A while ago I started loosing hope in the internet, even before ai it was mostly bots, and copy and paste articles. Everything is exponentially getting more and more malicious, with algorithms made to suck you in with obviously no care for the human user, just make stock go up, and make comically evil board members happy.
Not enough people are talking about what lemmy and bluesky have done, I’m not that tech savvy but from what I’ve understand their decentralized nature makes people always in control as opposed to one company.
Going on these sites brings me back to the earlier days of the internet, where it felt like interacting with real people, posting to an actual community, rather than being in one of those dystopian movies with slurm drinks and infinite amount of trash being pumped out by bots, to get as many views for monetization/outreach which is what pretty much all major social medias feel today.
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Offering a slight damper / correction:
This is about two things (design and ownership), which are correlated, but not identical.
Malicious design can be things like:
- Algorithms to keep people engaged
- UIs to confuse users (luring them to purchases, or making ‘cancel’ hard to access)
- Using intermediate currencies to make it harder to assert value
- …
Obviously, these patterns and practices can also be applied to a FOSS instance you own. There is less incentive to do so if the profit motive is removed - which makes a huge difference.
These design patterns are fundamentally about making user numbers go up. Attract more users, keep them on your platform longer, make them leave less. And a portion of user guidance mixed in. None of that is inherently evil, to some degree even desireable, and to some extent unavoidable to offer a functional service.
Some users may expect a feed like lemmy to browse indefinitely, since they find it inconvenient to have to click to go to the ‘next page’. And because they got used to this feature elsewhere. Others already see this as a dark pattern.
I just wanted to highlight how some of the malicious stuff may still be present in the fediverse, without any company involved. Here, we’re kind of in charge on both sides: Each is responsible for their own user agency (like controlling your online hours, or what sites you visit), and collectively to decide what user experience we want to shape (which might include controverse patterns).
I spent way too many words on this. Mostly I agree with you! And overall, users will encounter far less malicious patterns on FOSS.
[Edit: Formatting]
True, Fediverse gives us freedom. Glad, that You enjoy it.
Btw, Bluesky isn’t really decentralized, but it’s still better than X. Freer alternative would be Mastodon. Thankfully Lemmy is decentralized, and thanks to ActivityPub, from here you can interact with Mastodon posts, or other compatible fediverse platforms.
They are decentralized, the architecture is just more complicated and harder to run, but they are in fact decentralized.
You can run your own pds(data host), relay (pulls data from all pds), app view (app frontend), moderation (still in progress albeit), and even algorithms.
We have to stop saying they aren’t decentralized just because it’s more complicated and restrictive, large social media platforms will inherently be complicated and expensive in order to be reliant and fast.
Don’t they have that thing where you can turn your account into a self hosted website? Maybe decentralized wasn’t the best word, I mean users don’t have to rely on the website staying up / moderators not going mad or stuff like that.
Well, if bluesky official site goes down, it all goes down.
Only account data can be self hosted but at the end, it all centers around one server to make the full magic happen.
True in spirit but not to the letter. You can fire up your own server and federate Bluesky. The issue is that Bluesky’s centralized design means that you would be hosting a clone of literally all the data, which requires serious infrastructure and expense. But the protocol is open, so in theory an alternative provider (with resources) could do it.
If all Xitter users decamped to Bluesky, that might create incentives for more providers to step in, creating some competition and accountability. Non-profit foundations with deep pockets could do it, for example. That would definitely be an improvement compared to today’s corporate social media.
But I agree that ActivityPub is the more democratic solution.
Oh, ok, thanks for the correction.
Yeah they tried really hard to make people think it would be federated to get even the slightly more tech savvy people onto bluesky by basing their development on the same protocol as the properly federated mastodon. Turns out it was just a way to get more users and its actually entirely centralized in all practical ways. Bluesky is textbook “embrace, extend, extinguish”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
You’re actually right they are decentralized and your account would continue existing if you had your own PDS and either you or someone else was running a relay.
The OP above is essentially saying what if the relay goes down, but anyone can run a relay it just costs a few hundred a month and there’s little reason to do so (right now).
Usually people on this side of the Fediverse aren’t in the know on the AT Proto inner workings.
One thing you can point out is protocol ownership, Bluesky owns the AT Proto protocol and can change it however they like while ActivityPub is a W3C ownership so a lot more resilient (albeit slower changes)
You can do that here too with WordPress. It’s got a Fediverse connector. Many blogs will post on Masto that way. I’m surprised they haven’t made it here yet.
I was right there as well. I saw creators I trust putting out stuff talking about the state of social media today (Technology Connections on YouTube in particular) and that was around when I started diving back into bluesky, then after a little more reading around, mastodon and lemmy. Never looked back after that.
❤️
Enjoy :D
