Seriously i have zero idea what is going on with bluesky. I never used it. Why are people saying it’s centralised? I also heard that a lot of people are joining it.
Yet.
It’s a commercial platform, it’s going to enshittify because that’s what commercial platforms do.
Yeah let’s not confuse that for openly promoting and endorsing Nazis okay?
“Less nazi than Twitter for the next few months” isn’t good enough for me to adopt it. I’m not going to board a doomed ship.
Let me be perfectly clear here: Fuck Elon Musk right in the aorta. I am NOT endorsing Twitter here. What I’m mostly doing is endorsing abandoning both microblogging and commercial for-profit social media as concepts.
Bluesky is gonna get worse. They’re in attract mode right now just like any tech startup; they’re burning venture capital money operating at a loss in too good to be true mode to gather users and when they hit a certain adoption rate or simultaneous active user base all the shit Twitter and Threads do is gonna get turned on.
“It’s got moderation.” It’s got thought police in potentia. Either they’re going to start using their moderation systems as a political cudgel or they’re going to start letting scammers and shit through because they profit from the traffic whatever that traffic is. You won’t be able to say the word “poop” but commercials for anorexia pills will make it through to teenagers. Can you name a commercial platform that didn’t eventually do one or both of those? The only one I can think of that didn’t just die young was MySpace, which continued to exist into its irrelevancy.
I foresee a cycle of instability that goes something like “New platform just dropped, it’s like Facebook but it isn’t Facebook. It’s like Facebook used to be before algorithms fucked it up.” Early adopters join it, there’s a period where you still have to have Facebook because three of your friends whose ability to understand things doesn’t work won’t make the switch, eventually people leave those friends, everyone is standardized on the new thing, new thing does exactly what Facebook did, it fucks the world up again, “New platform just dropped, it’s like Screechbox but isn’t Screechbox, it’s like Screechbox before algorithms fucked it up.”
I’m kicking that in the head right now.
The problem is mostly that people see that as a natural progression of the free market, so they’re okay with it. That, and/or they’re totally blind to the fact that people like musk are symptomatic of a deeper problem with the system at work here. Myspace, early internet forums, any form of less explicitly centralized internet, those get blamed for not being “good enough” as a platform, compared to these other, more “successful” ventures, which inevitably use spam to make money or attract nazis to bolster their userbase in a short term bargain. It doesn’t matter to your average user that those platforms fell apart explicitly because larger market actors all swam around them like pirahnas and blasted them with spam and bots and all that shit in order to explicitly tear them apart and try to make a quick buck off of their shit.
In the market, that’s seen as a you problem, as a personal failing, if you can’t avoid that, or if you’re not willing to play along with that. That’s the average person’s view of any previous platform. These platforms rise and fall like, almost every decade or so at this point, more at the onset, obviously. People don’t have enough of a long term memory to remember why the last platform died and how it followed the exact same trajectory as the current thing.
You people are fucking insane. You act like what the Muskrat is doing is normal and inevitable. No, a billionaire owner of a website losing his mind acting like an infant and going online publicly promoting and endorsing Nazis it’s not the norm. It’s not the inevitable Next Step.
