I'm genuinely enjoying Bluesky, even more now than I was a year ago when it was a comparative ghost town, but in the back of my head I'm worried about the long-term financials of it. They're operating 100% off VC money right now, yeah? When that runs out, how much will it cost to keep the site afloat, and how far will they have to go to get it?
I know that the AT protocol at least offers a lifeboat against the "uh oh they overmonetized everything" problem, so that's nice, but I'm curious what their plans are, if anything.
Hopefully Twitter doesn’t get a heir and the whole concept dies.
There’s a weird distinction in Twitter, or something, between the tweets (which are, like, a single post in a discussion, but oddly emphasized) and the comments below them, which are, like, just as much part of the discussion but smaller for some reason.
A site that is: what people thought Reddit was supposed to be before it sold out (communities, mostly self-moderated), would be much better.
Is there a reason Mastodon isn't listed here as an open alternative? Not a single word of it in this article.
Surely it should have significantly benefited from the X exodus?
What can Mastodon do other than be user friendly like BlueSky to be on the radar as a true alternative to these corporate or VC backed social networks?
I've seen reports of the fediverse getting a bump in users. End of the day you will almost never see news about it because it has no marketing budget, and offers no investment opportunity. Money talks.
It remains imo the best social platform because of those reasons.
Just as Android is a popular Linux kernel-based OS because it discarded the desktop Linux userland, Bluesky is, successfully it turns out, a case of being open, federated, and popular because they focused on product, not on existing standards that hadn't quite hit critical mass.
Which is why you don't already know this to be true. I'm just reporting this based on knowing which communities made Twitter work and have migrated at enough scale to make Bluesky stick. Bluesky won't have more subs than Threads, but it will be what the old twitter was in scale and be the more culturally significant platform.
Trumpism has no culture. That's not shade. It just doesn't have any culture, any more than the Goldwater right or Nixon's "silent majority" were ever a cultural force. That Bluesky will be the center of cultural gravity online and be where people on the left migrate toward is just observationally true. Smarter people can speculate why that is.
Agree the article could have been better written but I don't think the fundamentals behind why people are leaving the corporate internet behind are going to change soon. Nobody that left because of trolling and abuse is going back for instance.
As really active ex-user of Twitter I suddenly had no reason to open it anymore as my feed in there is now less active than on Bluesky - most of the people I liked to follow either made the move or are double posting. There's just no reason to open Twitter anymore and I'm not really sure how it would change.
It all boils down to the one and only techbro that you should like. All other techbros are false-prophets, and by proxy their short-text based social network is also bad.
I know that the AT protocol at least offers a lifeboat against the "uh oh they overmonetized everything" problem, so that's nice, but I'm curious what their plans are, if anything.
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