| ▲ | fritzo 4 hours ago |
| The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy |
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| ▲ | lukev 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Bluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible. |
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| ▲ | PaulHoule 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | There is a lot of weirdness around Mastodon, particularly some people can’t seem to make up their minds if they want the stuff they post to be visible or not. | | |
| ▲ | jrm4 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. And I'm willing to be that Bluesky folk might be somewhat similar because they haven't figured it out yet. Except that the design of Bluesky severely increases the possibility of your data getting out of your control. And I can hear the immediate responses of "oh if you didn't want it public, don't post it," but as should be frightfully obvious -- not everyone thinks like that. |
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| ▲ | ajsalminen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'd rather say Twitter and Threads are the current winners if we're talking about userbase. Bluesky is basically in the same league with Mastodon while those two are so far above that you can't even see them without a telescope. |
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| ▲ | jrm4 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I mostly don't like this take because it presumes a precise definition of privacy that we all agree on. And it's not even remotely close to that, which is why I think the Bluesky model is perhaps insidious. |
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| ▲ | fritzo 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Good point. For sake of argument, how about this stratification of privacy levels: twitter/x/bluesky - a big tech company owns your data mastodon - a grassroots community organization owns your data zulip - someone you've met personally owns the data your blog - you own the data (and yes these are a bit of a category error, but to achieve privacy maybe we should broaden the category and sacrifice reach) |
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| ▲ | ghaff 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well). |
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| ▲ | lich_king 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change. | | |
| ▲ | rekmarks 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No they’re not? https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats | | | |
| ▲ | ghaff 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Without researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts. | | |
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| ▲ | rakovsky89 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Twitter/X is thriving, what are you talking about | | |
| ▲ | ghaff 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | We may have different interests and networks. Pretty much everyone I know has moved on. I don't even look at it any longer. |
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| ▲ | alterom 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy The entire point of a platform like Twitter / Bluesky is reach, not privacy. Posts and discussions there are meant to be public, and highly visible. It's not that people don't care. It's that this is not what the platform is for. What's important for a platform like that is not even anonymity, but functional pseudonymity. And that thing is on its way to the effectively outlawed with the push for "age verification". People do notice it and leave [1], but at some point, there might be no place to go to. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rmlzhy/welp_goodb... |
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| ▲ | jrm4 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I 100% agree, I always thought that even Private Messages were a bad idea. But no, we're way past "if you don't want it public don't post it." and then wiping our hands and being done. We need to think in a policy kind of way on this. And again, things are already dangerous -- but ATProto makes them more dangerous. It's something like a chain-of-custody thing. I think the world is collectively safer where the gathering of data like this is less reliable and less verifiable. ATProto's model makes the building of the proverbial evil Big Brother panopticon thing a LOT easier. |
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| ▲ | archagon 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon. |
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| ▲ | PaulHoule 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I am on a bunch of socials but as time goes by I like my cohort on Mastodon better and better. | |
| ▲ | verdverm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Many a Discord server would agree |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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