might be because the community there is more aligned with the type of content I'm interested in (generally more artsy stuff), but a lot of creators I already follow elsewhere have Threads, where they didn't have Mastodon or Bluesky.
Mastodon was the hardest for me to get into, and Bluesky is nice, but I still struggle with the idea of federation and how it works to find who/what I'm looking for.
Not inherently. If you think of social media as hanging out with your friend group, just expanded, it's very similar to IRL interactions. My Bluesky is mostly Spec fic authors, disability rights...
Not inherently. If you think of social media as hanging out with your friend group, just expanded, it's very similar to IRL interactions. My Bluesky is mostly Spec fic authors, disability rights folks, podcasters I like and a few random people along the way.
If your social media experience is the only exposure to the broader public you have and you're never hearing and interacting with any other opinions, sure that can be a problem. Bluesky has an attitude of blocking and moving on rather than getting in stupid arguments and I really value that. I don't know any of those people IRL, I don't feel the need to hear all their opinions on everything and weight them of equal value.
I’m not so sure I believe in the “labels” approach to moderation. For one thing it requires that somebody else sees the post and put a label on it before you see it which seems problematic when a...
I’m not so sure I believe in the “labels” approach to moderation.
For one thing it requires that somebody else sees the post and put a label on it before you see it which seems problematic when a platform like that often shows you a post a few seconds after somebody posts it.
Secondly it seems like it could be a center for a lot of drama, fake controversy and cattiness. That is, someone might be proud that “this post was moderated by the (American Medical Association|CPAC|NAACP|Greenpeace|…)” and thus moderation becomes another thing to argue about.
Back in the 1990s we all knew that spammers would install a copy of SpamAssassin and test their spams to see if they would go through it, that people who made viruses tested them with virus filters, etc. Similarly there is something to say about moderation being opaque: if people are just getting less visibility than they would otherwise they’re less likely to be angered, take countermeasures, etc.
Some better answers could include: (1) A.I. models that learn to label things the way people do, and (2) delays.
(1) could be decentralized like this: first a message is passed through an embedding model like https://www.sbert.net/ and then secondly it is classified with some classical ML algorithm such as the support vector machine. This is not as potentially accurate as a “fine-tuned” model where you train a deep neural net directly, but my experience is that I can train multiple copies of a classical ML model in 3 minutes which means the trainer is absolutely reliable and I get a good idea of the model quality. I’ve been able to train fine-tuned models that sometimes work and sometimes equal or outperform the simple model in 45 minutes. The first step is expensive and needs a GPU, the second is cheap. The central network can compute the embedding and pass it to you, you can install your own copy of the classical model and run it itself.
(2) could be cued by an A.I. model which would give moderators some time to look at spicy posts before most people get to see it.
My main problem is not any particular kind of content but rather the emotional tone of that content: (1) because emotional tone is contagious and I have a limited ability to absorb other people’s negativity and (2) because emotional tone is contagious such that negative content has a special power to spread in networks, particularly those using toxic “non-algorithm” algorithms such as boosting and the Mastodon explore page which privileges angry image memes that get boosted a lot as well as other angry content.
Angry content can be blocked in three places: (1) at the receiver (my client personally blocks angry content just before I see it), (2) at the sender (I get tilted sometimes, I know I’d do better if I had a buddy who could point this out to me), and (3) in the network. I’d say (3) is better because it directly targets the contagion. If something that would have gotten 250 boosts gets some suppression and only gets 25 boosts isn’t that a good thing for everybody except the makers of blood pressure pills?
I think I understand your ideas on moderation, and actually you'd be totally free to implement them for Bluesky! The beauty of their federation approach is users can theoretically plug and play...
I think I understand your ideas on moderation, and actually you'd be totally free to implement them for Bluesky! The beauty of their federation approach is users can theoretically plug and play whatever moderation systems they prefer.
The idea is that moderation can be individualized at the user level rather than the network level (like Mastodon or Tildes). Obviously there are upsides and downsides to letting users pick their own moderation system, but that's kinda what blocking and muting already allows Bluesky users to do.
In my opinion, Bluesky has come up with a pretty elegant and flexible solution to federated moderation.
Erm. Article from CEO of Floor64. Floor64 is "An insight company." Looks like direct advertisement for me. There a lot of similar articles on HackerNews. Upd: I have zero idea who is Mike Masnick...
Erm. Article from CEO of Floor64. Floor64 is "An insight company." Looks like direct advertisement for me. There a lot of similar articles on HackerNews.
Upd: I have zero idea who is Mike Masnick and why this its such big deal.
And honestly, after reading article, Im still not sure is it such big deal or not.
Sorry, I just don't like praising articles that don't bother with clear explanation of upsides and downsides. And idea of social network framework where each abstract layer could be managed separately by different providers is not quite appealing for me.
Upd 2: maybe in a few years Bluesky will become standard, but.. lets see.
Did you not know who Mike Masnick was, and so just googled him then skimmed his bio in order to find some reason to dismiss the article? Masnick has been writing articles about technology, the...
Did you not know who Mike Masnick was, and so just googled him then skimmed his bio in order to find some reason to dismiss the article? Masnick has been writing articles about technology, the internet/web, internet culture, social media, and tech/internet related laws for decades. Techdirt has also been around since the Slashdot days, and despite how oldschool it looks is still quite reputable.
And yes, he runs Floor64, an "insight company", as well as Techdirt... but do you have any proof that he's in any way connected to Bluesky or profiting from promoting it? Because him simply deciding to write about it because he's strongly supportive of its founding principles (good moderation, decentralization/federation, open protocols, etc) isn't surprising to me, having read hundreds of his articles over the years. He's been pretty consistent in his support for such things for a very very long time now.
Erm. Regarding proof - idea of Blusky is based on his research paper. I don't need to search internet, its in the article. I have zero idea who Mike Masnick is, but thats ok for me. I think I can...
Erm. Regarding proof - idea of Blusky is based on his research paper. I don't need to search internet, its in the article.
I have zero idea who Mike Masnick is, but thats ok for me. I think I can judge him by articles that he writes.
All Masnik's paper advocated for was developing open protocols (rather than centralized platforms), and proposed an alternative form of content moderation where users can subscribe to particular...
All Masnik's paper advocated for was developing open protocols (rather than centralized platforms), and proposed an alternative form of content moderation where users can subscribe to particular moderators to filter content for them... none of which are particularly new concepts, although he did articulate them well. Some of the ideas behind Bluesky may have been partially inspired by Masnik's paper (which Dorsey has referenced in the past) but Masnik has no direct involvement with the company, AFAIK. That's what I was asking for proof of, since you accused Masnik of "direct advertisement" in your comment.
Mike Masnick is one of the most thoughtful people you can find commenting on the internet and Techdirt is a highly respectable publication. I'm having a hard time understanding where you're coming...
Mike Masnick is one of the most thoughtful people you can find commenting on the internet and Techdirt is a highly respectable publication. I'm having a hard time understanding where you're coming from, especially without any kind of elaboration.
@cfabbro went over it in their response to your post, but additionally, you can read Techdirt's Wikipedia page and his profile on the New York Times. You don't have to know somebody's history, not...
@cfabbro went over it in their response to your post, but additionally, you can read Techdirt's Wikipedia page and his profile on the New York Times.
You don't have to know somebody's history, not necessarily, to comment on an article they've written, but if your intention is to accuse them of something in response, I think it helps to quote directly from the article.
I just can't be bothered to join one of these twitter alternatives. Takes too much time and effort to curate a list of people worth following. And anything I say on there is like yelling into the void anyway. So it's not useful for starting discussion, I can't be bothered to hunt down discussions worth having, and social media is generally a terrible format to have full discussions anyway.
I've settled into mostly just ignoring social media. I've got a Facebook to keep up on funny things a few IRL friends post and coordinate D&D/hangouts with them, but that's about it. And a TikTok for mindless scrolling while I'm on the toilet. That's about all the social media I need these days.
I tried Mastadon and couldn't figure out how to follow people properly. I still have it, but don't use it - the feed is just like, 2 guys.
I follow a bunch of people on BlueSky, and it's still just 2 guys in my feed, but that's because one of those guys is Neil Gaiman and he posts constantly. CONSTANTLY. It's hard to see anything else for all the Neil Gaiman posts. I have an account because I think this is where social media is headed, I want to understand it and be familiar with it, and I want to be ready for when major personalities/companies start making the move.
Plus, it's kind of nice to have a new social media space without ALL the companies; lots of conversation, but less corporate noise at the moment.
If you hop into the settings for Bluesky, there's a setting for how many likes a reply needs to have to be shown in your feed, setting that significantly up from the default of
2cleared a bunch of Neil off of my follow feed. I still enjoy seeing his replies and stuff in general that he posts, but the default2likes was far too few. You can also enable a setting that will only show replies in your feed if you follow both of the users involved in the transaction. I don't have that one on, but I might use it some day once the userbase starts to flesh out.The only winning move is not to play
I guess it's better than all the porn bots that follow my twitter daily
I don't use any twitter-like social media, but some people whose opinions I trust do, and from what they said it sounds like the biggest achievement of Bluesky seems to be just the right amount of gatekeeping (through their invite-only phase) but still attractiveness to "normal" users (unlike Mastodon) that it kind of feels like old, pre-constant culture wars twitter.
Of course, this may all be temporary, if it continues to grow for enough time. But some social networks, like Lemmy, failed to do this from the very beginning, so it's a really good start.
Personally I fail to see how it could be anything but temporary, when all the same preconditions for enshittification are there, and when the Twitter user base will surely all trickle in there eventually as Twitter falls out of fashion.
That's why I'm personally sticking it out with Mastodon; there's at least the hope that a different model will be more sustainable in the long term.
Mastodon is already lousy with culture warriors in a way that BlueSky isn’t. They happen to be on my side of the culture war generally so it’s not as hostile of an environment as Twitter, but they’re still annoying and I’d prefer to spend my time hanging out at whatever party they’re not at.
Mastodon has to have some of the single most annoying user-bases of any currently promoted social media website. I've tried it, three times now, and just left because of how inane I felt everything was over there.
Actually stuck with BlueSky, though I don't think their version of "federation" is really going to work out. I feel a lot of what we are seeing right now is going to be a stepping stone for whatever the next big social media websites end up being, whatever that may be.
I had to block a long list of words like “fascist” and “republican” and “gop” and also be pretty heavy with blocks and mutes to be able to stand Mastodon. I still have a pet peeve for angry image memes, if I ever get around to rebuilding my RSS reader around ActivityPub I want to make something that OCRs images and blocks images with a high text content.
Commenting is a problem for two reasons: (1) the UI completely fails to put replies in context, I don’t remember Twitter being that bad back when I used it but today it seems pathological too, one of the worst problems is people abusing the reply mechanism to reply to themselves 100 times which breaks… Everything. (2) Some people being really prickly about being replied to: the first person I replied to immediately wrote something that denied my humanity. One woman who wrote something about how impressed she was that she’d read an article about “beaver deceivers” got furious that I had written something that was carefully fit into the character limit of my multi-year history of managing a beaver population “just 15 minutes after I posted it.” She posted an angry image meme that somehow didn’t appear in my notifications and that I didn’t find out until another Mastodonster told me about. So I don’t reply unless I have watched the person for a long time and never seen them take a spaz.
Experience will probably vary by instance. I'm on an geographically-defined instance rather than one set up around a single topic, maybe that's why I've seen a more chill and varied timeline than you.
I find the idea of "oh you just didn't try the right instance, take time to browse the couple hundred that exist" to just be a massive cope from most Mastodon users (not saying you in particular, I just find it to be a bad thing to bring up).
I tried going through the list of different instances on fedidb, and the vast majority are just ghost towns or still populated by the absolute schizos that put me off the platform in the first place.
Mastodon will never take off. If a tech inclined individual has tried on three separate occasions to try and use a service and was put off by it by both it's user base and instance hunting, not many other people will care to or they will shortly abandon it. I'm happy that you had a good experience, but I would be willing to go out on a limb and say that your experience is the exception and not the norm.
Feelings seem to run high whenever Mastodon gets brought up in discussion. Personally I don't want it to "take off" and become a replacement for the major social media sites, I just want something that remains viable and doesn't gradually descend into a money hungry manipulative mess. So I'm not trying to convince anyone to move over there, and I'm not at all certain that I'm right about any of this.
Fair enough, and that's my bad if it came across that way. I think I got so tired of people in certain corners of the internet evangelizing about it so much that now I just got left with a bad taste.
If it meets your use case, it's all good. I just found nothing I was particularly interested in there.
I welcome the differences in opinion. I think a lot of people would agree that the Internet has gotten far too centralized but still don't see that that makes this kind of fragmentation desirable. Can't turn the big four platforms into 12 or 15 without some schisms.
I used to take the edge route of “if they dislike the Fediverse, they’re probably not worth speaking to.” Doesn’t work for IRL people, but a good filter to cut down on parasocial relationships.
I think with both of them, it depends who you follow, and it takes a while to find interesting people to follow. (It took a long time on Twitter, too.)
I don’t care all that much who the average or worst people are on large social networks, since I don’t follow them. It might be different if one of my posts got attention, though.
Bluesky doesn't work the same as Twitter, and while the differences may not be enough, I don't think all the same preconditions are there.
I respect that, but for me personally the people present on a social network are by far its most important feature. From the point of view of decentralization and long-term viability, Tildes can look even worse than reddit when you describe it as "an ex-reddit mod built his own little social media with strict moderation that he has exclusive control over", especially compared to Lemmy.
In reality most Lemmy instances are insufferable echo chambers with worse culture than reddit, whereas Tildes is pretty good.
I'm sure this is a controversial statement, but some of the Lemmy instances honestly remind of Voat with how the culture is developing...
I’m curious to hear more. Do you mean they’re on the path to have Voat-like culture or that it’s the same evaporative cooling effect applied to a different ideology?
How to put it...
I naively joined Voat way back when as I had a (somewhat naive but not entirely wrong) view that Reddit was becoming more corporate and clamping down on free speech to become more investor friendly. That kind of messaging can attract a diverse group of people, but it obviously became a Nazi bar over time (I dropped off way before that though).
What it feels like is the very extreme ideologies end up congregating and developing a lot of in-group signalling that promotes their platform as superior. I think Hexbear as an offshoot of ChapoTraphouse is probably the best example.
Unrelated to Voat, Lemmy also doesn't seem to have many, if any, design decisions to prioritize positive community interaction. Instead there seems to be more brigading like the old internet on much of the Fediverse.
Obviously Tildes isn't immune to some of that feeling of superiority, but there's a very very different culture that reminds me more of old Reddiquette like remember the human etc. There seems to be more focus on interactions than a low-effort scrolling content stream.
They absolutely did. It feels like banning the outright neo-Nazi circlejerks somehow made it easier to radicalize disaffected right-wing boys into IRL violence with dog whistles than when their hives were visible for all to say, "What a bunch of losers." It probably has to do more with userbase growth than any moderation decisions. Increase the denominator by that much and the impossibly rare events suddenly aren't so rare.
At long last, a critique of Lemmy that's more substantive than "Fedi is too hard for normies to understand."
What are some of the missing design decisions & features that would create a healthier community?
I can't believe I'm nostalgic for when subreddits had distinct flavors and you could tell when a brigade happened. Everything is so homogenized and the meta drama hasn't been fun in years.
I'm not a web designer, so I don't have many informed opinions on the subject. I mostly recognize dark patterns and terrible choices like new Reddit sharply limiting the number of replies shown in top level views.
I'd point to Tildes philosophy section to get some ideas: https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-design
I do kinda miss sub wars. There were some great memes created by collaborations between subreddits...
Did you read the piece? I (like the author of the piece) think the abstracted moderation and decentralized nature will probably do a decent job of keeping enshittification at bay. It's entirely possible that some new path towards enshittification emerges, but for the ones we know of now, it looks like they're doing their honest best to keep them in check.
I read it, I just see the pre-conditions for enshittification to be the financial incentives: bluesky was made by a for-profit company, and I don't think they would set it up the way they did if they didn't know they could still reap their profits from it in the end. That means they think they can keep control of most of the ecosystem either through the software or by policy.
They are for profit, but they have chosen to be a Public Benefit Corporation which allows them (and their board) to take actions they otherwise would be liable for, in the interest of serving the Public Benefit they've identified (In this case, "open and decentralized public discussion.") So there's even a hedge there.
As a PBC they have a duty to (a) the shareholders, (b) the constituencies materially affected by the PBC's conduct, and (c) the public benefit(s) identified in their charter; and crucially shareholders cannot end or dilute the public benefit commitment of the PBC from year to year. Which isn't perfect, but what really is? They're trying, and as a user of both Mastodon and Bluesky, I have to say that they're doing the better job. I can't get my socials to join Mastodon for anything, but many of them will hop onto Bluesky easy.
For them as a PBC, the financial incentives only exist so long as they're serving their charter public benefit, so while it's entirely possible that they one day choose to reincorporate or something (I don't know if that's allowed/possible) to drop their charter cause, I think their mission to build a functional protocol above and beyond the platform itself has ensured that they wouldn't be able to do so without materially ending their existence because the genie is already out of the bottle and their product is out there for anyone to duplicate if desired. 🤷♂️
I think temporary is fine, though. Some things are just fleeting; no reason not to enjoy them in the moment.
I'm curious, what time/year would you attribute that to?
I think it's different for everyone based on their online groups. I (and the people mentioned) am not from the anglosphere, so about a decade ago it was still quite easy to be isolated from all the bullshit.
I tried Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. I have to say, the only one I've been able to stick with is Threads. It might be because the community there is more aligned with the type of content I'm interested in (generally more artsy stuff), but a lot of creators I already follow elsewhere have Threads, where they didn't have Mastodon or Bluesky.
Mastodon was the hardest for me to get into, and Bluesky is nice, but I still struggle with the idea of federation and how it works to find who/what I'm looking for.
Is that really a feature? Isn't the whole problem with social media that you create your own reality-bubble?
Not inherently. If you think of social media as hanging out with your friend group, just expanded, it's very similar to IRL interactions. My Bluesky is mostly Spec fic authors, disability rights folks, podcasters I like and a few random people along the way.
If your social media experience is the only exposure to the broader public you have and you're never hearing and interacting with any other opinions, sure that can be a problem. Bluesky has an attitude of blocking and moving on rather than getting in stupid arguments and I really value that. I don't know any of those people IRL, I don't feel the need to hear all their opinions on everything and weight them of equal value.
I’m not so sure I believe in the “labels” approach to moderation.
For one thing it requires that somebody else sees the post and put a label on it before you see it which seems problematic when a platform like that often shows you a post a few seconds after somebody posts it.
Secondly it seems like it could be a center for a lot of drama, fake controversy and cattiness. That is, someone might be proud that “this post was moderated by the (American Medical Association|CPAC|NAACP|Greenpeace|…)” and thus moderation becomes another thing to argue about.
Back in the 1990s we all knew that spammers would install a copy of SpamAssassin and test their spams to see if they would go through it, that people who made viruses tested them with virus filters, etc. Similarly there is something to say about moderation being opaque: if people are just getting less visibility than they would otherwise they’re less likely to be angered, take countermeasures, etc.
Some better answers could include: (1) A.I. models that learn to label things the way people do, and (2) delays.
(1) could be decentralized like this: first a message is passed through an embedding model like https://www.sbert.net/ and then secondly it is classified with some classical ML algorithm such as the support vector machine. This is not as potentially accurate as a “fine-tuned” model where you train a deep neural net directly, but my experience is that I can train multiple copies of a classical ML model in 3 minutes which means the trainer is absolutely reliable and I get a good idea of the model quality. I’ve been able to train fine-tuned models that sometimes work and sometimes equal or outperform the simple model in 45 minutes. The first step is expensive and needs a GPU, the second is cheap. The central network can compute the embedding and pass it to you, you can install your own copy of the classical model and run it itself.
(2) could be cued by an A.I. model which would give moderators some time to look at spicy posts before most people get to see it.
My main problem is not any particular kind of content but rather the emotional tone of that content: (1) because emotional tone is contagious and I have a limited ability to absorb other people’s negativity and (2) because emotional tone is contagious such that negative content has a special power to spread in networks, particularly those using toxic “non-algorithm” algorithms such as boosting and the Mastodon explore page which privileges angry image memes that get boosted a lot as well as other angry content.
Angry content can be blocked in three places: (1) at the receiver (my client personally blocks angry content just before I see it), (2) at the sender (I get tilted sometimes, I know I’d do better if I had a buddy who could point this out to me), and (3) in the network. I’d say (3) is better because it directly targets the contagion. If something that would have gotten 250 boosts gets some suppression and only gets 25 boosts isn’t that a good thing for everybody except the makers of blood pressure pills?
I think I understand your ideas on moderation, and actually you'd be totally free to implement them for Bluesky! The beauty of their federation approach is users can theoretically plug and play whatever moderation systems they prefer.
The idea is that moderation can be individualized at the user level rather than the network level (like Mastodon or Tildes). Obviously there are upsides and downsides to letting users pick their own moderation system, but that's kinda what blocking and muting already allows Bluesky users to do.
In my opinion, Bluesky has come up with a pretty elegant and flexible solution to federated moderation.
Erm. Article from CEO of Floor64. Floor64 is "An insight company." Looks like direct advertisement for me. There a lot of similar articles on HackerNews.
Upd: I have zero idea who is Mike Masnick and why this its such big deal.
And honestly, after reading article, Im still not sure is it such big deal or not.
Sorry, I just don't like praising articles that don't bother with clear explanation of upsides and downsides. And idea of social network framework where each abstract layer could be managed separately by different providers is not quite appealing for me.
Upd 2: maybe in a few years Bluesky will become standard, but.. lets see.
Did you not know who Mike Masnick was, and so just googled him then skimmed his bio in order to find some reason to dismiss the article? Masnick has been writing articles about technology, the internet/web, internet culture, social media, and tech/internet related laws for decades. Techdirt has also been around since the Slashdot days, and despite how oldschool it looks is still quite reputable.
And yes, he runs Floor64, an "insight company", as well as Techdirt... but do you have any proof that he's in any way connected to Bluesky or profiting from promoting it? Because him simply deciding to write about it because he's strongly supportive of its founding principles (good moderation, decentralization/federation, open protocols, etc) isn't surprising to me, having read hundreds of his articles over the years. He's been pretty consistent in his support for such things for a very very long time now.
Erm. Regarding proof - idea of Blusky is based on his research paper. I don't need to search internet, its in the article.
I have zero idea who Mike Masnick is, but thats ok for me. I think I can judge him by articles that he writes.
All Masnik's paper advocated for was developing open protocols (rather than centralized platforms), and proposed an alternative form of content moderation where users can subscribe to particular moderators to filter content for them... none of which are particularly new concepts, although he did articulate them well. Some of the ideas behind Bluesky may have been partially inspired by Masnik's paper (which Dorsey has referenced in the past) but Masnik has no direct involvement with the company, AFAIK. That's what I was asking for proof of, since you accused Masnik of "direct advertisement" in your comment.
Mike Masnick is one of the most thoughtful people you can find commenting on the internet and Techdirt is a highly respectable publication. I'm having a hard time understanding where you're coming from, especially without any kind of elaboration.
Thank you, could you tell me/us why you think this way?
I updated my comment with some elaborations.
@cfabbro went over it in their response to your post, but additionally, you can read Techdirt's Wikipedia page and his profile on the New York Times.
You don't have to know somebody's history, not necessarily, to comment on an article they've written, but if your intention is to accuse them of something in response, I think it helps to quote directly from the article.