There’s plenty of reason to continue keeping some places but with the many options for the left, what are your favorites? I’m still open to better ‘federated’ option(s).
I am on a variety of platforms; Discord, Mastodon, Post, Tribel, Bluesky, threads, etc. and wonder whether it would be useful to have a preferential place beyond Twitter/Facebook for Kossacks. Could we have user groups to help ‘federating’ for other purposes beyond the DK mission?
Already, the most ardent Mastodon and Bluesky evangelists are finding themselves acting like rival factions in a war for the open web. But as decentralized social networks become more popular, the way that these ecosystems on different protocols interact with one another could set the stage for the next era of the internet.
Mastodon adherents have been skeptical of Bluesky from the get-go. As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it’s not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy. But in its earliest stages, Bluesky was a project at Twitter, funded by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Bluesky is now its own company, completely separate from Twitter. Even though Dorsey sits on its board, he has proven far more interested in Nostr, another decentralized protocol he backed.
For anti-establishment Mastodonians, Dorsey’s involvement was strike one. Strike two came when Bluesky decided to create its own protocol instead of using an existing one, like ActivityPub. Now, the debate over Bridgy Fed is something like a foul tip ahead of strike three.
The prevailing culture is different between Mastodon and Bluesky, with Mastodon trending more serious and Bluesky more cheeky. Some of these differences come from the leaders of the platforms themselves.
“The whole philosophy has been that this needs to have a good UX and be a good experience,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said on a panel last month. “People aren’t just in it for the decentralization and abstract ideas. They’re in it for having fun and having a good time here.”
techcrunch.com/...
The sour reality of it doesn’t make what’s happening in this moment any less persuasive. There is excitement in what awaits us on the other side, in what comes next. The addictive mojo of the social internet is in what it grants us: the ability—the privilege—to tap into new modes of interaction and being. Only, Bluesky doesn’t offer that.
As social media struggles to evolve into its next era, determining its function and purpose in our daily lives, it does not need more of the same copy-and-paste “disruption” we’ve gotten embarrassingly accustomed to in the past decade, despite those of us who yearn for the internet days of yore. Feeds like Black Sky, Book Sky, and After Dark read as attempts to recapture the chemistry of Twitter’s most robust and influential set of users. There’s an instinctive allure to want to bottle that magic and replicate it over and over. Nostalgia is tricky like that—but is it really what this inflection point in the evolution of social media calls for?
The mechanics of being online now require an unreasonable commitment to performance; you opt into the algorithm not because you have dreams of being an influencer selling new age hand creams—or maybe you do!—but because by choosing to detach you’ve opted out of a future that actually requires your participation on some level. Social media has made it that the harvest of digital production never stops. Coming to terms with being online in 2024 is to realize that you must water the land in your own way, because complete disconnection won’t work.
www.wired.com/...
What is to be socially mediated?