I like having Bluesky because it is a non-Twitter, non-Facebook space where I can hear from all my friends who are unable or unwilling to use Mastodon (a site with real barriers to entry). I haven't talked to a lot of those folks much since 2022 and I missed them.
I have intricate arguments why Bluesky is the wrong technical model for a distributed social network. But if a person has already decided *for nontechnical reasons* that they aren't using Mastodon, those arguments mean nothing to them
There is a lot of Bluesky negativity on Mastodon and like, I am actually pretty negative on Bluesky?, but sometimes the negativity expands into attacking *Bluesky users* for making a Bad and Wrong decision, and not only is this mean¹, I feel like almost all of *those* critiques are deeply failing at empathetic imagination. You have to consider the Bluesky user's choice from *their perspective*.
¹ Sometimes being mean to a person is an ineffective way of convincing them to change their mind.
Note: I don't know if I specifically agree with this argument but I think it is very, very interesting
A number of people replied to my first post to say "but my objections to Bluesky are governance-related, not technical!". IE, the "what if Bluesky turns evil" argument.
But say someone doesn't like Mastodon. They don't like the UX. Or they don't like the ~vibe~. If you tell them, someday Bluesky will enshittify! Well. That will not be a convincing argument if, from their perspective, Mastodon is *already* shit. Those folks want a site they enjoy *now*. "Will I enjoy it later?" is secondary.
@mcc I agree with you—I have no interest in being a door-knocker Jehovah's Witness for Mastodon. If someone isn't interested, I don't want to harangue them. It behooves Mastodon to make itself more attractive to those people so if they look at it again in a few years they might try it.
The only thing I try convince Bluesky users of is to enable the Fediverse bridge by following @ap.brid.gy, so those here can interact with them. If they don't like it they can always unfollow to turn it back off.
@WAHa_06x36 @mcc Ha - "placeholder" does a lot of heavy lifting in my coding too!
I understand, they have a concept of a plan to be multi server, but now with the VC money, that might not be the highest priority. But there is nothing in the design preventing it, so it could be possible, even by forking, to add it in?
@mcc You're echoing my thoughts creepily exactly in this thread, honestly. I don't hate Bluesky as it is today, but I am fully expecting to hate it N years from now. I am not expecting to hate the fediverse at that point.
So I'm on Bluesky, but I'm not investing my energy into it, I'm just there to hang out with friends even though we're at a kind of crappy bar.
@mcc "if" BS turns evil?
More *when*.
Matters such UX are very secondary to the environment and "governance", when governance is the same asswipes offering the same walled garden thing that didn't work for *us*, and ended up as musk's wet dream.
IMO IME FWIW AYBABTU NGGYUNGLYD etc
@eramdam @mcc I mean, fedi survives events like this about as well as CAP theorem allows it to (as does bluesky with its different tradeoffs). Maybe even better than it seems like it ought to. It's not a happy time (especially for those on m.s) but it does eventually heal.
It does place an upper bound on the growth rate of Mastodon, and eventually people self-select out as registration is locked down, but it doesn't actually *break* anything.
That does mean it's good that there was and is another alternative to bounce to, but the failure mode is more annoying/unappealing (to andi's original point) than catastrophic.
@mcc @megmac @eramdam I meant it in sort of all of those senses. And yes, the social issues would probably be the worst of it.
But the technical side too, but for social reasons: The network COULD grow to accommodate the inflow, but that requires both money and human effort, and that is currently provided by goodwill, which is a very finite resource.
The fediverse thrives under slow, organic growth where goodwill can also grow slowly.
@mcc @megmac @eramdam A commercial company can weather a sudden spike in demand by investing resources with the expectation of future profits. But a volunteer-run system does not have that feedback mechanism.
For a company, a sudden spike in demand is a challenge to overcome in the moment but good news in the big picture. For a person, it's just burnout.
@mcc @eramdam @WAHa_06x36 I see both as relevant but think there are (maybe surprising) emergent properties of the interaction between the way both scale here that make it pretty able to survive it on both sides?
Like, in past surges what has happened is:
- Mastodon.social falls down, delivers slowly, can't take on new users.
- Everywhere else rapidly locks down registration, because users spill over to them, and some other big servers almost fall down as well.
- in spite of that, large influx of new users who aren't used to the social norms join and conflict arises while the new and old users readjust to some new normal (takes weeks).
Looking at that like Mastodon is some kind of organism, the net result is a kind of organic self-protection against *both* technical scaling issues (by dramatically reducing the number of users who can flood in at once) and social scaling issues (by, for better or worse, bouncing a lot of the users who do make it in, and some older users as well, but can't navigate the shift of social norms(*)).
Yes, fedi can't just throw resources at scaling the same way a corporate/vc backed service does. That's why you can't look at how it deals with scaling the same way. It will never have "infinite users" joining at once like those will because those will throw resources at allowing all comers to join.
But those services (except, weirdly, discord) also can't really partition, even temporarily. They can't close registration. Both of those would be seen as failure. Those are seen as "bad things" about the fediverse, but historically they're (imo) the mechanisms by which it has survived in spite of lack of infinite resources. Again, for better or worse.
(*) this is neither an endorsement or criticism of the specific social norms of the Mastodon world, only an observation that they exist and that they create a self-regulating barrier to scaling the human part of the network.
@mcc 💯. detractors saying a product people like and use is actually a bad product and those users are stupid sheep is exactly like ceos claiming their busted product everyone hates and no one wants to buy is actually a great product and their customers are just morons who don’t know a good thing
like almost everything is good and bad in all kinds of different ways but the thing a lot of folks don’t get about products is they are, to get reductio ad absurdum about it, just jigsaw pieces. good if they fit and can be brought to hand, bad if they cannot and do not.
@PBernhardt Meanwhile bluesky is 100% about federated identity and data ownership… … … without actually achieving any of the other user freedom/corporate independence goals that Mastodon ddi achieve.
We have like!! 60% of a good model and 40% of a good model! and I don't know how to merge them into 100% of a good model without spending four person-years of intensive development time on prototypes and then winning three difficult arguments with Eugen Rochko
@mcc I have the impression a lot of the artists on cohost migrated to blusky because that's where the public was and now they aren't posting to fedi to my knowledge and I keep hearing about the BS public being bad.
I hope they are doing ok
@mcc I feel that this kind of things happened in the tech community way too often. It is similar for people to attack users of another programming languages and technology they don't like. It makes one feel superior, I guess. But at the end, this is actually an extreme bad way to actually convert anyone, and only will create a toxic environment.
See also: https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture
@mcc Fediverse "evangelists" honestly need to get over themselves. They definitely kill the vibe here in a bad way.
I love the Fediverse and I think it will be there when capitalism eats the other place, but hot damn it's so important to have a place people want to go and spend time with their friends.
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] "Decentralisation is not a selling point for 99% of people." Ouch. That cuts deep, man. #fediverse #activitypub #twittermigration
> Mastodon (a site with real barriers to entry)
If we're [re]inventing Starter Packs for the Fediverse, can't we re-invent invitations?
The main barrier is multiple instances and the requirement to choose the right one for you.
But I'm here on techhub.social. Why can't I send a friend a link to sign up with that instance, making the choose-an-instance thing irrelevant/transparent?
@Curtolian Mastodon still falls down hard when it tries to do search or threads across multiple instances. Hell, even following someone is a tedium of copy-pasting their name into your instance.
I've run Mastodon. I've run several. It's a massive resource hog that somehow, with all that it has going on, still can't manage to count replies accurately.
Lotta good stuff, lotta dumb stuff too.
@Curtolian Adding to what others here have said -- it's not uncommon that other Mastodon instances limit interactions with mastodon.social in some way.
Those reasons range from practical to ideological, and the limitations themselves range from 'dont show these users in home feeds' to 'completely ban anything to do with mastodon.social.'
If the only people you're interacting with are on .social it's probably fine, but it is a thing to be aware of!
I'm not keen on Bluesky's funding sources, but like you, it's nice to see folks again.
Now if they could feed whichever hamster runs the server with the bridged posts so things get from hwre to there again, that would be awesome.
And convince folks to go ahead and follow the bridging account so I can just read their stuff here...
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