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Comment by Kye | Hacker News Reader

(2016)

Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.

This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.

[0] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

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What's changed, though, really? I quit[0] social media near the end of 2019, and it greatly improved my mental health and life. While I haven't tried some of the newer options, I've kept up with new developments in the space. Nothing about the "new" social media platforms makes them at all attractive for me to take a second look and join back up.

If anything, things are worse. It's even more "algorithmic" and engagement-focused, continuing to promote outrage culture. Platforms like TikTok have turned addictive endless scrolling into a science. I know a few people who spend a significant number of hours of their days on TikTok and Twitter (ahem, sorry, "X"), and it just kinda makes me sad. (And I probably spend more time than is healthy on HN.)

[0] I still have my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but I don't post to them anymore, and I'm signed out of them on all my devices (and I've deleted the mobile apps). I don't allow myself to ever sign in on mobile. Once every 6 months or so I'll sign into Facebook for some specific purpose (like looking up someone's contact information when it's for some reason not stored in any of my usual places). Out of curiosity I'll scroll down the feed, and it's just kinda crap. Stuff from people I don't actually follow, stuff from people I do follow but is kinda boring, and interestingly the feed is dominated by the same 15 or so people (even though I'd amassed a little over 1k "friends" before I quit). I limit myself to no more than five minutes, and I don't post, comment, or even like anything.

The last time I signed into Instagram (probably two or three years ago), the experience was awful. I remember when it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the people I follow (and only the people I follow). But now (well, 2-3 years ago) the majority of items in my feed are either ads or promoted/reshared posts from people I don't follow at all. Stuff from people I follow is maybe one out of every five or six items. And it's all out of order, so I'd see something that someone posted a week ago, followed by, 20 items later, something that they posted a couple days ago. It's a shame; 2012 Instagram was such a beautiful platform.

So while yes, this article is now 8 years old, I don't think anything has changed for the better. The fundamental problems are still there, and have only gotten worse.

Oddly enough, the most beneficial thing I have is my Twitter account, because I can often DM airlines or companies support (like fedex support) for quicker responses.

Mastodon and Bluesky are still such minor players (even though I enjoy these projects and am optimistic about their future) that I don’t see anywhere where this doesn’t pass for contemporary commentary.

It depends what the product is for you.

If the product is the social graph, masto isnt even on the radar.

If the product is the discussion framework without the advertising or social graph. If you can find 15 people to have the same interactions with manually its a superior player.

This is purely anecdotal but with Twitter/X removing blocks there seems to be an influx of new users on bluesky, it's definitely not quite on the scale of other major social medias but it seems like it is well on it's way there.

Isn't Bluesky just a copy of Twitter from that era, anyway?

Not at all, not even close. They took the Twitter model and reinvented and reimagined it from 140 character posts to a timeline and brought us the 300 character posts to a timeline.

Bluesky was supposed to replace Twitter and turn it into a federated platform.

Some details on its creation and exit from Twitter here: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/13/bluesky-is-building-the-...

But federation is no longer on the table?

What do you mean? It's federated now.

Source? From everything I've read, BlueSky made a theoretically federated protocol, pulled millions of users onto its single central instance, then refused to enable federation in any meaningful way, so you're either on the central instance or you're effectively on some other platform that is separate from BlueSky and is shit. (Meanwhile on Mastodon, there are so many instances and no clear center - not even mastodon.social, since I block that one and rarely notice any loss)

I don't know what you've read, but:

https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting

https://atproto.com/guides/applications

https://github.com/bluesky-social

It's all there. Bluesky itself is split into tens of instances and has been since last year. A few people even run their own relays. Your information is very out of date.

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