Y’all are forgetting how hostile Mastodon users can be. Personally I feel a little bit scared of posting anything there.
The fediverse will still be here when bluesky is killed by VCs
Oh no, the twitter people going back to twitter after sold them out. This will end in tears.
“What are doing today, Jay?”
“The same thing we’re doing every day, Kate. Trying to take over the social internet!”
Now if only I could get a meaningful reply to a bug preventing complete account deletion, either on github or from support. It seems they modeled their support structure on Google’s.
“Today, social media, tomorrow the world! Muahahahaha!”
As I waited to meet with Pleroma-tan, the mascot and CEO of Pleroma, on the 5th floor of a walk-up in Alphabet City, I stared out at the city’s grimy streets and thought: Goddess forbid it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically kaleidoscopic fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after some kind of ancient Greek spiritual shit, or something. In camera, no less.
Then something miraculous happened. Moments before the legendary fox-maiden showed up, the haze lifted. Avenue D glittered in the sun. I could see past shitposter.club’s rolling hills all the way to a emoji-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally whirling.
The 324-year-old executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckleborg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Pleroma-tan was busy doing a 24-hour live stream of Mario Kart while delivering a lecture about the metaphysics of Stoicism and didn’t even hear about it.
Indeed, she seems most energized when she’s talking about the unique infrastructures underlying social media and all reality as well as several smaller apps, the Fediverse, or Fedi, which is a spellbook that servers use to communicate. The open source protocols allow the sovereign nations of the digital mindspaces to fully integrate with one another as needed. Any number of apps with complementary or contradictory ideas about moderation or immoderation or teleportation can work in tandem — or not. It’s up to them.
Pleroma-tan sees fedi as nothing less than the deocratized future of the social socials, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects, here and elsewhere. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Manhattan. Her ambitions might not be kinky, in other words, but they are fluffy. For now, call her an insurgent wonder worker — on whom the sun still shines.
Let’s see here… ahh yes, it’s a company run by a board with a CEO based in Amerikkka. Who gives a shit if it’s non-profit or not, the users are not in control. No thanks.
It’s also very much not non-profit.
You’re right, I guess the original thing by Jack Dorsey (Bluesky Protocol) was non-profit, but since becoming its own entity it is for-profit now. I conflated the two.
They consider themselves a Benefit Corporation, which I just learned is likely for-profit pretending to be socially aware.
Yeah I think “benefit company” is the most bullshit thing ever invented
this is potentially the last social identity you have to create.
…as long as you stay centralized on the central BlueSky instance. Once you move out to a (potential, future) federated server, that identity (and it’s super duper verification) doesn’t follow you.
You have mastodon, which actually made a federated social media platform, but which has failed to become mainstream, and Blue sky which became mainstream, but has failed to actually become federated.
Mastodon didn’t eat the world, but it’s pretty successful. I have a great time over there.
Overall, I like the options today a lot better than what we had 10 or even 5 years ago.
I am glad that both Mastodon and Blue Sky exist. I would like both to be successful.
I would like both to be successful.
Same
What I don’t get is why anyone would ever choose commercial social media again given there are Activity Pub clones for practically everything now, where you aren’t the product. So many people learned nothing from the ongoing Twitter debacle and the zillion Facebook privacy scandals apparently.
Commercial software has advertising: people whose job is to advertise it. That means TV and web ads for Bluesky, influencers talking about it. It also means a team of software engineers building parts of the system specifically to draw people in, whereas non-commercial software often rejects that (lack of infinite-scroll on Lemmy’s default UI, for example).
Activity Pub also requires a different mind-set that doesn’t exist elsewhere on the internet today. You need to decide which instance to join, or maybe to host your own instance. But it doesn’t really matter, because you can federate with other instances. But you have to drive some of that federation, so it does matter a little. It’s pretty complex and confusing and its a problem that only exists in this one niche of software.
Bluesky gives you an infinite feed that feels like you’re connected to the entire Internet without you doing any work. I think the AP service are doing really well, considering what they’re up against.
Fediverse software tends to be kind of hostile to convenience features people have grown accustomed to. Recommendation algorithms, for example. Lemmy is on the cutting edge for having a “Hot” sort.
I know Mastodon has historically been pretty hostile to even more basic things like being able to search posts.
I get why they think like that, and I honestly agree with some of it, but it inevitably creates a culture shock for outsiders coming from corpo media. I think that plus the network effect means the fediverse will always be kind of niche.
They just follow the herd. I wonder who directs the herd…
Try using Mastodon and Bluesky at the same time. Bluesky is a twitter clone and perfect replacement. Mastodon is an excellent micro-blogging platform, but has none of the features people actually liked about twitter. People love recommendation algorithms and quote tweet dunking. That’s the core of what it’s all about. Mastodon is glorified RSS, which is great if you miss those days.
fuck people liking shit … and fuck people going back to american corporate tech… yes, I’m mad like that.
Follow a few interesting hashtags and you have your recommendation algorithm, but one you’re in control of.
Have you seen the average person recently? They like to be spoon-fed content in a passive way. Look at Instagram Reels or TikTok.
Mastodon is fine for geeks like us, but the average Joe would find it dead and boring. Bluesky managed to fill that hole left by Twitter.
In that case, I wish the “average person” a lot of fun on corporate internet. Meanwhile we’ll have more fun on the federated indie internet.
Perhaps open federated systems should have recommendation algos too, just optional and open
Doesn’t PeerTube already do this? Maybe I am mistaken.
In any case there’s nothing inherently preventing this, just because a platform gets some of its data from other servers instead of its own users, it doesn’t mean it can’t use that data to run a recommendation algorithm.
I don’t want it though. I prefer choosing for myself what sources I want to get information from instead of getting any of it recommended by the platform operator.
It would be cool to download different algorithms people created to see how it feeds
Is Activity Pub integrated into Lemmy yet?
It is and always has been as far as I’m aware
@60d @heavyboots It is supposed to be but I’m not seeing any mastodon replies showing up on Lemmy yet so I thought I’d give it a try. The fact that I can see your reply from mastodon and reply to it proves something 🤔
Don’t you have to follow someone on Mastodon to see what they post? Are you already following 60d?
the way I do it is open up lemmy on the browser and you can copy the fediverse link and paste it into mastodon to search for it, but federation is a whole thing so not everyone who sees something from their instance sees everything from every instance depending on who is federated with who, so with mastodon and lemmy it gets a little weird. Ive seen some tools that help pull more content that otherwise your instance wouldnt automatically get itself so that you can see more replies etc but I havent messed around with that
@sqgl Apparently not. I just searched for their username on Mastodon, saw their comment and hit reply. I noticed later that Mastodon does have a note below the comments saying something along the lines of All replies might not display, go to Lenny to see more.
Cool! Yea I’m not on Mastodon. Replying on Lemmy via Voyager.
Wow, the delay is real LOL I replied from Mastodon but it hasn’t shown up here so I’m replying from vger.app and will see what gets here from where and when :-D It’s cool that it’s possible though, even if it’s not super practical.
EDIT to say that this comment showed up on Mastodon basically immediately but my Mastodon comment still hasn’t shown up here 1-2 hours later?! Weird??
@60d Nice, so it definitely works but there is quite a delay so not perfect. But here I am replying again from mastodon after checking that it did finally show up on Lemmy!
The delay is real, lol.
@60d @heavyboots
Kinda? This is @andrewrgross tooting at you from Mastodon, but I had to search for your address to find this comment. And I couldn’t find it from a different server. So… yes, but actually no.Still, I find it fascinating the degree that they’re connected. I’m gonna go see if this showed up on Lemmy now.
Your toot is here. Can you see my reply in Mastodon?
@60d
Yes!I just “favorited” it and clicked reply. I believe the reply shows up as a reply, and the favoriting action looks like an upvote.
It’s kinda silly. Like… is this useful? Unclear. But the ability for me to interact across two very different platforms seems like a technical achievement to me.
@60d
Also, I just took a screen cap and I’m embedding it in a reply toot. If this works, you can see what this conversation looks like in Mastodon. I’m interested to see if this shows up in Lemmy.Yup, I can see the screenshot and the up votes, so it was already more integrated than I thought. Cool!
There really are dozens of us!
This thread exchange made me smile, and I had to show it to one of my partners while giving the rundown about Activity Pub.
This shit is so neat.
I thought it was built on activity pub.
I’m gonna go over to my Mastodon account and try to reply to you. One sec.
@60d hasn’t it been?
Normies will be using weibo before they use Mastodon
All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.
… but probably not.
Are they building an army with troops, tanks, aircraft and naval ships? Are they going to physically and violently take over the social internet?
Decentralized app plotting a total takeover of the social internet? Are these tryouts for the mental gymnastics invitational?
The mental gymnasics part is the claim that Bluesky is decentralized.
Yes
