Technology

Agreed, at least it's happening with Meta too.

Archive

But yeah, you're 100% right.

man that is so cheeky of them!

Instead of abiding with the law, they just chose to block content altogether 🥲

BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.

The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?

Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it's still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.

Bluesky wants to tell people they're not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that's their key advantage.

The only thing that will guarantee they don't end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven't come up with a long-term revenue model, so it's not clear how they can avoid it.

I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.

The fediverse just doesn’t have the audience nor ease of use to be the smart investment for most people, at least in the short term.

In the long term, I believe the fediverse would be the right move. However most people struggle to think long-term outside of their own fields, and scientists are not immune to this phenomenon.

I don't understand why people ask this. Most people you talk to on Lemmy will say they don't want the userbase to grow much more than it has because with that growth comes the other problems that larger platforms like shitter and reddit have.

That's true by and large and we also don't have enough moderators here as is.

And for reasons I don't understand, people keep asking why mainstream media outlets, influencers, and other trusted accounts don't transition to the fediverse, as if they won't bring with them an influx of users (at least a fraction of which would be considered undesirable).

Why do you want them to come here? (As someone who would like to see Lemmy grow, I'm curious about how you think this will rollout and what the consequences will be). I would like to see Lemmy grow but I'm not sure all of that growth will have solely good follow-on effects.

Because the Fediverse is a mess with atrocious UX. Choose the wrong server and you might find you are cut off from a large chunk of it because a mastodon.art mod didn’t like something that happened on your instance and servers copy blocklist from each other (not a theoretical example, mind you, something I learned a few months into being on one particular instance.).

Servers can have all sorts of rules you will have to carefully study or risk getting banned (some for example will only allow images with descriptions being shared, this includes boosts.)

In short, the amount of work expected to participate is just - never - going to draw in the average user.

Its too nerdy for its own good. The plebs want simple. Its the way of things.

~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~

Most scientists aren't allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don't have the time.

But we did leave and if (or when) it becomes enshitified, we will move again. We don't need an idealised platform, we just want something easy to use which doesn't (yet) have the baggage and culture of twiXer

Problem is it absolutely will turn when the Bluesky owners Jay Graber and Jack Dorsey decide it's time to cash in. The project started out as a way to start decentralizing twitter, but they never actually accomplished that goal.

I'm on both and Mastodon is missing (at least in any easy to use way) most of the features that make Bluesky such a good destination:

• instant add subscribe lists
• subscribable block lists
• custom feeds/subscribable algorithms
• keyword/topic blocks
• nuclear block where you never see the blocked person again
• optional discover feed
• DM preferences

All these things (and more I'm sure I'm forgetting), make Bluesky very quick to get started with and very powerful for honing your feeds to be exactly how you want and free of harassment and trolling.

I am still trying with Mastodon, but it's really slow going and I can fully understand why people wouldn't bother. After a year I am way behind where I was in a week with Bluesky.

In a word, audience. I'd prefer it if everyone went with Mastodon, but the audience on BlueSky is orders of magnitude bigger. I cross post to both, but only because I don't trust BlueSky not to do exactly what Twitter and Meta have done eventually.

At least they weren’t baffled

https://http.cat/status/451

because I needed an explanation of what that means, and I wanted it to be cute and funny.