Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there's a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?

[–] vga@sopuli.xyz 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon? BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon?

The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?

BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.

It's the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren't federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.

[–] vga@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

How do you manipulate Bluesky?

The same way you manipulate Twitter, by tweaking the algorithm.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 0 points 6 days ago

That's not how it works.

[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago

It only has to be compatible with Mastodon, not necessarily be an actual Mastodon instance, see Meta's threads.net.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 6 points 6 days ago

Capitalists love interoperability when they can use it to disrupt other capitalists. When they get in a dominant position they hate it.

It's basic enshittification theory.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 171 points 1 week ago (15 children)

So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse

Bluesky is the newest iteration of privately owned and controlled social media

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it's usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.

They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it's just a buzzword, I believe.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Wasn't there a similar promise made by Reddit at some point? I remember people referring it to often until it became just some myth ... and then at one point, people just realized it was never going to change and then it became a full blown private corporation that wanted an IPO and became a monolith that never even considered sharing anything.

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 6 days ago

I honestly have no idea, that would be going much farther back in Reddit's history than I was on the platform for. It reminds me of Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto, though. It's true until somebody realizes that there's a lot of money to be made doing the thing that you said you wouldn't do.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 91 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.

Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don't get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.

The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though...

load more comments (11 replies)

[–] tfm@europe.pub 42 points 1 week ago (2 children)

So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse

They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

Because, despite being wildly impractical, it's technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized. Only recent a new host launched called Black sky. So it is no longer just one host. But it's been one host for so long it almost doesn't matter because so few people will switch.

load more comments (7 replies)

load more comments (11 replies)

[–] 73QjabParc34Vebq@piefed.blahaj.zone 49 points 1 week ago (1 children)

25% is too high, but at least it's not as embarrassing as 99%

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 34 points 1 week ago (12 children)

Wait, there are 1600 BlueSky instances to join? Are they counting people using a custom domain name as an entire instance?

load more comments (12 replies)

load more comments