While I would love people to come over to mastodon (or mastodon adjacent) I personally think this is a step in the right direction. Having more fediverse adjacent platforms makes it easier for people to communicate in a much less platform specific conglomeration.
Mastodon is broken as fuck for me. I don't know if it's my instance, or the country I'm in, or what. The app mostly just spins and hangs. It's been like this for a year. I've never been able to see who other people are following, which is something I like to do to discover new content. I've never been able to view videos that people post. I joined in 2020 and I'm probably just going to delete my account.
As much as I don’t believe bsky will be any different, and won’t join it myself, the momentum is there. Took a little longer than it should have but the tipping point is here and we should all relish in the bird’s passing.
I think bluesky and twitter will become politically divided and become their respective echo chamber rather than Twitter going out of fashion.
Overall the discourse quality will go down at both places.
A lot of people exist on twitter because their favorite celebrity or news cite or company exists on there. The problem is that the lefties and LGBTQ folk create a ton of twitters content and are also a huge majority of those celebrities.
So while I think twitter will become a sort of right wing cesspool, BlueSky will be much different. Especially since BS has the ability to essentially build your own echo chamber on purpose. Which I actually think is fine because some of the echo chambers I’d compare to the instances on here that try to keep people safe and civil like beehaw. But the moment bluesky keeps getting celebs and organizations to make the swap, it’s all over for twitter. There is a critical mass there that will migrate regardless and honestly the echo chamber design means right wing folk would also do well on the platform if they know what they’re doing.
My bet is that Truth Social buys Twitter in an all-share deal, simultaneously enriching Trump and providing liquidity to Musk.
Thought may happen but it will still be an improvement.
The big problem with Twitter / X is everything ends up being about politics.
Want to talk about a video game, you can't because some dipstick mega supporter is going to accuse it of being woke.
Want to talk about a programming language, nope apparently that is woke too.
Want to share a funny cat picture, nah, can't do that apparently a man having a cat is gay and woke.
It's exhausting dealing with these idiots.
The bird died years ago. Now we wait for the death of a letter.
I'm glad to see Twitter/X collapsing if only to add to Musk's problems, but at the same time just changing the corporate logo over the outhouse doesn't make it smell any better. It's a better place, but I'm sure it's temporary, the same people/bots/trolls will just migrate right along with the rest of them.
This seems fine, so long as the journos remember how to pull up stakes once a platform decays. I hope they learn a lesson about the importance of owning your own audience, follower lists, etc.
/glances at substack
I hope that too. It would be nice.
Not sure if this is an age thing but at a certain point I just stopped wanting “forever fixes”. Nothing is forever. You’re just patching in the hopes that the nex hole is easier to patch now that you have all the shit you need to do patches.
"Journalists flock to yet another proprietary, commercial platform as the last becomes increasingly 'toxic' for reasons unknown."
Oh shut up with that.
You act like there's some kind of alternative which there isn't. Mastodon, which I'm sure you were going to mention, absolutely does not count because it's a nightmare to use and they haven't bothered to fix any of its problems.
So there is no viable alternative.
Also because it's so awful to use, no one does use it, and so no one's on the platform. After all, journalists need to go where the viewers are.
There is zero point being smug about your open source platform, if no one uses your open source platform.
Okay then, hope people won't complain when things go to shit again
Just forever on march towards the inevitable due to convenience
You do realise people would’ve switched to mastodon if it weren’t so inconvenient? People don’t care about the long term projections of Bluesky. They want Muskless Twitter and they got Muskless Twitter. Simple as that
I'm just really tired of telling people about the obvious, and every time history keeps repeating
I don't believe it's just convenience, it's as you said, people don't care about the long term. In anything.
A big corporate platform (or whatever else, like, say, oil companies vs climate protesters) will always have more resources, whether it's for development or marketing, so people will always have to be a bit willing to not have full convenience for a better world
If we don't think about the long term, what are we even thinking of instead?
Social media rises and falls just like any other fad or fashion. It's a never-ending churn, as people (particularly, young people) inevitably crave something novel. There's little use in fighting the cycle, just as there'd be little use in fighting the trendy choices of a teenager.
It's frustrating to watch people en masse continue to make choices that don't make sense. It turns out that a lot of people are much more driven to follow the crowd than to have (let alone stand by) personal principles or rational decisions. Thankfully, we're not obligated to be like that. There's always some sort of counter-culture that bucks the main trends, and honestly? That's where the most interesting people tend to be.
If you feel driven to educate people on the futility of trends, then by all means, go for it. I just know it can be draining, and not everyone is going to be receptive. On the plus side, you sound like a rational person who actually thinks about their decisions - in a world full of followers, that can be pretty powerful.
I mean, what’s the alternative? Mastodon culturally could not get its shit together enough to be a viable alternative.
Ten years later
"Journalists flock from Bluesky...
How many more times am I going to see this same title before X implodes?
Can it implode? Leon can just keep burning money to keep it alive. It's going to probably be funded by the government soon anyway.
Same for Reddit, still very much alive apparently.
(I'm not going back, I'm happy here)
To call hate speech and harassment "toxicity" downplays both issues.
Wtf is "hate speech"?
A: whatever those in control decide it is, used as a means of suppressing dissent.
Just think about that for a bit. What if I controlled Bluesky and decided your description of "toxicity" was hate speech?
The definition as taken to the courts in the USA is:
"Hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color, sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin."
It has more rigorous legal definitions in many other jurisdictions where hate speech is explicitly illegal.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-319.html
Canada for example.
You characterizing toxicity and hate speech as being related isn't a position taken even remotely seriously by anyone who actually write laws on the subject, and many have been written across the world.
Broadly speaking, hate speech isn't "being mean" in any legal definition... But that is what right-wing talking heads like to strawman it as.
"Hate speech" is defined and outlawed by countries around the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country
Threatening people based on their religion, race or other attributes is not dissent.
Hahaha, they're just now noticing? Rich.
And how will Bkuesky be any different? It won't.
You're measuring Bluesky with a different measuring stick than they are.
You're measuring it with the "This is decentralized, and therefore not connected to corporate interests, and never can be" stick.
These journalists WORK FOR the corporate interests you left twitter (or maybe never had an account) over. They are measuring the stick by "These current users are just MAGA users in a cult".
As long as Bluesky doesn't start shifting right wing MAGA, it IS different for their purposes. It's just their purposes are not YOUR purposes, and therefore they can still say that it's different, and not have that be a lie. Doesn't mean it'll satisfy you any.
Wow, that's pessimistic
the same level of toxicity that I left reddit for seems to be permeating Lemmy, now.
Not surprising, considering that A) Lemmy is very similar software and B) a lot of the users are former redditors.
Just having downvotes creates toxicity.
People thought the first Trump presidency was a politically divided time, but maybe we're now entering an even more divided time, given that social media is now fragmenting along political lines, more prominently than it did before.
When a Maga billionaire buys a large social media platform... that will cause the divide. And it is.
journalists flocking to a site built on the backs of trans people and they'll still refuse to hire/interview trans people when talking about trans issues.
I’m not serially online enough to understand what you mean, can you expand on this?
According to CNN, X is the most ideologically balanced of the social media platforms (party affiliation stats are at 1:25).
I'm not saying that this makes X good, I'm saying it makes it interesting. Most social media sites lean left of center or very hard to the right, yet X seems to have found a balance. Or maybe it's in transition into being a far right platform, idk, but at least as of this moment, it's pretty balanced. Users are down, but it seems the current userbase is more balanced than it was.
That has little to do with whether X is "toxic," but I do think it's an interesting statistic to discuss.
Certainly an interesting statistic but one thing to keep in mind is that Elon Musk has control over the algorithm and he uses it to boost right wing causes. So even if the Twitter has an equal number of users from both sides one side is getting an unfair advantage. Sources: https://cybernews.com/news/x-algorithm-changed-musk-boost-right-wing/ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/x-has-disproportionately-pushed-right-wing-content-since-elon-musk-took-over-reports https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endorsement-x-boosting-republican-posts-july-algorithm-change
I think this whole concept speaks to how differently we all use social networks. For some, it’s a passive news source. For others, it’s entertainment. For others, it’s a place to be social.
Ideological balance is the least important feature for me in picking a social network. I’m there to joke around and talk to interesting people. In real life, my friends and I don’t go “You know what bar we should go to? That new ideologically balanced one down on 2nd St.” (and then my horny friend says we should go to the bar where he met a hot girl once and we end up at TikTok^1^, AGAIN).
^1^ That’s a joke. I’m 40 and my friends pick bars based on proximity, beer selection, and how long they have the baby sitter for.
I'm more interested in ideological balance, because I'm looking for social media to curate news sources for me. If all I'm getting is conservative or progressive articles, it's not doing its job.
I had a pretty good setup on Reddit with just the right subs to get a good ideological balance (despite Reddit being pretty left leaning), but I bailed when they pulled the API BS and I'm staying away due to their data harvesting. Lemmy is much worse than Reddit as far as bias goes, but it's better than nothing I suppose. I've had to actually go back and follow news sources to rebalance my media consumption, which is a pain because there's so much BS on news sites.
I don't want to be social, and if I want entertainment, I'll play video games or watch a movie/TV show. I just want to stay informed and hear other peoples' takes on current events, ideally from a diverse set of perspectives. And yet, my main options are left wing or right wing sources, both of whom will misrepresent stuff and nobody will correct them.
I'm probably not going back to Twitter/X because I hate the format, but I am happy to see that at least someone thinks it's somewhat balanced. I'm working on my own Reddit/Lemmy alternative with the express goal to make it easier to get a balanced feed, so hopefully some day I'll be able to eat my cake and have it too.
Have a link to the actual article and not some rando with a video without context?
I don't think there's an article, at least I couldn't find one. I tried to find the original source, but internet searches suck these days (or maybe I've lost my touch).
Here's a YT video that talks about it, but it's also quite biased. The two anchors here are conservative and "libertarian" (I think Robbie Suave is more conservative than he claims). And here's Sky News YT video about it (right-wing UK media IIRC).
I wish I had more to go on, and I'd really like to see the original story, but there you go.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
