this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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My experience with BlueSky has been that it is better than Twitter because it is smaller and doesn't cater to the far-right.
BUT...
It can become extremely toxic very fast because they implemented the same poorly executed features Twitter did that fucked things up. In fact, it's way worse than that...
The two features they copied from Twitter that hurt them the most are site-wide search and quote posts. Site-wide search enables people to "namesearch" or to monitor keywords for issues they want to fight about. Quote posts are a well understood "dunk mechanism", that largely encourages dogpiling.
As for being free of a central algorithm, that seems good, until you see that there are tons of community algorithms you can subscribe to instead. Now there are algorithms for things like "anti-Zionist posts" and "pro-Israel posts", which not only let people find their preferred echo-chamber, but also provide trolls access to exactly the groups of people they want to argue with or harass.
These algorithms can be built to detect certain hashtags and phrases, or they can just be big lists of accounts like a Twitter group. There's no telling when you might show up in one of these algorithms or why.
As a result, if you say anything less than agreeable about any issue, there's a chance you're going to hear from a bunch of accounts you've never met before, regardless of what side of an issue you are on, or how extreme your view actually is.
I don't recommend it. It's a pro-profit company that seeks to be a wholesale replacement for Twitter. AT Proto federation is a complete joke, it'll never expand if it doesn't have a flagship open source server. They'll give up on it just like Twitter did and just be another centralized, toxic, microblogging community.
The fucking lack of site wide search is why I hate these federated services. Such a glaringly missing feature.
I’d rather have a smaller but somewhat predictable group of peers I grow to somewhat respect and trust than being confronted by thousands of random strangers that are there for mere “engagemen” but not for helping each other out or saying nice things.
Idk man if you're talking about Lemmy there's not much respect going on in here, alot of comments get disappeared. It's like the mods are on cocaine constantly sometimes.
I got accused of being transphobic and banned from an instance because I said that hate towards trans people is a dead cat argument. I forgot that America literally wants to kill trans people my bad.
If you think that by "toxicity" I am referring to moderators protecting their communities, you are sorely mistaken. That's a feature, not a bug.
Good, you showed up in a trans-inclusive space and used right-wing jargon (coined by Boris fucking Johnson) that dismisses their testimony on their own lived experiences as being "shocking" and a "distraction", when they know full well that their rights and their lives are on the line. Sorry you didn't get a chance to correct the record on the fact that you were ignorant on the severity of the issue, but if you're still publicly complaining about being banned on other uninvolved instances, I'd say that they made the right move.
Yeah it really makes Mastodon unusable as the "one big forum" that twitter was and bluesky is trying to be.
I prefer allowing hashtags over site-wide search. People can use hashtags specifically when they want their post to be associated with a specific search, rather than letting people search for specific words and phrases.
Site-wide search works way better for communities structured the way Reddit or Lemmy are structured, since people can easily run afoul of different moderation policies, and get themselves banned from communities for bad faith interactions. You have no such protections on a microblogging service.
I want to be able to search for a URL and see what others have said about it. This is important for assessing credibility.
Its absolutely necessary in an age of disinformation
Obviously I shouldn't be able to read posts that are marked as "private" (eg only visible to people I follow), but the default "public" toots should be searchable. And not just site-wide, but fediverse-wide.
Thanks, this was helpful! Sounds like I’ll pass on Bluesky!