yes, see this thread

https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474

“#BlueSky isn’t decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that’s all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find “networking through Relays instead of server-to-server” as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else.”

There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A…

Of course it is, why would people throw millions at investing in a product and then decentralize it to the point that there weren’t any bottlenecks to apply pressure and extract a profit back out of it? It makes no sense and would be a ridiculous business strategy.

What is a good business strategy is associating your product with visions of decentralization while never truly intending to get there in practice.

One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.

wtf kind of lame criticism of mastodon is this…there are constantly cute pictures of pets being posted on mastodon… and like anywhere else with humans these posts are very popular on mastodon.

I would say these posts are MORE popular on mastodon because without an algorithm cute animal photos are going to stick out as popular even more.

This is all nonsense anyways, Bluesky is considered “cooler” by techy types with a childlike awareness of history, politics and power because the tech is cooler when considered in the abstract.

Coincidently none of these technical details have the capacity to make bluesky a truly open and free place otherwise those investors would sue bluesky for purposefully and willfully not pursuing profit for shareholders. This won’t stop certain types from pointing at pictures in the sand and reciting idle words thrown to the wind by the people in charge for now.

Bluesky exists as a legal instrument of profit, all else about bluesky is malleable and changeable and will eventually be bulldozed or undermined in the pursuit of profit for shareholders.

edit 2 this is a real human, and I was grumpy and while it was satisfying to point fingers it just makes me into the asshole so I removed that, but my broader point still stands

Right, they see the business of car sales as like horses for the rich and more crucially they see themselves as a luxury brand that associates itself with wealth via the inherent difficulty of owning and maintaining a large luxury car that excludes all but the rich. It is the same with Ralph Lauren and horses, polo in this case being analagous to the ridiculous high stakes driving fantasies luxury car commercials evoke.

I think the delusion that fuels this insanity is western car companies understand the future is no longer defined by visions of the car but they can’t admit it. They can’t make cheap, reliable ev commuter cars because from their perspective that would be admitting the truth they can not accept to themselves.

I don’t even think this has to do with money, surely there will be big markets in ev vehicles long into the future, rather it is about something deeper, it is about refusing to participate in any future that doesn’t unquestionably place cars at the center of it.

To western car execs a simple, reliable compact electric commuter car isn’t a car, zero percent of them drive anything other than sports cars and massive trucks/suvs and they see one of the fundamental utilities of a car is to seperate oneself from the city of dirty working class people between your mansion and executive suite office (who would actually benefit most from said practical small electric commuter cars).

I’m sorry I am not trying to dispute the spirit of your respose but I have to disagree, freight trains are thousands of feet long and haul unbelievably large quantities of material, the idea that it is inefficient to have a human (really a pair of humans) oversee and be responsible for a machine that large is laughable honestly.

…so is the idea that there is a genuine shortage of people willing to work as conductors, it is a convenient lie companies tell to rationalize why nobody wants to work for them because they pay shit and respect their employees so little that they won’t even give them unpaid time for necessary doctors appointments (see recent action of US train workers).

This point is even more true for passenger trains.

It is a massive responsibility we can afford to pay two humans to do it, a certain micro amount of inefficiency is ok.

Why do we need to get rid of the job of human radio presenter?

Techbros keep telling me AI frees people up to stop working shitty jobs and pursue their dreams, but the truth is none of these tech evangelists give a shit about anyone’s dreams if they aren’t some lame vision of factorio where the factories pollute the planet churning out ripoffs of human culture.

the big appeal of BlueSky is the initialization of the interface. It defaults you to “Following” rather than “Discover” and isn’t jamming a ton of ads in your feed. There’s basically no algorithm. Its a very basic service, rather than an engineered mess. More akin to Facebook or Twitter from back in the '00s, before monetization ruined them.

The big appeal of bluesky is that it is in the early stages of monetization that hinges on effectively enclosing a commons so that everybody chooses the product and everything else effectively dies off. The next stage will come, which is when the enshittification happens.

Do we honestly believe there won’t be enshittification because the priorities of the current development in the near future is focused on benefiting users?

…or to put it another way, do you set a mouse trap with food a mouse finds miserable to eat? Do you think that first bite of cheese accurately depicts the reality about to unfold?

Here is some more food for thought, given the fact that large western social media corporations and the investors behind them have the equivalent power and cash of small nation states… why all of a sudden the interest now? If Bluesky is a genuine vision of the future why did all these prestigious, highly paid people with more power and R&D resources at their disposal than any of us could hope to ever have…show up AFTER the fediverse already did the R&D, created the vision and took the impossibly hard step of breaking ground and fighting up hill against the network effect and a generally dismissive tech press?

Seriously threads and bluesky are false promises, the rest of the fediverse might grow and innovate slowly but it is genuine growth on genuinely community owned platforms.

Bluesky and threads are visions of the past wearing the future’s clothes. They are investor backed and fundamentally and irrevocably for profit ventures.

Do not be seduced into wasting your time in stuck in the past, this is a perfect reminder we already know where it will end no matter what their precariously employed devs say.

I prefer swappa, it is a used market just for phones and I have had good experiences with it.

You have used many words and referenced many concepts and yet you haven’t changed your argument at all, you are still just saying your position is “it sucks to suck”.

If you don’t care about ethics and empathy and rather subscribe to a rugged individualism where all problems are framed as failures of individuals and our responsibility to care for others only extends so far as the suffering person “deserves”, what is there to discuss?

Your position is you don’t care, one day when your turn comes to be one of those people who needs more help than others your tune will change mighty fast… but if we listen to voices like yours it will be far too late for you then.

I would prefer to point out how foolish your position is and build a world that will care for you when the day comes that you suddenly need more help than you ever thought you would.

Angels advocate.

All you are really saying is “sucks to suck” which isn’t so much a position on policy as it is a statement that under a failed social safety net you believe you would be fine.

Let me tell you something about your future, your body will (hopefully) fall apart slowly. It will be an awful, painful ordeal. Do you want the society you are in to target you as it is happening because your body is breaking down or semi-permanently injured?

Let me answer that one for you, you don’t.

Bluesky is vc backed by investors, it is a false promise that I am sure a lot of people working on the project believe, but it is a false promise all the same.

Bluesky is in the part of its lifecycle where investors tolerate no return on their investment in favor of drawing more people in. That is the relevant difference between Bluesky and other social media.

There are cool parts to Bluesky but it is absolutely a false promise of a future the fediverse already provides (however imperfectly). It is also full of “liberal” sheep who tell themselves they think differently but are so locked into the mindset of the way things are that they NEED their social network to be owned and operated for a profit by people orders of magnitude more wealthy than them.

Bluesky will end up essentially the same as all investor backed for-profit social networks, it will grow into a toxic, centralized (or in this case pseudo-centralized because of the moderation system), shithole where only popular accounts get any engagement with their posts. Mark my words.

well we better start eating then!

Fucked up and stunningly pathetic that acts of genocide are treated as “controversial”, what is there controversy over?

Israel is commiting a genocide, the evidence is horrifically clear. There is zero controversy over this among serious people.

lol are they trying get eaten for lunch by tools that generate static websites easily and without BS?

Netanyahu is so blatantly igniting a regional war on purpose

this is pathetic, fuck joe biden for doing next to nothing, he will be forever known for letting 100,000+ palestinians be murdered in front of his eyes as he sat there and did nothing to stop it.