Yup, I’m calling it.
bsky will prevail where Mastodon failed. The recent migration triggered the critical mass of Chaos Muppet Energy that Masto’s culture works so hard to extinguish
Like a climactic moment in a Zelda game where the accumulation of artifacts and switches pulled channels mystical energy.
I will see you over there!
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What threw it over the top for me was catching wind of a developing news event in real time—the Nazi party at MSG
with the blend of straight facts, analysis and jokes we used to get from Twitter
A range of voices broad enough there to really deliver. How exciting
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update two weeks later:
Yup. Bsky is where it’s at. It feels like Twitter used to feel, the vibes are positive, the voices are diverse, it’s easy to get the kind of content you need
Moreover, the product quality gap compared to Masto is yawning ever wider, with user-made feed algorithms, block lists, and starter packs
Whatever advantages Masto had from its early lead are exhausted, and as it relates to time and attention, I will not be betting on its success
https://hachyderm.io/@danilo/113367189576147761
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I do hope you will consider joining bluesky, as not all of my favorites have made the migration yet
If you abandoned it previously, as I did, give it another look. Journalists and scientists in particular are moving over, providing an insightful foundation for discussion and enriching the quality of feeds
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My favorite anecdote on the superiority of its product design culture:
For years Masto has avoided quote posts, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth in a conversation that goes in circles, to the detriment of making things people want
Bsky shipped a thing where you can just detach yourself from any quoting post you feel is acting in bad faith, or otherwise brings you attention you don’t want
Sorry, man, they got the juice
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Again, the juice.
Bsky is the number one free iOS app in the US right now.
Mastodon is the 184th most popular app in the social media chart. Here are some apps that rank ahead of Mastodon on that chart:
Masto’s leadership fucked the dog here.
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Reasonable people can disagree about the growth and funding strategies for a social media platform.
But Mastodon being less popular than a superfluous companion app for a game publisher no one likes is just poor stewardship.
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tired: bluesky will be enshittified by financial incentives
wired: mastodon is already enshittified by poor management
inspired: bsky is adding a million users a day and now tops the Android list as well
User-built algorithms, a chronological timeline, a great blend of safety and product features
Plus a much more diverse slate of conversation topics and contributors
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Bluesky now growing at a rate of 12-13 users per second
So why am I beating this drum?
Mastodon’s failure to capture Twitter’s collapse is instructive as a once-in-a-generation cautionary tale
Product design matters, protocol ideology is not enough, and disliking capitalism is not an exemption from economics
You will read a lot of copium about the fediverse still being viable, but it is now the smaller development target. That has consequences.
https://bcounter.nat.vg
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And I think the short version is this:
A professional team of 20 people, fully funded and paid a proper full-time wage, is an objectively more effective approach to building the future than one grumpy bottleneck guy making $60k a year and a bunch of other people looking on with wishful thinking
Disliking venture capital is NOT ENOUGH. You have to figure out a different model that still can fund enough deep, sustained, collaborative work to build a thing people want
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This is the mastodon energy in a nutshell, yup
“Love this crummy platform or get lost” is exactly how this happened
The final nail in the coffin here will be the culture.
https://freeradical.zone/@alltherum/113488808057395557
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But I think the thing that REALLY sticks in my craw is:
and
are mutually incompatible positions. If the place is really that bad it must be destroyed. And the way you do that is by displacing it in its niche
Building the Twitter killer is a moral imperative.
Instead the dominant Masto vibe is “Elon is terrible therefore let’s build a culturally marginal alternative with bad financials”
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This is kind of a microcosm of Masto Brain:
Bluesky has optimized safety and social features first ahead of client performance—eg reply gating, blocks that completely deny trolls access to your post’s audience, starter packs to bootstrap your social graph
while deferring client performance
An exercise for the reader to project whether Masto successfully applies these platform fundamentals before Bluesky invests in the nuts and bolts of client performance
https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/113492377287939587
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“I cannot BELIEVE Oprah is recommending Twitter on her show. It’s a monolithic ruby application that relies a on a SINGLE MySQL database. why isn’t she talking about RSS and showing people how an XML feed is structured”
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Feel how you need to feel about it, user experience eats ideology and sound architecture for breakfast
Cry yourself to sleep or build a strategy that accounts for this. That’s the spectrum of options here
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Damn, @marcprecipice provides a FOURTEEN YEAR OLD allegory to Masto’s current moment in a post-mortem of the company he founded, Wesabe
They ultimately lost the Web 2.0 personal finance war to Mint, and Marc’s clear-eyed analysis on why it happened—user experience—rhymes with the divergence between Bluesky and Mastodon
https://xoxo.zone/@marcprecipice/113500380537776062
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I am Strident Posting in this thread but let me be super clear:
While I think Masto has absolutely lost the plot, it would be the height of ingraciousness not to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of the Hachyderm crew
They have done the impossible for years since the first Twitter exodus, providing high-uptime service and ongoing governance. So much work.
It’s a thankless job built on a courageous idealism, and I will always be so impressed and grateful for their efforts.
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MastoCulture values the overall victory of mass adoption less than it does maintaining ideological purity and insularity. “I don’t care if Masto gets popular” is a posture that cedes all leverage to shape the future of social software.
Consider:
Mastodon became a one-way dumping ground for Threads posts
While Bluesky’s explosive growth is forcing Threads to change its product to remain competitive
If you can’t scare Zuckerberg, you’re not really in the game tbh
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/25/24305690/threads-default-following-feed-test
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you can set your clock by how reflexively mastodon will tell you that bsky will, some day, inevitably, ~enshittify~
Which is a dodge on the fact that mastodon is already ~enshittified~ through several paths that disqualify it from the sort of adoption that would give it power to shape the future of the web for good, eg:
https://toolsforthought.social/@billseitz/113545265144959068
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In other words:
“Someday it will be bad, so instead use the worse product today” is not a viable rhetorical OR growth strategy
Similarly, wild that scolding people out of using Twitter for years didn’t work at all, but building a better product did
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This is wild
I had no idea the Masto Purity Dork Cops blacklisted Hachyderm—as Dave says among the best citizens of the Fediverse—because they wouldn’t roll with with banning Threads
So on top of all the other shit, the Mastodon user must somehow navigate the stupidest internecine politics in internet history
How are you supposed to keep UP with that?
https://alvarado.social/@dave/113545732397167162
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I am positively RADICALIZED by this information
I have been posting this thread, frustrated though I am, as medicine. I think the internet is better off if Mastodon somehow figures its shit out, and that means socializing the diagnosis of its illness
But this is so positively STUPID, while fully baked into the design of the system, that I think the whole thing may be too dumb to be saved
Culture eats strategy—and protocols—for breakfast
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@danilo this stuff is the reason we talk so much about the distressing feudalism of fedi's model, yeah. we can't eliminate the fact that the modern world has multiple layers of political deception around social venues (that's true everywhere; there are entire platforms that we personally see as just traps for trans people), but we can and should work to minimize the consequences of making mistakes
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@danilo it's particularly distressing that the time at which people have to do the highest-stakes assessment of the political factors, choosing their very first server, is also the time when they're least equipped to do so
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@ireneista bingo
This is it
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@danilo @ireneista I wonder if the fix isn't as simple as embracing mastodon.social as the defacto starting instance for most people unaware of the intricacies of different instances (like Gmail is for email) and making it dead simple to migrate everything somewhere else at any time (unlike Gmail).
Regardless of it being as simple as this, it's rather late.
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@goncalossilva @danilo mm. that sounds like a self defeating strategy to us.
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@goncalossilva @danilo like, yes that works well for email, if there being five companies in the world which decide who can send email counts as working
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@ireneista @danilo Email was one example... But this "default instance" approach also seems to be working for Bluesky. 😄
I do think the "trivial to migrate part" is just as important and should be a core part of the protocol so that it's not optional.
As naive of a solution as it may be, I think we must acknowledge and address the fact that the average person does not care about instances, and that for them the friction of choosing one at first can be detrimental.
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@goncalossilva @danilo bluesky has a totally different goal than fedi. in particular, bluesky is a single platform controlled by a single corporation (see Christine's excellent thread/post a couple days ago on that topic).
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@goncalossilva @danilo whether we "must" acknowledge this depends on what our goals are. accepting centralization is totally fine if the goal is just to have a place to talk, without it being important to be free to set the terms on which we discuss things, decide in a community-driven way what behavior is acceptable, not be sued by right-wing organizations to force us to treat queer people on the platform as criminals, etc
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io a big difference between bsky and fedi is that bsky moderation can remove your account regardless of PDS. Nobody on fedi can just remove your account from the entire network by denylisting you on the relay so servers can't find you.
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io I'm conflicted with giving bsky this power. Although they seem to be on "our" side it worries me. I came from centralized platforms where years of me being on there could be erased in a single moderation decision. I do not like it, I hate what happened to me on tumblr. Bsky hasn't shown that they are going full 1984 yet, and they seem to use it carefully but that's something to be aware of. Especially as bsky continues to be in the spotlight of regulatory bodies and governments. Sure, they might not make that choice but what if they're pressured into it? Whole can of worms.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo so, we should mention at this point that we've been involved with content policy development in the course of our tech accountability activism (most of it back while we were at google)
on the basis of that experience we feel qualified to say that when newer, smaller platforms aren't oppressive it's because they aren't big enough to have an urgent financial and legal need to be oppressive, yet
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo there is not actually a way for a corporate entity running a communication platform, within the law, to not make the most vacuous, substance-free place in which anything of any importance is disallowed
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo and if there were, it would be incompatible with profit, so it wouldn't happen anyway
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo the rules that humans have made for ourselves have a certain hypocrisy baked into them, they only make sense on the assumption they cannot be enforced
centralized communication platforms make it possible to enforce the contradictory rules, which also makes it necessary
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo this is the reality we live in. we are hopeful that, on the timescale of 30 to 80 years, the world will come to understand this and figure out how to re-write those legal principles to leave room for human flourishing. the alternative if we don't is quite bleak.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo we don't think it's possible any sooner than that, because the structural factors are all pushing the other way right now and there is no meaningful opposition.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo anyway, what few places we do have in which it is possible to actually meet people like us and form deep personal connections with them, we will defend by any means necessary.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo we don't really have a lot of patience for discussion of this topic which isn't grounded in an understanding of what's actually at stake.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo or possibly we're just in a bad mood today, but we do stand by the above
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io People's lives are at stake. Everyone likes to diminish social media as an "optional" thing but it's really not. I have a ton of users who this is their only escape from their abusive situations. This is the place they can talk to people similar to them, freely. Without a place like this they would end up a statistic (to put it lightly). Not trying to toot my own horn or make a big deal of it but it's true. There are so many people who rely on public spaces like this to navigate the world. Suppressing access to open platforms like this will end up with preventable deaths.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo absolutely. as a trans person of a certain age, from a certain background, we would not have survived to adulthood without an uncensored internet.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo ("social media" was not a term back then)
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io This is not to take away from the fact fedi moderation can be at times terrible. It fucking sucks, I really wish there was a way to give people a taste of fedi administration without traumatizing them. I think that instances have a lot of self governance and that's a good thing but it's also what makes this platform hard to sell to people. I think that people should be encouraged to empower themselves by hosting an instance instead of joining one that's already made. I really like that model, and I wish it was more accessible (luckily things like https://activitypods.org/ seem to exist? I don't know shit about activitypods so I am hesitant to say they are the solution. I do know a variety of admins around me want to make "managed hosting" available to people wanting to self govern without the headache of being responsible for things like S3 storage or the technical aspect)
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io I say this as an administrator of an instance that's growing. I love the community. I just don't think it's possible to make a "diverse" community that scales up. https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/ eventually people get pushed out. I like that fedi is sort of designed in a way that it's relatively easy to prevent (larger instances can have portions of their user base split out into smaller instances and still communicate with each other). It's why I administrate multiple instances (this is the one I am "head" of but I help out with smaller instances around this community). It's a super difficult problem. Everything is opinionated and centers around the fedi admin. I am a strong proponent of things like user level defederation. You know as much as I enjoy having all of this power (i don't) even I get frustrated. If I don't want my account to appear on an instance there should be a way for me and exclusively me to make that decision for myself and myself only. It shouldn't be instance wide because that subjects everyone on here to that decision.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo absolutely. it does not scale beyond very small groups of people who all know each other. it fundamentally cannot.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo @ireneista it's hugely problematic and exactly one of the main reasons I want the Fediverse to ~~win~~ see mass adoption. :)
I agree that no single corporation should hold this much power.
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@goncalossilva @puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo we frankly don't see mass adoption as "winning", or even particularly desirable, certainly not at the cost of the reasons we're here in the first place. that's our personal view and you're free to disagree, but that is why we spent so many words on describing possible purposes people might have for this.
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@goncalossilva @puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo if in fact we are talking about unrelated and contradictory goals - which appears to be the case - then of course we are going to disagree about what course of action to take. it makes no sense to argue back and forth about what we should do if we aren't agreed on what we want to achieve.
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@ireneista @puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo definitely, I appreciate the civil discussion regardless. :)
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@goncalossilva @puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo yes, thank you, we do appreciate that as well
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