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Bluesky decides to enshittify at record speed! (gizmodo.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 138 points 5 months ago (17 children)

Everything was pointing Mastodon until Bluesky came. And guess what? Turns out the problem is and always has been corporations and centralized ownership.

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  • [–] 43 points 5 months ago (15 children)

    Mastodon has shit branding and I'm not afraid to say it.

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  • [–] 48 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 40 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    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).

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

    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).

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    I guess the question is... how? Browsers isolate what they know about you to domains. When you go to Gmail, it doesn't tell Gmail that you have a Hotmail email.

    As far as the browser knows, lemmy.world and lemmy.ca are as different as hotmail.com and gmail.com. The token that knows you are logged into lemmy.world is not sent to any other site, that would be a huge security risk. And the browser doesn't know what is being stored in the cookies, just that it's there and it should only send it to the domain it came from and never another.

    I don't disagree that this is a big problem. I just don't know how it would be solved while keeping the fediverse decentralised.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    That's one of the many fundamental design shortcomings of the Fediverse.

    But, in this particular case, the "how" could be a simple "redirect to a different instance" button, where you could select yours. Or the site could check for the cookies of known servers and check if one has a valid login token, and automatically redirect there.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    could be a simple "redirect to a different instance" button, where you could select yours

    Though not perfect, that would be a vast improvement on now. There are thousands of instances (remembering content is shared to Mastodon and others), and not every instance knows about every other, but you could auto-fill from the list the instance knows about, and if you end up back on that site it should remember what you selected last time and prefill it. Great idea!

    Or the site could check for the cookies of known servers

    This is simply not possible because browsers don't let a site do this.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    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.

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