Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/07/you-can-now-get-on-bluesky-without-an-invite-code.html
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But I can’t check it out without creating an account.
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Xiles who don’t want to trade one billionaire for another swear by Bluesky.
Apparently they’ve never heard of Jack Dorsey, the billionaire co-founder and ex-CEO of Twitter who sits on Bluesky’s board and has a major stake and influence there.
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It’s pretty difficult to launch a website with millions of user without any startup capital. Seems the best we can hope for is to get a less terrible billionaire in charge. At least Dorsey doesn’t force his personal posts into everyone’s feed.
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Mastodon has over a million MAUs. No billionaires, decentralised, no engagement-based advertising business model, and Nazis and other creeps strongly and systemically discouraged. We can hope for better.
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I’ve really found that life is better without Twitter. The only thing I don’t keep up on now is the newest music and I buy less T shirts.
I think your pot has been pissed in Bluesky. By some guy named Jack? I think you might know him….
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Yeah, who the heck doesn’t realize it’s being run by Dorsey? I’m on there despite that, but I took this announcement poorly because they STILL have not enacted massively important safety features, like two-factor authentication. I hope their moderation is as good as they’re currently stating it is, because it will be far too easy to enshitify the feed, and right now it’s low key calm and relaxing for the most part. Lots of posts about books, and pets, and herbal teas…
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From an article at The Verge
Bluesky is set up as a public benefit operation and has just under 40 full-time employees, about half of whom work on moderation and user support. Graber says the Bluesky app has 1.6 million monthly users and 25,000 custom feeds
20 people moderating 25,000 feeds and 1.6 million users seems a little low.
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I made an account yesterday and it’s got a post limit of 300 fucking characters? No thanks, I am not going back to that. It was wonderful to feel my brain unclench and stop trying to cram my thoughts into Twitter’s absurdly small post limit once I’d moved over to my own Mastodon instance and upped the limit to hundreds of kilobytes long.
Giving me a set of filters to populate my timeline with instead of a black box of an algorithm optimized for increasing engagement is theoretically clever but I’m not following anything and it’s still showing me a list of the most popular posts despite me unchecking that filter in the initial setup because Engagement and just fuck that. If I wanted to see Dril’s posts I would have followed him already.
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I’m in. I interested. Makes me sad to remember my enthusiasm for some of the old short-lived places like Feedly.
What? Did Feedly used to be something else? I’ve been using it for years as my Google Reader replacement
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I’m misremembering the name of something, for sure. This was back in 2010 or so? I’ll get it.
eta: This was it: FriendFeed
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Short posts of quick thoughts is the point. If you want more than that, start a blog.
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Username checks out 
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And behind that is the ActivityPub protocol, so even if Mastodon spins off the road, there are lots of other Federation choices.
No doubt a large company will try the old “embrace and extend”, but it won’t happen quietly.
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The same is true of mastodon, and you can also block entire server instances if you feel their moderation allows a high concentration of assholes. Kiwifarms social? Fuck all of em.
Also putting the onus solely on the end user to block does not scale well. There will always be an effectively infinite pool of assholes. There needs to be a way to delegate that work to moderators.
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No gods? No masters?
No billionaires.
No thanks.
