The fact is we need an alternative to X because the current owner has done and will continue to do terrible things not just to the service but apparently on a personal and political level that is beyond distasteful to a HUGE chunk of the users (if not even greater than 50%)
And Threads isn't going to cut it for similar reasons.
So in an imperfect world Bluesky is what we get and it's a legit alternative that's better.
The fact a Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge exists says A LOT. Good luck ever getting something like that with X without paying a literal fortune for it.
And the biggest issue with Xitter still isn't Elon Musk (have you forgotten the "Trump years" already ?), but because the way how that media works is turning discussions into flamewars, and its users into morons (including Musk, who reportedly was hooked on it long before he bought it). It's especially concerning when journalists (who really should know better) and politicians use it.
That blame lies very much on Twitter's founders.
SQLite simply stores those posts and that signed Merkle tree. The PDS account host server also has another SQLite DB with a list of its accounts.
They have fancier stuff in their appview server and relay server
Their promises of portability may ring empty but so far their lack of AI algorithm and ad feeds are what people actually come to Bluesky for
If you want federation, ActivityPub is there and ready to go. You could probably hack together a bidirectional Bluesky <-> Mastodon bridge without too much effort (requiring an account on BS to post from Mastodon) and enjoy the portability of your main account while also being able to follow your friends and such on BS.
I quite agree with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38445649
It really does show why engagement should never be monetised.
It's just full of fight videos, repackaged memes, controversial takes etc. all designed to get some extra money for the poster. Even VCs and the startup community gets in on it.
99% ultra-right wing political content with obscene amounts of overt racism, anti-semitism etc.
Even though when it asked for my interests politics wasn't even an option.
So just follow the accounts you're interested in? If you just signed up, how does the "for you" know what you like? You can spend all day on X and never see any of that stuff you mention.
Do you prefer "ultra-left wing" content? There's plenty on X, including angry marxists, anti-capitalists, de-colonisers, race-baiters, compulsive virtue-signallers, tantrum-throwers, Musk-haters, dis-information trolls, intifada-fascists, take your pick!
I remember back when Trump was president, every single post he made on Twitter had a torrent of abusive replies bubbling to the top. Even ordinary mundane posts about routine things happening in government were met with endless insult-memes. Surely you don't think Twitter was once a place where inflammatory posts were rare and everyone had good manners?
are hardly exclusive "ultra-left wing" users, arguably there's more of that to the far-right .. and that's just Tucker Carlson on a slow day.
> Even ordinary mundane posts about routine things happening in government
In your honest opinion, if Trump only ever made ordinary mundane statements about the routine day to day functions of government would there be anything like the level of anti-Trump anger exhibited?
Is it possible the insult-memes are an unsuprising result of a tendancy to praise Hitlers Generals, demonise the people he should work with as "the enemy within", suggest removing licences from news organisations he objects to, etc?
The point is/was regarding X, you can enjoy all the hate-memes towards your favourite enemy. Or just follow posts about Unreal Engine or ancient history or announcements from politicians etc. Follow your favourite Marxists! Or don't follow them. Anything is possible. But whatever you do, don't whinge about "Musk ruined Twitter". That's disinformation of sorts, since as I just explained, you can sign up to X and do whatever you want - read only, post pictures of paint drying, poke fun at celebrities, advocate for animal rights. Up to you.
https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/internet-report-twitter-to...
Twitter appears to be an outlier in that respect. Instead of displaying the usual post-acquisition stability, ThousandEyes’ data indicates that the number and frequency of outages did increase commensurate with the acquisition. If we compare the two periods (pre- and post-acquisition), it’s apparent that there were fewer and less frequent outages prior to the purchase.
• Long-form content
• Video streaming
• Grok
• Ability to edit posts
• Bookmarks
• Communities
• Better verification system
• Encrypted direct messages
• Cashtag feature
• Bold and italic text formatting
• Open-sourced algorithm
• Premium features
• Improved search
• Improved analytics for content creators
• And most importantly, less First-Amendment violations in secret partnership with the federal government
Grok is a nice feature, although for paid accounts only. It also seems slightly out of place on X. Most people are there to express themselves, not necessarily seek help or information from AI-gen. I tried it for some coding help, and it did fine.. but doing that task on X felt odd.
I'm in Australia, explanation follows:
From wikipedia: "In November 2022, at the request of new owner Elon Musk, Birdwatch was rebranded to Community Notes... and expanded to Europe and countries outside of the US."
And instead of censoring "secretly" in partnership with the US government they do so in partnership with the Indian government as well as individual Republican politicians.
Hard disagree. The platform is objectively much better than it was under Jack Dorsey.
> The algorithm isn't open enough that anybody can see if what it's doing matches the code.
Fair, but more is available than before.
> ...in partnership with the Indian government as well as individual Republican politicians.
Would you prefer X break India's laws, specifically Section 69A of the IT Act? I suppose they could do that and then the Indian government would shut them down in India.
Also, are you talking about X suspending Ken Klippenstein's account for doxxing JD Vance? X's rules explicitly state that doxxing people will result in a suspension, so maybe Klippenstein should have thought of that before posting Vance's home address and most of his social security number.
Here's X's policy against what Klippenstein did, which applies to everyone: https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-informatio...
The platform can not be called better, with more bugs and errors than ever.
Why don't they apply those rules to Republicans? Why can they specifically post stuff like private info about Hunter?
- Cool new features
- Encrypted direct messages
- Video streaming
- Ability to edit posts
- Communities (IDK what this but it sounds cool)
- Bookmarks
- Cashtag feature (?)
- Improved analytics for content creators
- Trivial decisions about policy
- Long-form content
- Bold and italic text formatting
- Untrue, or at least unverified
- Better verification system (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-confusion-and-risks-surrounding-twitters-verified-account-changes, https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/tech/musk-twitter-blue-check-mark/index.html)
- Open-sourced algorithm (https://www.wired.com/story/twitters-open-source-algorithm-is-a-red-herring/)
- Premium features (?)
- Improved search (?)
- Same shit different day
- Grok
My X is full of people having constant meltdowns or who are just always fighting others, no one really sharing anything interesting.
Haven't tried bluesky bc it was invite only (I assume it isn't anymore if you say it's accessible) and I didn't really care enough to ask for one from someone.
Bluesky literally just started and it already covers more things than mastodon ever did while providing a better UX without stupid technical limitations like not implementing global full text search.
I haven't seen a ton of musicians.
It's more than just programmers though; lots of news organizations, some government stuff... there just aren't 12M programmers in the world, it's got some variety. Though not everything of course, I know some folks who are still waiting on sports content to show up more, for example.
However sports and news content in general is still lacking, but better than mastodon for sure.
Of course, if you’re earlier you have network effects, but Carface seems doggedly determined to compensate by driving the existing network away.
The point is, there's little reason to go to the clones, you just lose the network effects, as X is still clearly "the" place to post stuff, and where your identity is the strongest. Which is important given in actuality it's not such a walled garden with authoritarian rule throwing people out like Twitter was. Only when everyone can have their say, you end up with something that ACTUALLY represents the "town square". Blue Sky might also be the town square, but more akin to one of a closed soviet military town.