Seriously i have zero idea what is going on with bluesky. I never used it. Why are people saying it's centralised?
I also heard that a lot of people are joining it.
Depends on your perspective. Would it be fine for Meta Threads to replace it? Threads supports ActivityPub, so in some ways it likely interacts better with the fediverse.
If we agree that Threads isn’t a suitable replacement, then clearly there’s some criteria a replacement should meet. A lot of the things that make Threads unpalatable are also true of Bluesky, particularly if your concern relates to the platform being under the control of a corporation.
On the other hand, from the perspective of “Twitter 2.0 is now a toxic, alt-right cesspool where productive conversations can’t be had,” then both Threads and Bluesky are huge improvements.
If it needs a server to talk to others, that's already bad. If it needs a server, but it can be my server, it's palatable. That's all the criteria you need.
Supporting ActivityPub doesn't excuse being owned and operated by META.
Will Bsky eventually shit itself like Twitter did? Sure, maybe. That seems to be the normal path nowadays. And when it does, I've still got my Masto account that I try to keep active as well. But at the very least, Bsky is a different company. I can have a bsky account without being dragged into an entire META ecosystem designed to put their chosen content in front of my eyes.
Even at it's worst, the fact that Bsky is it's own thing and not owned by a mega corporation puts it automatically about Threads, regardless of ActivityPub.
Sure, but as you cannot know the future, it's a bit tricky to pick a successor you want to support based on that, instead of absolutely right-now-essential things such as "Where people actually are".
It's also important to keep in mind how long Twitter's run was: It was originally founded 18 years ago. I'd be okay if every 10-15 years I have to get a new Twitter, tbh. I buy a new phone every 4-5 years, a new car every 15-20, I'm alright. It's cheap to go onto a new Twitter, I'm far less resistant to change with that.
That is to say: Sure, maaaybe (again, can't truly know) Mastodon is superior on a technical level. But not only is that absolutely not how social media operates, and second it really doesn't matter if a sucessor also goes down in 10+ years. People won't be able to care any less if a successor lasts that long, and considering how quickly Mastodon has turned into a semi-ghost-town once Bluesky got big, I kinda know what I'd put my money onto.
Of course all of this ignores a central problem with the entire category of services: They don't conduct conversations well, even stuff like Misskey or Mastodon.
Yeah this is kinda what I've never understood. We have these sorts of, complaints about the demographic movements of these platforms, sure, but their actual core structure is inherently optimized to prey on people's worst instincts, make discussion basically impossible. To prioritize pithy remarks and one-liners over productive conversations, they prioritize public facing ideologues blowing up much smaller individuals. Lemmy's slightly better in that regard, but I feel like we're always somehow descending in quality from what even a basic forum would be capable of.
The problem is that bluesky pretends to be a fediverse platform but only as an aesthetic, the founders don't understand the fediverse at all and they have made no real attempt to federate outside of lip service.
Nothing is wrong with it as long as everyone realizes that it isn’t really resistant to enshittification as the network stands now and isn’t meaningfully federated or decentralized yet
I disagree with saying there's nothing wrong with it, just as I would disagree that there was nothing wrong with the original Twitter. It is creating conditions which lead it towards for-profit behaviour which will end up hurting users, unlike some other platforms which are not run for-profit.
This is a far-reaching difference with real societal impacts if the platform becomes dominant, not just some difference in taste that can be hand-waved away as nothing.
….She said on Lemmy, a platform provided for free and free of ads by volunteers.
Every day I’m more persuaded that in the main, Lemmy got the dregs of Reddit during the exodus, who are the nastiest most argumentative, most poorly informed shitheads the internet has to offer.
Feels like you never truly where on Reddit if you felt it was a beacon of warmth and friendliness. Did you ever share an opinion contrary to the prevailing opinion on there?
The most recent and largest exodus was people protesting their apps going away. Imagine a person for whom site moderation leading to embracing Russophobic snuff films, excusing Nazi tattoos, genocide denial re: Palestine, and general censorship of the left were not reasons to leave but "my apps and app freedoms" moved them.
So yes these are people obstinately fighting over something they just made up but it sounds right to them and matches the vibes of their parasocial bubble. They might literally die if they spoke casually and acknowledged faults.