I have recently been watching a bunch of people who were still on X for various reasons migrate to Bluesky, and the main thing I have taken away from the experience is that the degree to which Bluesky is meaningfully decentralized matters to them not a...
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I have recently been watching a bunch of people who were still on X for various reasons migrate to Bluesky, and the main thing I have taken away from the experience is that the degree to which Bluesky is meaningfully decentralized matters to them not a whit. What matters to them is that being on Bluesky makes them feel like they are living back in 2009
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There is a depressingly circular aspect to all this, in that the reason Bluesky in 2024 feels like Twitter in 2009 is that the proprietors have not meaningfully tried to monetize it yet. It's still in the "leave money on the table to get people on board" phase.
With any conventionally funded (read: VC) service, those days are numbered. Eventually the proprietors will switch over into "revenue mode," and the enshittification will begin. But nobody making the move now wants to hear about that.
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@jalefkowit Also essentially Bluesky hasn't dealt with all of the problems Twitter and even Mastodon have had to deal with... yet. There's absolutely a cycle of the culture of a network that almost nobody is on yet, and everyone being upset by what that moves to as it grows.
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Kristoffer Lawsonreplied to Jason Lefkowitz last edited by
@jalefkowit while that’s true, a revenue model can mean many things. At the end of the day, having actual revenues that allow to build, scale and maintain a service should not be considered negative. It’s the lack of those, and the lack of investment, that leads to a slow development pace on Mastodon.
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@ocdtrekkie I suspect Bluesky has an advantage there, in that they're not trying to build a culture from scratch. They just want to resurrect the corpse of Old Twitter. So an answer to any question about norms or etiquette already exists: "how did they do it on Old Twitter?"
This is not necessarily ideal, as the Old Twitter culture had plenty of problems, and never appealed to more than a small minority of potential users. But it does let them skip the messy parts where they hash out what their culture is going to be.
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Jason Lefkowitzreplied to Kristoffer Lawson last edited by
@Setok I'm not against revenue per se. It's important that services be sustainable.
What I'm against is the revenue model that comes out of the VC/"blitzscale" world, where just making enough revenue to sustain the service is never enough. The VCs only want home runs, trillion-dollar businesses. So if your business is humming along at $500 million a year, covering expenses nicely and building up a healthy war chest, that's not enough for them. They will push you to make more. They would rather you go out of business than just hum along. So you enshittify, because you have no other options.
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Jason Lefkowitzreplied to Jason Lefkowitz last edited by [email protected]
I should probably note here that no business model is perfect, Mastodon's non-profit model has lots of its own problems, etc etc etc.
I'm just at a place where I would much rather try something new that may or may not work, rather than do the same old thing that I know is not going to work one more time.
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I should probably also confess my bias here in that a lot of the pitch for Bluesky is based on nostalgia, and I hate nostalgia. HATE it. Few things are ever as good as we convince ourselves they used to be.
And in the universe of things I might still be tempted to feel nostalgic about, Old Twitter is not among them. I never liked Twitter, even in its early days. To me it felt cliquish and performative. It felt like high school. And I hated high school.
So the Bluesky pitch is kind of lost on me. Adjust the size of the grain of salt you take my opinions on the subject with accordingly.
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Jason Lefkowitzreplied to Jason Lefkowitz last edited by [email protected]
In fact I wrote a whole thing about hating Twitter in 2013, before it was cool to do so.
(Some of these critiques apply just as well to Bluesky and Mastodon, of course. Make of this what you will)
I kind of hate Twitter - Just Well Mixed
In terms of designing a medium for discussion, Twitter's product design decisions have been disastrous
Just Well Mixed (jasonlefkowitz.net)
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@jalefkowit I wrote in 2012, when Twitter startend to lock out third party apps, that it will get worse, because the need to make money. But even political people with a technical knowledge didn't even seriously try the alternatives.
Leute, lernt endlich draus!
Ich weiß nicht, wie lange schon über "Walled Gardens" und "Datensilos" diskutiert wird. Trotzdem sind jetzt alle überrascht, dass Twitter plötzlich die Schotten dicht macht und Geld verdienen will. Und ganz unerwartet wird auch Facebook nervös, wenn der Börsekurs nur den Weg nach unten zu kennen scheint. Aber statt daraus zu lernen, sucht die digitale [...]
kaffeeringe.de (kaffeeringe.de)
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@kaffeeringe Yeah, it gets frustrating to hear people say that Twitter was great until Elon took it over. Because Twitter was not great for a very long time
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Owlet of Minervareplied to Jason Lefkowitz last edited by
@jalefkowit For all my irritation with people choosing Bluesky over here, I think many of them understand the enshittification cycle by now. They just figure they can stay ahead of the game at this ersatz Twitter for another decade or so, then do whatever everybody does next when it starts to suck too bad. Which, fair. Not inspiring , but fair.
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Jason Lefkowitzreplied to Owlet of Minerva last edited by
@noctuaminervae I kind of agree, but I would put it slightly differently: they have learned that this is just the way things work. Like a law of nature. Services grow, enshittify, and then die. You live by jumping from a dying service to a new service forever.
So if you say to them that maybe there could be alternate ways of doing things, it doesn't process. It's like you're saying to them that they could defy gravity and live in mid-air. You're coming at them from too far outside their lived experience.
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@noctuaminervae It reminds me of a lot of things related to computers. Computer people often do not understand the way "normal" people interact with computers. Normal people see computers as balky, unreliable machines that are constantly thwarting their intentions. They don't like using computers, because using computers is difficult and painful.
But it does not occur to them that computers could ever be better, because they've lived their whole lives with computers that aren't better. They just assume that balky and unreliable is the way computers are and will always be.
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@jalefkowit As far as I can tell, the big attraction is that BS has almost exactly the same look and feel as TwitX? So the learning curve is about as steep as going through a mall parking lot?
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@quixote Nobody ever went broke overestimating how much people hate change
