That’s not consciously why, but it’s certainly part of the stack of reasons that made BS blow up despite coming in from the rear in both building the tech/site and having absorbed the first wave of Twitter departures.
Incidentally, I have a dormant Masto account and active accounts here and on Bluesky.
Masto is a big disappointment and surprisingly bad fit for the Fedi/AP structure.
Would you mind elaborating why it’s a bad fit? No shade to Lemmy, but if anything I feel like that would be a worse fit. People always talk about how the best part of Reddit was the niche subs, and a big issue here is that now instead of one small community you end up with 50 communities that all have one subscriber each. Also, there’s a lot of reposting and cross posting to the same community on separate instances. Instances on what is functionally a more social network like mastodon make more sense, so you could for example have all players of a specific team on an instance just for that specific team, or government employees on a government instance. Make up and beauty influencers could for example be all on another instance, making their work easier to find.
I was never on any microblog sites though, so maybe I don’t really understand them.
Well, since all the variants of a community are visible from everywhere if this ever got big you’d think users would consolidate around thing. And this does happen with some. There are many groups around gaming or tech or Linux, but there’s typically a bigger one among those and as a new user you search and look for the one with the most people. And you can just follow them all and your feed just does the job of surfacing them for you together.
And there are some tools for managing reposts and the like that aggregate identical posts. It’s far from perfect, I agree, but it is functional.
But for a Twitter-like the idea is that people would group in instances based on interests and instances would revolve around interests. But that’s not how those work. You don’t follow twenty people that only talk about one thing each. People talk about a bunch of stuff. And people don’t stick to a theme within an instance in the first place, they just need an entry point to the firehose, and all entry points give you the firehose. You can host a hundred people with one thing in common, but their output won’t be the same and you will also be hosting a number of randos unless you’re strictly invite-only.
That means that using defederation as a moderation tool has a ton of collateral damage. People who chose an instance at random and got cut off with it. People who chose your instance and were following legit users of an instance you defederated. People who are on a solid instance but some bad actors joined it. People who disagree with a defederation choice on principle. And since Masto’s instance migration tools are even worse than its moderation tools when inevitably some petty bullshit leads to federation wars you’re going to end up having to migrate and rebuild a bunch of stuff. The opposite is also true, there is no guarantee that the bad actors will stay put in an instance if you cut it off defensively. And individually blocking them is pointless, since whatever new user they create will be fundmentally different and distinct despite looking the exact same because with the way accounts work across instances there is no way to prevent duplication on short handles. It’s a mess.
Here you’re subscribed to a subreddit thing that IS tied to an instance. If that gets really bad then sure, some of that collateral damage may also happen, but at least regrouping around a different version of the same thing is a communal process. You don’t have to track down every individual user again, you just start posting on the second most popular version of that thing and go from there.
Strongly disagree. Bluesky is extremely American-centric and basically just a bulletin board of “hot takes”. I find Mastodon much deeper, more engaging, and international. I’m glad I deleted my BS account and replaced it with Mastodon.
edit: However, I was never a Twitter user in the past
I have to say them setting themselves up to have “BS” as an acronym was a bad choice. Although I still hope it was intentional.
Look, it’s fine. You don’t need to be into successful things. But a bulletin board of hot takes is the core functionality of microblogging.
If you make a Twitter-like for “deep” conversation then… don’t make that. That’s why I prefer it here.
The character limit is in place because Twitter was a constant flow of headlines scrolling past your feed. You stepped into the stream and let the news and hot takes wash over you, get mad every now and then and ragetweet back, join a dogpile, whatever.
It’s toxic and bad, just like all social media, but it’s intended to feed you quick bites of condensed info constantly.
You want deeper, then go somewhere where you have no character limit, proper discussion threading and no focus on media posts. So… you know… here, kind of. Reddit, but by extension here.
But Twitter was successful because the flood of microhits was useful for famous people to reach out to fanbases asymmetrically while still retaining some feedback and validation and for people who needed access to those (journalists, marketers and activists, mainly) to be able to reach out and receive info from them directly and easily.
Mastodon is NOT that, and so Mastodon makes no damn sense. This does. Pixelfed does. Mastodon does not and it will never be a Twitter replacement for that reason. And since it’s made to be a Twitter replacement it will never be much of anything else, either.
Mastodon exists, currently, because enough people like it (and some of those people, myself included, like it in part because it’s less Americanized than BS). Perhaps a Twitter replacement should be better than Twitter. Maybe for many people Mastodon is an improvement.
If they want to reach their customers, they likely won’t find them on mastodon… hard to ignore millions of engaged users 🤷♂️
Mastodon moderation is also absolute garbage.
That’s not consciously why, but it’s certainly part of the stack of reasons that made BS blow up despite coming in from the rear in both building the tech/site and having absorbed the first wave of Twitter departures.
Incidentally, I have a dormant Masto account and active accounts here and on Bluesky.
Masto is a big disappointment and surprisingly bad fit for the Fedi/AP structure.
Would you mind elaborating why it’s a bad fit? No shade to Lemmy, but if anything I feel like that would be a worse fit. People always talk about how the best part of Reddit was the niche subs, and a big issue here is that now instead of one small community you end up with 50 communities that all have one subscriber each. Also, there’s a lot of reposting and cross posting to the same community on separate instances. Instances on what is functionally a more social network like mastodon make more sense, so you could for example have all players of a specific team on an instance just for that specific team, or government employees on a government instance. Make up and beauty influencers could for example be all on another instance, making their work easier to find.
I was never on any microblog sites though, so maybe I don’t really understand them.
Well, since all the variants of a community are visible from everywhere if this ever got big you’d think users would consolidate around thing. And this does happen with some. There are many groups around gaming or tech or Linux, but there’s typically a bigger one among those and as a new user you search and look for the one with the most people. And you can just follow them all and your feed just does the job of surfacing them for you together.
And there are some tools for managing reposts and the like that aggregate identical posts. It’s far from perfect, I agree, but it is functional.
But for a Twitter-like the idea is that people would group in instances based on interests and instances would revolve around interests. But that’s not how those work. You don’t follow twenty people that only talk about one thing each. People talk about a bunch of stuff. And people don’t stick to a theme within an instance in the first place, they just need an entry point to the firehose, and all entry points give you the firehose. You can host a hundred people with one thing in common, but their output won’t be the same and you will also be hosting a number of randos unless you’re strictly invite-only.
That means that using defederation as a moderation tool has a ton of collateral damage. People who chose an instance at random and got cut off with it. People who chose your instance and were following legit users of an instance you defederated. People who are on a solid instance but some bad actors joined it. People who disagree with a defederation choice on principle. And since Masto’s instance migration tools are even worse than its moderation tools when inevitably some petty bullshit leads to federation wars you’re going to end up having to migrate and rebuild a bunch of stuff. The opposite is also true, there is no guarantee that the bad actors will stay put in an instance if you cut it off defensively. And individually blocking them is pointless, since whatever new user they create will be fundmentally different and distinct despite looking the exact same because with the way accounts work across instances there is no way to prevent duplication on short handles. It’s a mess.
Here you’re subscribed to a subreddit thing that IS tied to an instance. If that gets really bad then sure, some of that collateral damage may also happen, but at least regrouping around a different version of the same thing is a communal process. You don’t have to track down every individual user again, you just start posting on the second most popular version of that thing and go from there.
Strongly disagree. Bluesky is extremely American-centric and basically just a bulletin board of “hot takes”. I find Mastodon much deeper, more engaging, and international. I’m glad I deleted my BS account and replaced it with Mastodon.
edit: However, I was never a Twitter user in the past
I have to say them setting themselves up to have “BS” as an acronym was a bad choice. Although I still hope it was intentional.
Look, it’s fine. You don’t need to be into successful things. But a bulletin board of hot takes is the core functionality of microblogging.
If you make a Twitter-like for “deep” conversation then… don’t make that. That’s why I prefer it here.
The character limit is in place because Twitter was a constant flow of headlines scrolling past your feed. You stepped into the stream and let the news and hot takes wash over you, get mad every now and then and ragetweet back, join a dogpile, whatever.
It’s toxic and bad, just like all social media, but it’s intended to feed you quick bites of condensed info constantly.
You want deeper, then go somewhere where you have no character limit, proper discussion threading and no focus on media posts. So… you know… here, kind of. Reddit, but by extension here.
But Twitter was successful because the flood of microhits was useful for famous people to reach out to fanbases asymmetrically while still retaining some feedback and validation and for people who needed access to those (journalists, marketers and activists, mainly) to be able to reach out and receive info from them directly and easily.
Mastodon is NOT that, and so Mastodon makes no damn sense. This does. Pixelfed does. Mastodon does not and it will never be a Twitter replacement for that reason. And since it’s made to be a Twitter replacement it will never be much of anything else, either.
Mastodon exists, currently, because enough people like it (and some of those people, myself included, like it in part because it’s less Americanized than BS). Perhaps a Twitter replacement should be better than Twitter. Maybe for many people Mastodon is an improvement.
I don’t think that acronym matters much with “Bluesky” being a short word, written and spoken.
Meh. I end up tempted to use BS a bunch and thinking about it twice because it may be confusing in unflattering ways.