TBH I haven't paid much attention to it, but as somebody who was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for years before Musk took over, I'm not sure I understand what niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that ActivityPub/Fediverse doesn't already fill. It just seems like a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent a new commercial social network.
And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it. Jack and his cronies aren't actually any better than Musk is, they're just smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the entire world. I don't trust them.
This tells me that you don’t actually want what Twitter is (was?) good at.
Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. It’s a different type of community/service, one that doesn’t have much value for me. (Not to say it’s bad! I just don’t care for it, it doesn’t do something I want.)
Equally, Twitter wasn’t (and mostly still isn’t) terrible for everyone. Everyone gets to choose what it is! I am particular about who I follow, I unfollow quickly, and I care not for celebrities and people’s “personal brand”.
Twitter is an incredible resource, if you want it to be.
That said, it could clearly be better, and any replacement that prevents a single entity controlling everyone’s algorithmic feed or deciding who can post or what they can say is worth exploring.
No, i understand what Twitter is. I was using it as far back as 2009. I have a problem with recent pre-musk changes, such as putting posts from people you dont follow and often dont agree with into your feed to make people argue. If you don't post iften enough, several times a day they will even send you notifications for posts that don't involve you and don't even come from people you follow.
And then there's Twitter turning itself into the arbiter of truth. Users were having blue checks revoked as a punitive measure, which means that it's not really about "verifying" somebody, it's just a stupid status symbol.
They have an AI that will automatically ban you on a whim if you talk about certain subjects; i was permanently banned for over a month for making a joke at the expense of anti-vaxxers before amoderator finally reviewed my case and removed the infraction from my account.
Their role in covering up the hunter Biden laptop leak is also disturbing. I don't even think there was anything noteworthy in the leak, but Twitter censoring something that might be embarrassing for a politician under the guise of combatting misinformation is a scandal unto itself.
These are all things that happened before Elon musk announced he was buying Twitter. It is absolutely a terrible, abusive platform and i cannot fathom why anybody would trust Jack Dorsey to run another social network.
> If you don't post iften enough, several times a day they will even send you notifications for posts that don't involve you and don't even come from people you follow.
I just checked my notifications - of the last ~100, over the last week or so, there's not a single one that isn't directly related to me. I've only posted one tweet in that week.
Refreshing to hear someone criticize Twitter for pre-Musk censorship and discourse-destroying policies, which indeed go right to Dorsey’s front door.
Most current anti-Twitter sentiment I see is from people who hate Elon Musk and want to see him fail. Limited principal discussion about what features a communication platform/protocol must have to best enable knowledge sharing and discourse.
I'm especially interested in what their new protocol offers that ActivityPub doesn't. There are more protocols than just ActivityPub, like Zot6 which focuses a lot more on nomadic identity than ActivityPub does. I'd love to know what it is that makes BlueSky's protocol better and therefore worth adding. Because if it doesn't do anything that other protocols already do, then what's the point?
As someone who's watched some of this but has little personal interest, the differentiation seems to be that Bluesky has a more compelling product on top of its decentralized protocol, judging by the reaction to it by 'personalities' from various domains.
If you want nomadic identity, a tiny tweak to expect ActivityPub instances to support a distributed content addressable URI scheme (optionally via proxies) is almost all that is needed, so if there turns out to be a lot of demand for it, it'll get added.
Maybe some folks like yourself thought Twitter was terrible before, but plenty of people were happy enough until certain changes by Musk. Mastodon itself had a large growth recently as people left Twitter in response.
I had an automated bot running for a long time on Twitter that I was happy with, until recently when API access was cut off. Now I'm looking for a new platform for my bot to run on as a direct result of recent controversial policy change. Maybe it will be Mastodon or Bluesky, or maybe something else. I think I prefer something more similar to how Twitter was than Mastodon currently is for my needs.
For an automated bot making announcement-like posts, a Twitter page is simply a web page with subscriptions for those having a Twitter account: you naturally assume everybody has a Twitter account and checks it regularly, or put more negatively, you ignore anyone not on Twitter.
Mastodon would serve exactly the same purpose with the set of people being "ignored" being much larger.
Email newsletter services would pretty much include everyone (on the internet, at least).
And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it. Jack and his cronies aren't actually any better than Musk is, they're just smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the entire world. I don't trust them.