MySpace didn’t die overnight; didn’t it take like 8 years for Facebook to overtake it? Anecdotally in my group of friends, the big exodus from MySpace to Facebook took like 2 years from ‘08-‘10
It’ll take a while, but I do believe we’re watching the downfall of Twitter.
And I suspect, now that Bluesky is the clear successor to Twitter, the process will only accelerate.
Truth social hasn’t failed yet, it could lose money and it would just be a propaganda service that costs money instead of making money.
It’s not going to have
fundingbribing problems until Trump is out of office.
Give it 6 months and then musky’s well funded administration will find a way to make bluesky feel the legal crunch
They can just shift countries. 32% of Bluesky users are from Brazil, ~ 7% from Japan, ~ 4% from the UK and 2% from Germany.
Could bluesky have won over Mastodon because of the fediverse barrier where people doesn’t know which server to choose?
Bluesky offers better access to the content people want with less effort. Mastodon was always going to lose that battle.
Its also able to pay for advertising and marketing
Do bluesky advertise itself?
That’s exactly it. People are bad at tech and do not understand it. If you even give them an additional option, this may confuse a tremendous amount of people enough to simply lose interest.
Bluesky is being run by a funded professional startup team and is aimed at the masses. Mastodon is run by activists and software devs and brings in other like minded folks.
Bluesky has an advertising budget. Bluesky has an entire team just working on User Interface.
The fact that people are so lazy that they keep going for the corporate-sure-to-enshittify options shows how little people actually care about escaping corporate control of their lives.
“It’s not my job to contribute to a community project” is just another way to say “it’s not my job to make the world a better place.”
The fact that people are so lazy that they keep going for the corporate-sure-to-enshittify options shows how little people actually care about escaping corporate control of their lives.
It’s not that deep.
People want to go where other people are. A tiny minority of them are even aware of the things that are influencing your decisions. Not a single moment is spent thinking about whether X or Y is more ‘corporately controlled’ before deciding to join a new platform.
It’s generally easier for the layperson to pay a gym membership than it is to have the upfront cost of a barbell set and coordinating a schedule with their neighbor who owns a treadmill.
I don’t want to sound too pro-corporate, I just don’t want to fault others when they fall for the veneer of a “cohesive product.” It takes a lot of work to organize a community project and why it’s so special when they do come together.
I use both. I’ve been on Mastodon for the better part of a year and only actively tried Bluesky the last couple months. My Bluesky feed is thriving, whereas Mastodon not so much. IMO this is due to Mastodon is missing the major quality of life features of Bluesky.
- Add lists
- Subscribable block lists
- Custom subscribable topic feeds
- Optional recommendation engine
These things make Bluesky very easy to get started with and more powerful even than Xitter was. It’s simply a better product if you have any requirements other than federation. Getting a good feed up and running doesn’t take more than an hour or two. Mastodon is a lot more work.
Subscribable block lists… I’m making an account.
Yeah this solves a lot of problems straight off the bat. Add me, I have a few posts at the beginning of my timeline that will help you get started.
There is starter packs now but not many have been made and I forgot the website that you find them.
Yeah, not many, only 184,281 have been made
I joined Mastodon and it sucked, I didnt know where I was or what the significance of it was. Not a fan, lemmy is similar but seems to have less compartmentalisation relative to youe server.
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That was part of the reason. I tried explaining Pixelfed to my photographer dad and he completely lost interest when I mentioned instances and equated them to e-mail providers. Non-technical people don’t like having to understand a technical aspect, and the nature of federation can’t be avoided.
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Keep in mind that these are the people who stayed on Twitter after it was infested by the musk. They’re leaving because it’s turned into a dogshit service, not because of any kind of moral stance. They won’t choose one service over another because it’s libre or decentralized or community-operated. They’ll flock to one that has a low entry barrier and high population.
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Speaking of which: Bluesky is where the people are. The merits of a social media provider are worthless if it has a fraction of the population of a direct competitor.
We should just point normal people to the biggest instance and never mention anything until they’re settled in.
It is the most viable strategy, but we did that with lemmy.world and now a third of the fediverse is screeching about censorship on the largest instance and directly shitting on LW users.
The merits of a social media provider are worthless if it has a fraction of the population of a direct competitor.
No they aren’t, the network effect isn’t some magical all powerful force of nature that you cannot resist.
We can choose to join a community that is small and help grow it, frankly if people aren’t able to grapple with that I don’t think they are ready to come here anyways which isn’t to say that the fediverse doesn’t need to work on becoming way more accessible and friendly to the average person.
and help grow it
You grossly overestimate the average social media user’s willingness to make an effort to create a Thing when that same Thing already exists in a usable state under a different name; and yes, for the purpose of having a Twitter-like microblog, Mastodon and Bluesky are identical.
if people aren’t able to grapple with that I don’t think they are ready to come here anyways
And they didn’t. It continues happening in real time, and the value gap between Mastodon and Bluesky, from the average social media user’s perspective, continues to grow. Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.
Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.
My point is that it is unreasonable to compare the popularity of a scam being hyped by some of the biggest names in the techbro world with direct access and influence over the mainstream tech press and millions in cash to spend on advertisements, luring in big social media accounts and making a slick UI and onboarding process and most crucially lots of time to hold off on enshittification/monetization…with a community developed fundamentally decentralized constellation of people who are maintaining and developing the fediverse on a budget that is peanuts compared to the literally astronomically larger budget Bluesky has.
The danger with leaving this context out is it leads you into thinking rich people are smarter and have better ideas than you when they are really just richer than you and every single interaction in society is structured to benefit them and defer to their preferred narratives.
Bluesky was always going to grow more explosively than the fediverse, the whole fundamental issue with corporate social media is the immutable need for endless growth that supercedes any moral concern and indeed any concern for the longterm at all.
There is no use lamenting the fact that the fediverse isn’t growing at the clip bluesky is, and there is the very real danger of getting caught up in the hype and losing sight of why it is unreasonable to hold the fediverse to the same expectations of nearterm growthrate.
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I think that’s a good part of it, to be honest. Plus I think also helps that Bluesky’s handles look visually less confusing and unusual than the conventional double @ sign for the fediverse
@user.bsky.socialvs@user@bsky.socialPlus other things like having starter packs
I think it was mostly that Mastodon wouldn’t send referer headers.
So when people look at where their traffic comes from, 50% would be unknown, 20% would be Twitter, 10% would be Bluesky, and most importantly, Mastodon would never show on that report.
(Numbers made up and inaccurate.)
Also helps it was created by Jack Dorsey.
Who’s now left Bluesky which is probably for the better given his views on a lot of things
Agreed. Twitter was still a shitshow, when he sold it. Just not as bad as now.
I don’t know how many not tech savvy people know this, but it helps too.
Who cares…it’s just changing one shitpile for the next soon-to-be shitpile. Bluesky will inevitably go down the shitter too once its users have enough inertia to keep them there as they squeeze them dry.
Twitter isn’t falling due to not being open source, or not being decentralized, or any of the other reasons I’ve heard people advocate for mastodon.
People are leaving twitter because it has gone fully right wing in politics. Twitter will not “fail” in the traditional sense. Twitter will fall, but not fail.
Twitter will be the right wing conspiracy platform.
Bluesky will be what twitter was 5 years ago for the left wing.
Nothing else has changed. This isn’t a rebellion against corporate social media. This isn’t meant to be a fediverse uprising. None of that is happening. This is nothing more than Mary, and Beth who voted for Harris wanting to use twitter how they used to, without right wing agenda being added to their twitter feed. Which is exactly what bluesky is. A twitter clone without the racists.
Twitter went right wing because of the model.
When it’s all about following people and very short forms of communication, it will eventually lean right.
Same way the lemmy format encourages nuance and ideas over people, so it will eventually lean left
Dare I suggest that the reason for twitter becoming so right wing, is that it’s a centralized social media website, subject to the crazed far right whims of the capitalist who bought it…
deleted by creator
…I wasn’t replying to you. I was replying to the other guy who said it doesn’t matter since bluesky is just the same as twitter in terms of ownership.
I noticed that and deleted my post but the deletion probably hasn’t federated just yet, sorry about that
Bluesky is at least semi-decentralized, however, though not to the same extent as something like Mastodon
I’d also argue that Twitter is also uniquely bad even among other problematic platforms
Bluesky is at least semi-decentralized
No it isn’t, this is marketing and until the developers actually put their money where their mouth is and provide the genuine capacity for decentralization (not just along some narrow technical definition but actually decentralized in practice) this is pure marketing hype that you absolutely shouldn’t trust until you are given indisputable proof and then you should still be skeptical because they can always pull the rug out from under you.
Bluesky is open source yes, but what they are talking about is the CLIENT side of Bluesky, the actual system is dependent upon proprietary code that is most definitely not open source.
Yep, and for anyone who curious why it’s not actually decentralized, I highly suggest to read this thread from someone who worked on ActivityPub:
https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698
And part 2:
It’s actually more so the other way around. The backend (PDS and relays) is open source but I believe the AppView is not currently open source
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
Why do bluesky advocates always concede the “appview” part is effectively centralized, mandatory to interact with as part of the community inside the silo of bluesky and is indefinitely considered a proprietary entity to bluesky themselves, to the point that the CEO of bluesky (a crypto person which should already be a red flag) has gone on record saying they haven’t ruled out using “appview” to interject ads into the network as an avenue for monetization … and then act like that doesn’t undermine the basic sales pitch of bluesky in the first place?
I feel like I am being sold a boat by a salesman that just explained to me with a straight face that yes the boat technically has a huge hole in the bottom of it but that the rest of the boat is far more seaworthy than any boat ever and the builder is absolutely going to deliver by fixing the critical design flaw soon even though in this case doing so would existentially threaten the “boat” builder’s business and besides the salesman knows one of the low ranking workman at the “boat” builders yard and he is very trustable.
“The way Bluesky is built largely prevents a business model solely relying on ads, because users could create alternative feeds without ads on its open protocol.” - Jay Graber CEO of bluesky
This is incredibly disgenous to say, sure you could run your own entire seperate network using bluesky… why would you? You have to either choose to be in the big silo or you are banished to outside of it, a state of affairs the fediverse was specifically designed to stop from happening and yet it still struggles with overcentralization.
I am sorry, I have been on the fediverse for years and seen it struggle with the natural tendency for winners to win more and centralization to occur from bandwagoning (exhibit A: mastodon.social) and I think it is hilarious anyone who is actually paying attention thinks bluesky has a real chance of becoming and staying decentralized in any meaningful sense (especially when the investors knock on the door to pay a visit and say it is time to start delivering).
There are other app views in the works from other people, but yes in the current state it is rather centralized. That’s why I started off saying it was semi-decentralized. I wasn’t claiming it was super decentralized
You don’t call it semi-boat if there is a gaping hole in the hull and no convincing indication the hole will be fixed or indeed any really solid evidence the hole wasn’t put their on purpose to negate all the other floaty bits.
You either call it a scam or a $15 million boondoggle of a yacht that was designed so poorly that it can’t even go in the water without sinking.
Everybody has been led by the hype into speaking about this boat as if it was a foregone conclusion it will float when nobody can even conclusively demonstrate the motives of the builders and financers is to create a boat that actually floats rather than just the vibe of one.
We have a perfectly seaworthy boat here and while it is ugly, obtuse and patched together it is still actually a working boat that was designed by people who would be absolutely mortified and ashamed to find out they somehow missed patching a gaping hole in the hull that allowed the cold brutal ocean of corporate money to rush in and effectively sink the ship before it could even set sail.
Monetization of the commons to the exhaustive extent modern capitalism demands is fundamentally at odds with any meaningful sense of decentralization and worse the health of the commons and the community members who compose it, it is surprisingly easy to understand if you just think about the basic incentive structure here.
If nothing else I will personally find it very funny if Elon Musk spent $44,000,000,000 on something and then unintentionally destroyed it in just three years
He didn’t spend 44 billion on twitter. He spent 44 billion to gain a hand in the 2024 election. He already won.
I’m still going to enjoy it if I get to watch the $44b not buy any more elections. I know he can afford to do it again, but you’ve got to take what joy you can get from the world, you know?
Maybe it didn’t started for that goal.
The Saudis footed the bill for most of that $44bn - most is only out of pocket about $10bn of it iirc.
Fwiw he didn’t actually intend to buy it, he was shitposting and got nailed by the SEC, only THEN did he try to work out what to do with it.
Unfortunately the “what” turned out to be destroying democracy and helping Trump turn the US into a feudal state
The Saudis footed the bill for most of that $44bn - most is only out of pocket about $10bn of it iirc.
I mean they definitely got their money’s worth in terms of torpedoing one of the most threatening social media tools for politically destabilizing authoritarian regimes.
Anyone who wants to see everything Musk owns crash and burn?
I hope it’ll start plummeting.
