Technology

When you sign up with Bluesky, it gives you the choice to sign up with the big main server or with an auxiliary server. Just like Lemmy does.

The problem is that when Lemmy got hit with a big influx of users, the main server couldn't handle the load, so they quit accepting new users. This confused and upset a lot of people, because now they had to go shopping for another instance to apply to, and many of the bigger ones weren't accepting new users, either, because of the same problem. This was a crucial moment for the adoption of the platform, and the infrastructure just wasn't there to handle it.

EDIT: Shit, I think I'm misremembering that. That's what happened with Mastodon. Although, it could've happened with Lemmy, too. In fact, it's a problem with all of these social networks that aren't run by gigantic corporations. People expect a certain level of service, and you can't provide that unless you have a ton of money.

I never had a Xitter account so take what I say with a grain of salt, as I only interacted with the platform as a spectator.

For me it was funny to watch as I slowly saw people dive into madness over the most irrelevant things.

It didn’t matter if it was left or right people still lost all senses over unimportant things like Hunter Biden’s laptop or this week’s conspiracy theory.

I opened Mastodon and as I scroll through I see the following order:

1. republican bad post
2. republican bad post
3. republican bad post
4. something linux related (usually hector martin)
5. republican bad post

And I get it, republican is bad, but after reading 3-4 republic bad posts my mental state needs a break or something different which is what Xitter was able to do. Some new music being announced/discussed, maybe a video game, maybe a joke.

BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.

I personally think that the problem is rooted in defederation, it’s being used willy-nilly like it doesn’t have effect on the people using the platform. But not becoming an echo chamber is essential to a platform’s long term health. If I know that a platform has the same message for me when I open the app I’ll just start using it less, which is what happened with Lemmy sadly, I open my feed and it’s full of dystopian and republican posts, I just don’t bother anymore.

Incoherent rant over.

I haven't used Mastodon, but if it's anything like Lemmy, most people won't want to bother learning what an instance is or what federation means.

FOSS enthusiasts regularly overestimate how much hassle regular people are willing to put up with to do something, and how much they care about corporations.

Mastodon is great.

The only reason why it doesn't get as much traction is because it doesn't manipulate your dopamine and serotonin receptors like other networks do with their black box algorithms that are designed to steal as much of your attention as possible, while almost certainly throwing you into an unhealthy filterbubble/echochamber.

Because Bluesky keeps to what made Twitter popular in the first place. The UX. You make a post and its syndicated to a federated feed that anyone can search for, and you can tag content using hashtags.

It's a great concept. There's a reason a lot of people use it.

Archive

But yeah, you're 100% right.

man that is so cheeky of them!

Instead of abiding with the law, they just chose to block content altogether 🥲

Most scientists aren't allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don't have the time.

It costs time and money. The handful of times I published articles in an open access journal, I had to pay close to $5K USD per publication.

Theoretically, researchers can publish on Mastodon or something similar but that unfortunately won’t give us the reach we need. That might be fine with well established names, but for dumb-dumbs like myself who are still trying to make a name for ourselves in our field, we want the highest impact publisher we can find. Those typically come with a price tag.

Sometimes the grant also dictates acceptable publishers where you can submit your manuscript.

Sadly, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Agreed, at least it's happening with Meta too.

BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.

The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?

Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it's still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.

Bluesky wants to tell people they're not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that's their key advantage.

The only thing that will guarantee they don't end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven't come up with a long-term revenue model, so it's not clear how they can avoid it.

I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.

The fediverse just doesn’t have the audience nor ease of use to be the smart investment for most people, at least in the short term.

In the long term, I believe the fediverse would be the right move. However most people struggle to think long-term outside of their own fields, and scientists are not immune to this phenomenon.

I don't understand why people ask this. Most people you talk to on Lemmy will say they don't want the userbase to grow much more than it has because with that growth comes the other problems that larger platforms like shitter and reddit have.

That's true by and large and we also don't have enough moderators here as is.

And for reasons I don't understand, people keep asking why mainstream media outlets, influencers, and other trusted accounts don't transition to the fediverse, as if they won't bring with them an influx of users (at least a fraction of which would be considered undesirable).

Why do you want them to come here? (As someone who would like to see Lemmy grow, I'm curious about how you think this will rollout and what the consequences will be). I would like to see Lemmy grow but I'm not sure all of that growth will have solely good follow-on effects.

Because the Fediverse is a mess with atrocious UX. Choose the wrong server and you might find you are cut off from a large chunk of it because a mastodon.art mod didn’t like something that happened on your instance and servers copy blocklist from each other (not a theoretical example, mind you, something I learned a few months into being on one particular instance.).

Servers can have all sorts of rules you will have to carefully study or risk getting banned (some for example will only allow images with descriptions being shared, this includes boosts.)

In short, the amount of work expected to participate is just - never - going to draw in the average user.

I'm on both and Mastodon is missing (at least in any easy to use way) most of the features that make Bluesky such a good destination:

• instant add subscribe lists
• subscribable block lists
• custom feeds/subscribable algorithms
• keyword/topic blocks
• nuclear block where you never see the blocked person again
• optional discover feed
• DM preferences

All these things (and more I'm sure I'm forgetting), make Bluesky very quick to get started with and very powerful for honing your feeds to be exactly how you want and free of harassment and trolling.

I am still trying with Mastodon, but it's really slow going and I can fully understand why people wouldn't bother. After a year I am way behind where I was in a week with Bluesky.

https://http.cat/status/451

because I needed an explanation of what that means, and I wanted it to be cute and funny.