Welp

I saw this from the moment BlueSky was trying to advertise itself as Twitter 2. Single point of ownership means it will definitely come to be locked down over time because server cost and administration will always be a problem.
- The company is a company just like the company used to fund Activitypub and Mastodon development.
  The protocol is still federated. Content addressing even makes mirrors more reliable!
  (besides the current DM implementation, when encrypted messaging is ready it's meant to get federated too)
  Also, reminder that this is a UK law applying to all social websites there, even your average Lemmy instance. You could get blocked if you don't comply.
- well yeah.. twitter 2?

Applies only to the UK, which is requiring it for apps that host adult content: https://www.theverge.com/news/704468/bluesky-age-verification-uk-online-safety-act
- From your helpful link:
  "If users don’t want to verify their age, or if they’re under 18, they will still be able to have an account with certain features limited. Bluesky will block “adult-appropriate content” and turn off certain features, such as direct messaging."
  So you can still use Bluesky without age/identity verification, including being able to post.
  
  As always to do with Bluesky, Lemmy way overreacting to news exagerrated so much its essentially false.
- Yeah, I get pushing for Mastodon over Bluesky, but Bluesky is being forced to do this by the UK government for UK citizens so this is just exaggerated rage bait.
  
  Rage bait, or a line being drawn? The excuse that it's just for certain type content, only some features will be limited, etc. sounds like "it's just a little bit of Orwell, why you so mad bro?" Let the free market sort it out, if most people are fine with limitations (and future additions to those) then so be it. There are alternatives right now, so make a choice.
- Beware USA :(((
  Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online (July 4, 2025)
  
  its a good thing I never write and have sex at the same time
- which is requiring it for apps
  The simple solution is not making everything a fucking app...
  It's always hilarious to watch people act like they care about security and privacy but download 27 different apps instead of just using a web interface...
  It's like the iPad generation can't figure out a bookmark list
  
  I said apps but I probably should have said websites and apps, because websites aren’t exempt. I hear you on how frustrating it is when they’re making everything an app, though.

Bluesky is the reason I'm pretty much over with the idea of ever convincing people to worry about privacy, digital freedom or societal issues at large.
Twitter was bad, became even worse, people wanted to migrate - sure. We had Mastodon, which worked perfectly, was Federated, was open for subscriptions, it was free, had working third party apps and a community already. Barely anybody migrated.
Then Bluesky shows up, and it's the exact same technology, only more limited and with lesser freedoms... but because it's a commercial company behind it, people immediately chose it. The argument that people don't understand federation doesn't even work, because the promise that Bluesky was going to participate in the Fediverse was even part of the marketing material.
People CRAVE big tech. They're not victims of abuse or ignorance, they're willing participants that would rather be enslaved by a corporation than use any collaborative effort.
- The average person is a fucking moron man ¯(ツ)/¯
  
  average person uses x and when you tell them that x stands for everything wrong with the world they just say something like "yeah but Joe Schlimblio posts on x and I follow them"
  
  Not even just average people. Exceptional people who absolutely know better still fall for this shit. The "marketplace of ideas" is a failure.
  If people want real ideas they need to grow them and care for them and that shit is hard and it will cost you time and money.
  
  Fucking Moron Man! Defender of the average Joe, protector of the woefully mediocre! Without a thought in his head, but a spring in his step, he fights on with the conviction of a total idiot!
- People don’t crave big tech, big tech just has more money and willingness to advertise and astroturf. When a newspaper or tv show or influencer mentions BlueSky in a story, it’s a 50:50 chance that an expensive marketing agency fed them it.
  
  Exactly. You cannot grow without expending money. You cannot expend money if you are not generating money.
  These services will not work until they have an economical purpose.
- You blame Humanity's nature, and thus devalue the truly big difference, just one of these social networks has millions and millions invested in marketing.
  It's clear that advertising has a lot of power to influence people's choices, otherwise oligarchs wouldn't burn so much money on it.
  
  Bluesky barely had any effective marketing at all. Their main push was word of mouth and the "exclusivity" of launching under a invite-only system. That's it.
  But "oh, this big tech wants my data and not yours" was enough.
  
  It’s clear that advertising has a lot of power to influence people’s choices, otherwise oligarchs wouldn’t burn so much money on it.
  Marketing, advertising, etc. It's a science, a field of study. What is the goal? To make people buy things, ostensibly. How do they chose to do achieve that goal? Deep analysis of the human psyche and studying methods to manipulate them into taking intended actions.
  Advertising is the science of psychological warfare.
- I wouldn't immediately chalk up the success of private commercial operations over open non-profit ones to a slavish misanthropic outlook on humanity. Consider that with millions in investment capital comes millions in marketing budget, too. There's an information war and we're outgunned.
- I wonder how much the adoption of newer platforms has a lot to do with having money to advertise. I feel like I lucked out a bit finding lemmy when reddit had the 3rd party apps shut down, just stumbling on a comment before it was deleted. Whereas if the commenter had paid for it to be an advertisement it may have stayed up
- We had Mastodon, which worked perfectly
  tbh several of my colleagues complained that they found discovering new content and/or content outside of their servers really hard, and the whole federation is just too complicated for not-technologically-minded people 🤷
  (no personal experience because I don't use any microblogging platforms)
- the issue with Bluesky is primarily the userbase. the vast majority of them want something that "just works" and if you provide them with alternatives they scream and reeee and all that. it's annoying. also annoying the constant unoriginal posts of "Mastodon is the Linux of social media" like it's some gotcha moment for them.
- People CRAVE big tech. They're not victims of abuse or ignorance, they're willing participants that would rather be enslaved by a corporation than use any collaborative effort.
  I don't disagree, but this is why I find it so exasperating how so much of the tech world, including the open source community in general, refuses to understand this in terms other than a nihilistic distaste for human beings in general.
  What you are saying is that the tech specs that bluesky defenders listed in my face from the beginning, all along the continuum of bluesky diehards to people on the fence considering the tech.... all of that was NONSENSE from the perspective of evaluating the impact that the technology would have because the problem is political not technological.
  I need to emphasize, that from the beginning most of the Bluesky support I saw was from technology minded people who are VERY smart at engineering systems and software but have the political awareness of an overconfident baby and refused to at the time look squarely in the eyes of what makes silicon such a globally hurtful force.
  Now I am left wondering, as I thought I would from the beginning, why we wasted all that time on handwringing about how maybe this abusive relationship could work out with Bluesky. This time it will be different I swear I changed I won't abuse you for profits now I promise....
  Look I am glad y'all learned your lessons... hopefully you did? This isn't just about useful idiots learning way too late into the game that Bluesky was always going to turn out like Twitter though, this is about why the tech community at large refuses to address political questions in an adult and mature manner that doesn't sweep anything that can't be easily categorized in digital, binary terms under the rug because it is uncomfortable to talk about in a professional environment.
  Your nihilism is part of the same coin that has allowed companies like Microsoft to profit off genocide in Gaza while only a meager handful of Microsoft employees speak up and are thrown out and ostracized for their unprofessional behavior.
  Stand up for your beliefs, stand up for humanity, don't cede a narrative that this universe is cynical to them without contesting it and demanding more evidence. I will not be convinced people are as generally bad as the ruling class wants me to believe, it is always a lie. Part of that for me is not letting them convince me people want this suffering because you can twist people's intentions, fears and motivations so easily into destructive ends... evidence you hold in front of me of people behaving in evil ways only illuminates the capacity of violence to spread like a contagion, it doesn't convince me humanity at large desires the state it is being subjected to.
  
  Your comment is extremely weird because I did not defend, expect anything or debated Bluesky tech. To the contrary, I'm specifically pointing out that Bluesky was obviously bad and Mastodon should've been chosen instead.
  My nihilism wasn't challenged, it was confirmed. People chose the bad option, they chose it again, and will choose another bad option in the future.
- I constantly get downvoted for "blaming the victim" when I say that, but its true! If you have the power to do something, and choose not to, youre partially to blame...
  I dont get how people can pont fingers then go buy the same product from the same asshole and act surprised...
- I think this is true. Billionaires and their corporations are obviously morally bankrupt and have been manipulating all of us for long years. But at the same time, it seems to me that there is also some 'consent' on our part. There's a lot of people who will still choose to be oppressed, even after having everything explained to them and seemingly having understood.
  Perhaps thay's how deep all the decades of social engineering go. Or maybe we just really like convenience, to the point where we're willing to become slaves if it means our lives are convenient.

In the Fediverse, nobody knows you're a dog. Arf arf
- Unless your account is on pawb.social
- Hey! This here is cat territory. You just walked into a world of hurt, pardner.

Generally, enough to be always, the "protect the children" argument is used by the worst warmongering authoritarian neocons to ensure enslavement.

I've been telling people that Bluesky is just another Twitter, even started by a lot of the same people.
Skip the drama and use Mastodon.
- Mastodon launching quote toots at just the right time.
  
  Toots is such a cute word
- They are all drama. "Guess what I ate today? A hotdog! Isn't that exciting?" We can use none of this.
  
  How dare people share thoughts and emotions, we should all strive to be more efficient like you are.
  
  https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre

I have never understood why people have ever thought or said that bluesky is better than reddit, or decentralized, or somehow not going to be abused as the company takes a very large amount of VC funds.
- Pretty sure this is about the new EU legislation afftecting anything from porn sites, through nexusmods, and apparently even shit like bsky.
  
  Not EU, UK. The EU, for now, does not require age verification. They are currently working on a system where your age can be verified using a secure token where Bsky would not get any more info than "this person is over 18", at which point, they will most likely mandate its use.

This is simple. Age verify because Bluesky is filled with porn. Soon, almost every state or the nation will require age verification if you host porn.
You can thank the religious GOP trash
- won't somebody please think of the children!!1!
  
  The children aren't fucking right, they need to be shown.
- In this case it's the fault of the UK government and a Tory era policy labour has kept

Fediverse wins once again :3

This is literally what all of us who opposed the id verification for porn sites warned people about (not that most of lemmy doesn't agree). This was always going to happen. Foot in the door, passed legal hurdles, now the floodgates open.
You can bet your ass this is going to be standard for browsing most of the "major" internet sites by the end of the decade. What a mess.

I mean, firstly, this appears to only affect UK users (atm). And secondly
Users who don't verify their age will have certain content and features, like direct messages, restricted
So, features I don't use or want, for the time being. Which will be a problem when I run into it, I guess. As it stands, BlueSky remains the least worst option. When that changes, I'll change with it.
- Less worse than Mastodon?
- But muh bait-posting!
  Muh outrage!
  
  I mean, its still a shit policy and it makes BlueSky worse.
  Just not bad enough to do another platform migration, particularly to a platform nobody I know actually uses.

I would not surprise me if eventualy Mastodon servers will have to do the same especially the Mastodon servers located in the EU and UK.
- There is not "the" Mastodon. If servers are affected by such stupid laws, people can go to servers in countries that aren't affected. Or at least until the great firewall is built.
  
  Which is also exactly why it will never be popular. People don't want to have to deal with jumping around instances, dealing with the poor discoverability of the fediverse, etc. Even lemmy has that issue, I'm here because im a linux nerd so there is a decent amount of content i want here found easily but for anything else might as well be worthless.
  
  Sorry I meant the Mastodon servers located in the EU and UK, not Mastodon as a whole.
- The EU does not require age verification, only the UK does.
  
  Actually the EU has mandated "proper" age verification for pornographic sites in order to protect the children.
  So it wouldn't surprise me if it will extend eventually too other sites too.
- ~~I would not surprise me if~~ eventualy Mastodon will have to do the same especially the Mastodon servers located in the EU and UK.
  Ftfy

Keep telling people about Mastodon. Don't push them. Just explain that this is a result of BlueSky being VC funded and more will follow just like it did with Twitter, Facebook and so on. Add that Mastodon is open source run by multiple non-profits around the world so if one fails, the rest would pickup the slack. Conclude with - if they want to stop having to uproot their network every so often, Mastodon is their best bet for microblogging.

Hell you don't even have to be funny on mastodon.
What we ARE picky about is posting images without descriptive text or asking for a volunteer caption.
- some of the alt text is straight fire tbh.
  for example:
  a bloated orange corpse has been posed by a taxidermist to shake hands with a castrated old man who has confused the corpse for an ice cream cone. (c 2025 whitehouse oval mausoleum)
  
  Christ in Valhala that jacket on the left looks like it is trying so damn hard to keep the flood of flesh horror at bay for the sake of all living souls.
  
  Thats a shit alt text tho. Alt text is used by vision impaired people, it's not a joke field or a witty remark field.

I'm just going to leave this here...
https://www.ageverificationfacts.org.uk/
- They always have the same excuse for authoritarianism measures don't they?
  Think of the children, safety or terrorism
  
  It has always been so really - it's a clever strategy really. It ensures you can be easily branded if you opposed it "don't you care about online safety for children", and ensures it remains in place as "government removes online safety for children" is a powerful piece of propaganda.
  I keep meaning to team up with a sociologist and write a piece on this particular tactic; alas time gets away from me!
  
  Terrorism in the UK is now when you oppose genocide so the mask has gone fully off

Any social media that wants my ID becomes history, you got no business with it and i don't trust you with it either.
As of late i've been leaning towards things like: "i really wish we didn't have mobile phones" employers have been overstepping boundaries imo ever since we have them and i don't want any of that. I'm yours for 40 hours, everything else is mine.
Along with how every device now comes with ads with some bullshit excuse, i really don't need ads in my home i'm already bombarded with them everywhere i go.
I'm still one of those: "i love seeing peoples interests through well taken photos" instagram users, before every post was an "influencer". Now instagram is: ad, actual ad, ad, ad, ad, actual ad. How the hell did we let that happen and why are people still looking at it...at least i wish it was just looking, with all the goddamn loud music and nonsense audio jumbled into one big mess to raoe your ears even though it isn't even you looking at it but some brainrotten child in a mcdonalds.
I'm getting older and grumpier i guess. I should just learn to live with it.

We'll see how well bluesky's decentralization works now :p
- Pretty sure deer.social will keep working, etc
  
  Bluesky isn't actually decentralized. The way they designed the protocol ensures that you must be big enough to handle the entire network to support a fully decentralized network. There are even parts that can't be separated from the main BS instance as it's hardcoded into the software.

Libsky is also enforcing the genocider censorship.
But it's no surprise, never trusted it to begin with.
It's to Blue MAGA what Twitter is to Red MAGA
- Mastodon.social the "main" instance also enforces genocide censorship according to multiple Lemmy users.
  Luckily there is...
  Twitter..........
  
  And luckily I can do without all of them most of the time.
  Sometimes unfortunately people post an X link and I can't see it.
  Can't even make an account anymore, I'm on the (black)list.
- Libsky - X
  \ Blue MAGA - X
  \ crazypeopleonline - trifecta
  
  ohh bloomcole left lemmy.ml because they were blocked by too many people, time for a new block.

who could have forseen this?

Not really disagreeing but how do we stop bots and fake accounts then? Bots/shill accounts have destroyed social media.
- I think about this all the time.
  I would love a community of specific aged people.
  Like I hate browsing the internet and suddenly it's "Am I (M19) overreacting because my mom (F38) hates my new girlfriend (F41) and their husband (V289)?"
  Bro, I don't have those problems as a M40 with scope.
  
  I think that’s less a bot problem and more a fake story problem. A lot of those stories are just creative writing exercise. Every once in a while it’s real but that’s very rare.
- Human moderators.
  
  Cuz that worked so well for reddit

lady posted this without any tags. how is she supposed to rub someone's nose in it if no nose can find it?
- Tags eat into the 300 character limit. She had too much she wanted to say.

Yeah! Privacy only for the amusing! 😜

~~As long as you're funny~~ As long as you add alt tags
The mastodon police will get you quickly if you don't

It’s only a matter of time before Mastodon follows suit. Remember when we all believe Reddit would never go corporate?
This is the natural order of tech. It cannot survive without selling out.
- Bluesky was built to be a Valley bigotfest and data vampire from the very beginning.
  The lead dev of mastodon is kind of a jerk sometimes, but he doesn't run the instances.
  I'm pretty certain that my Masto home instance isn't going to turn into corporate trash because the the people running it have been running queer servers for decades and are community-funded.
  And suppose mastodon does turn into shit? My home instance also supports other fedi protocols.
  Companies founded by Jack Dorsey or taking VC money, though? Guaranteed hellsite, just a matter of time.
  
  which instance?
  
  Fair enough, but money changes a lot of things. History is rife with examples of this. And while that may not be a catch-all rule, there’s a better chance of it happening than not if history serves.
- didn't the founder for mastodon say two years ago that they would rather shut everything down before selling it?
  
  Didn’t Reddit say the same thing?
- The Fediverse has scaled impressively well and currently boasts millions of active users, and about the only thing that seems to actually be shaking smaller instances hosted by hobbyists on very tight budgets are if an AI scraper finds them and starts trying to use them as an ingress point to slurp up Fediverse content (which is honestly sad given they could simply spin up their own instance to suck data down via Federation)
  
  Remember Reddit? Facebook? Twitter?

It's already impossible to be anonymous on the internet. Our governments just want it to be cheaper and easier to track us, so they can scare us and oppress us if they want to. Also, billionaires want to sell us more crap we don't want or need, and use their bots to keep us divided and ignoring how much they're stealing from all of us, all of which is easier if they know exactly who we are and what we're doing at all times.
But, you know, no lengths are too far because it's "for the children". We all know how much our governments and billionaires care about our children.
- SIM card registration is global. I have been to dozens of dozens of countries. You want a phone number? A dataplan?
  PASSPORT PLEASE!
  It is FUCKED how quick that happened, and that everyone is like laa dee daa about it.
  
  I've head in some small shops you can still get sim cards without id ("oh I forgot it at home" ...)
- impossible to be anonymous on the internet
  Sure it is. It's just about effort vs benefit.
  
  I'm a security technician.
  It is extremely difficult and way beyond the capabilities of 99% of the human population.
  And you know what? That is way more than they need.
  At those numbers, if you think you're anonymous, then you are kidding yourself- you become the single glaring hole in the puzzle, and it becomes even easier to detect you, specifically because of the glaring You shaped hole you create traversing digital space.
  Unless you're extremely qualified, supremely attentive, and use nothing but the most psycho anon hardware, they got your ass.
  Even then- everything you ever did before that is logged in a databank.
  When they need that data, if you ever become a problem or a target, your file is on record and available at the press of a button.
  If you are on the electric grid, you're known. Period.