this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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[–] Hubi@feddit.org 32 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (20 children)

I don't think there are any other Instances aside from the default bsky.social‬ right now. It's only federated in theory and essentially a closed platform until that changes. Pretty sad that it gets all the attention instead of Mastodon.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 33 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (12 children)

I'm not even sure what the word is to describe that mentality. The closest I think of is "willfully ignorant", but that's not quite it.

Basically people like you are blind to the reason as to why bluesky and not mastodon is getting all the twitter runaways.

And you're blind to it, not because you're incapable of seeing the reasons. You're just unwilling to accept that those reasons ARE the reasons it's happening this way.

Basically the 95% of society don't give a shit about federation. It's not a selling point, it's a scary confusing distraction. Many of them probably went to sign up for mastodon, as they had heard of it......but then they found out:

"There are thousands of mastodons, and if you sign up on one, you can't sign up on the other, and you can only talk to the people on your mastodon......oh, bluesky is just one service. You sign up, and you're done. Oh, it's even asking me if I want to connect with mastodon. So that means I never needed to connect to mastodon! And this one is just like twitter. I know this. The other one is scary. This one is what I like."

And then you come in, correcting every wrong aspect of what they just said. You start using terms like fediverse, and instances, and federate, and they just give you blank stares.

They don't give a shit about that. At all. At allllll. At allllllllllll.

I'm going to include a picture here. I took a picture of my wall while I was watching a hockey game. You'll notice their twitter handles. But those handles are also accessable all across the net. That's how the fediverse should work.

TonyBrownpxp. You'll notice they don't put the X logo in that graphic. They just put the handle, and assume the audience knows what to do. Now, Tony Brown isn't a celebrity. He's a hockey announcer for a Cleveland based AHL hockey team, the Cleveland Monsters. AHL is the farm system for NHL. So this is minor league hockey.

Hardley someone who anyone would instantly know the name Tony Brown. However, if you're watching hockey, and you see the handle @TonyBrownPXP with no other context, as shown in this photo, you know how to contact them.

But, if he were to say, have a mastodon, it would have to be @TonyBrownPXP@mastodon.social

And furthermore, if @TonyBrownPXP@mastodon.world exists, that means you can't just throw @TonyBrownPXP on the screen with a mastodon logo, because which @TonyBrownPXP IS it???

And so now your screenis just FILLED with text, all because handles aren't handled universally on the fediverse. I'm personally signed up for 3 diffeeent fediverse services, all using Lost_My_Mind, but on 3 different instances. What if a 2nd person signs up Lost_My_Mind on a 4th instance? I have no way to prove that's not me. And I don't think anyone gives a shit enough about me to investigate if it WAS me. So anything they say, would in the minds of humans, be assosiated with me.

And while I won't call TonyBrown a celebrity, it's the same for celebrities, and guys like him. He encourages fan interaction during hockey games, and he refuses to call it X. He always says "Send your thoughts or questions to me on twitter, or I guess they call it X now, which is a stupid name, but send your questions to @TonyBrownPXP and we'll address the best ones during game breaks and intermission!"

Says almost the same exact thing, almost word for word, always with the snide diss of twitter, every game.

Now I've never signed up for loops, or pixelfed, or peertube, or a lot of services. But when I signed up for the fediverse, it should have had me pick a username. Lost_My_Mind. Ok, now when I sign up to any service, Lemmy, or Pixelfed, or peertube, or anything else, Lost_My_Mind should be my handle.

And if someone ELSE tries signing up for Pixelfed, on a different instance, they can't use Lost_My_Mind. Even though I don't have a registered pixelfed account. Even though I don't have an account on that other instance.

I'M Lost_My_Mind. Not you on another instance. But that's not how the fediverse works. And because people don't understand, or give a shit about any of that, they just go with what they know.

Right now, we're in the early days of the fediverse. The experience should be centralized, while the underlaying services and protocols should be decentralized. Because right now, the whole thing isn't decentralized. It's fractured.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 18 hours ago (5 children)

Basically people like you are blind to the reason as to why bluesky and not mastodon is getting all the twitter runaways.

Bluesky absolutely provides a better, more cohesive and centralised experience than most of the fediverse microblog alternatives.

That's why it's getting more people

But the reason it can do that is because it's centralised, with federation tacked on. And that centralisation means it's most likely going to go through the same cycle of enshittification as twitter, facebook, reddit etc. Twitter was great to use back in the day. Reddit was great to use back in the day. Then they got large captive audiences that couldn't leave because of the network effect, and instead of trying to make the platforms attractive to new people, they started to bleed their existing customers for value at the expense of their user experience, because those people had nowhere else they could easily go.

Bluesky will go down that same path if they get a critical mass of users and stop being the "alternative" to twitter.

Mastodon and the fediverse will always be an alternative at best, because they can't compete with the experience of using a centralised network. But the Fediverse platforms don't suffer from the vulnerability of centralised networks and their path to enshittification. And for me, that's going to keep me here.

The only way I'll move to Bluesky is if they truly embrace decentralisation to the point where the platform/network could exist without them.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

I'm with you.

I think GP has one or two good points about shortcomings of the existing distributed platforms, but I also think these things can be addressed. For example, a centralized system's single namespace for usernames brings advantages for both identity and usability. This would be harder for a distributed system to implement, of course, but it's not impossible.

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