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I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.
Pass
While I understand that, I’m in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.
Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It’s the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.
But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I’m not going to fight it. I’m having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I’ve written the media address of environments I’m familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.
Good take. Bluesky is a good stop-gap.
I’ve also been thinking, if Bluesky never federates and enshittifies in a similar way to Twitter (which it will do much faster, just cause it’s a different era), then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…
then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…
or people will have lost the ability to imagine alternative and better places…
…which is where we come in to make sure they don’t forget!
Yep. Already true to a large extent. But it doesn’t take a majority of the world to make the fediverse work. We just need enough for it to become broadly attractive to a critical mass of people. It’s big enough to self-sustain now, so I think it’s just a matter of time until it hits that point.
Arbitration of what? It’s a free service. What money could they possibly owe you?
If the mods or admin do something that causes you injury, such as ignoring requests that will prevent harassment.
…how would them ignoring requests cause injury??? We’re still talking about bluedky, right? The online twitter clone without musk as it’s main selling point?
If someone was doxxing you on bluesky, for example, and in the doxxing, you got attacked/injured by someone who recognized you/went to your house.
Then the person liable to you would be the person doxxing you, not Bluesky themselves unless Bluesky themselves was the party that doxxed you and in that case I don’t think a court would hold you to the arbitration.
We’ve seen Disney try but then withdraw an attempt to enforce arbitration when a lady died from an allergic reaction in their* restaurant. Her partner had signed up for Disney+ free trial. It’s not unimaginable a court would hold you to it since we’re already in Upsidedown World where forced arbitrary is legal.
That is an ass pull if I’ve ever heard one.
Let me make sure I understand your comment correctly.
You’re saying that if you post information publically, on a platform whose whole concept is that everything is public, and someone uses information you posted there to identify you, stalk you, break and enter, and then assault you…that it’s the fault of the service you used to post that identifying information?
That’s the arguement being made?
No, I believe the argument they’re making is if someone else posts your private information on BlueSky (think Kiwifarms doxxing gay people and sending that info to Christian hate groups), and BlueSky moderation doesn’t take action against the account posting the info, and then somebody uses that information to find and attack you, then BlueSky is culpable in the attack because they could’ve done something, but didn’t.
A better example, I think, would be the recent issue with known transphobe Jesse Singal and his followers, who came to BlueSky around a month ago and immediately began posting bigotry and false info. When reported to the moderation team, they did nothing about it (he actually got banned by the auto-mod and then manually unbanned during that period, but that’s another story). If he were to do something like my example, posting a trans person’s private information online and telling his followers to harass them, and BlueSky did nothing to remove the posts or his account, then they’d be legally culpable for enabling anything that might happen to you. But under arbitration, you can’t sue them for it.
Ah, THAT explaination at least has legs. All these other responses I’m getting are these abstract “mouse trap if everything goes exactly like this”, sort of explainations.
Although, I still don’t think financial recouperation is the path I’d take. I would be pressing legal charges. Like, criminal acts go to prison type charges.
This is correct.
I find this weird. If someone were to send your private information to someone via physical post, is the post company responsible for that too?
Would you say it is a one in a 30 million occurrence, roughly?
It was an asspull example but there are similar cases in the past. Forced arbitration of any lawsuit you present for any reason is bad, be it as simple as their software accidentally bricking your phone or as major as an attempt on your life being ignored by the platform.
You’re not thinking evil enough, honestly. Two examples off the top of my head, each being fairly innocent mistakes: If you enter your phone number for 2FA, it’s not going to be public-facing. It’s their responsibility to keep that information private from internal and external threats. Ok, so what if it leaks… right? Oh, it turns out the hacker SIM swapped your phone number for the 2FA, and did a password reset on your account via support chat. Still no big deal, its just social media… Except you’ve been giving updates to all your patreon backers on your project that’s shipping soon. It suddenly vanishes off the internet, replaced with a crypto scheme, and all your supporters just flooded your bank with chargebacks. Your attempts at getting your account back are met with silence and your supporters are now furious. Was any of that your fault? No. You get $100.
Let’s try another example: Bounty programs are used by companies to collect bugs and other possibly exploits so they can be fixed. “Too expensive, nobody will know if there’s a bug anyway.” So the app on Google Play store gets installed by 30 million users with a critical flaw… if a very specific image is opened in it, the phone bricks. All the news sites cover the bug, pushing the image to the front page. You open the app and… Your expensive phone just died. Were you at fault for that? No. You get to join the arbitration group and get an individual settlement of $12.
Think more evil. Don’t stick with the “I have nothing to lose” because you almost always have something to lose. The fact these terms were even thought of and written means you do have a financial investment in the platform.
That’s why 2FA via phone number shouldn’t be a thing
You have nothing to hide. Just sign away all your rights.
They can break data protection laws and stuff…
Ok…and why would they pay YOU that money? Wouldn’t it be companies and governments they pay?
If a company violates my rights and causes issues for me due to leaking data, then obviously i can sue them for damages.
I’ve gotten settlement money from it before
During signup, they make it sound like it’s a federated service. It is not. Dumped it when it was explained to me.
Off topic, but I pointing this out reminded me of visiting some ancap circles to see the crazy stuff they discuss. At one point there was a question about how externalities would be handled in their system of private courts and such. When ever I do read some terms and conditions there is almost always something in regard to arbitration. Predictably they were not happy about someone pointing that out and explaining that it is for the benefit of corporations not the customers.
Funny, someone shared an article in another post about all corporate money going to Delaware, https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2022/06/delaware-is-everywhere-how-a-little-known-tax-haven-made-the-rules-for-corporate-america/
What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.
Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it’s probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.
The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.
What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?
Sounds like the protocol equivalent of regulatory capture.
I’m not familiar with Blue sky, do they advertise as federated or how exactly do they claim to differ from a regular platform like original Twitter?
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture
And reading an article from TechCrunch,
“The social network has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design and community-specific moderation.”
“Is Bluesky decentralized? Yes. Bluesky’s team is developing the decentralized AT Protocol, which Bluesky was built atop.”
“However, the launch of federation will make it work more similarly to Mastodon in that users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will.”
So it definitely is pitching that is it decentralized and federated. Maybe the argument is that it “will be”, but at the moment it is not and at the moment it does not look like it will be an actual possibility.
Now people leaving Twitter is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s possibly just kicking the can down the road. In a few years we’ll likely have articles complaining about missing “Old Bluesky” and how “new Bluesky” has the exact same problems that “Old Twitter” had.
Maybe the argument is that it “will be”, but at the moment it is not
Hey, I have a couch you should buy, it isn’t comfy right now but trust me, im a random stranger and I promise you on my word that after you buy it one day soon I will come back and fix it up so it is the comfiest couch ever!
Also maybe like somebody could make a non-profit to add features to the couch my business already sold customers on with marketing hype!
Thanks for you detailed and cited response. Very clear!
Weird, I had a bluesky add-on on my experimental friendica installation and have not noticed any messages other than the ones people I followed participated in.
I have since deleted it, so cannot figure out what they have done differently.
And that’s the kicker. Bluesky can never be meaningfully decentralized.
I guess it could allow multiple funding models. Instance A is ad supported, instance B is a paid service. Not exciting for us self hosters, but there is possibility there.
Mastodon has around 1 million active users³ Bluesky has around 3.5 million active users²
Bluesky doesn’t have a decent way to see active user count, but it is likely higher than 3 million
Mastodon retains 10%, Bluesky retains 10% also, but I can’t confirm it
Edit: Using unique likes, it shows about 2 million active users on each day¹
Source:
Nice. Glad to see people leaving xitter en mass.
I feel like we’re going to have a similar issue a couple of years or decades down the line with Bluesky. People would be better off on the Fediverse instead.
No, this time will be different, I swear!
And that’s fine. What the exodus to Bluesky is doing is making it easier for people to stomach switching to similar platforms, so if Bluesky also went to shit, the inertia is much lower for people to abandon it.
People are atleast getting used to the @username@instance thing through bluesky… That would make mass exodus to fediverse in future easier (if that ever happens)
the issue with that is the fediverse isn’t the easiest thing to sign up for. and the fediverse needs explaining pre-sign up for most people.
listen I have both bluesky and mastodon so I get you. but for now, bluesky is at least not the platform of an angry nazi man child. (at least not yet).
Another corporate social media platform, what could go wrong?
I can’t wait for them to bring in ex CIA/IDF types to “clamp down on disinformation”.
What do you think the closed beta was for? It was so they can get in and get on the moderator roster
It is less than ideal.
I only hope that it gets people used to the idea that you can leave a platform and the sky wont fall down. Sooner or later these guys will try a federated service and learn that protocols > platforms (in this case activitypub).
Love an app that defaults me to people I actually follow and doesn’t bombard me with endless reams of ads or engagement bait.
We’ll see how long that lasts. But for now, its a blast from the past to be on a social media app I don’t hate.
Whenever I see how they keep getting brought up, I’m always reminded of that Dilbert ep about how people just fall for blue logos that are easy on the eyes. They don’t even have to know what it is… just the fact that the stupid logo is blue is enough. lol
Can I get the icon in cornflower blue? https://youtu.be/4NomQYQK1bE
To anyone bemoaning BlueSky’s lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.
It’s a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary “relay” as an alternative to Bluesky’s that can still communicate across the same protocol (The “AT Protocol”) while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.
They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).
I feel like the reason the reason why it’s taking off so much is because it’s not federated.
It’s like people hear the term federation and they get afraid. I know it’s not that simple but still.
In other words, people don’t know what they actually need.
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Yeah I was confused on if it was connected, if I was explaining it to myself id say that the fediverse has interconnected forums that all serve the same content and can be accessed by making accounts on different websites or apps.
Lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected forum/threads side of the fediverse.
Mastodon, sharkey, plaroma, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected microblogging slide of the fediverse.
They all have different features, like mbin has account reputation, piefed has topics which let you sub to multiple related communities at once, etc., but the content is shared between those that serve the same type of content.
Since they’re all built ontop of the same protocol ppl can always come in and build on top of it or make hybrids while still letting everyone access the same content. Like mbin having both microblogging (tweets) and threads, letting you post and view both from the same account/website.
And it legit takes 5 minutes to sign up for 5 instances and see the differences, mine showed the same content for the most part, only lemmy.world was missing the piracy community, other than that it was all the same and any nervousness I had about it went away after seeing the feeds being the same.
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Not only do I don’t mind multiple instances, I welcome it. It’s a feature for me, not a bug. But having to create multiple accounts is a no-no and what keeps people away. People say you only need one but that’s not true if you want to be active in multiple instances.
If the fediverse had a way to unify account creation, that would be a game changer. It’s pretty much what’s holding the fediverse down, be it Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc. It’s frustrating because without that limitation I could see the corpos being given a run for their money.
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they should understand by the 2nd one, I just wasnt sure where I wanted to commit, it became fun by the 2nd one to pick an instance like a club
there really isnt much friction either if you dont cate about piracy otherwise id have stayed on lemmyworld when vyjr reccomended it, they really just need to try it, I complained until I tried it
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I don’t personally think it’s because of that. Sure, federation as a concept outside of email has a bit of a messaging problem for explaining it to newbies, but… everyone uses email, and knows how that works. This is identical, just with it being posts instead of emails. Users aren’t averse to federation, in concept or practice.
Bluesky was directly created as a very close clone of Twitter’s UI, co-governed and subsequently pushed by the founder of Twitter himself, who will obviously have more reach than randoms promoting something like Mastodon, and, in my opinion, kind of just had better branding.
“Bluesky” feels like a breath of fresh air, while “Mastodon” just sounds like… well, a Mastodon, whatever that makes the average person think of at first.
So when you compare Bluesky, with a familiar UI, nice name, and consistent branding, not to mention algorithms, which Mastodon lacks, all funded by large sums of money, to Mastodon, with unfamiliar branding, minimal funding, and substantially less reach from promoters, which one will win out, regardless of the technology involved?
