@Gargron @EUCommission The European Commission is on Bluesky too: https://bsky.app/profile/ec.europa.eu, but hopefully they’ll be able to switch to their own PDS or one based in Europe one day…

glances at trending

#mozilla

#proton

#bluesky

Great day for open source platforms to be on their bullshit huh? :blobfoxthumbsdown:

@jasonkoebler

UPDATE: #Bluesky Backs Down Reinstates Censored Video

Thanks to 404 Media @404mediaco, the video has been unblocked.

https://infosec.exchange/@josephcox/114071618066890090

"New: Bluesky deleted the AI protest video of Trump sucking Musk's toes, calling it 'non-consensual explicit material'. Now after we published, Bluesky has put it back.

"re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts."

New: Bluesky deleted the AI protest video of Trump sucking Musk's toes, calling it 'non-consensual explicit material'. Now after we published, Bluesky has put it back.

"re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts."

https://www.404media.co/bluesky-deletes-ai-protest-video-of-trump-sucking-musks-toes-calls-it-non-consensual-explicit-material/

@jasonkoebler

Just wondering how #Bluesky users and the Bluesky advocates here on Mastodon are responding to today's political censorship. Would love to see some of the reaction. Please feel free to post examples below. Thanks.

@jasonkoebler

On the same day that Jeff Bezos cracks down on unflattering opinion in his newspaper, corporate #Bluesky begins to censor the progressive ex-Twitter/X users that had flocked there thinking that they where switching to a safe haven.

So, it matters who owns your platform.

We don't know who all owns #Bluesky (it's a secret), but we do know that VCs and crytobros are big equity holders, and the expectation that they will stand up to political pressure should be exactly zero.

You know all those warnings that corporate #Bluesky is vulnerable to political censorship...

And so it begins.

"A Bluesky account you control... posted content or shared a link that contains non-consensual explicit material, which is in violation of our Community Guidelines. As a result of this violation, we have taken down your post"

https://www.404media.co/bluesky-deletes-ai-protest-video-of-trump-sucking-musks-toes-calls-it-non-consensual-explicit-material/

What happens as the political pressure to toe the line increases?

Public Social Media Fediverse is the only defensible option.

Af en toe doe ik wat vergelijkend warenonderzoek tussen #Twitter, #Bluesky en #Mastodon:

Op Mastodon binnen half uurtje 17 boosts:

En 77 na een dag.

https://mastodon.social/@Kletskous/113675350596075497

Op Bluesky 0 https://bsky.app/profile/kletskous.bsky.social/post/3ldm2qhs46s27 en op

Twitter 1 like https://x.com/Kletskous/status/1869457820623749319

Is your child a far-left extremist?

Look for warning signs:

#FarLeft #extremism #equality #fascism #genders #racism #history #philosophy #injustice

In principle, any such effort to move #bluesky closer to its stated ideals is to be welcomed. And its principal actors likely were never going to bet on the fediverse, or they would have done so already.

I remain skeptical that, with Bluesky in control of final moderation decisions and key communication flows such as DMs, an external entity can accomplish these goals.

Als ik zie hoe Big Tech begint te dansen naar het pijpen van #Trump & Musk, word ik overmand door twijfels over #Bluesky. Het is en blijft een bedrijf met private eigenaren, die het medium, net als Twitter en Facebook, ooit zouden kunnen gebruiken voor massamanipulatie van de publieke opinie. Ik heb de afgelopen maand een beetje geswitcht tussen BS en #Mastodon. BS heeft voordelen (meer nieuws, relevante medegebruikers), maar Mastodon lijkt me veiliger en toekomstbestendiger in deze boze wereld.

If I add the #traffic from #Mastodon & #Flipboard & #Bluesky into #Fediverse (I know, I know... but they're federated or bridged), they're now comparable to #Facebook. 😯
Will be interesting to see that graph, when #Threads federates here and (!!) allows automated posts.

#SocialMedia #TwitterMigration #MastodonMigration #eXit #Xodus

(🧵 2/2)

2024 is ending, time for a last look at the #traffic to @heiseonline via X/ #Twitter and its alternatives.

#Mastodon was very stable, which made it the biggest source by the end of the year. #Bluesky grew significantly at the end and is now clearly in second place. #X fell the whole year, and our departure (from posting there) just accelerated that. But #Threads (where we can't post automatically) is still far behind.

#SocialMedia #TwitterMigration #MastodonMigration #eXit #Xodus

(🧵 1/2)

That happened faster than even I expected, and I'm a cynical Gen X guy.

And to put the rest in context: #Bluesky and #Flipboard still bring by far the most traffic per follower. #Mastodon is now a little bit behind #Facebook. #Threads and #X bring way, way less.

#SocialMedia

(🧵 4/4)

If you combine #Mastodon, #Flipboard and #Bluesky into the #Fediverse, they are not that far from #Facebook. But of course, that's a bit of a stretch (at least for now).
But what's clear, is that Flipboard is not as strong as before. Any tips, on how to get more out of @Flipboard?

(🧵 2/4)

Another week is over, time for new stats regarding traffic to @heiseonline: It seems like there is a new balance with #Mastodon in front, #Bluesky brings now half as much. Although we stopped posting to #X, it still brings in more than #Threads and roughly as much as #Flipboard.

(🧵 1/4)

Is #Mastodon all perfect and shiny?

No.

Do I feel way less harassed here than #Twitter?

Yes.

Would I trust a corporation like #Bluesky again after the Twitter dumpster fire?

No. x 1,000

There are so many smart people working to make this place better and I appreciate them. Thank you! ✨

spotted in the wild

Honestly baffled

@Gargron TY for all your hard work. I believe it is paying off. I left #twitter in 2017 but went cold turkey. Tried #bluesky earlier this year but after a week I deactivated because it felt the same as twitter and I left twitter because of how bad it made me feel. A few weeks ago I decided to try mastodon and it hits different. I'm not steeling myself before opening the app. I'm still getting a feel for it but I'm I haven't left yet and don't intend to any time soon. Long live the

#BlueSky real time user growth counter:

#Bluesky journalism starter pack

Am lucky that I landed here on Mastodon 2 yrs ago instead of #Bluesky or #Threads as they were trying to mimic that dumpster fire place.

I told myself I would not join another corporate social media site from scratch. With no true tech background I figured out how this worked, reached out and found fellow birdsite friends amongst the rubble.

Thank you to @trumpet and team for allowing me to join here on the #scotland instance. (That's another story lol) ❤️

For those joining the Xodus for #bluesky, you’ll find me there:

Regarding #Bluesky opening signups, one person on HN comments:

> The account portability is probably the biggest problem with the #fediverse right now.

And while that may be true from an end-user perspective, imho it is not the biggest problem. The fact that for a new dev building an #ActivityPub app is like a Viking trying to discover America is problematic. While #ATProto has the Holland-America line where you can check in for the ride.

@maegul
Right. Portability is a red herring though. Its effectively meaningless - who cares if i can move my website host. Who cares if its technically possible to block google from crawling me if everyone i know can only find me through that. Worse, if they can only find me through something that doesnt tell anyone where it gets its websites from. What benevolent organization has the resources to crawl everything without ulterior motive, and again how would i even know? If we organize a mass movement away from the main relay because its downright dangerous to have everything public, we would also need to make that relay break the protocol to be private access to similarly safe feed generators and app views, host our own PLC resolver - breaking the chain that makes migration possible, even if i still technically hold the git repo with the right hash, they own the means of finding it.

It all seems nice until you think about how any of it would actually play out. It would be cool to be wrong, id love to see a web utopia spring up from a platform billionaires pocket change, it would be such sweet irony. but seeing the same focus on account portability trotted out again and again without answering any of the hard questions keeps demonstrating how shallow this pipe dream really is. Moving accounts on the fedi is too hard, true, but to still think thats the main barrier and the answer being to give me literally only that and my ability to shop for a new algorithmic slop bucket as agency is just demonstrably wrong the second you think twice about it.

App views invert identity, and thats sort of interesting for a minute - instead of me subscribing to a platform, the platform subscribes to me. Except wait wasnt a series of platforms that mine all my data to serve me targeted shit the whole problem in the first place? Why is it compelling to require any indie app view to require me to surrender literally all my data to something they literally and uncritically call the firehose to be viable? Even if the indie app view is beautiful and lovely, it structurally depends on Sidechannel Information Leaks As A Service where now instead of a single platform having to win my trust to harvest my data, to merely exist online i literally must allow literally everyone to harvest it so i can have the privilege of them telling me what to look at.

They talk about how many thousands of algorithms have been created, but take a look at the list of them, it shows you how many people subscribe to them, sorted by popularity, descending. Compare that to the number of accounts on bluesky. Try and find the source code for the most popular feeds. If you can, are they doing anything more interesting than a manually curated list of accounts or posts that contain a hashtag? Try and find an algo that does actual account-level recommendation. Are there any? Youll find a handful of open source ones that have shut down. Try and run one. What happens? Who has the resources to run something like that? For how many accounts? Sample the firehose for a week, including all your feeds. Compare the number of accounts and posts that show up there to the number of accounts active in the firehose. If it really worked, youd expect to see a lot of different algorithms serving a lot of different posts from a lot of different people to a lot of different people. Evaluating how far that is from reality is left as an exercise to the reader.

And thats the network working as designed - saying nothing about the intrinsic impossibility of safety given the identity model.

I find very little of it compelling. I was interested in lexicons until i saw how they are used in practice as a wildly ineffective and repetitive API spec. I was interested in the use of DNS and DIDs for lightweight identity beacons until i saw how almost a year (?) later there are no viable plans to replace PLC with anything but Identity As A Service. I was interested in the PDS as a signed data store until i saw how it was only discoverable and useful by being crawled by a single public relay. Its a hodgepodge of half finished ideas that could be cool if any critical feedback would actually affect the design.

As i always say when i talk about this, id love to be wrong, and if it turns out to be really cool ill happily join.