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@clive @pluralistic

I'll boost this because I think everyone should get a peek behind the hood of these things. I don't know about Bluesky, but if it's driven by advertising, I will not touch it. The beauty of Mastodon is no ads. I'm sick to death of people trying to sell shit. If I need something, I know where to look. I don't need absolute garbage shoved in my face incessantly by folks only interested in our money, not our issue. To that end, I say fuck that aspect of capitalism.

Clive Thompson

@lednaBM @pluralistic

yes, one enormous advantage of a federated service like Mastodon -- and all fediverse projects -- is that they're self-funded by the people who form the community of users

self-funding by the community has its own limitations bien sur

but it doesn't have the mass deformations we've seen with every major social network so far

I can't imagine how bluesky will avoid running into the same monetization problems in the long/medium run ...

@clive @lednaBM @pluralistic I don’t pretend to know either, but I was never going to pay for X, but I would pay to support bluesky, and if that would keep it from enshittifying, it would be worth it

@kookster Except that you’d pay and it would still enshitify. It will either be used against the community as Twitter was or it will give less & less of what you want till you pay more, rinse repeat. . @clive @lednaBM @pluralistic

@Pineywoozle @lednaBM @pluralistic @kookster

Yeah this is also probably true

Until you can leave and take your followers with you, a service doesn’t need to pay close attention to what its user base wants — it’s got lock in

@lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic

I think some people indeed would pay for Bluesky!

The problem is I suspect it’s a minority … and like many corporate social networks, Bluesky would probably like to grow *fairly* quickly, and “free” does that better

Mind you if they made it so you could really leave Bluesky and take all your followers with you …

… then *that* would probably be an even bigger preventative against enshittification than a paid option

@lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic

Since — Cory’s made this point many times — then the folks running Bluesky actually have to pay attention to what the folks using Bluesky want

because now they could face serious competition 😅

@clive @lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic

Sorry, but this does not make sense, or maybe misunderstanding you. The fact that Cory has raised this point does not mean Bluesky will do anything about it. They will just ignore it, or give some tech mumbo jumbo ostensible explanation about how it will someday be possible. These guys are consummate vaporware salesmen when it comes to anything that would secure against enshittification, like a real distributed network or taking your followers with you.

@clive @lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic

Just would like to point out how effective from a marketing POV the Threads promise to interface with the Fediverse was, what a year and a half ago, and how difficult a time the largest social media engineering company on the planet is having pulling this technical miracle off, sarcasm intended. It is not hard to promise things you never intend to do, and gain all the PR benefit up front for them. Until reporters become less credulous that will be the MO.

@mastodonmigration @clive @lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic paying of BlueSky is not support of the platform. It’s just a subscription of a commercial service like Netflix. The investors will still try to get maximum value out of it by adding advertising and data mining.
Compared to that paying for your own instance, or contributing to the expenses of your fediverse instance is real support without any strings attached.

@mastodonmigration
"Promising things you never intend to do" is practically the basis for our entire economic and political structure.

@clive @lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic

@rgulick @mastodonmigration @clive @lednaBM @pluralistic preach! There is no greater act of optimism than “it’s on the roadmap”, show me working code

@mastodonmigration @clive @lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic sarcasm indeed, being actually federated as a true member was indeed never the real intent.

insread:

1- have a back up plan so the timeline isn't just tumbleweeds in case the main plan to forcefully enroll the whole Instagram userbase into Threads hadn't worked out (they did end up reaching critical size fast enough).

2- have some ongoing efforts to point at in case the EU's anti-mopoly (DMA, etc) start to look to closely into Threads.

@mastodonmigration @lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic

no, neither Cory nor i are saying that Bluesky *will* do it ...

... it's that *if* they did it, it would be a critical move to help forestall enshittification ...

... in the same way that because on Mastodon you can take your followers with you, it prevents any single server from becoming too dominant (and unresponsive to its user base)

But *will* Bluesky offer portability? I'll believe it only when I see it 😂

@clive @lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic

Cool. Would love to see this kind of 'show me the money' attitude from more tech reporters. Thanks for the reply.

@clive @lednaBM @kookster @pluralistic of course. Paying does not make it a market. You need to be willing and able to leave.

@enkiusz @clive @lednaBM @pluralistic I think with the oss code and api access there would be little friction in leaving even if one doesn’t host a pds. The question is where do you go? I think enough of bsky is oss and has ref impls that it won’t be long before the community builds the rest for a full alternative, regardless of promises from the public benefit corp overlords.

@clive @lednaBM

The mass deformation is that the plurality of users are on a single server and it's poorly administered.

@clive @lednaBM @pluralistic I'm fully prepared for bsky to enshittify so I'm maintaining a presence here too, we've proven that our tech works. If we have more users I wouldn't have even had to bother with bsky in the first place