i do think the degree to which bluesky is stressing that they do not use blockchains really underscores how toxic even a faint whiff of blockchain has become to any normal platform
This is why I have been trying to warn about #BlueSky.
BlueSky has just been partially bought by a cryptocurrency company "Blockchain Capital" and appointed a blockchain / cryptocurrency expert to their board:
The board member is a bitcoin researcher involved with NFT analytics.
BlueSky describe the tie-up with Blockchain Capital as a "natural partnership" and says the blockchain company has "a uniquely deep understanding of our decentralized foundation".
Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video.
@Tusky About that "bug" when #tusky hangs up while writing a shared post: now I gut that very same issue with a post shared from #bluesky towards #pachli.
@helpers Has anyone ever successfully added a rss feed from a bluesky account to their friendica account? What does it look like? I tried to do with a friendica account, but it broke all the timelines. I can't read any posts from anyone I follow now on friendica. #Friendica#Bluesky#NewHere#Friendica#Bluesky#NewHere
So I don’t really understand why people are still trying to educate others about the problems of closed platforms, algorithms and how they work with silos like threads and blue sky. It’s very clear that people just want to talk to their friends and they don’t care about close platforms versus open platforms, algorithms, or who controls it or any thing of the sort. My advice, rather than try and convince people to move over to an open activity pub enabled platform, just let them do their thing and continue to improve the open social network. When their beloved social media platform goes through the #Enshitification cycle and they’re looking for an alternative because they realized that their platform was out of their control, that’s when you show them your much more mature open social media then it was years ago. In short, if they want algorithms, let them have it over there in a closed platform. Let them go over there. Let’s just continue to improve the space and cultivate this space into something people wanna actually join. #BlueSky #Threads
@Tusky Hi Tusky! I've noticed that replies using the Android app don't make it across the #Bluesky bridge. At least not for me. They do in the official app. Thought I'd let you know.
Bisher habe ich nur Beiträge inkludiert, die 'rp24' im Text enthielten. Für diesen Post habe ich alles gezählt, was in der jeweiligen Suche auftaucht. Dadurch steigen vor allem die Zahlen von #Bluesky (+230), weil der dortige rp24-Feed mehrere #rp24 Suchbegriffe enthält. Bei #XCorp kommen ein paar (+28) false positives über Matches in Usernames dazu. #Threads ist jetzt auch dabei und überholt Bluesky knapp.
Zusammenfassung der Posts zur #rp24 über die drei Tage. Fediverse mit einem klaren Vorsprung vor #Xcorp, #Bluesky und #Threads sind quasi gleichauf. #Linkedin konnte ich nur unvollständig erfassen, weil sie Suche dort nur einen eingeschränkten Zeitraum zurückgeht (und Posts haben keinen Veröffentlichungszeitpunkt, nur einen Veröffentlichungstag). #Facebook abgeschlagen am letzten Platz. #Instagram kann ich gar nicht mehr vergleichen, weil die Suche nur noch Top-Beiträge anzeigt, nicht mehr die aktuellsten. #TikTok Suche ist ebenfalls ungeeignet, weil Hashtags nicht exakt gematcht werden und deshalb die Ergebnisse statt mit re:publica mit RetourenPrinz24 voll sind. Solltet ihr Vorschläge für andere Plattformen haben, wo öffentliche Kommunikation zur Veranstaltung stattgefunden hat, lasst es mich wissen.
Plattform | Posts im Zeitraum (posts gesamt gefunden) von wie vielen unterschiedlichen Accounts Fediverse 1747 (2288) von 400 X Corp 1284 (1723) von 485 Bluesky 942 (1125) von 332 Threads 936 (1208) von 196 Linkedin 587 (597) von 467 Facebook 286 (481) von 151
Vielleicht schaue ich mir noch irgendwann Reposts und Engagement an.
#Mastodon and #Bluesky are both federated, but they use different federation protocols and don't yet work well together. Here's some good news that Bluesky (the only member of its #ATProtocol federation) is taking steps toward interoperability with #Mastodon and the many members of the #ActivityPub federation, aka the #Fediverse. techcrunch.com/2024/04/25/blue…
Fediverse! I’ve been building a bridge to Bluesky, and they’re turning on federation soon, which means my bridge will be available soon too. You’ll be able to follow people on Blu…
Checking in on whether #bluesky / #atproto has become any more like a communication medium, and... nope. almost unchanged since i looked at it last in June. Bluesky is a spectator platform where a small number of accounts receive most of the visibility and smaller accounts are effectively invisible. The introduction of new feed algorithms (to the degree that happened, there aren't really many that I can find in wide use) did not change that. This is a non-normative analysis: in some cases, it is good to have a medium that promotes some very small number of posts and accounts, eg. to surface singular events, etc.
From a 25h sample of the firehose... - 600k posts, 2.4m likes, 250k boosts, 350k follows - 40% of posts receive 0 likes, 70% receive <= 1 - accounts in the 99th percentile of likes received 44% of likes, accounts in the 95th percentile received 74% - 40% of posts were from accounts within the top 95th percentile of accounts by likes received. - the maximum number of likes for a post by an account not in the top 95% is 32.
The first plot below shows the cumulative sum of likes received on the y axis against each account in the sample on the x axis - this includes accounts that didnt' post during the sample (but would still have posts that could be liked, so this also shows the extreme recency bias). The second plot is a hockeystick showing the number of likes (*not* cumulative sum) received on the y axis per post on the x axis.
For background, the default algorithm only cares about likes, boosts don't matter, which is why i am calculating things by likes here - they are the primary algorithmic signal.
These are the same calculations that I did back in June, but this time i'm leaving the firehose open to do a longer sample to be able to parse momentary virality from persistent effects.
It seems that #Bluesky is getting some traction, so it's good to summarize the facts: - it's centralized (99% of users on one instance), - it has insufficient moderation, - it's not easily publicly browsable, - it has terrible terms of service (you grant them broad rights to all your content).
The only thing that makes it different from X in principle is that it's not run by a mad man (yet)... Ah, I forgot it's Jack Dorsey's project, nevermind.
Mám tu další pozvánku do sociální sítě #Bluesky od zakladatele Twitteru. 😊
ℹ️ Stačí si v Obchodě Play a Apple App Store stáhnout aplikaci a při registraci pozvánku vložit. Pokud pozvánka nefunguje, někdo byl rychlejší a použil ji před vámi.
An update on #BlueSky and #AI. They have answered to questions and revealed that their deal with hive.ai specifically forbids the latter from training their models on user data. BlueSky have also updated their TOS to be more clear.
See the linked toot from @growlbeast for more details.
I’d still avoid it personally, their “moderation” is nonexistent and I wouldn’t touch anything backed by cryptobros, but for now this is good news :)
Bsky does have say in how Hive uses the data Hive gets from Bsky as it's part of the agreement they have with Hive and It would have to be disclosed in our user end ToS.(The ToS states our data is NOT used beyond moderation models, meaning it does not go to the image gen model.)
BSky has been updating their ToS to be more clear about it apparently too.
here's an email sent from the team to my friend regarding some of this:
To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is used to train generative AI models.
BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they use all content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.
Hive's APIs enable developers to integrate pre-trained AI models that address technically challenging content understanding needs into their applications.
An update on #BlueSky and #AI. They have answered to questions and revealed that their deal with hive.ai specifically forbids the latter from training their models on user data. BlueSky have also updated their TOS to be more clear.
See the linked toot from @growlbeast for more details.
I’d still avoid it personally, their “moderation” is nonexistent and I wouldn’t touch anything backed by cryptobros, but for now this is good news :)
Because #Bluesky requires an app and I won't install apps on my phone, I'm running it on an Android #emulator on my desktop. I refuse to get a Tiktok account, but I will view individual Tiktoks. I never got a Hive account because of the whole app thing and even more flimsy BS structure than most. I've had a FB account since the early days when it was for colleges only, but I only log in a couple times a year for work. NEVER used the app.
Right now the #Fediverse feels like a treehouse village full of ewok scientists, #Bluesky feels like the first week of senior year at a gifted college where everyone's doing amphetamines and no teachers are around, and #Twitter feels like a once-popular neighborhood playground where the tarmac is crumbling, it's always twilight, some of your friends are still clustered nervously near the edges, and crowds of bullies are moshing in the center.
> And then do a surprised picachu face when inevitably some surveillance capitalist robber baron enshittifies it to a point of complete unusefulness.
> It fascinates me how quickly people forget lessons from the whole Twitter kerfuffle, and just fall for another Silicon Valley silly con. Without even skipping a beat.
> In other words, “neutrality” and “speech” and “voice” and “protection from bans” is mentioned right there, front and center, in #BlueSky’s overview and FAQ. At the same time moderation and anti-harassment features are, at best, an afterthought.
(…)
> Of course the sad reality is that people will buy the hype, build communities under the everloving watchful eye of Jack “Musk is the singular solution I trust, likes are superficial if not paid for” Dorsey.
> In a pretty meaningful way, “speech and reach” is the model of #Twitter today. You just don’t get to choose your recommendation/discovery algorithm.
(…)
> The only way to effectively fight harassment in a social network is effective, contextual moderation. The Fediverse showed that having communities, which embody that context and whose admins and moderators focus on protecting their members, is pretty damn effective here. This is exactly what BS is not doing.
> Of course, fedi could also have some search and discovery algorithms built on top. Operators of such algorithms (there had been a few attempts already) would also benefit from being first and going big.
> But their potential power is balanced by the power fedi instance admins and moderators have (blocking and defederating) and by the fact that fedi is perfectly usable without such algorithms. And by strong hostility of a lot of people using fedi towards non-consensual indexing.
> #BlueSky’s decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.
(...)
> The rule of thumb with search and recommendation algorithms is: the bigger, the better. The more data you have and the more compute you get to throw at it, the better your recommendations will be. So it’s a winner-takes-all system.
> Almost exactly six months after #Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.
tl;dr: - #BlueSky seems designed to get secondarily centralized in the "reach" layer (as they call it) - moderation is an afterthought - Jack Dorsey
Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even
So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but pos…
Matt Mullenweg (founder of Wordpress and current owner of Tumblr) wants to know how you want Tumblr integrated into the #fediverse (or #bluesky). Those of you who have Twitter accounts should go voice your ideas directly cause this will probably happen in the not so distant future (they already had a job posting listed last year where they were looking for #ActivityPub people)
