John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed

Intentionally, I think.

I’m really not happy about bluesky their fragmentation of the fediverse protocols

shrug, I wish they were with us, but they are also a big ole corporate entity, so I'm kind ok with us staying our our side of the fence. As they need to implement payment and corporate protections to their network, we're free to be free over here.

is only going to harm us in the long run.

We don't have to play ball. not with them anyway,

I think, If we have any credible threat, it's going to be from the Governmental gross anti-tampering laws, forced moderation, or backup regulations. They could make it legally difficulty for us to exist.

Bluesky was always twitters goal, they were losing hella money, so they devloped blue sky.

I'm not familiar with the details of that, but it seems like more of a red herring to me. A form of controlled opposition to divert people away from truly revolutionary platforms.

Of course it has to seem like a plausible alternative, but is it actually decentralized or altruistic enough to make a meaningful difference? I think not.

"Public benefit corporation" is a meaningless designation. All it means is they have the option of putting their mission over their shareholders, not that they are obligated to do so.

Chances are it's really just that, a start. See OpenAI.

If I was losing money and wanted to mantain control over the public id become a public benefit corp too

So twitter didn't make money anyways, this is a better way for them to hold power

This was literally the photo that finally got me banned from Reddit years ago.

How can anyone not love the guy?

I'm not sure anyone mentions bluesky as an alternative to big tech.

Pretty sure they only mention it as an alternative to musk/X.

The thing that it really has going for itself is that it simply isn't twitter. And Muskler made sure that's a huge deal.

We still shouldn't be doing the dirty work of rich people for them.

We should all be promoting Mastodon over the centralized and corporate-owned bluesky.

Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?

yup. no question. Not one instance mind you, but Reddit is also a giant cluster. (and clusterfuck)

As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations,

We just need the big bois to stop stuffing themselves. There's 0 reason to have 2/3 of the totally traffic flooding into world because people are scared of Federation that they never even have to deal with.

Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc.

Maybe we make some premium pay servers with baller architecture, killer response time, user capacity limits and high speed storage?

But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.

Eventually, it's going to be ads, donations or payments. It's all someone else's computer, someone has to foot the bill. But at great scale, you should be able to have an ad-free experience for something in the range a dollar or two a month.

LW definitely can't handle more traffic than it already has. It already (thanks to the admins' refusal to update to the latest version of Lemmy, which fixes this issue) takes multiple days for LW content to get federated to other instances properly, which is why I've had to switch over to this alt account of mine because there are zero comments on this post in my main instance. With more users, that delay would grow from days to potentially weeks.

technically we are federated, so kind of?

Come to Lemmy, we got: blood thirsty Linux users, furries, femboys, communists, and tankies. Also, porn.

It's no different than reddit, DIGG, or the Something Awful forums before they got popular.

We need to get more people in here if we want it to actually be a Reddit competitor. Right now it’s good for some communities, but smaller ones are still extremely underpopulated.

It's good to have some friends, but don't let too many normies in.....

Someone is wrong lol. NFL, for example, cannot do anything outside of Twitter at this time. They are apparently working on it, but it's gotta be implemented league-wide, so it's taking some time. Idk if they're even trying to get onto Mastodon, last I heard it was just Bluesky.

This is a large org with hundreds of millions of fans, with no presence on Fediverse really. I'm sure there are mirror accounts, but none are official.

I do 🥺

Yeah, odd inclusion. Duckduckgo is indeed a search enginge, but it's essentially just a front end for Bing.

DDG and Brave were pushed as "censorship free" alternatives, back when I was looking into covid disinformation, because the very obviously fake websites would sometimes rank higher on them

There may be more to it though

I mean yeah, doesnt matter. The point is people shared alternatives to big tech just like folks who are not in the power right now. Cause apparently x is musk's and it looks like the consensus is that rest of big tech is siding with Trump for profit

Brave's business model is a crypto scam wrapped in a protection racket. It man-in-the-middles the site's ads, replacing them with Brave's own, then holds the revenue hostage unless the site gives legitimacy to Brave's crypto by accepting it as payment.

For comparison, "normal" ad-blocking consists of an end-user exercising his property right to control the operation of his own computer by programming it not to display the ads at all.

Hopefully you can see how the thing Brave does is very different, and much more ethically fraught.

It’s not explicitly rightwing.

A couple years ago Musk was recommending Signal.

It’s just an example of right wing people recommending alternatives.

And here’s how and why it will be enshitified:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/

https://www.businessinsider.com/x-competitor-bluesky-valuation-new-funding-round-2025-1

And is comprised entirely of no one I care to follow, awesome.

I’m wondering this too People are hyped about bluesky but it is the same corpo bullshit that Twitter is. I mean it is literally by the same dude. Why fold?,

When I said bluesky will be the next Twitter did I said Twitter is a good place. Twitter is now bullshit.

There is another interpretation. Calm down.

Why bluesky instead of mastodon?

Because there is only so much oxygen in the room, and corporate ventures like Bluesky seem to come into really exciting DIY community spaces that are creating amazing things and pull the oxygen out of the room while never quite delivering on what they are promising... or seeming to promise... and in the mean time the projects that originally created the innovative energy in the space are lost in the noise.

I mean... see basically the entire early history of the commercialization of personal computers for endless repetitions of this pattern.

Remember we are not the customers of corporate social media companies, we are the raw husks they extract value from through surveillance capitalism and ads/paid content.

There is a Firefox extension that does automatically (although it seems to be a bit unreliable). Maybe someone can extract that part into a library and make a not with it.

Yeah, infighting in the resistance is a waste of time.

Interesting info, thank you. It isn't FOSS so I don't plan on actively using it but I try to keep my finger on what's up. I don't miss Reddit and wish I didn't need a FB for my job. My account is almost a ghost though and I don't have it on my phone. I'm sure they still have way too much data on me though.

Imagine traveling down a liminal space of tubes and the only signs are nondescript TLDs.

I think the rise of hate speech on centralised platforms relies very heavily on their centralised moderation and curation via algorithms.

They have all known for a long time that their algorithms promote hate speech, but they know that curbing that behaviour negatively affects their revenue, so they don't do it. They chase the fast buck, and they appease advertisers who have a naturally conservative bent, and that means rage bait and conventional values.

That's quite apart from when platform owners explicitly support that hate speech and actively suppress left leaning voices.

I think what we have on decentralised systems where we curate/moderate for ourselves works well because most of that open hate speech is siloed, which I think is the best thing you can do with it.

I think that it's just words & images on a screen that we could easily ignore like people did before, and people are indulging a grandiose conceit by thinking that moderation is that important or serves any greater cause than the interests of moderators. On social media that seems to be to serve the consumers, by which I mean the advertisers & commercial interests who pay for the attention of users. While the old internet approach of ignoring, gawking at the freakshow, or ridiculing/flaming toxic & hateful shit worked fine then resulting in many people disengaging, ragequitting, or going outside to do something better, that's not great for advertisers protecting their brand & wanting to keep people pliant & unchallenged as they stay engaged in their uncritical filter bubbles & echo chambers.

With old internet, safety wasn't an internet nanny, thought police shit, and "stop burning my virgin eyes & ears". It was an anonymous handle, not revealing personally identifying information (a/s/l?), not falling for scams & giving out payment information (unless you're into that kinky shit). Glad to see newer social media returning to some of that.

Are you new to the internet? NSFW literally means what it says: it's content that would not be safe for you to be viewing at work.

Advertising has nothing to do with it, which is why you still get ads on NSFW boards on 4chan; they're just NSFW ads.

Dipshit in chief and his butthurt-prone sidekick will probably sue.

SMS is incredibly antiquated as soon as you want to do anything multimedia, or heck sending an SMS longer than 144 characters.

My mother received a video over SMS the other day and it legitimately looked like it was filmed on a Nokia 6310.

I've encouraged my family to use Signal to replace SMS and it functions really well as an SMS upgrade. It's more secure, private, supports sending decent quality multimedia, the interface is simplistic, it has formatting, does video calls well, and you can send a long message without it being a hacked together string of 5 messages.

From both a security and usability perspective, it wins out on SMS in my opinion.

Edit: there's also the nightmare of group chats with SMS. I hate when extended family try to use it

i imagine its because text messages are saved by your provider and can be used or accessed by law enforcement even if deleted. but that may or may not be an issue for most people swapping recipes or talking to their family about normal every day stuff.

Maybe you want to communicate through an encrypted service?

SMS is a pain in the ass. iOS users aren't using SMS, they're using a proprietary system which is inaccessible to android users. Occasionally a 1-on-1 text works with RCS but it's janky

I may be wrong, but I think it's because some company owns the rights to the show in Canada and doesn't want people watching it on YouTube

Indeed it is, that is such a weird block

Thanks!

I just got it on the dl instead

They want to make crime fighting more accessible to the police... 💀

There is a lot in here that I don't understand.

1. What's wrong with Moxie? You mean it's weird he's an emeritus and not part of the board?
2. What's "much more questionable" about the other people? From the descriptions on that page they all seem like standup people.
3. Could you explain the "relative proximity to some in the US establishment" bit? That was too vague for me to grasp.
4. "some have been designating anyone who questions Signal as 'Russian Propaganda' and immediately deflecting about how Telegram is bad, is even more curious." — Who has done this, you mean? And why exactly is it "curious"?

Honestly, there was nothing at all in there that I understood, due to how vague it all was. I would appreciate it if you or someone could fill me in here, because it's important to know who's driving this thing, and if the platform can be trusted. I just want to not go by some vague rumors before I make up my mind.

louder for the people in the back.

Interstellar is the official Mbin app: https://joinmbin.org/apps

I don't understand the point of installing a web browser that only runs one website.

Socialized healthcare, removing money from politics, and taxing the rich is not "the lesser evil" it's fucking good. It's blatantly a force of great good that we keep snubbing and blaming for no reason at all.

What we should be doing is giving them majorities and supermajorities and praising them for the great work they do.

Bluesky is what happens when someone with a corporate mindset wants to make something new and good. Mastodon happens when hobbyists get together and make something. Ive heard BlueSky has a board of people in charge to make sure it doesn't end up like twitter. Exactly what one would expect a company to do. Make sure something doesnt go wrong? Put a few people in charge. Mastodon just has the whole community. I may be wrong here as I dont use either. Right now Im just wondering what will happen when BlueSkys provider comes knocking with the hosting bill. As mass social media migrations are rare, its just a shame people are leaving twitter for another big tech site instead of something more community grown.

For me the advantage of Bluesky is that I can own my identity. I can reserve myusername@mydomain.tld and use that, without having to run my own instance.

With Mastodon I’d have to put up a full-ass server instance and worry about federation etc just to have my “own” identity instead of myusername@mastodon.social or something

from what i understand, a decentralized bluesky is nothing for an enduser at all.

TL;DR: the cost for an enduser to run a bluesky instance will soon be prohibitive because of the amount of storage needed owed to its shared heap architecture. but what it does is to provide a "credible exit" - if users lose trust or the company shutters, there's nothing in the way of another organisation picking up the mantle and continue from there on.

BlueSky made their own protocol that they control, citing that ActivityPub wasn’t enough for what they wanted to do

Sounds like bullshit for useful idiots that don't know what they're talking about.

True. For now I'm happy to just see Twitter lose.