this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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Now that I’ve had the chance to try both (thanks to fisco@lemmy.ml), I can say that Mastadon seems more familiar to me as a former Twitter user. Despite being a Twitter spinoff, Bluesky seems to be trying to reinvent the flow of things. I’m not quite sure how hashtags (or their equivalent) work there.
I’m not sure which is better yet, as I’m too new to Bluesky to really form an opinion, but those are my initial impressions.
I’d like to see the National Weather Service and local government agencies start posting to one or both though, as weather and traffic are the only reasons I look at Twitter anymore, and I’d prefer not to support it at all.
Bluesky doesn't have hashtags, but the algorithmic feeds are supposed to pick up on keywords that it deems relevant to the feed you're subscribed to.
The problem with that is you will often get posts which are nothing to do with the topic of the feed, but they use a word which the algorithm thinks is relevant. I was subscribed to a general Gaming feed, and I would often see posts about Donald Trump, just because someone used the word "game" or "playing" in the post.
Another silly one was in a PlayStation feed, where I kept seeing posts from sex workers selling their content on a site called Clips4Sale. Because the URL has "ps4" written in the middle of it, it was added to the feed. 🤷
That sounds rife for "Manufacturing Consent" possibility. Like how the platform owners can just decide what you want to see like that. Yuck..
I'm not sure if that's really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It's an element of it, you're right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they're a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we're in, they're affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:
Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don't mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.
More referring to when websites pushes certain kinds of content against the will of its users. Youtube pushes right wing content. Twitter and Reddit on that crypto bs. Facebook pushes disinfo and terrorism. There's no benefit for doing things that way, they just do it because they can.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.
An interesting part of it is that I'm not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it's still a fault of the platform if it's being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust 'the algorithm' that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.