I'm not very active on Mastodon, but saw this post - browsing the bluesky hashtag for a bit afterwards did not really give me much info. I can definitely imagine enshittification happening there, but what is causing the current drama in particular?
None of these comments are correct. This is referring to an economist and semafor article. In the article, a democratic strategist said that his “moderate” candidate was bullied off bluesky.
(No doubt because he is super zionist and isn’t doing anything to protect people from trump).
Then some people quoted the article saying bluesky is dying and it got out of hand everyone started repeating it without knowing the context.
All that happened is some center right pro elite politician got criticised so much they left the platform. And now the mainstream media is trying to paint bluesky as “not inclusive” or “too radical”.
https://bsky.app/profile/vulgareconomics.bsky.social/post/3lq3bdtdgks2r
some center right pro elite politician got criticised so much they left the platform.
Sounds like the exact right amount of inclusion and radicalism to me.
LOL, the bsky users (blueys? skyes? bskits?) sure know how to bully people, if nothing else. I loved how they treated Adobe some weeks ago.
Some people are expecting the imminent apocalypse because there's verification now. I don't think it's a bad idea to verify that somebody is who they're claiming to be but what do I know.
oof. is that what this is about? that's a big thing for some people - especially now.
i know what you're saying with your last sentence, but it also allows people to be tracked down and held accountable for criticizing trumps favourite things.
Not like you have to be verified.
i just still don't get it. like, twitter was a 2012 thing, back when text messages were a thing with limitations. now, the only limitation you have is texting between an apple and an android. why the fuck is twitter even still a thing - if not for the fact that most people can't take a thought longer than 140 fucking characters?
Wha? Because this is not "texting"? I don't know what you're asking.
twitter was founded as an app that allowed you to basically broadcast a text message. back then, sms messaging only allowed for 140 characters max per message. that's why twitter became so big - it was basically a great way to shout headlines out to everyone who wanted to hear you. this was back in the days where the internet was still becoming a viable commercial thing and people were still mostly using tvs/cds/landlines.
now, texting is pretty much indistinguishable from emailing, and everybody's phones are fully on the web. the only thing imo that's still keeping tweets around is that people don't want to consider options that provide for a reason they might have to read more.
The broadcast part is what matters, not the character limit. A normal SMS message has just one recipient, maybe a few more for a group MMS, but a Tweet goes out to the world wide web. Although Twitter was designed such that it could be used via SMS, that never defined the purpose of the platform, and changes to the SMS protocol do not obsolete Twitter's use case.
I am still having serious trouble following. Is your problem the fact that there's a character limit?
twitter is an outdated phone app that was built for SMS back when text messages had a limit. it should have had a predictable lifespan, but now it's become a fake-ai-assisted culture war battleground that's run by the world's biggest idiot and oligarch.
i'm having trouble following what the fuck you're having "serious" trouble following. and i'm starting to think you aren't asking this question in good faith.
Twitter definitely was not any attempt to emulate the function of SMS.
I can't tell if you don't know what SMS is for, or what Twitter was for.
Twitter was not founded as a mobile app. Twitter was (officially) desktop-only for the 1st 4 years of its existence. Calling it a SMS-replacement app is ludicrous, since it mainly existed on PC for the first few years. I personally think the concept is dumb, but it became famous because it forced people to keep their messages short and interesting (aka clickbait?), not because it replaced SMSes.
Early on you could tweet by sending Twitter an SMS. (Not that this contradicts what you've said. I still don't know what they're getting at)
With a 140 characters limit, silly and meaningless rants like yours cannot exist. That's a win!
Twitter was a thing because celebrities won't text at you directly.
Not that texting can't be toxic and social, though. Whatsapp groups are a major vector of far right radicalization, among other super shady stuff. All social media was a mistake.
One criticism I saw was that if you want to verify, you have to use a Google Form and log in with a Google account, which goes against lots of people's efforts to get off Google.
I've thought it would be cool to run a $1 monthly paid mastodon server where your username has to match the credit card used to pay. + maybe other stuff like verifying degrees, medical licenses, etc so that people with such things can have a verified presence with which to interact with the rest of mastodon.
Uuuuuh, I would not like my actual real name associated with an account like that. If I'd use that for work purposes solely, like LinkedIn, OK... But this, no.
Obviously. You'd only use it if you specifically wanted to back up what you were posting with a medical license or status as a public figure or whatever. This isn't a service targeted at the average shitposter.
Bluesky is owned by VCs that want money back on their investment. Bluesky are saying they'll do ads.
I always figured ads were inevitable, but as long as there's no algorithm for me feed and no shadowbanning, I'm happy
The only thing I've personally noticed is we seem to have received another burp of magas recently.
It takes very little effort to keep that shit out of your feed on Bluesky if you don't want to see it, so I usually only see the magas when they crop up in comments on George Takei posts and similar.
I'm a big proponent of the "block early and block often" mindset in the fediverse and bluesky, so I do tend to notice how much time I spend blocking magas, and I hadn't needed to do so for weeks until recently. I figured it was from 4chan imploding.
you can subscribe to block lists. heres an example of one that looks for MAGA stuff https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue/lists/3l53cjwlt4o2s
Careful with those lists though, it's not unknown for bad actors to add innocent accounts to them.
I'm on several MAGA lists because the dumber sect of Democrats can't understand that people exist to the left of them.
Dare not criticize the liberal lest ye be called a conservative.
Wait, why does George takei attract magas?
Or is he just a well known & largely followed person on bluesky?
Wait, why does George takei attract magas?
Its because he's their most prominent gay, non-white opponent. They don't like it when he reminds them he actually experienced American concentration camps before they were moved to El Salvador.
Oh, you mean a decent real human? Yeh, that makes sense they would target him
Well known, largely followed, and often roasts the Trump admin. Same with Mark Hamill. (and yes, GT being gay and open about it does not help!)
Whether it's happening now or later, it's a corporate media site, so it's inevitably going to become enshittified and populated with AI and bots.
Could be referring to Bluesky's silencing of Palestinian voices.
I've seen the open letter linked in that article shared a few times on Mastodon. I'm not sure how big a deal 3000 boosts makes it on Bluesky. But browsing the thread quick and seeing it full of posts shared by the publisher of the letter being deleted is a bit worrying.
Is it real Palestinians? Or is it the scammers taking advatage of their situation to wring money out of people? Cause theres a LOT of those on bluesky.
The other comments are roughly correct in general, but the current drama is because a couple people said "Bluesky is dying" because the number of unique users that liked a post over the past 3 months has gone down (that's the Number that went down), and then a bunch of people got mad at those people because that's a single very specific measure and Bluesky is objectively doing very well and anyway they'd still use it if it wasn't popular etc etc.
Regular internet drama, basically.
It's not just "hey, look,.traffic is down", but rather a few.folks saying "see, traffic is down because you keep commenting negatively to politicians and journalists "
The stats are trending down, but not precipitously so and still at a level that (AFAIK) eclipses the whole fediverse. And there are plenty of journalists and politicians who engage or endure the negative feedback.
blusky users concerned with the state of twitter, mastodon users concerned with the state of blusky, lemmy concerned with the state of mastodon. you guys are so boring and shallow.
IRC users are in pure bliss. Last community to worry about them died of old age and the bubonic plague.
ANSWER: some people value the ability to act online without having their activities traced back to them. there are many different reasons that people may want to do this - and some are bad. this initiative seeks to fight the bad ones without any consideration to any of the other ones. a lot of people online do not want to be tracked in any way that could identify them. this change oversteps some peoples' boundaries.
it's very telling how there's a variety of correct answers here
Not an ounce of sympathy. If you ignore every single warning sign and get willingly fucked by billionaires to get away from billionaires whilst saying federated social media is inherently worse then you deserve to stay on the sinking ship. Hopefully you know how to swim in corpo-infested waters.
A community that helps people stay up to date with things going on.