Okay, at this point I’m not even waiting. I made a bridge-burning post on Insta, deleted the app off my phone, and have set a reminder to delete my account in one week.
My pictures are all saved (and I can browse them faster than I ever could in their app anyway).
Not gonna happen
Looking at AI results- it’ll be one weird imitation of me.
Callisters; all the way down.
That would be cool. No more Facebook etc in Europe.
Every time he mentions Elon Musk, he puts on the funniest music, like the music they’d play on a cartoon for someone who is not very smart? He also called him “histories greatest dipshit” and that’s just facts.
“Don’t throw me in the briar patch…”
hanks for posting that, Mindy!
I wrote about this back in the BBS but this is the reality any centralized platform is eventually going to face: it costs a lot of money to maintain the Bluesky infrastructure, especially as it grows and needs moderation. That money has to come from somewhere, and can’t be offloaded the way mastodon has done to server owners in the same way.
I expressed skepticism then and will do so again. I don’t think there’s an easy way to do this for a general purpose platform at scale. We have an example of this already - pre-Musk twitter. By all accounts they tried really hard to do the right thing and still failed egregiously.
I don’t know what the solution is but personally don’t expect Bluesky to solve this issue. I’ll happily continue to support it (the same way I do mastodon) until something better comes along, though.
For the science & research community specifically, I genuinely think they’re better off either on mastodon or their own Bluesky instance where they have direct control over moderation and reach, but that - again - requires funds, which brings up the other reality of social media: good, curated, moderated spaces cost money and this reduces their reach due to paywalls or other requirements. Misinformation and hate are hosted on ad-supported, public instances with unlimited reach. The inevitable result occurs.
Meta Executives Who Are Women
35%
He’ll probably start firing to bring that number under 10%.
All good points, especially with regards to moderation. That’s real work that needs to be compensated, although volunteers can do some of the labor involved. If you’re building a community, then expecting everyone to participate should be part of it. But, is that what Bluesky is attempting to do, build community? Not necessarily, they are looking to derive a profit. Even if they have the best intentions, that is still the goal…
As the article points out though, one possible way to do it is to make it non-profit. If the goal isn’t generating a profit (which in the modern economy demands endless growth and constant cost-cutting), then that changes the game. That doesn’t mean the need for money goes away, just that it takes some of the problems associated with a for-profit corporation that Cory has been talking about off the table at least. The author argues for collective ownership of a platform. That can be funded by everyone paying in (or people who can afford to paying in). I believe at TOP, I at least once advocated for a publicly funded version of social media. I think it could work, but we have to get out of the Reaganesque mindset of “government can’t do anything”… Of course, it can and should. Not everything in life is served by having it driven by profit motive. Somethings can and do work that way, but much like housing and healthcare, it’s becoming increasingly clear that social media is poisoned by the profit motive. And of course, government run social media could also be a problem (look at the surveillance interventions by the PRC’s government). But that is not an insurmountable problem.
I suspect that there are not easy answers here, but we do know that the current cycle of enshittification isn’t working, and that is driven by for-profit corporations that seek maximum profits at whatever cost to all of us. We’ve seen some truly awful things happening thanks to the enshittification of social media. It doesn’t have to be that way, and I’d love for the folks at bluesky to actually pay attention to what happened with other platforms, why, and address it in whatever model they go within the future.
Not to promote toxic behavior, but “masculinity” is not the first thing I think of when I hear the name Zuckuss.
We need more masculine energy. We need a return to the foundations of Facebook and everything built upon it: to be a place where men gather to ogle, perve on, judge, and rate women purely in terms of their attractiveness and utility to men. You know: masculine energy.
a lesson people oughta take from the rise of bluesky is that buying into anybody’s claimed hegemony online is dopey. Facebook didn’t used to exist, neither did Instagram or TikTok or any of this stuff. as soon as any platform starts to stink no sentimental attachment is practical or good. bail ASAP
