I run a few bots on Bluesky and absently check it occasionally on a personal account. Anecdotally I can say that I'm seeing a lot more engagement even just over the last week.
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I'm on Bluesky. I have seen a drama increase in followers in the last few days since Twitter let blocked people see content that were blocked from.
It's a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
I had to decide if I was going to Mastodon or Bluesky. I picked Bluesky because after reading Mastodon's integration problems with itself I wanted nothing to do with it. It couldn't scale unless each instance played nice and in the years since it went live they had refused to do that and showed no signs of even moving in that direction.
What are the Mastadon Integration problems?
I'm pretty sure they're referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.
Bluesky is ""federated"" in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there's basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.
To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it's an irritation.
Partly. Except the time different Mastodon instances were not federated much or at all. If you wanted to go follow someone on Mastodon you had to know the exact server they were on. In an environment like Reddit and Lemmy where you're there for the communities instead of the people that isn't an issue. But if you want to go follow some specific podcaster you need to know the instance because there's no guarantee that whatever instance you happen upon is going to be joined up with the one there on.
Everyone was busy running their own servers and not trying to tie everything together. It was a thing that could be done but a thing not enough were doing.
That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there's only some high-profile defed exceptions.
A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn't remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.
It sounds like an asocial network - something for me finally, perhaps :)
Is Bluesky federated?
Theoretically, yes. Practically, the way their model is set up, it costs a lot to host a federated server so no one is doing it.
Wait really? I thought cost were relatively low since a lot of people do it themselves
Taking a page out of Valves book.
Doing nothing and let the competition drive customers your way.
Not really what Valve did. Valve kept doing cool things that benefit the customer, while the competition actively drove them away.
I don't follow social media. Is BlueSky feature rich and only getting better?
The biggest thing that valve did that kept them in everyone's good graces is that steam's core functionality hasn't had any major changes in years. Dare I say, more than a decade.
It's a platform where you buy games, download them, and play them.
In the early days you still had to deal with all the bullshit, including third party launcher installs and crap to get things going, and over time, valve simplified all of that, making it easier than ever to take advantage of the core function of steam: buying, downloading, and playing games.
Literally the only improvement I can absolutely, positively credit them for, is making that entire process, easier, simpler, and quicker, than ever.
Sure, you can chat to people, track achievements, comment on your profile, comment on your friends profiles, buy and sell cosmetics on the market thing, even voice chat and I think they have a way you can stream your game to friends.... Not sure on that last one.
It's like Facebook, FB marketplace, FB messenger, discord, Twitter... And a bunch of other services, all huddled together to make a bastard child with the entire PC video game industry.... That's steam.
But the core mechanic that was always the main reason why steam was great, remains the same.
I think you might be underselling how important things like the steam workshop and steam's multiplayer support are.
Games like Starbound or Don't Starve benefit a lot from the workshop.
While insert any party game gains a lot out of steam's multiplayer support and friend list.
Also, while I don't use Linux myself, Steam is one of the main reasons why Linux Gaming is a thing.
I don't mean to, I wasn't exactly looking at a comprehensive list of steam features when I wrote that. I'm sure I missed several of steam's very good features from what I listed.
My main point was, and still is, that the core thing that made steam stand out, has more or less stayed the same throughout its existence. You log in, buy, download, and launch games right from one really easy to use program, it manages all the particulars about product keys and saves, etc. So you can focus on playing the game rather than trying to get the game running.
There's a ton of other really good features that steam and valve in general have introduced, and I'm not trying to diminish the impact of those things.
While other games stores are pulling crap like exclusives to their platform, and requiring dumb shit like invasive spyware "anti-cheating" rootkits, steam has kept the basic formula the same, and doesn't restrict any major publisher from deploying something on their platform. Other developers will still delay making their games available on steam for one reason or another, but steam has been fairly neutral in what's published.
I am aware of some exceptions, so I'm not going to say it's entirely universal that anyone can publish anything to steam, but it's fairly rare that steam is preventing a game from being available on the platform.
That core purpose of steam has always been good. All the other stuff is almost always also good, but the core purpose of having steam installed is the same, or better then, when steam was first released.
It's a lot of art, cats, and big tiddy cartoons. I haven't found anything too onerous in its UI, the community has a somewhat toxic level of positivity but that's certainly better than the general toxicity of most of the web these days.
we've been seeing these "twitter's in biiiiiiiiig trouble now!!" headlines for how many years now?
yet people refuse to just delete it
i can't wait for the day i can go a full 24 hours without twitter shit showing up on every feed
I deleted Twitter as soon as Space Karen took over.
However, my friends and so many people I follow on other platforms still link their Twitter profiles. For some there needs to be something solid to make a real and consistent migration. I was overly hopeful that Threads (yes, another evil) would have buried Twitter.
Bluesky is decentralized only in its name. And media storage.
This isn't necessarily true. Just because their architecture is harder and not a simple server host does not strip away its decentralization.
They have decentralized the following:
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App access (can build your own or show openProto posts in your platform
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Algorithms
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Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)
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More if you consider the domain name hosting stuff and media storage control. Also moderation is planned to be decentralized.
Isn't the only thing that really matters decentralised control?
Open protocols and APIs seem pretty meaningless to me if there's a single point of control for the brand.
If everyone migrates to bluesky and then bluesky says "of we're not doing that open thing anymore because of this new embiggened thing we're doing" everyone will still be on bluesky.
Open protocols and APIs seem pretty meaningless to me if there's a single point of control for the brand.
You'd need to expand on this more for me to understand you. Yes there's a single point of control from a moderation standpoint (labeler), as there is on Lemmy instances. But anyone can host their own ATProto relays and the Bluesky relay will federate with each other automatically.
If everyone migrates to bluesky and then bluesky says "of we're not doing that open thing anymore because of this new embiggened thing we're doing" everyone will still be on bluesky.
Not necessarily because the accounts are atProto accounts and you can migrate to another platform(albeit another doesn't exist yet) without data loss. As far as the Bluesky app goes it really just shows you atProto posts and hosts your data (similar to Lemmy instances) they as an entity just also maintain the OSS backend Relay crawler and more.
I really think a lot of people have this perspective that it's not decentralized just because it truly is a lot more complicated due to there being like 5 different moving pieces of decentralization (PDS, Relay, Appview, tbd labeler, algorithm) and they do a great job at obscuring it for regular users which is a great thing. And nobody has really tinkered around and set-up any sites or integrations with it yet. I'm personally trying to get a two way mastodon integration as it's possible but nobody has done a solid implementation (just somewhat gnarly bridges between protocols)
I've been on Bluesky and Mastodon but I'm seeing people pretty happy with how less toxic it is on Bluesky.
Just wait until enough sane people have left Twitter; it'll then implode and the fascist Nazi shitheads will migrate.
They don't want an echo chamber- they want to be able to shout their slurs and right-wing bullshit at you while you can't respond. It's exactly why places like Voat and that shitty T_D knockoff crashed. Once the ratio of right-wingers to non-right-wingers on Twitter hits a critical amount, they'll start looking for other places to infest.
Just wait
Dude. It's been 2 years. The people who were going to leave because of Elon already left.
I'm not saying the current twitter userbase 100% fully believe in his views, but I am saying that they're not leaving the platform over it.
Either they don't know about bluesky/mastodon, or they don't care enough to leave.
Uhh, the very existence of this article indicates you're wrong. Elon removed the block feature and even more users left; how can you say that "the people who were going to leave because of Elon have already left"? Certainly the group who disliked Elon on ideological grounds did, but there are plenty of other users who are leaving because they're finally deciding the changes Elon is making removes any value they see in remaining on Twitter.
I mean at some point elon will buy bluesky, too
At the rate we're going all that will be left on X is EM and his 200 sockpuppets.
Glad to see people leaving X. I look forward to it’s end.