Bluesky

[WolfEyes]

Ok, so maybe its just me, because I never DM people on anybof these platforms aside from family.

But what the heck is it with people who DM immidiately after you follow them. This really feels like its just some sort of spam trap.

I just ignore them completely.

I had that happen this morning on Tumblr. Followed someone and they immediately messaged me:

Thank you for the follow. you now realize those trolls are morons. to put it as nice as possible, you cannot find someones information with their credit card because it is ILLEGAL to do so. I mean no harassment towards you and hope you had a good holiday season!

lolwut?

Upon reading the message I immediately unfollowed. I don't know wtf that was all about and I don't want to know.

 

[Free]

People online and their enthusiasm is a mixed bag. I try to avoid it.

 

[Lexxi]

So, finally decided to create a Bluesky account.
It won't let me.
It's giving me some puzzle to complete and I'm apparently too stupid to be on Bluesky. yay?

WTF is it asking me to do?

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54292692220_1d65b4c3e7_h.jpg

 

[Khamon]

Choose the egg.

 

[Lexxi]

It finally let me in after I randomly clicked on random spots over and over again. It is even possible that I'd clicked on the egg and that's what got me in.
As I said, I too stupid to be on Bluesky.

 

[Lexxi]

I'm now following 24 accounts. Most of which are connected in some way or another to Star Trek. hmms.

 

[Isabeau]

Celebs and tech luminaries including Mark Ruffalo want to create a fully open social media ecosystem

This is an attempt to save platforms "from billionaire capture.”

Some of the big names behind this project include actor Mark Ruffalo, actor/director Alex Winter and sci-fi writer/journalist Cory Doctorow. Brian Eno is involved, as is Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia.) The plan involves building new social media apps on top of the pre-existing AT Protocol, which is a decentralized framework that Bluesky runs on. This would ostensibly give users significant control over their data, algorithms and the entire online experience

The foundation also requires money to start building critical infrastructure. All told, the organization hopes to raise $30 million over the next three years. There’s a GoFundMe right now, with the intent to raise an initial $4 million. Initial funds will be spent to launch a public interest foundation that will attempt to make “Bluesky’s underlying tech fully resistant to billionaire capture.”

 

[Free]

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

We used to have one, before Google borged Usenet.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Nope, AOL was the death of Usenet.

 

[Khamon]

Nope, AOL was the death of Usenet.

yeah, that is when the intrawebz police roleplay became a bit overwhelming, but we still used it, until OMGBBQFUGoogle, then it ended, train of thought, not a sentence, end of line

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Celebs and tech luminaries including Mark Ruffalo want to create a fully open social media ecosystem

I'm glad that they realize that BlueSky could go the way of Twitter literally any minute and that's a very real problem that I fear many Twitter escapees don't realize they're setting themselves up for.

But every time I read an article like this I want to scream. I do not know why people are so incredibly hostile to ActivityPub, but it's there, it's robust, it already exists, and it is ALREADY immune to "billionaire capture". The Fediverse has a microblog alternative, AND a regular blogging alternative, AND video streaming alternative, AND a photo sharing alternative, AND a newsboard alternative. You could spend $30 million dollars on developing these further and it would be a much better use of the money - but, I get it, generally if you did that you wouldn't get to start a new "foundation" and use some of that money to pay yourselves executive-level salaries.

 

[Khamon]

 

[Free]

I do not know why people are so incredibly hostile to ActivityPub

Why the Nostr snub? Is it because of the cryptocurrency taint?

 

[Noodles]

I'm glad that they realize that BlueSky could go the way of Twitter literally any minute and that's a very real problem that I fear many Twitter escapees don't realize they're setting themselves up for.

But every time I read an article like this I want to scream. I do not know why people are so incredibly hostile to ActivityPub, but it's there, it's robust, it already exists, and it is ALREADY immune to "billionaire capture". The Fediverse has a microblog alternative, AND a regular blogging alternative, AND video streaming alternative, AND a photo sharing alternative, AND a newsboard alternative. You could spend $30 million dollars on developing these further and it would be a much better use of the money - but, I get it, generally if you did that you wouldn't get to start a new "foundation" and use some of that money to pay yourselves executive-level salaries.

Yeah, I don't get it. I think I mentioned before, its also the ultimate verification mechanism in the end too. Just going off the original article a bit, Mark Ruffalo couod be MarkRuffalo@hollywood.social (or whatever) and we would always know its him because the hollywood.social instance could be controlled, by the industry.

And even better, he could have that account, for celebrity promotion, but then also be MarkRuffalo@activists.social (once again, or whatever) for his political causes, if Hollywood exects want these people to seperate themselves. But also, once again, its also now out of singular control, so if Hollywood decides Mark is being too spicy for them, and they dump him for whatever reason, he still has his voice or whatever.

The point is more that for the more casual/lazy types of celebrities, or politicians or whatever, they can just be on the "Official Gated Instance".

And people from where ever can just follow them.

As for Bluesky going the way of Twitter, I feel like that is definitely something a lot of people are aware of on some level.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Why the Nostr snub? Is it because of the cryptocurrency taint?

lol...if by taint you mean "the only thing it was really made for", then yeah.

The builder of Nostr doesn't like the Fediverse because the decentralized servers have the option to defederate from entire other servers, which can be used by admins to protect their users from spam attacks and harassment and is somewhat difficult for bad actors to get around. Since aggressively spamming ads and links to new projects is the lifeblood of crypto/blockchain/"web3", that's pretty much a no-go.

 

[Isabeau]

I think many do “realize” this. They’ll just switch again. It’s not that big of deal for the common folk. The people who had such a hard time deleting Twitter were those afraid to lose their thousands of followers cause they thrive on that. I don’t really care about it personally.

Right from the start, you heard people saying how it will all just become Twitter again, or how they will be ads, or how lame people were to switch. So what? Don‘t switch then, or use another site. It almost feels like some are more about the “I told you so” than about an alternative. I mean, how smart to realize it may all happen again! Ok

 

[Noodles]

lol...if by taint you mean "the only thing it was really made for", then yeah.

The builder of Nostr doesn't like the Fediverse because the decentralized servers have the option to defederate from entire other servers, which can be used by admins to protect their users from spam attacks and harassment and is somewhat difficult for bad actors to get around. Since aggressively spamming ads and links to new projects is the lifeblood of crypto/blockchain/"web3", that's pretty much a no-go.

I like the federated blacklist thing in theory, but for a bit, and I have no idea if its still accurate, it did feel a bit abused.

Like it one person on a server says something that is maybe sort of offensive, not even necesarily blatantly, then some mod on another server throws a stink and now that entire first server is blocked. Often with a comment on the list that implies the blocked server is basically 100% nazi asshole types.

And there never seemed to be a way to get a server off the block list.

 

[Isabeau]

Bluesky

bsky.app

Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social)

Maddow: If you don't have Bluesky yet, I recommend it. It is a social media network that doesn't make me want to stab myself in the eye with a rusty fork

bsky.app

 

[Adeon Writer]

Some perspective:

Bluesky currently has 150% more users than Twitter had when I signed up for Twitter in 2009, and Bluesky has been around 1 year less than Twitter was at that point.