Ada

It’s not shit yet. Right now, it’s good. Honestly, better than the fediverse in core usability.

The issue is whether it stays that way. And yeah, if they open up the way you’re talking about, I’ll probably move over myself, because that’s the protection against enshittification. But if they don’t open up, if they stay centralised, and just play at federation, then the writing is on the wall for how it ends, because it’s happened countless times before. And I won’t invest my time or effort in being part of that community only to lose it

Sure, but the network itself is still there and still running, and I can still use it (albeit with some disruption).

The point is though, that as long as it’s not dependent on a single instance, enshittification isn’t the inevitable end state.

And for me, despite the usability issues of the fediverse instance based method, it’s a better alternative than joining and losing another social media network to gradual enshittification and slack moderation

Basically people like you are blind to the reason as to why bluesky and not mastodon is getting all the twitter runaways.

Bluesky absolutely provides a better, more cohesive and centralised experience than most of the fediverse microblog alternatives.

That’s why it’s getting more people

But the reason it can do that is because it’s centralised, with federation tacked on. And that centralisation means it’s most likely going to go through the same cycle of enshittification as twitter, facebook, reddit etc. Twitter was great to use back in the day. Reddit was great to use back in the day. Then they got large captive audiences that couldn’t leave because of the network effect, and instead of trying to make the platforms attractive to new people, they started to bleed their existing customers for value at the expense of their user experience, because those people had nowhere else they could easily go.

Bluesky will go down that same path if they get a critical mass of users and stop being the “alternative” to twitter.

Mastodon and the fediverse will always be an alternative at best, because they can’t compete with the experience of using a centralised network. But the Fediverse platforms don’t suffer from the vulnerability of centralised networks and their path to enshittification. And for me, that’s going to keep me here.

The only way I’ll move to Bluesky is if they truly embrace decentralisation to the point where the platform/network could exist without them.

Bluesky is centralised and funded by VCs. It plays at being decentralised because people can bring their own hardware to the party and plugin to the Bluesky network, but if Bluesky (the company) turns it off, then Bluesky the platform/network ceases to be usable. They also started without allowing federation with their core network, so they can easily disable it again at any time.

Bluesky is not decentralised in any meaningful way, which means its at risk of the same bullshit that has driven most of us away from reddit, twitter, facebook etc

Anything that requires end users to react to trolls in a reactive way and in a troll by troll basis, and only after the troll has dropped their payload is going to take its toll on vulnerable folk.

Big popular blocklists that people subscribe to aren’t always the answer, because they also have a history of incidentally impacting marginalised groups, even when they’re trying to protect them.

Instances that welcome that part of Twitter are mostly defederated.

Bluesky just got major investment from a crypto bro…

It’s not flukey…

It’s a federated protocol, but the network itself isn’t meaningfully federated, and is basically just Bluesky (the company) infrastructure. Hopefully that changes, because until then, it’s still a centralised social media platform, despite the underlying technology