So I thought that BlueSky was set up just like Lemmy in that it was fully decentralized into a sort of “terrorist cell” structure that wasn’t focused on profits, but then found out that BlueSky has a CEO. Since this is a business, what makes BlueSky fundamentally different from Twitter or Instagram?
I feel like so long as a social media platform exists through monetization (in some form or another private companies need to make money), we are ultimately replacing one dictator with another.
Bluesky is still in the “trust me bro” stage. The others have matured into the “fuck you, pay me” stage.
It isn’t. It’s just the shiny new toy that twitter users who are desperate to leave the platform jumped to because everyone they know who already jumped ship moved there. They’re marketing themselves as “better” than twitter and supposedly have better guardrails, but only time will tell when they start to enshittify.
I enjoyed Twitter for a long time when it was smaller and ad free and didn’t suck, and now I’m enjoying Bluesky while it’s smaller and ad free and doesn’t suck.
It’s unlikely Bluesky could ever suck as much as Twitter and Reddit have come to suck, but if I have to leave Bluesky in a few years for the next one, then so be it.
Keep an eye on the interest rate of some relevant central banks. When interests are low, investors have money to spare, and they can even make large rocks float. Once inflation gets out of hand, interest rates respond accordingly, suddenly investors disappear, and rocks begin to sink. That’s exactly when the CEO of SinkingFast Inc. has to make some quick decisions about strategic enshittification.
It’s different because it’s the only one that’s called “BlueSky”
This to me is the only sensible answer.
Im my opinion, BlueSky is merely this year’s Threads.
Who knows, maybe next year we will have ‘X’ (pun intended) which would be the year’s BlueSky.
Rather than go over it again, here’s my speculative answer to why BS has grown so much quicker than Mastadon - which isn’t quite the question in the OP, but will cover much if the same ground (That whole thread is worth a read IMO.)
TL:DR - It’s different because it isn’t shit. Yet.
And it might not become shit. I think it’s a shame that people are so instantly cynical about the possibility that things might turn out alright , especially if the people using it go into it having learned some lessons from Twitter, and with a determination not to repeat the mistakes. At the moment BlueSky is fun and friendly, and I’m going to enjoy it that way for as long as it remains the case. If it goes to crap, then I’ll move on.
That’s a very pragmatic take
Different? Jack Dorsey, the founder, and still largest single shareholder of BlueSky hasn’t sold it to a Saudi Arabian beard. Yet.
It isn’t. It’s another attempt to capture a lot of users for capitalism use.
Some of this is more just a generic overview of differences in perspective.
- It was inspired by this piece by someone who is now on the board that manages it. Yes they have a CEO, but there is a bigger board collaborating on direction decisions
- They have an explicit policy opposing sharing data for AI usage.
- It was initially the place for a bunch of frequently targeted minorities and the leadership implemented a bunch of changes that — in combination with a attitude of “block don’t engage” because many people aren’t rational actors — significantly make the space safer for users and less susceptible to dog piling and harassment.
- Moderation is handled far better that any other large social media platform in my experience.
- It was created as open source and as an open protocol from the start so in the event of a takeover, it’s relatively easy to spin off a clone (see protocols link).
- They allow more openness to 3rd party moderation tools in a more integrated manner.
- They have been open about discussing funding planning in the future and red lines that are unacceptable to them.
- There is no algorithm in your main feed. You see only what those you follow share. There is a discover feed, but if you hide that it has no impact on your future experience.
In relation to the second point, I am assuming the policy is opposing intentional or willful sharing of data for AI usage, as there already datasets composed of BlueSky posts out in the wild[0].
[0] https://www.404media.co/bluesky-posts-machine-learning-ai-datasets-hugging-face/
Correct. They are clear in that link as well that BlueSky themselves will not do anything to harvest and/or monetize data for AI. But there’s really no way to stop bad faith actors from crawling any perceivable content for malicious purposes.
They’re getting ready to release a subscription service.
Social media servers cost money. There are only three options.
1: (Lemmy, bsky now) - someone runs it for their own private reasons and users bemefit as side effect or charity.
2: (Twitter, facebook, reddit) - someone runs it as marketing, and sells user eyeballs or data.
3: (some MMOs, bsky future) - someone runs it and sells users things to keep it running.
Baky says they want to keep the current experience free, and are contemplating a freemium add-on subscription. Maybe they’ll stick to this and maybe they wont, but “they sell subs” isnt guaranteed enshittification they way that an IPO and ads are.
They banned libsoftiktok
Technically it supports federation, similar to Lemmy. But there’s still only one instance. I don’t know if it’s due to the immaturity of software or something else. If someone want’s to try the code is there.
I think the presence of ActivityPub (basis of Lemmy) already attracted most people willing to bother with hosting an instance so the potential adopters are not very incentivized to experiment with another thing.
The link is to their open repos. Which is example implementations of their protocol, their web/phone apps, stuff like that.
Not their actual instance code.
You can’t run your own bkuesky instanceFrom what I’ve read on Mastodon, only part of it is federated. Other parts are administrated centrally through Bluesky. And the parts that do federate require so much bandwidth and processing power that self-hosting isn’t an option; you’d have to have a large infrastructure to do it.
One big thing it has over Mastodon is same migration and quote tweets, and other UX, some of which Mastodon is fundamentally against. A lot of people there don’t like quote tweets and want to build their social network without them. I’m not as sure why they can’t get their act together with moderation.
Bluesky was developed by twitter before musk took over. They spun it off and now we’re here.
Better to ask how is BlueSky different from Mark Suckerbug’s ‘Threads’?
Lets me sort the timeline chronologically
